Why "Listening to Your Body" Kept Her Stuck for Years (Cori Lefkowith) | Ep 452

You've been told that tracking your food is obsessive, that if you just listen to your

body and eat intuitively, you'll find balance.

And that feels right because who wants to weigh chicken on a food scale for the rest of

their life?

Today's guest believed all of that.

She's a certified trainer, a former Division 1 athlete, a state powerlifting champion,

and a founder of one of the fastest growing online coaching companies in the country.

In her years, she avoided macro tracking because she thought it would make her relationship

with food worse.

She tried every other approach first, none of them stuck.

When she finally gave tracking a chance, she realized that the thing she'd been avoiding

was the thing that set her free.

In this episode, she is going to explain why the advice to just be intuitive fails most

people.

What's actually happening when you feel stuck in a cycle of starting over and a simple

system you can use to break out of it for good.

Welcome to Whits and Wates, where in every episode, we put a popular piece of fitness

advice under the microscope, find the hidden reason it doesn't work, and give you the

deceptively simple fix that does.

I'm your host, Philip Heyp, and today I'm excited to be challenging the idea that structure

and tracking are the enemy of food freedom.

My guest is Corey Lefkowitz, founder of redefining strength, where she coaches women through sustainable

nutrition and strength training.

Our company has made the Inc. 5,000 list in back-to-back years, and she has a brand new

book called The Strong System, a science-backed toolkit to keep you on track.

Corey spent years actively resisting macro tracking before becoming one of its biggest advocates,

and that 180 is the foundation of what we're talking about.

So by the end, you're going to understand why just listen to your body often backfires

for most people who are trying to lose fat or build muscle.

But the change loop is, she has an interesting framework that is going to help you out,

how to recognize when you're trapped in the change loop, and how a six-step system can

turn tracking from a chore into a tool that you actually want to use.

Corey, thanks for coming on Wits and Wates.

Thanks for having me, super excited to dive in.

What I love about your story is that you have the open mind to have learned through your

own journey of, hey, you know, in the past, you would coach people on nutrition and fitness,

telling them, maybe you don't need to track macros.

And there's definitely a dichotomous kind of thinking out in the fitness industry, which

sometimes it's his own trap, right, like the black and white thinking.

So, you know, did you truly believe that at one point, how has your thinking evolved,

and what did you settle on to where you are today?

Well, the internet is amazing and also slightly embarrassing when you go back and look through

its archives.

But I did find even proof on my blog of when I wrote about how I would never track and

how tracking was too restrictive and obsessive.

And when I did that, it was after an experience of actually tracking where I'd cut out all

the foods I love, I felt miserable, I felt hangry, a little energy.

And so I really had to turn in from this experience that it wasn't right for me, but I completely

wrote it off.

And I determined that if I was eating healthy foods, that had to be enough.

But then as I started to do that and recognize my progress wasn't happening the way I wanted

to.

I sat with myself for a second and was like, okay, well, what's going on?

And as I began to research, I realized what gets measured gets managed.

And I didn't really have any clue of the portions I was eating.

And I don't know about you, you but like peanut butter and that portion, that is not the

actual serving size on the jar.

It just got through that out there.

But I was not measuring it out and my portions were very distorted.

And so I decided that I was just going to log what I was currently doing.

And through just logging without making any changes, I began to realize that tracking was

just data.

I assigned all meaning to it and determined to make a choice to cut stuff out, to restrict

to a point where I felt hangry.

And I say hangry because it was hungry and angry.

Hungry isn't just enough.

It's the low energy too that comes with that restriction often.

So I began to realize that tracking was just a tool and it was a tool to fuel better.

So there was that evolution and it's amazing to find.

And I think it's also not only recognizing the habits, but the minds that's behind them

that allows us to find freedom in the variations or tools or tactics that really help us move

forward.

Great frame on this, right?

Because it sounds like when you originally tracked, you connected it to restriction and

really there are two separate concepts happening in parallel, which can give somebody a misaligned

association, right?

Which happens as all the time as human beings.

And you just said it's a tool that can be used.

It's a tool that can be misused and how you track is important.

What I did like one specific thing you said is your idea of portions was distorted until

you tracked and I didn't have so not long ago, you guys can find it in the feed about developing

intuitive eating skills.

