89. How My Fitness Journey Changed My Life For The Better

I would love to do an episode here in the next few weeks before the new year , I guess , kind of a wrapping up my thoughts of 2023 . Just like a I don't know some kind of a podcast episode to get all my thoughts out about this year , kind of wrap it up . It's that time of year , right , where we're reflecting and all the things .

And I don't really like to be corny , but I do want to do an episode about certain things that I learned this year , where this year took me as far as my business , wow , and life and fitness and all the things .

So that might be a longer episode , but I would love actually nothing more than to sit down with this microphone of mine and chat with you , my friends . Maybe I'll go live . Oh my God , I shouldn't have said that . That's scary , but anyway , we'll see what happens . But somehow it's December , you guys . Yeah , this is the last month of this year .

It's just crazy . It's blowing my mind . It's making me nervous . It's also like exciting me for , like this time of years in my world and this fitness world is a pretty big deal , right , people are kind of struggling , and then it's January , so I'm geared up for it , I'm ready , but I'm also like how the fuck is this year almost over ?

All right , let's dive into this episode . I'm going to be talking today about how the fitness lifestyle that I talk about , how it has improved my life , and the idea for this episode came from . I wish I could find the message on my Instagram DMs .

By the way , I just went through my DMs to look for this message from this sweet female Don't remember her name and I saw that I have a bunch of unread messages on there and I'm so sorry I have to get back to those . I just miss messages sometimes .

But anyway , I couldn't find the conversation that I was having with this very sweet girl that messaged me and she asked a question . Basically , it was something like could you explain the difference that macros have made in your life ?

And in a little more in detail , she was asking like how has your life changed from that restrictive you know that , yeah , that restrictive , obsessive mindset lifestyle that I was living . How has it changed now ? And it was a really cool conversation . We exchanged a couple of messages back and forth after because I was like , wow , that is a really good question .

I don't know that anyone's ever really asked it like that before . And it caught me off guard because I just I hadn't been asked that before .

But when I went to just reply , you know , like macros have really allowed me to have confidence in you know my goals , and to have confidence in my body and to give me , like this , freedom from you know , food restriction and I really like my brain naturally just goes , keeps going . And I was like , wow , this , my lifestyle , has really changed .

All things to macros right , kidding , but sort of not kidding . You know this fitness people always say like fitness changed my life . Going to the gym changed my life , and that's true for me . And also counting macros changed my life , but not in a way that's just like the macros changed my life .

Right , it's learning and it's trusting myself and it's going all in on something that I'm not sure is going to work , but it's really pushing through and I've learned so much going from that restrictive , cardio , beach body driven lifestyle , not to say that Beach Body made me that way . It's not necessarily their fault , but also that's what I would .

That's the era that I was in , right . There have been other times when things like that have taken over the market . I mean , back in the day there was like Jazz or size and all that shit's no different . But now , where I'm at now is just drastically different , and it's taken me so long to get here that sometimes I forget the process .

But anyway , that's a very long introduction to the topic and but that is a really loaded question . So to talk about how fitness , how this lifestyle that I talk about , preach about , drill into you , how that's really changed my life , I really do want to talk about it and I'm excited because you can see if you're in the process of this .

You can see where you're headed and if you're not starting , if you haven't started the process of this , but you're kind of toying around with like , oh , the ideas you say are pretty cool , christy , it sounds great . You can see where you're going to have to go , right .

So to understand where I'm at now , I first have to go back and talk about my old lifestyle . So that's literally what I did for notes for this episode . I went back and thought about what did that look like when I was for myself . It was me , stuck in this beach body mindset .

Not only was I just a participant in the beach body lifestyle , I was a coach , remember . So I have a back end view of all of that right . But for me , like physically , what that looked like was I was obsessed with not missing a workout . I was obsessed with pushing play and hitting the calendar exactly like it was laid out .

I was obsessed with the perfection and it was very restrictive . It was a lot of cardio , it was a little bit of lifting . I was trying to be smaller . I was trying to be perfect and not miss a container and not miss a workout and read every single you know pamphlet that came along with it and like soak it all up and just . It was obsessive .

Is that the word that I want ? It was . It was taking over my life . I viewed food as bad . Mostly all food I thought was bad in a way , because I didn't understand it . I didn't enjoy food . I thought , you know , fruit was carbs . I thought veggies were , you know , carbs , fat , I didn't know . It all made me like I thought anyway .

This is all going to make me gain weight . I don't know how to eat any of this food without feeling bloated , without gaining weight , without getting bigger Like . That's just the mentality that I had . I didn't have any knowledge , I didn't have any control . I felt completely taken over and overwhelmed by this lifestyle .

