EP45, Summer Nutrition Survival

Somewhere between Memorial Day and Labor Day, most people quietly give up on the thing they said they wanted the most in January. This week, Matt is joined by Anna Terry to talk about why summer is the hardest season for nutrition, and what you can actually do so you're not starting all over again in September.

In this episode we break down:

• Why routine is the real culprit. When the school schedule disappears and the kids go "full feral," every decision becomes a willpower decision. The structure that made healthy habits automatic is gone, and that's where things fall apart.
• Social eating is constant. Barbecues, concerts, parties, beach days. You're not having one bad meal, you're having eight bad weekends in a row and wondering why September feels so heavy.
• The "summer is short" excuse. For anyone living in New Hampshire, you know it. Two good months a year, so you YOLO it, and then the holidays hit right after. Before you know it, you're focused on your health for four months and coasting through the rest.
• Alcohol: the hidden variable. It's not just the calories. It's the sleep it wrecks, the cravings it triggers, and the workouts it costs you the next morning. That's the spiral nobody talks about.
• Dehydration that looks like hunger. You're sweating more, moving more, drinking the same. Your body signals thirst as hunger, and you eat instead of drink. Easy fix, hard to remember when you're in YOLO mode.
• All-or-nothing thinking. One cookout turns into a ruined weekend turns into "I'll start again Monday." A bad meal doesn't deserve a consequence. It deserves a healthy meal to follow it.
• BBQ and Boundaries. Anna's new specialty program starting May 16 at Juggernaut Fitness. No macro tracking, no food diaries, just practical, week-by-week boundaries that let you show up to every cookout, concert, and adventure this summer without the guilt spiral.

This week's Unstoppable Challenge: The next time you eat something and feel the guilt creeping in, pause. Notice the thoughts. And instead of skipping your next meal or punishing yourself, eat something healthy and get right back on track. That's it. That's the whole game.

Support the show: The next UBC raffle draw is May 2nd. Congrats to last month's winner, Jessica, who joins us on April 25th. Use the link below to support the show and get entered in the monthly drawing.

Interested in BBQ and Boundaries? Current Juggernaut members can sign up directly through the Kelo app. Not a member yet? Reach out and we'll get you connected.

Transcript

Welcome And Summer Food Reality

Matt 0:16

Let's go! Welcome to Unstoppable by Design, where we talk all things fitness, mindset, and what it means to truly be unstoppable inside and outside the gym. I'm Matt Terry, and today I'm joined here by Anna Terry. Anna, how are you?

Anna 0:32

Great, sir.

Matt 0:34

Great, sir, Pinky Out, so Pinky Out, sir. And in today's episode, it's nearly a cookout season. We're talking burgers, beers, potato salads, s'mores.

Anna 0:50

Hot dogs.

Why Summer Breaks Healthy Habits

Matt 0:51

Hot dogs. And somewhere between Memorial Day and Labor Day, most people quietly give up on the thing they said they wanted the most in January. Today we're talking about why summer is actually the hardest season for nutrition and what to do about it. Plus, Anna's cooking something up at Juggernaut, and you're gonna want to hear more about it. So, Anna, why is the summer so hard?

