Client deep dive... Having flexibility & making body composition progress on a maintenance intake!

Today we are looking at one of my long term gals, and how she successfully navigates fat loss and maintenance phases, while also building her shape, increasing strength and progressing with her body composition... All while enjoying a flexible diet 😍

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DISCLAIMER
The Eat Like Ruby podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature and should not be used to treat any medical conditions, health conditions, illnesses, injuries and/or any nutrition related conditions, deficiencies or similar.
This podcast is not to be used as, or in place of, medical advice or dietary advice.
Please consult your health care professional before implementing any of the advice, information or protocols discussed in this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello fam, welcome back to the pod. Today we're gonna do a client deep dive episode. So if you're a regular listener of the pod, you would have heard these before. We haven't done one for a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months, but pretty much I take one of my current clients and I just talk about their history, goals, plans and protocols we've got in place to work towards those goals, little things that have come up along the way, like little, I don't know, mindset things or habits or anything. It's just like real, actual coaching. Obviously, on the pod we speak so much about like different plans and protocols and things you can put in place and all the things you want to think about when you do that, but I think it's really cool to then just look at an actual real life scenario and just go like this is how it's playing out for this client, this is what we talked about, this is what we look at, this is what comes up, etc. So I love these episodes because I love my clients. Um, but I just think it's cool to see what all of this looks like in real life. As always, I'm gonna respect the privacy of this client. This is a particularly private client, so I always do respect people's privacy and don't give away too many details to like reveal who they are. But definitely not gonna do that with this client because I know I think she'll be equally like nervous that I'm doing an episode about her, but also chuffed because she's such a long-term eat like we gal. She's a massive podcast fan. So hopefully she'll get a kick out of this. And then for everyone else, like I said, I just like to do these so you can see actual like practical implementation of all the shit that we talk about. I don't know if implementation is a word, but I'm gonna keep going and get into it. So this particular client falls into like our typical gym girl category. Obviously, in Eat Lacroby, I work with a lot of performance girls and athletes and then gym girls. This is a gym girl. And like I said, she's been in Eat Lacroby. It actually feels like for such a long time. It's been a little bit over two years, but it feels like three or four years just because she's so regular, she's so consistent, she's awesome. And I spoke to her literally two nights ago, and there was just like a few things that came up to the point where I was like, literally, when I was talking to her, I'm like, I gotta do an episode about you. So here we are. But to give a little bit of a backstory, this client came to me early 2024 to do her first muscle gain phase, and she'd never done anything like this, to the point where, like, just to put in a little bit of context and just massive shout out to this client, the first gym session she did in Eat Lack Ruby, like the first online training programmed session that we gave her, she did 40 kilos on the leg press. And yesterday she did 230 kilos. Just pausing to let that one land. First session just over two years ago, 40 kilos. Now she's at 230 kilos. Like, that is insane. And I know she's gonna be listening, and now that I've dropped those numbers, she's gonna be like, yep, shit, this episode is about me. So it is about you, but those numbers are awesome. And that just kind of shows like where she was at when she first came in. Like I said, she came into a specific muscle gain program and hadn't really done that before, hadn't dabbled in that before. She was late 30s, is now 40, um, but was late 30s when she came in and quite beginner to the gym and especially like the muscle gain scene and all of that. So that is awesome. I love it. I, you guys know, like my jam to help someone navigate a muscle gain phase and get out of the deficit and all of that. We've spoken about that a lot, and I'm sure we're gonna speak about that today because this client has done that very well. But just to give a little bit of context, she hangs around the 60-ish kilo mark, let's say like high 50s up to mid 60s. We're gonna talk about that a little bit today because she's had some really cool progress with weight, and I just think there's a cool thing to look at there. And then standard high, fairly standard activity levels, like I said, does online training with me. Sometimes we do four sessions a week, sometimes we take it up to five. At the moment, we're doing four, and then just pretty standard activity levels outside of that, works a full-time job, lives a normal life. So I would say fairly relatable to a lot of our audience, which is cool. This is why it's cool to then look at like what we've specifically have done with this client. So I'm gonna kind of give a brief summary of what we've done over the years, and then really I want to talk about a couple of things that came up when I spoke to her the other