It was my whole life revolved around what time am I going to work out ? You know how long is the workout ? Don't miss the workout . What am I going to eat ? Fill your containers , check it off the list . It was out of control . My current lifestyle , on the flip side , I'm not obsessed with food . I'm not restricted by food . I'm not aiming for perfection .

I do a lot of lifting and a little cardio now , so that's completely flip flopped . I'm allowed to eat anything I want . Yes , I do have lists of like things that I love to eat as far as carbs and fats and proteins and you know things when I'm like I really need to hit my protein goal , but I really want Oreos , so what's in the middle ? Like what ?

What can I have ? And my list now just take out the guesswork for me and gets me really focused on something quick that I can have and be like oh yeah , you would really benefit from a vanilla Greek yogurt with an Oreo in it instead of the entire package of Oreo . So I do have little lists for things like that . I'm a list maker what can I say ?

But I know food is fuel . Now I have knowledge . Now I have educated myself . I know so much about food and workouts and my body that I just know that food is fuel . I know that lifting weights shapes my body . I know that I'm not restricted . I know that I'm allowed to eat anything that I want . I very rarely think about my own fitness .

I think about your guys' fitness and notes and you know content and my coaching and all . I'm thinking about fitness all day . As far as my own takes me 45 minutes to get a workout in , I know what I'm going to eat . I'll track it if I want to , if I need to for my goals . Otherwise , like it doesn't , it's not on my brain at all At all .

So it's a complete flip-flop of what my old lifestyle looked like and what my new lifestyle looks like . I did enjoy working out back then , but it wasn't the same . It was still a chore and I think that was mostly because I just didn't enjoy it . It was a lot of cardio and I really started to like lifting .

Now I didn't like lifting at first because it was new . It was scary . I thought I was going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger , like I was scared to lift so much I didn't think it would help my body look how I wanted . I thought I had to do cardio . It wasn't an easy transfer into lifting weights . It was hard , but I stuck with it and I did .

I was always thinking about my calories , like I said , my food , my workouts , my body , and now I'm just not . So what I have gained by this new lifestyle , honestly , is basically my life .

I have basically gained my life back , and I was actually talking about this a little bit too on a call with a client earlier today where I was talking about how , when my kids were little , I was very , very restrictive . I've talked in these episodes before about how I would eat my son's pizza crust out of the trash can and binge foods like that .

When my kids were really little , I was in this place of not eating carbs and hardly eating anything and just really , really restrictive in that state , and it makes me sad to think about all of the time that I missed out on .

Not that food is everything , but you know , I have a daughter and it would have been really good for me to have shown her and I'm doing that now , so I don't feel like terrible about it .

But you know and these are crucial years for my daughter because she's 17 right now so for the last four or five years I've shown her a very good , healthy relationship with food .

But when they were little , we would go get ice cream and I wouldn't have any , or I would take my food to certain restaurants and there's nothing wrong with saying no to ice cream and there's nothing wrong with taking your food into a restaurant . But for me , as a mom , I just wish that that would have gone differently .

I wish that I would have appreciated my body and not tried to shrink it and spent more time with them , probably honestly doing things that are different .

And I , a lot of those things didn't happen because I was sick for a while , honestly , and because of my relationship with food and my body , and I know that that is true for a lot of women , but I just now that I'm on the other side of that , I'm like , damn , I did miss out on some things but , that being said , that was my old lifestyle .

That's just what , the rut that I was stuck in . And now some of the things that I have changed , some of the things that are different , are I am a completely different woman than I was and I have gained my life back , literally .

When I thought of all the ways that my life that I have changed , I should say from that old lifestyle to this one , I really truly gained my life back . I have so much time now that I'm not , honestly , that I'm not spending meal planning and meal prepping and shopping and divvying up the foods and I'm not spending time stressing about my body .

I'm not spending time hating my body . I'm not spending time thinking about what I'm gonna do for a workout . It's not consuming my life .

This new lifestyle and the route that it took me to get here was hard , but looking back , it was so worth it because now I look at my body and I know that I am enough that , even if I don't love what I see in the mirror some days , I know that I need to do what I need to do . I know I need to do the shit , whether I feel like it or not .

I know that I'm strong and I want to be strong rather than just being skinny . I know that I need to have food for fuel . I know that I can have whatever I want to eat . I know that food is good for me if I eat it in a certain way .

I know all of these things and that's because of the journey Not necessarily what I'm doing now , but because of the journey and I have freedom from all of that restriction , and it wasn't easy to come by .

Some of the hard realizations that I had along this journey are that I was in my own way , that my lack of knowledge was the problem , that I trusted people who knew nothing about this space to help me . I trusted doctors . I trusted beach body coaches .

I trusted just random people that probably said they were personal trainers or that didn't have my best interest at heart , that just wanted my money . I trusted those people to help me and to teach me macros and workouts , and that was not good . That's not really my fault because they say right , you think those people know , but they don't .

