The Real Reason Your Body Isn't Changing & How to Fix It

There's nothing worse than doing the work and not seeing the results. 

In this episode we are going to go over WHY that happens and HOW to fix it. 

Thanks for listening! Check out my instagram for more @coach.alyciaca

Transcript

0:31

Good morning, my friends. Maybe it's not morning for you, but it is for me. Are we supposed to be recording a podcast episode today? No, we're not, but we're pivoting. And you know what, this might be a good lesson for all of you because last night my dear dog, Kevin, decided that he was going to vomit all over the couch. And after that I promptly discovered that some ants were trying to infiltrate his food. So after spending about an hour solving all of those problems, I eventually went to bed only to be woken up by Kevin repeatedly throughout the night because my sweet baby boy had a tummy ache. Did I mention Kevin as a dog? He is anyway. He just wanted his mom, he just wanted to snuggle. He didn't necessarily need to be sick, but I sat up with him from 1:30 AM till about 4:15 AM and then I went back to sleep till about six, got him up. Fed him a little bit, went back to sleep till eight. And here we are a little bit low on energy, a little bit not where we wanna be. Also, what I was planning to do today had to get pushed because I am still waiting on some feedback before I execute. So my point being, rather than just being like. Guess I'm not doing anything today, which was actually my initial thought, which is so funny. I was like, oh, I can't do the tasks that I planned because I don't have that feedback. And also I'm really tired, so I guess I'll just do nothing. And then I was like, or you could do what you were supposed to do tomorrow, today and flip flop. That's allowed. So some same thing can apply to your workouts. You had a night that went to shit. You aren't able to get to the gym on the day you were supposed to go to the gym. Instead of skipping your workout, do the workout you were supposed to do tomorrow, which was a 20 minute run around the neighborhood. You know what I mean? We can pivot. That's what we are good at. The point of this episode, I shouldn't say the point. What we're gonna talk about today is. A subject that I think a lot of you are ready to talk about, and it's the real reason that you're not seeing body changes in your thirties, your forties, despite feeling like. You're doing everything right, and I'm gonna go ahead and put a disclaimer on this and say that I am not talking to anyone who has a medical condition. I'm not even necessarily addressing the perimenopause or menopause crowd because that is a little bits. Different. And that's something that I talk about more. So inside of my course. I'm just talking about us regular gals out there who have reached a stage in life where we're like this is it. This is what they all told us about. This is the time when all of a sudden I just, I'm hanging onto the weight. And this applies for men too. This is not just a women only thing. So if you are a man out there listening, sit your ass down because. This applies to you. So if you're frustrated that your body isn't changing, it's probably not because you don't know what to do. You do know it's that either. You're not doing it as well as you think you are, or there's some things that we need to change, we need to fine tune. I guess those kind of go hand in hand. Hand in hand. Or you're doing it really well, but you're not doing it really well as often as you need to be. So generally the advice that we get is eat less, move more. That's how you lose fat. And that is actually super true. That's how it works. It is an energy expenditure equation. And you can say, what about hormones and what about this and what about that? And I will tell you that yeah, there are a lot of things that influence both sides of the equation, but that at the end of the day, it's still an equation. So whether you are somebody who you know your hormones are a little bit wonky, that might just mean that you're expending a little bit less energy because some systems are getting downregulated. What it doesn't mean is that the equation no longer holds up. It does. Fat loss is always gonna come down to expending more energy than you're consuming. Okay? So that brings me to my next point, which is that metabolism, it doesn't slow down as we age. Not in the way that we have been led to believe that it does. It's not this drastic thing, and I feel like the goalposts keeps moving. Like when I was younger, I would hear oh, you're thirties. And then I would hear oh, just wait till menopause. And again, that's another subject, but, or oh, we'll wait till. This, that, or the other, and it's okay, what am I waiting until? And what we know now is that menopause or not menopause your metabolism doesn't really change until. About your sixties, what does change is our activity. And a lot of us sit here and we're like, I don't get it. I ate whatever I wanted in college. I was binge drinking on the weekends and I was, in the best shape that I'd ever been in. And some of you might be like that wasn't me. Actually. I was absolutely one of the people that gained the freshman 15. Hi. I know that was me. I certainly put on some weight in college when I had when I was left to my own devices and unlimited amounts of shitty beer. But for a lot of us, we look back on that point in our lives of our. Late teens or early twenties is like the time when it felt effortless, at least compared now. Or we might've felt like we gained weight then, but like we were very aware that what we were doing wasn't like the best choices, like the all you can eat buffet in the dining hall, plus, ripping shots at. Two o'clock in the morning plus eating burritos on the floor of your friend's house as the sun comes