day. Just because she has gone through so many of the things we speak about on the podcast, and now she's in a position where I was pointing out to her, like, you've done so much work, you've gone through so many things, you're now in a really cool position where you can just have a bit of freedom, have a bit of flexibility. That's what we're gonna talk about today. But to kind of summarize like how she got to this point, so she came into eat lacribie in 2024, did the muscle gain phase. We obviously put like personalized training in place to suit her. Like I said, we dabble between four to five sessions a week, just depending on what her schedule's like at the time, what we want to actually include in the training. We just see if we're vibing four or five sessions. So we had that in place throughout 2024. And then with her nutrition, we calculated her maintenance calories to be in those like low to mid-2000s, like I always talk about. She is that sort of standard body composition, activity level, etc., that I see with so many girls. And usually we see maintenance around 2200, 2300, give or take. So with this client, we started her there, and then we just nudged her up towards like the mid-2000s, and then we nudged her up to 2600, and then we ended up sitting around 2700 calves, give or take, for the surplus. So if we think about her doing a muscle gain phase, she did want to go into a small surplus, but she did want to kind of gradually ease into it, and rightly so. Like first muscle gain phase, first time in the like Ruby World. She's like, what is this? Didn't want to just jump headfirst into a surplus, that makes sense. So we eased her into that over those months, and that is just such a cool process to go through, especially when you're working closely with a coach, because like I said, we put those like 2200 cals in place, sat there for a few weeks. I'm like, your body is eating this up. Like we're going up a little bit, sat there for a few weeks, same thing. So we took it up again. And like I've said on the podcast before, that can be really cool to do with a coach because we're watching everything closely. We're not gonna let you move too far in a direction that you don't want to go. We're gonna intercept anything that starts happening that we don't want to be happening, and then you can go through that process quite confidently. And then, like I said, we landed at an intake that was about 2700 cals, and that was showing to just be that really slight surplus for her, which is awesome. And around that time, I'm literally pulling these numbers out of my brain. So they might not be perfect, but she was sitting around the high 50s, like around 59 kilos, and then we started to move into like 60s gradually, 61. And it's one of these things where I specifically remember this muscle gain phase for this client and for a few clients who were in it, where when it's the first time someone's gone through that process of like gradually increasing cows, moving into a little bit of a surplus, we see that very gradual weight gain over time. And sometimes you might have like a big spike one day or a big fluctuation one day, and that can be like a little bit panicky. We've obviously spoken about scale weight so much in the podcast before, but if it's your first time intentionally trying to gain weight, when you see those big jumps, it can be a little bit like, shit, have I gone too far? Have I pushed it? Like, is this too much? And I specifically remember in this phase for this client and for a lot of the girls in there, we went through those day-to-day fluctuations and those random spikes and everything. And this was a 20-week program. And at around the 10-week mark, we had a group call, and I literally said to all of them, you're all up by about like one to one and a half kilos. Like in 10 weeks, we've put on a kilo. And that's just such a funny thing to point out to people because, like I said, when you have days where you see a big jump or a big spike, you can just spiral and think like, oh my god, I'm eating too much or I'm pushing too far or whatever. But then you have days where it drops a little bit and it ebbs and flows. And then, like I said, for this particular client, around that halfway point, she's put on like a kilo give or take. And then that's why we kept nudging those cows up a little bit. And then by the time we got to the end of the 20 weeks, she's put on, say, like three to four kilos in 20 weeks of really structured training, really, really consistent nutrition. This is a very consistent client, just FYI. So coming back to that muscle gain phase, that was such a cool process to go to because I said to her, we have just seen your body maintain really well through those 2000s, and now we know the surplus for you is pretty much up over the two and a half thousand calorie mark. That is unreal information to have. I've said this on the podcast before, but going through processes of being really consistent with an intake and finding out how your body personally responds to different intakes is such good info to have because for this particular client, and this is something I'm gonna get into today, but she now has that info for life. She knows how her body responds to so many different intakes. And I said it in an episode really recently, but when you've gone through that process and you know where your maintenance intake is, or you know that your body can maintain and you can sit on a really decent intake, that's such good information to have. Instead of feeling like anytime you want to be on track with your nutrition, it has to be on low calories. So this client is such a perfect example