And one fact I mentioned is that even the most expert nutritionist, dietitians, coaches

are typically off about 20% but even with the skill, they're off by 20% without the skill

it's 40, 60, 80, 200% off, you know, who knows.

So when we have that belief that tracking is disordered, where does that come from?

Is it exactly like your situation or is there something like in the evidence we know that

this association has developed, even though it's not reality?

I think it all comes back to mindsets.

There is not a one size fits all approach to anything.

I mean, and the more we see the nuance and things, the more we can allow ourselves to

be able to use different tools and tactics at different stages of life.

But it's recognizing that you can be obsessive without tracking.

I know lots of people and I've worked with lots of clients who come into tracking because

they need to eat more and giving themselves that clear evidence that they can eat more,

that they should eat more, they can include foods they love, really helps them release

some of the obsessive tendencies they already have because we can get very restrictive without

even like having that thing that we're weighing and measuring.

We can decide that foods have to be off limits, that they're evil, that they're bad for us

and we assign moral value.

So obsession is a mindset, it is not inherent in a tool or tactic.

But we do often use things in a way that then creates that association and it's really

kiwi recognize that because when I even say that tracking and I actually believe that tracking

in some form is right for everybody, that means vastly different things for people.

It can mean just writing down what you're eating, it can be writing down emotions on how

you felt with the food, but you need some form of data to give yourself that ability to

step back because we are very bad at remembering things and feelings play a huge role.

And to slightly go back to the intuitive eating thing, one of the most eye-opening things

early on in my coaching career was not only my personal experience with tracking, but

I had a client and she was on a weight loss journey and I was having her track macros.

And we encountered somebody when we were out who said to her, I can't believe you track.

Just eat intuitively, listen to your body and she was like, well, my body tells me intuitively

that I want to eat that whole pint of ice cream in the fridge when I get home from work

and spend the stressful day.

And with that moment, you could see the other person sort of be like, oh, because there

isn't this recognition that we're each coming at food from a different upbringing or a different

perspective on it.

And some of us have trained ourselves to emotionally eat because that has solved the feelings

in the moment and that pattern is so ingrained that we don't even sometimes realize we're

replicating it until after we've done it.

So that tracking can help bring that awareness and recognize when we're eating out of intuition

in a way that we've just trained our body to respond.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because those signals that people just assume you have

become more and more dysregulated and dysfunctional and with certain behaviors like chronic restriction,

right?

Because you're talking about fueling and but chronic restriction let alone eating disorders

and such which makes it even worse or it's just completely dysregulated that connection

and some of it is neurological too with between that and your hormones when we talk about

all the types of hunger.

So one thing you mentioned that's very powerful is that your system of tracking itself can

be so flexible.

Like when we talk about flexible eating or flexible dieting, it's not just macros.

It's, you know, the way you're tracking.

So what I'm interested before we go on is in your past when you weren't quite on the

side of full on tracking.

Were there things you in hindsight did find successful that may not fit in the tracking

window?

Does that make sense?

Like, are there things you still carry to you to this day that are disconnected from

tracking that helped you and still help you with food, let's say?

You know, this is the question I've never asked myself, but I would honestly say no because

I think in some way you always are tracking.

You're keeping a log of what you've done.

Like even if you think about the mindsets and the confidence you have, it's a log

of proof that if you've stacked one way or the other, when you don't trust yourself

to go into a program again to make changes, that's because a proof you feel you've

stacked.

So in some way, we're always tracking everything mentally, whether or not we're aware

of it.

And so I think what happened before is that I would track my food by having specific foods

I deemed healthy to eat, but I was still sort of tracking what I was doing.

It was just from the framework of having good and bad foods, which for me honestly led

to more obsession and restriction and more starting over again, because I would ultimately

want some food that I had labeled as bad.

For me, the stricter macro cycling and tracking actually allowed more food freedom because

I worked in those foods so that they could be a balance.

And when I want to balance in a little more fun foods, I switch how I'm tracking.

So maybe it's a more minimalist approach, only watching protein calories or maybe I'm

taking pictures just to make sure my portions are somewhat in line.

And to allow myself to really understand am I feeling full, am I not feeling full, if

I'm not feeling full, am I not feeling full because I had more processed foods that might

not have really made me feel full so that the hunger queue is still there.