Anna 1:16

Well, Matthew, I think there's a couple of reasons. So here's where I'm at. We have everybody, like you said, right? There's people want they people have like fat loss goals in January, right? They have these resolutions. Everyone wants their hot girl summer, you know, and then we work hard up until summer, and then we just let it all go through that time frame, like you said, right? So what happens? Why is summer so hard? Or why do we just let it go, right? It may not be that it's hard, it's just what drives us to let it go. So one of the things is for many of us, our routine is gone or significantly changes. So, like for us, we have kids. Our kids are not in school in the summer. So a lot of people who are on that same boat, they lose that routine, that morning routine of getting their kids up for school, or maybe now it's summer camp and it's a different schedule and there's different prep that comes with it. So you have a mix-up and routine there. We're often traveling more in the summer, or even just like taking day trip adventures that we don't typically take in the winter. Again, screwing up routine, maybe not allowing us to have whole foods for eating out because they're maybe more ad hoc. All of a sudden it's nice out. It's like, you know what? Let's go to the ocean. And you're an hour and a half from home and you're eating fried food on the beach just to, you know, be fueled. So, like all that structure that we have during the winter when we don't really leave our homes and we have a good routine goes out the window. And humans function very well with structure and routine. So all of those things, you know, like habit stacking, right? All those things that made nutrition essentially automatic kind of go out the window in the summer. Another one is social eating is almost constant. Everyone's basically coming out of their little hybridation caves and wanting to be friends again and go outside and like hang out with people and not be in their homes. And most of us socialize via eating or drinking. So those two things are very much more active. We're having barbecues, we're having more parties, we're having more events, we're having concerts, we're going on little vacations and adventures, like we already said. And you so you just have so much more exposure to greasy fried foods, right? Or pastas or just more high calorie things, desserts, and alcohol than we typically do when we essentially hibernate in our homes during the colder months. And so, like some people might look at that and say, well, Monday through Friday, I I still do have a routine, but then it's the Friday night, the Saturday, and the Sunday that turn into these bad weekends that I'm throwing out in quotation on that. Another one, I got a list if you haven't figured that out yet. Another one is a lot of people, especially who live here in New Hampshire, have that summer is short excuse. So we get like two nice months a year that we can actually like go outside and do something. So we send it, right? So we work really hard January to like Memorial Day and for our hot girl summer, and then we just let it all go and send it because YOLO, summer is two months. Let's just go out and live our best lives while we can, and then we'll we'll get back together, you know, in September and we will figure it out again. But guess what? September comes holidays, and so you have what four months of the year that you're actually like focusing on your health and your physique, and then the balance of the year, you're just not for various reasons. I mean, it's all choice at the end of the day, and like listen, I've I've been there. So it's hard to be consistent, you know, especially when you do have that thought process of there's only two good months out of the year, I'm gonna go live life, or holidays. Like, I only get 12 good holidays with my kids before they're wanting to hang out with their friends until instead of me or whatever, you know. Like, we're gonna live it up on holidays. Like, there's always that thought process somewhere in the back of our minds. Then we talked about alcohol a couple of times, so this is kind of like I would say a hidden variable. So some people still remain with their habits of tracking food over the summer and they don't go too far off the rails. But tracking alcohol is something that I see not often done, period. Whether it's over the summer or year-round, it's kind of something that just slides under the radar. The biggest issue here is not necessarily the calories that come with alcohol, it's the effects that alcohol has on you in terms of how you sleep. Like poor sleep, your recovery isn't that great. And having poor sleep and poor recovery leads to poor future decisions, such as eating more food because you're trying to get energy, you're getting sugar cravings, or when you're out drinking, you're gonna be getting some cravings and you're gonna have a lot of snacks with your alcohol. Having poor sleep and poor recovery may lead to skipped workouts. So now you're not working out as much. You're eating more calories, unhealthy, I shouldn't say unhealthy food, less nutritious foods, maybe not working out as much. That's kind of like the spiral that alcohol can send you down. So it's not so much the alcohol itself in that moment, it's the lasting effect that it has on you after you drink it and the decisions it may lead to you making. With a different kind of drink, it's just hydration in general. So it's hot out, we're probably sweating more, we're moving a bit more because we're out and about, but we don't typically change how much water we're drinking. On top of that, we're adding alcohol, which is not hydrating, and probably more like salty foods that are impacting our D our our hydration. So if we are dehydrated, because we're not focusing on that, and we have all these other elements that are layering on top of potential dehydration. When you are dehydrated, it signals in your body similar to hunger. So there's probably there's many like diets and fads out there that are like, oh, if you're hungry, just drink water, or you hear them say drink a glass of water before every time you go to have a snack or you go to have a meal. It's because dehydration can show as hunger. So hydrate first, see if you still have those hunger pains. But if you're not tuning into that, which we're probably not in the summer when we're out yOLOing and having our best life for a hot girl summer, you're just gonna snack and you're gonna make those decisions and having more calories instead of drinking water. So hydration is a big piece. My last, my last one for Realsies is kind of that all or nothing mentality that people have again pretty much year-round, but it comes out a lot in the around the holidays and around the summer because you go out to a cookout, you have one bad cookout. Again, I got my little air quotes going, and next thing you know, well, the whole weekend's gone now. And that cookout was Friday night, and then you spiraled Saturday and Sunday, and you're like, all right, I'll get back on track Monday. And you're going through that vicious cycle of I'm doing great Monday through Thursday, Friday night, go off the rails, all or nothing mentality. I guess the whole weekend's out the window, starting again on Monday. For the average person, you're not gonna get or maintain your results by doing that, especially a female. Females, we it's unfortunate, our hormones get involved when we do stuff like that, and it makes a bigger impact on us that it may a guy, a guy might be able to maybe maintain a little bit better depending on alcohol consumption, but it's it's impactful. Like you really want to try and follow that 80-20 rule and also know that one bad meal does not deserve a consequence. What it deserves is a healthy meal following it. That's all it takes. That's all it takes. You don't punish yourself by starving yourself, don't punish yourself by skipping meals. If anything, that's gonna get your hormones more involved and work against you. A bad meal or a bad decision deserves a healthy meal to follow it, and you will get back on track much faster than you normally would.