So the knowledge was the problem . I didn't have any knowledge . I learned that my health was my responsibility . I learned that I am more than how my body looks . To look in the mirror and love yourself is amazing . At any weight , at any size , at any way , you look right . But it's okay to want it to look better For so many years .

I'm gonna get fired up here . I've always been smaller , aside from when I was pregnant . I've been a smaller person and people would always say that I was too obsessed with working out , I was too obsessed with eating healthy , that I was too small , that I was too fit , that I woke up too early to work out , that I you know all the things .

And then I started posting my job on social media and then it was like now I'm too confident and I'm too cocky and I'm all the things , and it's okay . It's okay that I wanted my body to look better . It's okay that I wanted my body to look better than most other people's bodies .

It's okay that I went through this journey , even if maybe I was too obsessed and you know all of the things that was on me because I was trying to be better and yeah , that looked like restricting and that looked like me wanting to be smaller and skinnier , but I didn't know any better . At that point I learned that I needed to stop obsessing .

I learned that I needed to be patient and I learned that I would have to stop listening to everyone else around me . People that were saying that I was working out too much . People that were saying that I was obsessed . People were saying that I was quote unquote too healthy I don't know if that's even a thing .

People that just say all kinds of shit because they don't want to focus on themselves and they're focusing on you and your journey . I had to stop listening to all of those people , and you will too . I also had to stop listening to coaches and things of that nature , people of that nature and all the numbers . I had to stop researching macros .

I had to stop Googling what are macros . I had to stop Googling what is fitness , what is progressive overload . I had to stop calculating my macros and calculating my calories and like . I had to stop obsessing with it and I had to do the work that I talk about all the time .

And I needed to be patient because let me dive into this really quick the more that I researched , the more information that I gathered , the more stuck I became , because if you Google what are macros and how to calculate macros and macro calculators , and all that . You will get a different answer every goddamn time , and then you feel completely lost .

That's exactly what happened to me . So I had to stop doing that , and what I learned is there are exceptions to every fitness rule . If there was one way to calculate your macros , then every single personal trainer on the internet wouldn't have a macro calculator .

There would be one , but there's so many different ways and reasons to calculate your macros that everybody can market one , and there's a million different fit trackers and there's a million different scales . Right , there are exceptions to every fitness rule . And you know why ? Because it's basic information .

You can find out what a macro is , sure , googling it right . What is a macro ? It's what makes up your calories , it's macronutrients , it's proteins , it's fats and carbs . The general information is fine , but you have to apply it to you . You have to bend all that information to make it fit for you .

Okay , and this is exactly what I did , and I'll be honest with you . Those things that I just mentioned and rattled off , that I was in my own way , that my lack of knowledge was the problem , that I trusted the wrong people , that my health was my responsibility , that I'm more than how my body looks but it's okay to wanna look fricking amazing .

That I needed to stop obsessing , that I needed to be patient , that I'd have to stop listening to everybody else and listen to myself All of those things . That's what I learned from doing this journey . What I learned from restricting was absolutely nothing . All I learned from that other lifestyle was that I don't wanna fucking do that anymore . I'll be honest .

So the fitness industry is basic . You can Google BMR . You can Google calories . You can Google maintenance calories . You can Google every single thing that I talk about in a basic way . The reason that doesn't work for everyone is because it's basic , and you , my friend , are not basic . You are a very complex being .

So Let me actually give you an example of this . So I was creating a guide earlier with my virtual assistant McKenna , who's absolutely amazing , and there will be another announcement about her in a couple of weeks . But anyway , back to what I was talking about .

I was doing the calculations and double checking them and I was calculating my own BMR and my own calorie deficit . I did all the numbers , calculated them correctly and it had my deficit . It had me being at my BMR , my regular calorie and take for my body to not gain or lose was over 2,000 calories .

Then I put myself in a 500 calorie deficit , which is pretty steep , and that had me at 1,500 calories . I'm just letting you know that . That's what my numbers looked like and that's correct . If I were to calculate those , that is the correct calculation . That's what I use to calculate my client's macros .

But then I take that number and I manipulate it because I need to know what they've tried , who they are , what their life is like , what their workouts are like . There's a lot more factors that come into it and that calculation didn't work for me .

If I were to start eating and that was a weight loss calculation so if I were to start eating that 1,500 calorie amount , that's basically my maintenance right now . So what I'm proving to you by that is and I won't go into a lot more detail about that because that might be confusing what I'm basically trying to say is I used an internet calculation .

I used the basic standard macro calculation for myself and it was wrong . Now the numbers aren't necessarily wrong , but that was wrong for me . That's not where I'm at in my life . 1,500 calories is not a deficit for me right now . Could it be if I reverse back up to 2,200 calories ? Absolutely ? Do I want to do that ?