of someone that went through that and has really been able to gather that information and it's come back to serve her so well. And we're gonna speak about that as the episode goes on. But she then over the last few years has just gone through a few different phases of like maintenance, some mini cuts, deficits. She's done a lot of that on her own. So she's done training with me ever since she started in early 2024, but she's come in and out of nutrition. So sometimes if we've run things like a muscle gain phase or different programs with a particular focus, she might jump in them and then she'll have phases where she just monitors her own nutrition and just stays with me for training. So even that is such a win, and I can think of hundreds of girls who are listening that do that as well. And that's awesome because again, if you do have a specific goal that you want to work on or something new that you do want help with, you can come in and do that. And then when you reach a point where you're like, okay, cool, I don't need that help anymore, I can step away and manage this by myself. That's awesome. So then coming back to this client, if we fast forward to 2026, she came into the new year training with me, but just doing nutrition on her own. But anytime I talk to her about training, like if we get on a call to talk about training, we just naturally start talking about nutrition as well because I just feel like I know her so well. And I'm like, what have you been doing? Tell me everything. So when we spoke at the start of this year, we teed up a new training program, and then she was like, I am gonna do a deficit throughout the first couple of months of the year. So last year she had her 40th, she went to Europe, she did a bunch of different things, and she hadn't done a deficit for a while, so she was like, Yep, I'm gonna come into a deficit for pretty much like Jan, Feb, March of 2026. So that was cool, and she did all of that herself. Like I said, she was just doing training with me, so she set all of that up because we've done that in the past. She knows where her deficit is, she knows how to do all those things. So that was awesome. And then I spoke to her just before Easter. So we were due to do a program update, training program update just before Easter. And I was like, how did the deficit go? How's everything going? And she was just vibing. She was like, Yep, deficit went so well. I'm about to come out of it for Easter, then I'm gonna go to maintenance, I'm gonna sit up maintenance throughout the year. Like she had such a solid plan, and it was just going so well. So that was awesome. And then, like I said, I spoke to her literally two days ago for another program update. They come around so fast, but new program update. And I just said, like, how's things been going since you came out of the deficit? You've gone to maintenance, and she was just in such a good position, like with her numbers and her stats and everything she was telling me. But also, like, this is a client that I've worked with for a long time. So I feel like I've had calls or I've worked through things with her where she's not feeling that good. And then when you jump on calls, you can pretty quickly tell, like, this person's feeling good, she's in a good place. So I could see that straight away when I spoke to her the other day, which is awesome. And she'd gone through that deficit at the start of the year, come into maintenance over the last few weeks or even last few months now, pretty much since Easter. And she'd pretty much done what we had done in the past. She bought herself out of the deficit straight up to 2200 cals, sat there for a little bit, nudged it up towards 23, 24, and then that pretty much brought her to where she was at when we spoke the other day. And then that brings us to some of the cool shit that I wanted to speak about with this client. So, two of the first things that I wanted to talk about that I spoke about with her were in relation to scale weight. So when she did this deficit at the start of the year, she was around the like mid-60s or not even, probably like 63, 64 when she came into the new year. And then she did the deficit for about 10 weeks and came down to literally bang on 60 kilos, like 6-0 on the dot. And that's where she ended the deficit. And two things I wanted to look at here, or two things I did look at here with her, just because we were talking about all of this stuff. She's then, like I said, brought herself back up to her maintenance intake, nudged that up a little bit. She's sort of finding where the sweet spot is with that. And her weight is pretty much hanging between, say, 61 to 61 and a half kilos. And because she logs it in our training app, I could see it all. Like I could see every number, every piece of data, which is awesome. And I said to her straight away, this is maintenance, in my opinion. Like looking at this, this is 100% maintenance. Because often people can look at something like, oh, well, I finished the deficit at 60 kilos and now I'm 61. First of all, like we've spoken so much about weight fluctuations and day-to-day movement and all of those things. No human being is gonna weigh the exact same number every single day. Like it's just never gonna happen. So anytime I see a person pretty much hanging back and forth in like literally a two kilo range, I call that maintenance. And with this particular client, she'd pretty much come up to that 61 over those first couple of weeks. And then she was just hanging there. And I said to her, like, that is a hundred percent maintenance because you're not continuing to gain and move in a direction that you don't