Matt 10:01

Let's go.

Anna 10:02

That was a lot. I just went.

Matt 10:03

That was a that was a big list.

Anna 10:05

Well, yeah, you ask and you shall receive.

Matt 10:09

Let's circle back to one of the first things you you talked about, and it was how routine is gone in the summer. I think that is under stated.

Anna 10:23

Yeah.

Matt 10:24

Because maybe during I mean, especially if you have kids, you have a routine to drop them off at school by a certain time every day, or even if it's childcare, but there's some sort of routine there, and then all of a sudden when they're in the summer, that routine is gone. Meaning maybe it they wake up a little bit later, and it's okay that they wake up a little bit later, and it throws off your prep times and putting things together, or you know, when you're done, maybe instead of going back home during the winter time and hanging out with your family, maybe going outside, if you're going to the park, doing all these different curveballs and trips and things during the summer.

Anna 10:59

Yeah. And too, like, man, if your kids are home, they throw off your like in like not going to summer camp or whatever, like they throw it off a ton because their routine's off. And anyone who has young kids who are left to be free, they go full feral. And that that really just messes up everybody's routine and decisions. Because then you're tired and you're like, just eat this, and I'm just gonna eat this. And again, that fatigue, the poor sleep, the poor recovery, whatever causes it, leads to those kind of behaviors, and then spirals tend to happen after that.

The Barbecue And Boundaries Plan

Matt 11:34

Yeah. So all of these things, all these things that we just talked about. That's exactly why we built an upcoming program.

Anna 11:44

Oh, where did you go?

Matt 11:46

What program would that be in?

Anna 11:49

Well, I'm so glad you asked. So some of you may have already seen it. We're so stealth. So we are doing a barbecue and boundaries program starting in May, and it is specifically for these things. So, listen, I want to YOLO it up in the summer too. I am a Leo, I love the sun, I am outside, and I also want to make sure my health doesn't go backwards. And thinking about like the 80-20 rule that I mentioned earlier is how can we keep our health in the front of the mind 80% of the time and have fun and not think about it in that 20% window? So, a lot of what barbecue and boundaries is going to be is working just on that. So, we're not gonna be doing macros. I'm not gonna ask you to track everything that you eat. We're gonna create boundaries that you will function within, boundaries that you will have to ask some other people to uphold. Like, I mean, anybody of you, anyone of you listening have family members that are huge food pushers and it's like they can smell when you're on a diet and they all of a sudden make all your favorite foods and shove them in your face. Like, how do we have a boundary around that? And like, how do we appease that? Because we probably enjoy whatever it is with again, without doing that spiral. And one of the biggest things, so we'll have a couple pill, a couple pillars that we're gonna follow. And one of them is exactly what I said earlier. It's gonna fall in line with your bad meal, your bad snack, whatever it is that you're classifying within that bucket, does not deserve consequence. It deserves a healthy meal to follow it. So there's that little tidbit that we'll be working on is kind of trying to work on that mindset of like you don't, there's no consequence, there's no punishment around you making a choice to have fun this summer. What we're gonna try and do is balance it out. So you're gonna you're gonna go barbecue, you're gonna go concerts, you're gonna go events and birthdays and adventures, and we're gonna put boundaries around it that allows you to do that, have fun without the guilt. So without giving too much into what we're gonna do in that program, that's kind of like the basis of it is how do we do these things? How do we function and all these things that we're having fun and want enjoy in our two months of nice weather in New Hampshire without having to start all over again next January? Or without like, can we maintain? You know, like nobody, like we got enough things in life that cause us stress and guilt. We don't need to add having fun to that list. So this program will kind of help juggle that.

Weekly Format And Boundary Practice

Matt 14:30

Yeah. Yeah. And what's the what's the format of it? Is it in person?

