00:00
Hey guys, this is Cori from Redefining Strength. Welcome to the Fitness Hacks podcast. This is a show where I share all my free work on the nutrition tips. I’m not going to ever fill this episode with sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a review or leave a five-star rating or, even better, share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know. So let’s jump right in.

00:27
1. Stop trying to build a lifestyle. So hear me out. When we approach working towards a weight loss goal or a muscle building goal, we think I have to create sustainable habits that become a lifestyle, and while that is partly true, I think we’ve gone too far down this road of trying to make everything feel sustainable, right to start, feel like a lifestyle right to start. And it’s simply not going to, because to reach a goal, we don’t have to reach a new set point we’ve never been at. We’re going to have to do things we’ve never done and they’re not going to feel natural, normal, because what feels sustainable, what feels like a lifestyle, is what we’ve always done, what we want to fall back into naturally, even unconsciously. So I think this attitude of I have to create this lifestyle holds us back from implementing hard changes at times, and I was trying to think of a way of describing it, because that doesn’t mean go do a cleanse, go do a fad diet, go do a diet with a label, something that is completely unsustainable, with no relation to your true lifestyle or what you honestly want to live like after you reach your goal. But I think it has to be this balance of realizing that what you do to reach a goal is not what you will do to maintain it.

01:38
So, in trying to think about this, I was trying to think about a great description of this, and it’s like you get to design a house from scratch. You’re going to build that foundation, you’re going to build that structure of that house and you want that to be perfect and set in place. That is learning about macros. That is learning about progressions. It is things that are unchanging. It is the fundamentals of working out and nutrition that you need to understand because you want that solid foundation. Because so often we don’t learn those things, we go into a fad diet and we’ve thrown up this haphazard house and it’s why it falls down. But once you build that house, once you understand macros, once you understand the basics of working out, you have your program design. You know that you have to repeat workouts.

02:14
Once you have some of those fundamental habits and routines and like understandings in place of what it takes to reach a goal or what it takes to adjust your lifestyle, or even that self-awareness of where you’re at and what you might need to change, then you can start to decorate the house right. When it’s built, you can decorate it and as you decide. You know the f the f fashions go this way. You can change the decorations as you make more money and want to add in some extra elegant stuff or stuff becomes old. You can change out all the inner workings. So if you go through menopause, maybe the dressings in the house are chaff to change, right. But we can shift as our lifestyle, needs and goals evolve. But we want it to be the decorations in the house, the wallpaper or lack of wallpaper, painting the furniture, all those different things that we’re shifting, because it’s a lot easier to change those things out over time than it is to rebuild a shaky foundation and we risk everything collapsing in.

03:01
So we want to think about building a lifestyle as can I understand the fundamentals of things? Can I understand okay, everything I’m doing has to come back to the protein, carbs and fat I’m consuming. I can adjust the types of food. I could decide to go paleo, I could decide to go vegan, but ultimately the macros matter most in terms of the results. So I can change the types of food I’m including. I can choose to cut out bread if I think that’s going to help me get better results, but I have to understand the macro breakdowns that cutting out that bread is really going to create. We want to understand the fundamentals. When we understand the macros and what we need as we reach our goal to now maintain our results, we can shift our macro breakdowns to then gain muscle. We can shift our macro breakdowns to then be able to perform in an endurance sport. When we haven’t done an endurance sport, we can shift our macros. We’re changing the exact implementation of those macros, but macros are the foundation, they are the structure of the house. The other things are the decoration, exactly what ratios we use.

03:52
So, as you’re looking to make a change, as you’re looking to achieve a fat loss goal and maybe even reach a level of leanness you’ve never achieved before. Stop thinking it’s going to feel sustainable. Stop thinking that thing that you’re going to be doing is a lifestyle, because it honestly isn’t going to feel that way. A lot of the changes you might look back on and be like, oh, that wasn’t so bad, or I wish I’d done it sooner, and a lot of the fundamentals you’re putting into place again, the macro breakdowns or the workout progressions that are clearly designed, will carry you through to maintaining. But how you’re implementing those things will shift your lifestyle.

04:22
Your diet, your workout should be constantly evolving and if you think about it, we do get this attitude a lot more with diet of. This should be a lifestyle, it should feel sustainable. I have to have this balance right. Cutting out foods to reach a goal is not sustainable, but understanding why maybe I chose to eliminate those foods for a period could be sustainable. But we do this a lot more with diet, where we think it should be a lifestyle, or we go to extreme restriction, versus with workouts. We kind of have accepted oh, I’m going to do this program. Okay, now I’m going to shift to this program when I want to reach a new goal, we have to take that same approach. But I want you to get out of this mindset that it’s going to feel like a lifestyle, especially to start, and that what you’re doing right now will become the thing you do forever, because it’s only the underlying principles, it’s only that foundation of the house that we don’t want to change. We want to be able to decorate it anyway we’d like, as the wind even strikes us, as we want to work towards another goal. So hopefully that analogy helped and I hope that as you’re working towards your goals, things have felt hard, if they felt unsustainable, if they felt different. Good, it probably means you’re on the right track to achieve a new result, because what you do to achieve your goal is not what you will do to maintain it, and the more we can focus on that, the more we can create the principles that build a lifestyle while making the changes and the hard changes that we actually need right now to move forward.

05:28

Thanks for listening to the Fitness Hacks podcast. Again, this is the place where I share all my free workout and nutrition tips. I’m never going to run sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a rating review or share it with somebody you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and it would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know.

*Please Note: this transcript is auto-generated and there may be some errors in the transcript