want to go. And I'm gonna come back to that in a second, but you've had that little initial increase and then you're just holding steady. What we have to think about is that initial increase is an increase in food volume in the system. Two months ago, you would have 1600 calories worth of food coming in every day, and now you have 2300 calories worth coming in every day. The actual weight and volume of that food is gonna contribute to the total weight of your body. And then at the same time, with that additional food comes additional things like carbohydrates and sodium that are gonna change the fluid levels in the body. Obviously, carbohydrates are gonna store in the body as glycogen. So all of these little things are gonna contribute to more mass and more weight in the body, but not more body fat or a change in body composition. And that's just so important to think about because, like I said, if you're hanging, say, like you do a fat loss phase and you hit that peak low on the scale, and this is just yet another reason why we don't just want to look at the scale or nitpick the numbers, but it's cool to really point out what's going on with these numbers here so people can understand why we don't want to nitpick them. But if you hit a peak low in a fat loss phase and then you come out of that and you go to a decent maintenance intake, like I said, you're gonna have food mass, additional calories, additional carbohydrates, which is gonna be additional glycogen, additional sodium, which is gonna contribute to different fluid levels in the body. So all of those things come up when the calories come up and create what I would refer to as the new normal. Because once they come up initially from the deficit to maintenance, they don't keep coming up because you're not gonna add a ton more carbohydrates to the body or heaps more sodium to the body. That stuff's gonna jump up quite a bit when we jump from the deficit to maintenance. But then if we hang out maintenance, like I said, all of those things just become the new normal. The new level of those things that's coming in is the new normal. And then how those things are sitting in the body becomes the new normal for the position that the body is sitting in. And so, like I said, when I looked at this client's data overall, like it comes up on my screen as pretty much a big calendar, and I can see what she's done every day for like the last six weeks. And it's awesome because I was like, we've seen it just do that little increase, but then it's held so steady. That is maintenance, and she's having these day-to-day fluctuations, but like I said, it's anywhere from say 60 to 61 and a half kilos. It's not a huge range, and it's continuously going back and forth, so she's not continuing to gain weight and move in a direction that she doesn't want to go. She is maintaining. Funny that when you're eating at maintenance. But then another thing I said to this client in relation to weight, and I feel like I've said this on the podcast before because we've spoken about weight so much, but someone made a very particular comment to me last year. Like a client made a comment that just stuck in my brain so much. So I was finishing up with a client who had spent the last few months working with me to pretty much find her maintenance intake and just settle at maintenance. And she'd done a really good job. It was awesome. And she was hanging around the 64-ish kilo mark. This is a different client, by the way. I'm just using this example to explain my story. So this particular client at the time was sitting around 64 kilos, give or take. And I remember she said to me, like, we were talking about how she was now gonna navigate maintenance moving forward. And she was like, Yep, like I'm fine with the little fluctuations and I'm fine with all of these things. And then I just know that if I start to see the 65s, I've gone too far. But this particular client was pretty into training, like strength training, and she pretty much wanted to sit at maintenance and gradually progress with her training and build her muscle mass and build her shape and her strength and everything over time, which is awesome. I love this. But something I had to point out to this client is she had this very sort of strong boundary in her mind that was like, so long as I'm still hanging in the 64s, I'm good. If I see a 65 on the scale, that's gonna indicate that I've quote gone too far, I'm no longer maintaining, I'm moving in a direction I don't want to go. And one thing I just pointed out to her was you want to sit at your maintenance intake, like you want to sit on a really decent intake, you want to really fuel your training, you want to get after your training, you want to have progressive training in place, and you want to gradually build some shape and some muscle over time, correct? And she was like, Yep. And I said, Okay, so if you want to build muscle over time, over time, the addition of that muscle that you build is going to accumulate and add to your total body weight. Pretty slowly, pretty gradually, but it will over time. So just clock the fact that you have a very strict boundary on the fact that if you see a 65 on the scale, I mean, there's other reasons that we shouldn't have such a strict boundary on a number like that, but just honing in on this particular aspect, because I think so many people can relate to this, where it's like you do want to sit around maintenance and you don't want to gain unnecessary body fat, but you do want to gradually work on your body composition and your shape, etc. And that's exactly the position this client was in. And this is when I said to her, just