up. So it's yeah, I gained some weight maybe, but like it makes sense and now it's like I feel like I'm doing everything right and I'm either still gaining or I'm not losing and that is pissing me off. And I hear you.'cause that is incredibly frustrating. But one thing that we don't take into account is the activity level when we are at that age. Do you know how many steps you were probably getting in, like bouncing back and forth from bar to bar house party to house party, mingling, chatting, dancing, doing all those little things. Being a college student, walking around campus, biking around campus, like you may not have acknowledged it then, but we weren't. Generally not very sedentary at that point in our lives. High school, you're literally being forced to go on a walk every like 50 minutes when the next class starts. Things like that, that, it may have seemed like it was. On easy mode, but really we just, we were doing more, we had more free time. We weren't chained to a desk. We were more active. We were hanging in the courtyard with our friends. Like I said, we were walking, I don't know how many miles while we were drunk at three o'clock in the morning trying to find our way home. All of that changes as you get older. Thank God, right? Thank God. So most programs. That you've probably followed or you've seen, they hand you a training plan and maybe a meal plan or a macros calculator or something to that degree. And the issue here is that you're trying to replace what happened for you naturally with something that's structured and that can be really difficult. So what I mean by that is. There at this point in our lives when it felt like we were in great shape, and we didn't try that hard, it's because we were naturally expending more energy than we were intaking. And maybe that was because we were walking everywhere, like I said, and we were broke, so we weren't like eating out all the time. Now we're like, okay, I have to fix this, so I'm gonna make a plan. And all of a sudden this becomes something that you have to follow, something you have to do something that takes up mental bandwidth. And it's not just so simple as oh, I made these few tweaks and everything's back to the way that I want it to be. And the other thing is that some of us need to get really realistic about what we actually want, because. Unfortunately, I don't wanna say unfortunately, but it's just the case that a lot of people that are selling training plans, nutrition plans, and certainly this was the case when I was coming up in like the 2000 tens in my twenties. A lot of those people are ones who take health and fitness and wellness and whatever you wanna call it, to the extreme. And I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but what I'm saying is they have made it their entire life. So I'm talking about the bodybuilding competitors. I'm talking about the professional athletes. I'm talking about the influencers who their only job is to, work out and mill their own oats to make flour. That's not how you make flour. But do you see what I'm saying here? When you're taking advice from people like that, it's probably going to be a lot more restrictive than what is going to naturally align with you. And for these people it can be too. A lot of bodybuilding competitors suffer from eating disorders. At worst disordered eating at best. A lot of them have very unhealthy relationships with their body. Body dysmorphia. You can see if you followed some of their journeys, like the drastic swings in weight from one show in between shows to prep, and it's normalized as like this is the sport. And to a degree it is because. They realize that level of leanness isn't realistic year round, but the fluctuations are quite a bit more drastic than they maybe necessarily need to be. And so when we're taking advice from these types of people while knowing that's not the life that we wanna live, there can be a disconnect. And so we're following a plan. That fits what they know that fits their life, but it doesn't necessarily fit ours. Okay. The next thing you have to do is get really realistic with yourself. So I have gotten good at this to a point where maybe I'm sometimes too realistic. But what I mean by that is taking a moment, stepping back and asking where you could have done better. And I don't mean I guess I could have eaten only kale instead of kale and chicken, so I have less calories. Am I actually being consistent? Do I actually know what I'm taking in, or am I just more so eyeballing it? Have I actually been consistent with my workouts? Am I trying hard in my workouts? Do I have the energy to be consistent, or do I have the energy to give the effort that I need to in order to give results? So let's say your sleep sucks and all of a sudden you're having cravings and your recovery is totally tanked, and so you're overeating at night, but in your mind we have like this selective bias of I don't understand, like I've been good all day. And we're ignoring those little like bites and snacks and things to, to satisfy scratch that itch that happen late at night. Or on the weekend. This happens all the time when I have asked clients in the past who have been frustrated with their progress with fat loss. I've asked them to write down their meals or their food for the week, and do you know how many times they did it? And this is when I was coaching in person, almost zero. And they'd come to me on Monday and I would ask them like, okay, do you have your food log? And it would be, no. This weekend was, it was a little bit unusual, like we were out of town for this. And in the beginning when I was a younger coach, I was like, okay, that makes sense. Let's try again next week. But what I've since learned is it's always unusual. Things don't go as planned. That's the data that we need. Okay? The