No , no , I don't , because if I got myself up to 2,200 calories , I'd have to move more , I'd have to exercise more , I'd have to run , I'd have to walk more miles a day , and I don't fucking want to .

So this is what I'm saying when I have to stop listening to everyone else and ignoring all the numbers and ignoring what everyone says and ignoring what the internet says , and I have to figure out what works for me . And that's exactly what I did . So , all in all , I'm a different woman than I was back then restricting .

I know exactly what I believe as far as health and fitness goes for myself , because I walked through it . Can you get there another way ? Absolutely . Have other people gotten their dream body another way , a different way than me ? Absolutely . Will people tell you that their way is better ? Absolutely , we all only know what we know .

We view things not necessarily as they are , but through the lens that we've lived through . Right , I love macros . I think they're amazing because it taught me patience . It taught me all of those things that I listed above . It's given me food freedom . It has helped me to build my body .

It teaches me that no foods are off limits , that I can use extra carbs for a leg day and build some killer quads , which I'm trying to do . Carbs have changed me like helped me so much . You might talk to someone else later today . That's like . I freaking hate carbs . You should do keto . Keto is the way right , because that's what they did .

But what I learned because of what I lived through is that I never want to restrict again , I don't want to have rules around food , I never want to under-fuel my body again , and that's for me to decide , and that's what's helped me change . And that's for you to decide too . This is all in your power , right ?

I know my body so well and let me just drop this little tidbit here I know my body so well because of the years in between . That's where the fitness journey emphasis on journey comes into play .

If you just went straight from restriction and that start over every single Monday mindset , the all or nothing mindset and you jumped straight to the perfect , happy vision of this lifestyle that I'm kind of painting , even though it's not perfect , if you didn't have that struggle in between , you wouldn't appreciate and you wouldn't know , you wouldn't have the knowledge ,

you wouldn't have the education , you wouldn't have the experience and you wouldn't be as confident because you would just be like , oh , that's freaking easy here , I am over here killing it . And that's not true . I have lived through that middle part and soaked it all in so that no one can tell me what I need or what I don't need .

I'm completely confident in my body , what it needs to be fueled , what kind of workouts it needs to do . I know if I need a rest day . Right , I know all of that now . And so to sum up in a lot of words how fitness , how the fitness lifestyle that I preach , has improved my life .

It has given me life , it has given me a whole new body , it has given me a whole new mindset , and I need to transfer that into some other areas of my life , honestly , and I am doing that . But what macros and this fitness lifestyle will give to you ?

If you take the time to appreciate the journey and if you don't give up , and if you stick with it and you realize all those bullet points that I mentioned , if you stick with that , all of this can happen for you too . You also can view food as fuel . You cannot obsess about food all day , every day . You cannot obsess about workouts all day , every day .

You can have this confidence in your body , not only looking in the mirror and have confidence , but have confidence in the inside , knowing that you're feeding it well and knowing that you understand what it needs , and you really can feel like I'm really tired , my soul is tired or my legs are tired , like you'll know the difference .

So it's hard for me to put into words , honestly , how all of this has changed my life , and I'm trying to do that that's why I have this podcast is to try to get this out into the world , get my feelings out into the world , but it's hard .

I do want to also say I was talking to a new client shout out in a will this morning and she was really giving me a lot of her backstory , which one-on-one clients . We do get a lot of backstory and it's a lot of-she joked that it was kind of like a therapy session and I said back like it is a therapy session .

It's easy to find information , it's easy to know what you need to do , but the hard part is to do it and the harder part is to do it for a long enough period of time that you see the progress and that you know that it's going to work .

But this is so much mindset and that's another reason that I have this podcast , like I was saying , is to help you understand that it's not just the numbers and it's not just the macros and it's not just the workouts . There's so much more that goes into it that if you forget all of the stuff that's important , it doesn't make the journey quite as sweet .

I can easily say to you like oh yeah , I went from a very restrictive lifestyle to now I'm confident in my macros and I don't think about my fitness at all , really . But that's missing the entire story of how I got here . That's missing who I am and who I became and why I'm in the position that I am now and why I'm so passionate about helping you .

So and it takes all of that to know if I wouldn't have gone through all that shit in the middle , trying macros eight times by myself , right sucking , and not have any idea what I was doing , if I would have just like skipped over that part , then it wouldn't be so sweet on the other side . But that's where it comes .

When you're , like , so proud of yourself that you're doing it and you're eating more and you're seeing the success and mentally you're feeling so much better , that's where the change happens . So I hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as I did . I could have got a little more spicy there , but maybe on another episode I will do that .

Maybe on the episode where I'm kind of summing up my thoughts for the year . I'll get sassy again , but again I hope you really did enjoy this . I love just kind of chatting with you and letting you get to know me a little bit more . I think that's really important too , and I absolutely cannot wait to talk to you next week .