I would say we're always tracking whether or not we realize it.

That's a great way to put it.

So then can you systemize your tracking to make it work for you is really the goal.

We all have bank accounts and there's some level of tracking going on, but some people

don't think about it and they spend, spend, spend.

And then before long, they're like, Oh, no, I don't have any more money.

I need to use a credit card.

Others may track every single expense and use budgeting software and I spent a weekend

not long ago doing that for my business and saying, Oh, no, I need to cut out a bunch

of expenses.

But sometimes you need that next level.

You need to level up the amount that you're scrutinizing and using that data.

So what is it about logging that I guess threatens people that I would suspect is emotional

about all of this?

I mean, you kind of alluded to it here and there.

Do you see today one or two big buckets where people still resist when you say, no, this

is going to do it for you?

I think a lot is tied to our past experiences with it where when you have a bad experience

with something, you're not going to want to do it again.

I also think that we have to recognize that when we say tracking, the mental pushback

we get is against the form that we envision first.

And so we don't like to make changes because we're only comfortable being uncomfortable

in certain ways.

And generally the changes we're resisting are discomfort in a different way.

And we do see that data as judgment because we instantly place judgment on ourselves.

We know we are not doing the things we feel we should.

And so therefore we see it as a negative.

So I always like to start people with just tracking what they're currently doing.

Hey, you're not trying to make changes.

You're not trying to judge.

You're just seeing what you're doing because maybe the changes you think you need to make,

you don't actually need to make.

Maybe you need to eat more or not less.

And that is honestly the biggest relief because you start to separate out the emotions from

like the tool a little bit.

But we so often just go into something wanting to make changes and trying to make these

sweeping overhalls that it's not the tracking.

It's the overhalls that are really getting us, but it gets the association anyway.

So I would say the mental hang up really does come back to the discomfort of something

new and outside what we've always done because we push ourselves into pain.

It's just pain we're okay with.

And then it's recognizing like, Hey, how can I do this in a way that doesn't get that

mental push back to start?

Yeah, that makes sense.

So the form we envision using most is usually what comes our head is what you said, which

sometimes makes us repel against this idea until you realize, no, there are multiple ways

to do it.

And let's do it and take a baby step of letting it show us what's happening, what's reality,

what's your baseline, rather than going to the next step.

And that's super, super revealing, I totally agree.

So you talk about something called the change loop, which is a cycle of you try something

new.

They get some results, but then they hit a wall or plateau, then they quit, right?

Or switch to another program or the next shiny object.

And I'm assuming you went through this yourself many times in your past, tell us about that

change loop, how you recognize it, like why it's important to understand that patterns

and then we can do something about it.

I did the starting over Monday for far too long.

And I think a lot of people can sympathize with that.

But then I recognize I am never starting over.

You are stuck with everything you have done prior.

And that sounds really negative.

And I don't mean it to be because you're also stuck in a positive way with the lessons

you've learned if you really reflect on everything that's happened.

But that's why when someone asks me like, how long is it between X photo and X photo

in this transformation?

I'm like, my entire life.

And so when I started to really recognize this pattern of constantly starting over, I

recognize the emotions that went with it.

We get really excited for a new program because we've hit this point of like, the pain

of change, like just as worth anything, right, to us, right?

Because the pain of staying stuck just stinks so bad.

We are not liking where we are.

So we get really excited with a program promise, something that says it's like new exciting

whatever else.

And so we go all in.

In going all in, we never reflected on who and what we are, what habits have sabotages

in the past, any of our realistic lifestyle, right?

We just go for this ideal we see, hey, this woman looks lean, I'm going to do that program.

That's right for me.

We get super excited by it.

Do all the habits and we hit like the habit overload where you start to be like, okay,

I'm doing all these things.

You know, I can do two day workouts.

I can cut out the dessert.

I love.

I don't have to have the wine.

And then you know, like at the end of the week, you weigh and you're like, okay, I lost

some weight.

I think I can do this.

And then another we go by and maybe the scale doesn't go down or even goes up and you're like,

what the heck am I doing?

Why am I doing this?

Right?

And so that's where we hit the habit overload leading to emotional sabotage where I

also call this the flat tire rule, where it doesn't feel worth it.

It's Friday night.

You're like, forget everything.