clock that very tight boundary that you have on 65. Because if you sit here for a while, but you do have that awesome training in place and you are slowly accumulating more muscle mass, eventually you want to move into those 65s. Because if that means you have a slightly heavier body but with the same amount of body fat on it, then that's a massive win because you want to build muscle and you want to build shape, and you want that shape to be showing through in your physique. Come back to what I just said. If you've got the same amount of body fat but more muscle, that is going to show through as that shape that you want. And that shape and that muscle is gonna weigh something. So this is such a perfect example. I mean, we've probably all seen those things online where people are like, this is my body at 60 kilos, and this is my body at 62, and the 62 kilo body is like way more shredded and muscly and shapely, and whatever words we want to use. But that's a, you know, usually online they're quite extreme examples. But it is a good example to just show that if we do have the goal to want to keep progressing with training and keep progressing with our body composition and our shape, we just don't want to have those really tight boundaries and numbers capping us from doing that. And even if we think about my own muscle gain phase, if you've listened to the recent episodes, I've said in those episodes, like, I want to build muscle that I've never built before. So that muscle is gonna weigh something. So I'm working towards having a heavier body than I've had before, but a different body composition than I've ever had before. So it's just clocking the fact that like heavier doesn't necessarily mean bad and gradual progression in weight going up isn't always bad as well. If we look at goals like this and people in these positions. And if we come back to the client that I'm actually speaking about today, this is something that we were talking about the other night when we spoke because when we had done deficits in the past, she'd come down into like the 58 kilo range. And she literally said to me on the call, she was like, I cannot imagine going to 58 now. Like I hit 60 and that was enough. Like I was feeling pretty small, I was feeling pretty tiny. She's like, I don't know how I used to be two to three kilos lighter than this. And this just ties in with what I was just saying. Like I said to her, yeah, but last time you did a deficit and you hit those 58 kilos was like two years ago. Over that two years, you've taken your leg press from 40 kilos to 230 kilos. So you better believe some muscle and therefore some shape has come with that. So now the body that you used to diet down to and hit 58 kilos with, now when you diet down to 60, you could have the exact same amount of body fat on your frame. You could even have less body fat on your frame as you did two years ago, but you've got this additional muscle. So again, it's just such a good example of why we don't want to just be stuck on those numbers of like, this is, you know, this is a weight that would be too far, or if we're dieting, we're going in that other direction. People like I have to get back to XYZ weight. Again, with this client, perfect example. She's like, deficits used to end for me at 58. I ended this one at 60 because I could just see that losing another two kilos was not needed at all. Because now I have a heavier body because I have more muscle and more shape on my body. And again, if you've listened to all Of my muscle gain episodes, I've said the same thing. I would expect to end my deficit later this year. I'm gonna aim to be like three or four kilos heavier than my last deficit. So it's just a cool thing to think about, especially if you are a gym girl who's getting after training. Just clock any sort of boundaries or anything you have on your weight, especially like that. Because weight ain't really the goal. I said this the other day when I was talking about myself. Like, I do not have weight loss goals. Even if I go after a fat loss phase or when I go after a fat loss phase, I have body composition goals, not weight goals. I don't need to weigh certain numbers. Come back to this client. She doesn't need to weigh in at a certain number or hit a certain number. So that's just a cool thing to think about if you're in a similar position. And then there was a couple of other little things that came up with this client that I wanted to look at. And one of them in particular, or actually both of them, but the first time we're gonna look at is something that I think is so relatable to again, girls in similar positions and girls that have been in the nutrition and training world for a while, especially if you've been doing good shit with your nutrition and training for a while, like if you've been flexible dieting, had good training in place, you've been in control of your nutrition and training for a while. What I want to talk about here is gonna be really relatable to you. With this particular client, like I said, she has gone through maintenance, surpluses, fat loss, back and forth a little bit, gone to different goals, different phases, different intakes at different times, which is awesome. And then one thing she said to me the other day is like, yep, I've nudged my intake up that little bit. I'm hanging around like two, three, two, four. And she's like, I was even thinking about playing around with some high and low days, like maybe higher days for training, a little bit lower days for rest days, something like that, right? And one thing I said to her, and I say this to so many experienced girls, and especially so many athletes