Anna 14:35

Yeah. So this one will be in person. We'll meet once a week. Talk about how the previous week went. You'll have homework that I'll give you to focus on every week. There's no like write this paper and bring it to me or anything like that. But like a boundary, like a boundary per week that we're gonna practice and we're gonna test out, report back how it went. Where did we have success? Where were our challenges? Work through it as a group. Every week we'll have some, let's we'll say like group, what's it called, mastermind sessions together and work through some challenges. I'll give you little handouts. We'll do some role play to work through food pushers specifically and how we're gonna navigate those things. Just get confident in holding a boundary. That's something that I think a lot of folks can struggle with sometimes. So we'll have some exercises that should have people leaving feeling confident in holding the boundary per week and knowing that it's the best decision for them, and it's not a bad decision for the other person either.

Matt 15:36

Right.

Anna 15:37

It's again, it's just it's juggling. You don't have to swing the pendulum all the way from the left to the right. We're gonna try and keep it right in the middle uh for everybody.

Matt 15:47

Yeah. I think it's important because it's it's coming up fast, something to be mindful of. Like we're not shooting for perfection. No, we're just shooting to do a little bit better, break free from that cycle that you might find yourself in every summer where you're starting back over.

Anna 16:01

Yeah.

Matt 16:02

We come back.

Anna 16:02

And honestly, even if it's if you're reading if you're listening to this and you're like, this is me like all the time, great, because these lessons are not specific to a barbecue. It's just sp it's to anything that may cause you to, for the lack of better word words, say binge, right? Like maybe you're gonna, maybe it's in the winter and you're like, I'm gonna go to Smitty's and I'm gonna have a big old thing of lummy tenders, you know, and and the supersized fries or whatever, you know. Like, what do we do next? We don't punish ourselves, we have a healthy meal. We have protein and vegetables.

Matt 16:40

Yep.

Anna 16:40

You know, so it can the boundaries that we're gonna work on together can be applied anywhere, really.

Matt 16:45

Yeah. This starts uh May 16th.

Anna 16:49

Yeah.

Matt 16:49

Let's go. Yeah. You can sign up through your Kelo app if you're a current member. It's on the uh the I don't want to call it the app store, but the storefront in Kelo.

Anna 16:59

Yeah.

Matt 17:00

And if not, just send somebody an email, call us. If you're not a member and you're interested in this, let us know. Send us an email, and it's gonna be uh a really good time. Like you said, it's not just for the summer.

Anna 17:10

Yeah, no, you can just well timed. Yeah, and you can apply anywhere. And I think it's um I think it's beneficial for everybody. Even if it's something and you're like, well, yeah, I know, I know. We know it, but it that that piece of accountability is really what takes what we know and puts it into action. And that's where you're gonna see the difference.

Matt 17:27

Right, what's that saying? If if knowledge was the barrier to fitness and health, everybody'd be walking around looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Anna 17:34

Heck yeah.

Matt 17:35

Knowledge is everywhere. We know we need the coaching. To do. Yep.

Anna 17:39

Action is the real power.

Raffle News And Listener Challenge

Matt 17:40

Yep. Cool. All right. Well, excited to see this take off. Want to give a shout out to our next raffle, upcoming raffle. It's gonna be May 2nd, giving away another full seat to Ultimate Bootcamp Challenge. Shout out to last month's winner, Jessica. Congratulations, joining us on April 25th. If you're interested in supporting the show, we really, really appreciate you. Use that link and you'll be added to the monthly raffles as we keep going. So, yeah, what's our unstoppable challenge for the listeners for next week?

Anna 18:15

Ooh. I say practice that one pillar. If you do something this week and that you have guilt afterwards, right? You eat a you go to DQ and get a large blizzard or something, you know. Take a moment and reflect on what your thoughts are. Are you beating yourself up and are you saying I'm gonna skip a meal or eat less? Challenge yourself and choose not to do that, and give yourself a nice, healthy, well-rounded meal.

Matt 18:46

Yeah, just get back on track.

Anna 18:48

Just get right back. It's okay to eat. It's okay to eat.

Matt 18:53

It's actually really good to eat.

Anna 18:55

It's actually preferred. Even after you have something a little knotty, calories might be up, but hormonally, you're going to be more sound, which is gonna make tomorrow a better day.

Matt 19:04

Yeah. Boom, that's it. Cool. All right, well, let's do that. Let us know how it goes. If you see Anna or I walking around and be like, hey, I ate three pounds of cake, but now I'm back. Now I'm back. Right? However, however, it goes. And and that's it for this week. So until next time, be well. Be unstoppable.