You go pour the glass of wine and then you pull out the box of cookies and one cookie

becomes like 10, especially if you're me or the pint of ice cream for free ice cream.

It just is this whole downward spiral.

And it's basically what I call the flat tire rule because you get a flat tire, right?

You don't get the results you want.

Maybe even do have the wine.

But instead of stopping there, you pull over to the side of road instead of fixing the

flat, you slash the other three tires, maybe even like the car and fire and walk away.

But you spiral a lot more than you need to.

And then there's the guilt.

This is part of that emotional sabotage because so often if we just stop at the event instead

of making ourselves feel guilty, we wouldn't fall off and quit for multiple more weeks.

But that's what we do.

And then we end up getting to a point where we are so not happy with the situation, but

we're also so not trusting yourself that all we can do is hope that the next thing will

be the thing.

And so that's where we repeat the pattern.

And the only way to break it is to ultimately like sit with ourselves and say, why does this

keep happening?

Is it the same point?

Is it how I'm doing the habits?

But it's that self-awareness we need to build because there is no perfect plan.

And the more we keep trying to go on a plan or fall off a plan and see it that way versus

seeing ourselves as a plan, the more we just keep ourselves stuck.

So I do follow up to some things you just said.

So on habit overload, and you kind of alluded to the fact that if you're trying to do a lot

of things, and then you make a little progress, but then you stop making progress, it kind

of correlates with those speed bumps.

So do you have like a framework of, hey, literally one habit at a time for a certain amount

of time before you go to the next, like a stacking framework that you suggest to people

or is it a little more individualized?

Well, the more individualized, always the better.

But I think what the thing comes back to is that self-assessment of effort and outcome.

I like to think of it as the habit budget.

And it was funny that you brought up money before because I do think of it as like, what

are you putting into yourself to invest that gives you more energy, less stress, more

ability to do more things?

And then what is taking out from your self control?

And this is a lot of different things.

And I don't think it's one set time of like 21 days, 4 to 5 days, whatever it is.

I think it's more when that budget gets out of balance that we start to see that real

pushback or habit overload.

So if you're making changes in January, where maybe the holiday weekend has you, you're

feeling a little blah, you know, it's not a time where you're traveling, you're like,

okay, I have an ideal time, like works not busy, whatever else.

So you can make changes based on that time.

Maybe it is working out six days a week, maybe it is truly tracking macros intensively.

And you start those habits and you have enough in your savings to really budget for them.

But then you see the summer come or for some people who might be all the way to the holidays

or some that might be, you know, their birthday, like just in February, whatever it is, we

have that time where all of the sudden stress or lifestyle shifts.

And maybe we're not putting as much into savings, we're not doing as much for ourselves

in terms of like the self care or maybe work stressors increase or family life changes.

And all of the sudden the habits that felt within budget no longer do, even though they

didn't change, the effort didn't really change, but the feeling of effort did.

And we have to recognize when that shifts, because when that shifts, if we don't evolve

those habits or see what else we can adjust in our outside life, that's where we end up

saying, forget everything I'm done.

Yeah, that's resilience, at least in my opinion, that's what came to me was the ability

to stretch the rubber band and let it come back rather than break when time goes hard.

You know, planning for the worst case, let's say you could either run in such a way where

you're always behind paycheck to paycheck, which maybe we think about that as the budget

you just mentioned or also even our calories, let's be honest, or you kind of always on fumes.

And or you can like focus on muscle and focus on fuel and like pay yourself first again,

thinking in money terms, like take out the profit and the owners pay first, which is like

taking care of yourself and then seeing what's left.

So when we talk about fuel and adding things in and building muscle and all that, I know

that's like in your belly, right?

Where does that sit in all of this, even from day one, like as you're starting to do an

audit with someone or habit assessment, how are these conversations going, Corey, with

regards to building muscle because there's so many fears and like myths around that, especially

for women, for example.

Most of us do come into wanting to make healthy lifestyle changes because we want to lose

weight.

I know for me, like out of college, I did want to perform a certain way.

I was into like lifting and building muscle, but a big journey into macros was because

I had decided, you know, I want to see body recomb.

I want to lose fat.

I want to get lean.

And in that process, I recognize that if I actually wanted to stay lean, not only did

I have to recognize there were more phases to fat loss than just the constant cutting,

but I recognize that muscle was everything.