or people with like performance goals. We don't want to stress about hitting an exact calorie intake every day. We want to think about consistently falling into the range that we need to for the goals that we have. And I think this is especially applicable. Like this is applicable to everybody, but it's especially applicable to someone who has gone through a few things like this. And literally, I said to this client, you have done the work to be in a position now where you can have enough consistency in place overall to keep you where you want to be and move you in the direction that you want to go, but enough day-to-day flexibility and wiggle room that it can be very enjoyable and very sustainable for the long term. And what I mean by that is we know how this client's body responds to so many different intakes. We know where her maintenance is, we know where the deficit is, we know where the surplus is. Give or take, like those things can move around a little bit at times if other factors in your life change. But for the most part, if this client wanted to go to a deficit, she would know how. She wanted to maintain, she would know how. She wanted to go to a surplus, she would know how. So that is awesome. Like I always say, that's very valuable information to have. And then when you come back to the position she's in right now, where she's at right now and the goal she has is pretty much just want to hang at maintenance, want to make sure I'm eating enough, fuel my training, and training is my priority. Like I don't have big nutrition goals. I have big training goals, and I just want to make sure nutrition is in place to support that and be flexible and enjoyable, et cetera. That is awesome, and that is such a sweet spot to get to. And like I said, it's a similar thing we see with athletes. Like athletes don't really have big nutrition goals. They have big training goals and they need to make sure nutrition is then set up to support that. When we have goals like this, whether you are an athlete or whether you're a gym girl who's doing it more so for like lifting, body composition, et cetera, like I said, you don't have to hit an exact calorie target every day. No one has to hit an exact calorie target every day, right? But if someone is a beginner and or they're trying to find out how their body responds to different intakes, it can be a lot harder if we're not consistently hitting that intake, right? So if we think about this client, the first time that we were going through that process of trying to find her maintenance, trying to find the surplus, etc., if she was having big day-to-day flexibility, it's gonna be really hard to do that. I'm not gonna be able to say to her, I think XYZ is your maintenance intake because you're hitting a different intake every single day, right? So there are times where it can be beneficial to be pretty consistent with an intake to see how your body responds, gather that information, and then decide where you go from there. Coming back to this client, she's gone through that. She's gathered that information. So now we're at the point where it's like, where can we go from here? And what I said to her was you're now in a position where you pretty much know like your maintenance is 2400, give or take, right? So you don't have to hit 2400 calories every day. You can have days where you maybe hit 21 or 22, and then days where you hit 25 or 26. And I think especially when we're trying to just eat at maintenance and eat enough overall to fuel our training and to fuel our other goals, this is when this is very applicable. Because if we think about what I just said there, we've essentially given this client like a 300 calorie buffer either side of their intake. If someone is on like 1500 calories and working towards fat loss, we probably wouldn't want to do that because we probably wouldn't want to have days where we tell them to eat 1200 calves, right? So there are times where it makes sense to tighten things up and be more consistent with a more precise intake. Then there are times like this where it's like we know where we want to sit overall, but how we do that day to day can have more flexibility and more wiggle room. And even if I use myself as an example, I've spoken about this heaps over those last few episodes about my muscle gain phase. I know my surplus is up around that 2,800. Now I'm thinking it's more like two, nine, maybe 3,000, but I'm not hitting perfectly on 2,800 cows every day. I'm hitting anywhere between, say, two and a half and three thousand. And just knowing that overall that's gonna leave me in that range that I want to be in. When I decide to go into a fat loss phase, I know my deficit is around like 1600, 1700. I'm gonna calculate that I'm gonna pick an intake and I'm gonna hit pretty friggin' close to that intake every day, right? Because that just makes sense for the goal at the time. When I look at this goal of the surplus, or like I said, the client with the goal to maintain and just fuel training, or a lot of my other clients that are just focused on training and getting nutrition in place to support that. Like I said, you wanna have enough overall consistency just to feel good every day and have like consistent energy levels and hunger and performance and things like that, but it's not gonna be dependent on your body being like, we need 2420 calories. If we know that for a particular client around that 2400 mark is maintenance, like I said, we can be a little bit lower than that some days and a little bit higher than that some days, but if overall we're constantly ebbing and flowing in that range, that is awesome. And I personally