Carbs Aren't Ruining Your Body, Restricting Them Is

If you're scared of carbs, scared of calories, or convinced that eating less is the only way to look toned and lean — this episode is going to change how you think about food.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why carb restriction is one of the biggest things keeping you from building muscle and seeing real results
• The science behind why your body needs carbs to fuel your workouts, protect your metabolism, and actually build lean muscle
• Why the scale going up when you start eating more isn't body fat — and what's actually happening
• How to shift your mindset from controlling food to fueling your body

If you've ever wondered how to eat more and still get the body you want, this one's for you.
Got questions after listening? DM me on Instagram — I'd love to hear from you.

Instagram: instagram.com/lainijojo

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lainijojo/featured


Other content mentioned:

Dream Body: https://youtu.be/R1vAc9Nyq-Q?si=QGyAtBnXPmfNBKZ9

Personalized Macros & Nutrition Plan: https://lainijojo.com/macro-guide 

Physique Revival 1:1 Online Fitness & Nutrition Coaching: https://physique-revival.com/application-laini

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you are scared to eat more carbs, scared to eat more calories, if you want to build muscle, if you want to have a healthy body, if you want to look toned or lean, I want to be able to speak to you today and help you understand why not eating carbs and fearing carbs and believing what diet culture has told us about that is going to keep you from getting the results that you want and having a healthy body. If you have believed a lie that carbs make you fat, they make you gain weight, that you need to avoid them, I am here to tell you that is not true. I want to break it down with the science. I want to tell you about my own personal experience with this and how I've helped almost a thousand women learn how to fuel their body while eating more calories and more carbs. And my hope is that at the end of today's episode, you leave with a new film confidence in fueling your body well, the importance of it, and you're able to see it through to actually get the results that you want. Welcome back to Her Revival. I'm your host, Lady Gibson. How are you guys doing today? I hope that whatever time of day, whether you're working out, on a walk, doing chores, I hope that it's a great day so far. And I hope to add some good positive energy to that. And I'm so excited to talk about today's topic because this is one where honestly what sparked me to is I made a reel about this on Instagram. And anytime I do, especially the story that I want to share with you guys, it always gets more views and just more comments and more interaction from other women, either saying, Oh my gosh, I did this too and it changed everything for me, or other women saying, I'm so nervous to do this, but I keep hearing people talk about this. And I want to be able to just anybody who is in that boat, especially, I want to just affirm for you that it is the right call how to navigate this. Um, and that's not fearing carbs, being able to actually eat a lot more carbs than you might think and more calories than you might think, and not only feel better and be healthier, but actually look better. Because I had the same thought that a lot of people do. Most of us women fall into this with diet culture where we're told that carbs are bad. If I've had, if I had a dollar for every time someone has told me that they thought carbs were the devil, I'd be able to buy myself something real nice. I wish I was joking. And so many women are terrified, and men too, terrified of eating carbs because of this misinformation that has been given to us. And then diet culture and carpet uh other companies have profited a lot on furthering this narrative that carbs are what make you gain weight and gain fat, and that you need to avoid them, or that we need to seriously restrict our calories and our intake in order to achieve this body that we want. And while, yes, we do need a calorie deficit to lose body fat and to lean out, that does not mean extreme restriction or avoidance of an essential macronutrient, which is what carbs are for your body. So I want to tell you guys a little bit of a story and explain my my history with this because I was actually somebody who was terrified of carbs, like terrified of carbs, terrified of calories, so much so and believed all that misinformation that I actually disordered such a terrible relationship with my body and exercise and food and actually developed an eating disorder. So I come from a place of being someone who I fully get it. I get all the thoughts going through your head and I get why you think what you think, but I want to be able to show you what I learned through my degree in exercise science and health and human performance and all of the experience that I have and with personal training and online fitness coaching, um, so, so many people. So the story that I'm referring to that I want to share with you guys is I was at Costco, love Costco. I was at Costco checking out, and my husband and I, who is a professional bodybuilder, so he eats a lot of food, right? Um, we eat a lot of rice, and that's like a main carbohydrate source that we'll use. I'll use it in like one, maybe two of my meals for the day. And my husband uses it for a good bit. So we get a lot of rice. So I get a big, big bag at Costco, and I'm checking out, and the lady looks at me, and I do have on, I have like a little band, like a little crop top on, and some like little dress slacks. And she looks at me and she goes, How do you eat so many carbs and have a flat stomach? And I said, You know what, girl, that's actually a really good question because I used to think the same thing. I thought that I needed to avoid carbs and they would make me gain weight and gain fat. And ironically, I started actually looking the best when I started eating more carbs. And she was super confused. She's like, What do you mean? I said, Well, I've spent