And if we start with a focus on muscle, everything else is going to happen because you're going

to see improvements in your health, which is going to make your body more efficient,

which is going to lead to fat loss.

And while it's not sexy to think about it in that way, the reason you feel like things

work, but nothing is actually worked long term is because you're approaching it as fat

loss first over building muscle first.

And those practices have often made us lose muscle in the process in trying to weigh less,

but they've also adapted our metabolism.

And if you think about your metabolism as like all the lights on your house being on

to start, and then with your dieting practices, maybe with age, some have dims, some have been

turned off, you can go turn them back on.

But it means giving your house the energy so that it can do that.

And so you have to fuel to build that lean muscle.

And in the process of building that lean muscle and all the processes regulating back because

they've potentially downregulated in order to survive off the calories you're consuming

and the training that you're doing, you'll see yourself actually building that

muscle and losing fat and seeing the recomb happen.

Of course, it's not a fun process.

And often takes far longer than we want.

And it's really challenging, especially mentally, because you often at first see the reverse

of what you want to have happen, actually happen.

Yeah, you see maybe a little bit of extra weight gain, you carry a little more fluid.

You maybe even gain a little bit of fat and you're right, this kind of messaging is everywhere

because it's important because it leads to the other question I was going to ask you,

which is about what you're measuring from the beginning, because we mentioned nutrition,

okay, that makes sense.

But you also mentioned weight, which involves the scale.

And we know that the scale can be helpful, but definitely out of context can be very dangerous

in the wrong hands in terms of how it's interpreted.

So given muscle and fuel and no longer restricting and having a flexible diet and all these are

important, what are the basic things that people should be measuring and not paying attention

to as well, at least early on?

It really does depend on your goal, because if your goal is gaining muscle, I'm probably

going to tell someone to just chuck the scale out or put it in their closet for a little

bit just because you can't really watch it.

Because often you will even be building muscle before you lose fat.

And yes, your glycogen stores are going to be full because your body thinks it's in a

calorie surplus.

This is the DAPS.

But we measure a lot what we like to call NSVs or non-scale victories.

And so we have reflection sheets not only on, are you doing the habit consistently?

Because I think a lot of times we don't notice our own inconsistencies and then we get

really frustrated.

We're putting in a lot of effort for things not to snowball.

But we want to measure progress in other ways because that's really the signals often

before we reach our goal that things are working.

So is your sleep improving?

As you're increasing calories, are your nails growing?

Is your hair growing?

Are you fidgeting more?

We want to make note of all the different ways that we can see those habits paying off

to know that we're on the right track because we see a lot of those signals well before

our ultimate goal.

And then I do think body measurements, progress pictures can be very helpful to track progress.

But the more ways you measure success, the more ways you give yourself to be successful.

So you got to measure progress outside of your ultimate goal.

And I even think setting complimentary targets is really important.

So if you're going after weight loss, you want to think about a performance goal in the

gym, you want to think of habit consistency goal, you want to think about outside challenges

that you know will keep you in the habits that ultimately pay off with if you're going

after the scale change, the scale change.

That's great.

And you just said complimentary metrics.

So again, digging in one more layer, does that mean that the suite of metrics can change

quite a bit from person to person, not even one person from goal to goal, but literally

like this person may need to have these three things on their list at most of the time,

even for the rest of their lives.

And this person over here is these three other things.

I'm curious like how that comes up.

Oh, it definitely does like a each season of our life is going to be different.

And if you're trying to work towards a muscle building goal, you're going to have to work,

like, let go of some of the habits that you did to lose fat.

And so you have to track them progress in different ways.

But it really depends.

Like I always start with clients with getting an accurate assessment of where they are.

What aren't you happy with in your life right now?

What have you struggled to do in the past?

What do you feel like is sabotage you in programs?

Like where would you like to see improvements in your life outside of the way that you want

to lose?

And when we do that, we can often find little things that I like to call sort of pulling

on the thread that unravels everything where we know things that will be signals that

things aren't paying off the way we want or habits have started to slide.

So if a client comes in saying, my sleep is just horrible.

As we're making changes, if we start to notice their sleep is bad again, we yes, look at

outside stressors, but say, hey, have things change in how you're doing your meal timing?

Are you starting to try to do too much in your workouts?