think this is the sweet spot where you can, I don't I don't really like that terminology where people are like, just listen to your body. Like I said to someone the other day, if I listen to my body, I'd just eat a jive Nutella every day, right? Like we can't, I don't think we can just be like, listen to your body. But I think there is a sweet spot where we can take nutrition education, we can also take our own history and our own data, and then we can somewhat listen to our body and just go, okay, I know there's certain things that I want to tick off every day. I know there's certain boundaries I want to have in place, but those boundaries can be arranged, they can be wiggle room on those boundaries or amongst those boundaries to just keep me in a sweet spot overall. And coming back to this client, this is what I said to her. Like, she kind of told me this is what she was doing. And I just said, like, I think this is so awesome for you because you've done the work, you've had the consistency on good intakes, and now you can take everything you learned during those times and find this sweet spot for yourself where it is consistent enough to keep you where you want to be and move you in the direction that you want to go, but you can have day-to-day flexibility with that. I think that is awesome. And I think for this client, she was saying to me, like, I don't want to do a deficit for years, if ever again. Like, this is where I want to sit for a long time. So if we think about sitting in a position and doing something every day for a long time, you want to make sure that that thing does keep you in the position that you want to be in overall and keeps you feeling good overall, but is also flexible and enjoyable so it can be sustainable for a long time. And that is really what I think the sweet SWOT is for people in this position. And then that brings me to the last thing I had on my list. I said this to this client, I've said it on the podcast before, but I think it's worth saying it again. One thing I pointed out to her was if you sit in this spot for a while, at any time, if you want to pursue any other goal, you can. Like if you decide that you want to go into a surplus, you can. If you decide at some point you want to go back to a deficit, you can. So you can sit in this sweet spot that we just spoke about where you've got that bit of flexibility, you've got that bit of wiggle room, but overall you're feeling good. And then if you ever decide, like, hey, I'm gonna do a deficit, okay, cool, I know what to do with my nutrition, I know what to change, I know what to adjust to go and do that. Hey, I want to go to a surplus, I know how to do that. And I said to her, think about it as like where you're at right now is just like your foundation. It's like your home base, and you can venture off in any direction towards any goal, anytime you choose to, but then you can always come back here to where you are right now. That is awesome. Like that is maintenance, that is the life-changing shit that I talk about. Like that is so good. If you have a position that you can come back to at any time that makes you feel good, fuels your health, fuels your training, is enjoyable, is flexible, is sustainable, but keeps you in a position that you want to be in and keeps you feeling good physically in your body, but also just mentally without too much diet fatigue or anything, that is unreal. Like having that to come back to, having that to sit at majority of the time is awesome. Having it to come back to anytime is awesome. And then, like I said, if at any moment you just want to go into a deficit for two months, you can. If you want to go off on a holiday, you can. If you want to go off and do anything, you can. And then you can go, okay, cool. When that thing's done, I know where to come back to. That is awesome. Like, in my opinion, that is the ultimate place to get to. And even if we think about my nutrition over the last few years, if you're a long-term listener, you'll know like I did a deficit in the middle of 2024. And then I pretty much hung at that spot that I just said for 18 months before I decided to then be like, yep, okay, cool. I'm gonna pivot off into a surplus right now. Then I'm gonna pivot back to the deficit and then I'm gonna go back there. So that's just such a cool position to be in, a cool place to get to. And like I said to this client, I was like, you have done the work to get there. Like you've had really good consistency with a lot of different protocols over the years to learn all of these things for you, to now be able to take those learnings and be like, okay, cool, how do I set up a really long-term sweet spot? That is awesome. That is unreal. I think this is where I'm gonna wrap up this episode because I could just keep going on about this all day. But massive shout out to this client. Like, she's just done such a good job. And I can think of a lot of my girls who are in a similar position. So, just a cool one to think about if you are in that position, just thought for a second, be like, hell yeah, this is awesome. If you feel like you're still navigating different protocols to eventually get to this position, just use this as your evidence that we can absolutely get there. And it is worth, in my opinion, it is worth doing the work where we learn enough about nutrition. We also learn about how different nutrition protocols work for our body. And we do that work and we have consistency with it to then get to this point. I think that is unreal. I absolutely think it is worth it. That is all from me today. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I will be back very soon.