data that we need to look at is the data, when things aren't controlled, when things aren't in a vacuum, when things aren't perfect. So you need to get realistic am I doing quote unquote, five days a week, but then the sixth and seventh day, it's like a free for all, and how can I make that more balanced? So that doesn't happen. Yeah. And then again, half-assing the workouts. Do you have metrics to show that you're not just showing up and going through the motions? And this is so often the case this is why I request that my clients log their weights used in a workout. So I can see that we're actually making progress on certain exercises. And this is also why I prescribe an intensity, excuse me. So that they know exactly what I want them to shoot for in every set, instead of just, I'm going through, I'm getting it done and I did my workout. It's more am I able to give it my full effort and can I look back and see, oh, I went from 20 pounds on dumbbell bench press to 30 pounds over the course of four to five months, or whatever it might be. We wanna see that we're actually not even making progress, but that our effort is staying consistent and we're not just, like I said, half-assing it and then we can talk about perfection is some creep. My favorite, I was an expert at this. My goodness. Okay, so this happens. When you go on your healthy eating journey, your exercise journey, but we're gonna talk about food purely for this example. And, you've done your meal plans and you've swapped everything out and you're in a calorie deficit, so you should be losing fat. And you're like I'm in a calorie deficit. I'm supposed to have 1800 calories today. If you're tracking, what if I just have 1600? Then I'll get an A plus. Wrong, okay, I did this shit all the time. That is not a good idea because you know what happens? One, it gets harder to maintain that two, that becomes your new bar that you set for yourself completely arbitrarily, and you're like, it becomes like a competition where you're always trying to beat it and then your energy goes to shit. Then you're not doing anything else. And then all of those systems I talked about start to downregulate anyway, so you're not spending as much energy and eventually you probably end up binge eating. This happens all the time. Like I said, I was the queen of this. I would have my little macro sheet, my calorie sheet, and it was like a badge of honor for me when I came in like under my galleries for the day. And it's no bitch, that's not the point. The point is to get as much as possible out of it with doing as little as possible, right? That's the point. Sorry, I'm screaming. Okay, so what are some things that we can fix right now? So let's talk about your energy management instead of punishing your body, feel it for performance. So that reframe. Instead of I'm going to eat less because I wanna lose weight. It's, I'm being mindful about my nutrition choices, my food choices, but I wanna make sure that I have enough to get a really good workout in because if I get a really good workout in, then I am driving muscular growth, I'm driving perhaps aerobic system adaptations, and then I'm probably getting more out of it. I'm burning more calories. So it's not just so simple as to be like, I'm just going to eat less and hope everything else works out. We wanna make sure that we have enough energy to do what the other things that we need to do to make this sustainable. And that goes into your mindset as well. So not relying on motivation. We have to make it so it's pretty damn easy to show up even when nothing else is working, right? Like we have to make it so that it almost is a no-brainer. Like the weights are literally in front of my face. The program is right there. I know exactly what to do. I know exactly what to do based on like my energy levels today. And I'm just gonna do it and I'm just gonna execute it. I'm not gonna sit there and wait until I feel like doing it. I'm gonna make it so easy to start that it's a no brainer. And the reason I can speak so much on this is not only because I have worked with people who have gone through this, but because I went through it myself, right? Like I said, the idea that more is always better, restrict more, exercise, more. Et cetera. I was the queen of that, and that's why people do the 75 hearts and the whole thirties because they're looking for this thing that is so structured and takes it as far as it can without, being too crazy to get them. These results and because it has a, an end date, right? Like you hear 30, you hear 75 days, you're like, okay, I can do this for that long. That's not the point. The point is to create a life that you can sustain every single day that you don't need to put an expiration date on. And that's the point that I've gotten to and that I've worked with my clients to get to as well. Because you don't have to do a reset if you build a life that allows you to sustain the body that you want. And that is what I work with everybody, is to create that balance. And it's really fricking hard, but. It's hard to create it once you get it. It is like you put life on easy mode and all of a sudden, like the fat loss is coming more naturally. The muscle building is coming more naturally. The food noise is more quiet like it feels more like it did back when it was easy. So if your body isn't changing, just know it's not because you're lazy. It's not because you're clueless. It's not because your body is broken. It's because something that you're doing isn't working. And hopefully I gave you some good examples of what those things might be and how to troubleshoot them going forward. Because when we fix the those and then consistency becomes automatic body composition changes, follow. All right, I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the next one. Bye.