Are you adding more somewhere?

But we'll find the little ways of measuring progress that are key to them and how they

want to feel in everyday life and use those as those checkpoints throughout because we

don't do well with forever.

We need some sort of end date in our head.

And so by even saying, hey, I'm going to check in with myself every few weeks on these

other things and do a more deep dive reflection.

We give ourselves that point at which we're assessing our lifestyle to make tweets because

it's fun to adjust.

We should always be growing and creating a lifestyle doesn't mean you're doing one thing.

So I do like to set those things forever because I think we all need those little boundaries

or buffers.

Otherwise, we get those 1% deviations that just completely pull us off course.

So the tension here that I feel and I've seen this in my own clients is the ones that

then start adopting this mindset and doing the tracking and learning from it.

Then they get all the wins and they start to progress.

And then six months or a year down, they've really made a big improvement.

Now they hit this other wall that I've noticed, right, which is a little bit of a new tracking

fatigue wall where you're almost like bored because things are going well and you're tracking

the same things over and over again and you're looking for a little bit of something different.

So it's almost like this longer term tracking fatigue.

Have you seen that phenomenon?

Yeah.

And that's where you want to almost proactively assess and address that.

So like I know it during the holidays, I get tracking fatigue in the way that I do it

in January.

I will not do it.

I started to recognize like, Hey, I can't force the same habits.

So proactively now going into the holidays, I come up with a different game plan.

So when a client starts to say like, Oh, this doesn't feel worth it or well, I deserve

just one.

You know, like this is just like a bite like a nibble.

It doesn't matter, right?

And you start to see that excuse creep like creep in.

You got to recognize that is self sabotage starting to happen.

And so at this point, while we struggle to do less, it is a time to do less to ultimately

move forward more consistently.

So as you feel that sort of pain pushback that fatigue with the habits you're doing a desire

to do something new, do something new.

Just do it with strategy and intention because if you're controlling it in that way, you're

not going to end up doing something that's going to derail you, right?

If tracking full macro cycles like protein carbs and fats is feeling like too much, why

not just track protein or why not say, Hey, I'm feeling fatigued with my meals and this

full tracking because there's other things I want.

How can I work this in?

Like I love to say like, how can I get away with more stuff, right?

Can I work out a little bit less because right now I just don't feel energized to go

60s a week and get away with that, so to speak.

Can I include more foods that I love?

Can I go out to eat more or can I adjust the way I'm doing some of the habits that really

match what I need now, but proactively evolving and adapting the habits is so key because

we do get bored and that's why we search for something new.

We just want to make sure that that doesn't make us jump ship on something that's working.

When I hear someone say, Hey, I'm going on a trip in a month.

What do I do?

I'm like, Yes.

That step one is saying like, I need to have a structure or plan.

Even if the plan is, I'm not going to track, but I'm going to have certain guidelines or

thoughts or whatever around the trip so that I enjoy it.

I also thought of the idea that, you know, you could always exchange within that budget

you talked about.

Working out six days a week and like, well, I'm going to go down to three.

I can get some more sleep now on those other days.

Right?

So there's always these wonderful trade-offs that you can get.

So that kind of addresses the, I guess, a little bit of a fatigue, which is probably more

of a novelty and a seasonal thing that humans deal with all the time, right?

And just kind of keeping it different.

What about when you're actually trying to then nail in on a root cause or a bottleneck

for someone, but you also said you don't want to try to do everything at once.

So how do you narrow that down?

What is a good system to do that?

And you have all this data coming in?

Data can overwhelm us.

And I say that as I have like a tracker on my wrist, but you have to understand what

the data is telling you and you have to come back to who and what you are.

So with all the different habits, with all the different metrics, you have to then say,

what does my lifestyle actually look like right now?

And the reason I come back to that is because what feels doable for you right now.

And that's where we started.

And when you get those wins stacking, all of the sudden, you want to do more.

And it's going back to even though the working out 60s a week, because I think this is

a great example of it.

If you have six workouts on your schedule for the week and you do three, generally you

kind of feel bad.

Like you could say, well, I still did three, but generally we're like, oh, I only did three.

Versus if you only had three workouts on your schedule for the week and you did three

or four, all of the sudden, you're like, I'm a rock star.

This is same three.

Yes, maybe you designed the workout slightly differently.