a lot of time now fueling my body well and focusing on building muscle. And as I focused on building muscle, so many things happened when I finally started eating more calories and more carbs. I was kind of at this point where I had been restricting them for so long. I had such a terrible relationship with food. I was working out consistently, but I wasn't seeing any progress. And I didn't understand why. And I thought the answer was what like diet culture tells us is I need to just do more workouts. I need to do longer workouts. I need to burn more calories in my workouts. I need to do more cardio. Maybe I get more steps. Maybe I restrict a little bit more. Maybe I try to skip a meal, see how long I can go without eating. And I did all of this more and more and more of the wrong things until I got to this point where I said, okay, this is really unhealthy. I have no energy to go throughout the day. I'm always inflamed and puffy and bloated, and I have brain fog and I get sick and I don't feel strong in my workouts. I'm not progressing, I'm lifting, but I'm not getting stronger. I'm not seeing muscle definition. If anything, I almost feel like I kind of look worse a lot of the time. My relationship with my food is awful. I think about it constantly, all the time of what can I have next, or what's off limits, or I wish I could have that, or oh, I like trying so hard to get myself to not just go overboard with food because I felt so restricted. And I got to this point that unfortunately a lot of other women get to too. That's a lot of the women that I worked with with 101 online coaching have been in this position. And it just breaks my heart, which is why I'm like, I want to share this message with more people and the science with it, where I said, okay, enough is enough. I know this isn't working. I know this isn't working. I know diet culture told me to eat less and move more, but this is clearly not the answer. So I need to stop this restriction. I need to find a different approach. And I started finding women on Instagram because Instagram was around at the time. It was very different than it is now. But I was found, I was in college, like over like about 10 years ago, maybe. And I would see all these girls where they said that they were eating a ton of food, like well over 2,000 calories. And I was like, whoa, I would get so fat eating over 2,000 calories. What? And they're like, I'm eating like over 200, over 300 grams of carbs. And I'm like, how? Like, how can you do that? And they looked amazing. Like they had so much muscle, they had definition, they were toned, they were lean, they looked so strong in the gym, like they were so badass. It was so, I was like, oh my gosh, I want that. Like that is what I want. And they're doing something completely different than what I'm doing. And I thought what I was doing was gonna get me that, but I'm now seeing like that's not that's not adding up. Like, are they just special? How are they doing that? And I would see them talk about how okay, yeah, I mean I used to restrict too. And I just I reverse dieted and I started eating more, and I was so fueled and my workouts felt good. And I was like, okay, I'm terrified. That goes completely against every logic I've ever heard, uh, everything I've ever heard. But I this isn't working. And so I'm gonna try that approach. And if I don't like it, I have a little like scapegoat. We're like, I can I can go back to the restriction if I want. If I don't want to do this thing, I can go back to this. I am probably gonna still get those same results, but I like I can go back if I need to. So I personally hired a coach at that time, but I started eating more. The coaches just to help hold me accountable, if I'm being so honest. I was like, I don't know if I trust myself to take the emotion out of it. So I'm gonna hand this over just because I was, I was real, real bad, real bad. Um, so I started eating more. And this coach had me eating way more calories and carbs than I ever thought was appropriate to assign for myself and actually doing less workouts. I started doing instead of like six or seven days of lifting, which is insane. Don't do that. Um, I did four days of lifting and I was like, oh my gosh, what? And I instead of doing like 30 to 45 minutes of cardio almost daily down to I think it was like three times a week for like 15 or 20 minutes walking on the incline trip. Like that was it. And I was like, this person is going to make me blow up like a whale. Like what they are off the rockers. I was like, okay, I said I was gonna trust them. I am paying money. I have some skin in the game here. I'm gonna do it. And I just followed the plan. And it kind of scared me, but I followed the plan, and they had encouraged to get in more whole foods, to get in more fruits and vegetables. I started actually paying attention to fiber more than I ever had previously before as well. And I was trying to get in like a different variety of foods, and the craziest thing happened. Like it was better than I thought it was gonna be. I had so much energy. Like I did not realize how low my energy was until I started eating more. I did not realize how like brain boggy and lethargic I was until I needed, until I started eating more. I was no longer relying on insane amounts of caffeine to be able to function and to think because our brain also wants to run on carbs. I actually felt so strong in the gym. Like I had not felt like that in I don't know how long, since like maybe when I first started lifting before I started like really getting into the restriction. I felt so strong. I was progressing. I was able to track my weights and reps and like progressively overload each week. It was so cool. I started seeing muscle definition. I actually leaned out. I had a six-pack for the first time, eating more food and more carbs than I ever thought was appropriate to like intentionally eat. I'd never intentionally eaten that much before. And I felt so much better. I looked so much better. But honestly, I would say the best part of it is the food noise went away. And I wasn't expecting that. Like