So you optimize the three days a little bit better, but it's still the same time technically

and both would still count, but it's the momentum and mindset you create.

So I think when we're trying to address bottlenecks, so much of it isn't just a tool or tactic

that we're looking for.

It's the mindsets and lifestyle that we need to address underlying it because a perfect

plan, if something, it's not something we can do consistently, it really doesn't matter

versus imperfect changes done consistently, you're going to add up far faster.

For sure, the compounding effect, I mean, even a fat loss phase that you plan out from

day one, you don't know if by day two or the next week something interrupts your life

or something changes.

So always be ready to pivot and kind of squish it, expand it, go up and down, like it

doesn't matter.

As long as you're in control of that, you'll be fine.

Even if it's even day to day, like that's what I've seen.

So thank you for kind of validating that for people.

This is not a fixed thing.

You don't just have a plan on day one and just run with it.

So then if you expand that out longer term to a decade, let's say, or two decades and

now you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, right, I'm sure you get the question like, my body

doesn't work like it used to.

My hormones are different, my recovery's not there, my joints hurt, and whatever system

you've put in place doesn't work either.

And I say that with a caveat because if they work with you, you already help them put

in a resilient system, right?

But how does like say the women and the men in their 40s and 50s listening to this handle

that?

Well, I'm of the suck it up buttercup mindset.

And I say this not from the no pain, no gain, push through pain type attitude, but more

of the give yourself agency to control what you can control.

And I bring this up because guess what?

As we get older, our body does change.

We don't have the optimal hormone levels we once did.

We aren't as efficient at a lot of processes, that's aging, but we also have to own that

a lot of the things we did before that when we thought we were a superhero and could

just push through the pain and you know, diet and eat whatever we wanted created a lot

of the situation we're in right now.

And so if we created a lot of it, we can also reverse a lot of it.

So life is constant evolution and the more we own that and give ourselves back the power

of choice and give ourselves the ability to really assess what we need now to move forward,

the better off we're going to be.

So as we enter, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70s, I have a client who just at 79 going into her

80th year has seen amazing recomb built muscle.

And it was because she decided, hey, I'm going to train in a way that fits what I need

right now.

And when we truly own what we need right now and don't think about a number of years that

we've been on this planet, but more, hey, do my joints feel achy, how am I fueling?

What's going on with my lifestyle?

Then we can start to assess and adjust because there's so much from how we fuel and even

our hydration because we don't recognize how much our hydration has an impact on our

joint health.

But even to our training that can really help us move forward better, but it means optimizing

for our body now.

When you think of some of the most persistent myths that people come to you with in that

category of age related body change, because I do like the idea of like, let's not use

excuses.

Let's have this stoic attitude toward things like control, which you can control.

Better like the top two strategies in general for dealing with those kinds of challenges.

So let's pick one.

Let's pick perimenopause and weight loss resistance.

So perimenopause and the hormones shifts, it does change how you need to fuel and train.

And you're going to see a lot more variability that you have to address.

But again, and I don't say like the agency, the choice as like a push through pain or

just will power your way into it because you can't.

But it's more taking ownership of what you're actually seeing going on and recognizing

you always have a choice.

And like part of that choice is the perspective you have on what you're dealing with, right?

You can see those hormone changes as you're doomed.

This is just too hard.

You can't handle it.

Or you can choose to see the hormone changes as, okay, my body is telling me these signals.

How can I address them to feel most fabulous?

Because if I control what I can control, it is the cycle of if you start to adjust your

nutrition, you see changes in some of that hormone balance, which then impacts your sleep

positively, which then allows you to make more changes, right?

So it's, you can get caught in that cycle.

But I would tell them like, Hey, you need to really look at what changes you're seeing.

Has your sleep shifted?

Are you seeing more inflammation?

Are you not recovering as fast?

Do your joints hurt?

Are you having night sweats?

Like what's going on for you?

And then from there, we start to look at, well, what's the smallest change we can make

that addresses the most of these things?

And really that all starts with tracking what you're currently doing because we don't

recognize how much our food is not like contributing to making some of the symptoms worse.

But we're not optimizing our nutrition to make some of the symptoms better.

And then from there, we go into the diet and workouts with paramanopause.

We see a rise in stress, so to speak on your body.

And so because your body is more stressed and your mind might even feel more stressed,

especially with other lifestyle things, you can't add more stressors on top of that.

No matter how positive the stressors technically are because working out is a stressor trying

to adjust your diet is going to take some mental strain.

So you need to really assess the things and recognize that if you're an extreme calorie

deficit, that is a stress on your body.

So how can you reduce the stress through how you're fueling and training to match what

you need?

I love it.

So there's a reframe.

There's the tracking to see what your biggest ROI lover is going to be.

And then of course, you want to fuel and train to be successful and look, anyway, who says,

well, I'm not lifting weights and you suggested to them and they still say they're not lifting

weights.

I'm sorry.

You got to start lifting too.

It's part of this process at some point, right?

Yeah.

Like, it's not even, okay, well, why don't you want to lift?

Yeah.

Of course.

And then how can we do strength work that maybe meets you where you are right now?

Can that be body weight training?

Can it be bands?

Like, where is your resistance to this?

So I want you to go research all the reasons why someone might promote this.

And then I want you to give all the arguments you have against doing it.

And then really research why they're valid or why they're not valid.

And then I want you to assess how they might be a mismatch for what you need right now.

And through that, we then get to the point of, okay, so what are you willing to do?

And what are you willing to say is worth it for that goal, even?

If you could only track calories or macros, what would you track?

Macros.

What's a food rule that you used to follow that you now think is nonsense?

Carbs are bad.

What's the hardest habit for your clients to build?

That's a good one.

You know what?

And maybe this is personal bias too, but drinking enough water.

Okay.

I would say that's the hardest habit because it's so simple seeming, but it's so important

and when we think we're getting enough, we're not getting enough.

The second one I was going to go with is protein, and increasing protein is often hard.

Yeah, it's interesting because walking comes on the list for me too, but hydration is

a good one.

There are almost the things we take for granted.

If you're listening to this, it's a thing that you're not doing.

All right.

So when we think of tracking apps, how long before someone should maybe try not using an

app, and I'm talking about apps specifically, not necessarily tracking in general, but most

of the time people are using apps.

I say why go in with the mentality that you're ever going to stop using it.

Okay.

Good one.

Good one.

And then let's say you are coaching yourself when you are 25.

Do less.

Can you elaborate?

Yeah.

So I would say do less because I decided that I was going to try it out extra to my diet

and I ended up injured.

I would also say train intentionally off of that because I would push through and not

be paying attention to what I felt working, which led to a lot of injuries and my now

love of prehab.

So often we waste a lot of effort trying to outwork time and it's just not going to happen.

And that's also what leaves us really frustrated feeling like the effort hasn't been worth

the outcome we get.

But if we do less, we're going to create more sustainability and consistency long term.

And we're probably actually going to see results faster.

All right.

So to wrap it up, I often ask this question, is there anything you wish diet asked and

what is your answer?

I would just add with all that we've talked about today, there is no right time to start.

And when it feels really wrong to start, that's actually the right time because so often

we do only try and make changes when we've deemed it the right time or the perfect time.

And that's why we keep making changes and habit changes that don't stick.

So I would say if now feels like the wrong time, if everything in your life is just fighting

against you wanting to make changes, make one small change because if you can do minimums

at the worst of times, you're going to be able to do so much more when times are really

good.

And that's how we sort of level up so that we see progress over the weeks, the months,

the years.

It's not the best times in optimizing them.

It's the 1% of improvements at the worst of worst times.

There's no right time to start.

That's so good.

What's the biggest excuse when is it people say they don't have enough time or this thing

has come up or like what's the biggest one they use to say it's not the right time?

Oh, there's so many specific ones.

Let's face it.

There's always life.

Life is always our excuse, but life is always going to be there, right?

All right.

So this is good stuff.

A lot of psychology in here, a lot of counterintuitive things that people may not have heard about.

My track can be so powerful on anything in their life, anything guys, not just food,

not just training, but everything finances, everything else in your life, tracking be

helpful.

Where can people look you up, Corey?

Where can they connect with you and we'll throw those in the show notes?

I am redefining strength on every platform and redefiningstrength.com so you can find

me YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, all that jazz.

And you guys can check Corey out.

She's awesome.

And you know, it's been a pleasure talking to you today on Wits and Wates.

Well, thanks for having me.