I did not realize how bad my relationship with food was. Like I knew it was bad. I knew I had I'd previously had like the disorder, like I had said, but I didn't realize how often I was thinking about food and my body and burning calories and exercising. Can I have this? Or ooh, was that too much? Or ooh, I want to have this. But like I told myself I can't now. I just really want to have it. And it's this like weird, like like red button effect is what I call it. And that was just gone. Like I stopped thinking about food like that because I finally was able to view food as fuel, as what it's meant to. And I feel like so much of diet culture and society, what we're taught, it views food and calories and especially carbs as this thing that is just a number that makes us fat, that makes us gain weight, that is something to fear, something to control, something to low-key like obsess over. Like either obsess over or like completely not think about it at all. Like if someone, because I know before that I had no awareness of trying to be healthy, I was just eating. And this was like in high school and middle school, you everybody did this, right? Because I didn't know, I didn't have that kind of guidance living in the Midwest, but it was like frozen pizza and like goldfish and pretzels, and like I probably went through a day having maybe like 30 grams of protein tops and like no fiber and like not really fruits and vegetables. Cause I didn't know. So I either was obsessing over food and controlling it, scared of it, or I just wasn't thinking of it at all. And what it did with me being able to go through that process of eating more calories and eating more carbs, I had to change my mindset and it really challenged me, but it was so beneficial and I've held on to this ever since. And it's what's gotten me to a place where I have such a healthy relationship with food. Um, and what I teach everybody that I work with, and like just the message that I share online is like food is fuel. The reason that we eat food is to fuel and to nourish our bodies. And our body's main and like preferred source of fuel is carbohydrates for your body, for your brain, especially. It wants to run on glucose, which is like how we our body uses carbs. It's like the currency of it for our metabolism to be able to have carbs. So your thyroid is kind of, I always say it's kind of like equivalent to your metabolism. Your thyroid controls and influences your metabolism. And your thyroid has to convert what's called T4 or your inactive thyroid hormone into T3, which is your active thyroid hormone. It needs carbs for that to happen. So if we're not eating a lot of carbs, that's one of the ways that our metabolism can slow down, or we don't have as much energy. So we move a little bit less, we're expending less energy. There's so many variables. We're not able to fuel our workouts, and weightlifting specifically is fueled by carbs. We're not using fat to convert that to energy when we're weightlifting. It's not an efficient process. We need energy a lot faster than what that what converting fat to energy um allows. Converting carbs to energy is quicker. Our body wants to use that. We literally store carbs in our muscles in the form of glycogen, if you've heard people talk about that. And I'll talk about that in a little bit here. We literally store carbs, or we're meant to store carbs in our muscles. We store it in our liver. We store it in our body because our body wants to and needs to use it. We literally have blood sugar, which is like carbs. So you can measure your glucose in your blood. Your body literally has that flowing around to be able to readily use for energy when we need it. Like that is a body was designed to be able to use carbohydrates for energy. So I was able to make that understand, okay, food is fuel, food is energy for my body. And no wonder it wasn't responding the way I wanted to, because I wasn't putting the fuel in it that it needed to do the thing to get the response that I wanted. I needed that fuel. I needed to stop fearing it of all the things that dye culture and just the junk that they had put in my head. I had to get that out of there. And replacing that with the science was so helpful. And then just literally the experience, because it's one thing to say, hey, trust the process. Like that's kind of hard. Like, I'm not gonna lie, that one's hard. For me, it's so much easier to trust the process when I can trust the science. I can trust the science of how this works, of how my body's made to work, of how it's gonna respond when I do this thing. And I see so many examples of other people who have done this and their body responds the same way because that's how our bodies were made. And I was able to trust that more. So I was able to slowly, I started to feel better, my body started to look better, I started to perform better. And I stopped viewing food as that thing to control and view it as this fuel for my body. And I also stopped viewing it as this source of pleasure or escape because that's what I had turned it to, and that's just a learned thing that a lot of us do. So especially if like you do any of these things, like I want you to know, like it's not your fault. Like, please don't feel bad for it, because most people fall into this because that's just kind of what we're taught, that's what we're modeled. And viewing food as this like pleasure or this escape. I know for me, if I was like stressed or bored or anxious or uncomfortable or whatever it was, like I was always turning to food and it turned into this like weird relationship and reliance on it. Um, and then again, the obsession and the fear of it, like those don't go well together, like that go together a lot, but they really don't mix well. Um, so for me being able to just dismantle all of that came from me intentionally eating more and allowing myself to see that food is fuel and carbs are fuel and carbs are good for my body. So I started eating more of those, and then I was intentional with even how I fueled my body, with making sure before and after my workout, I had adequate carbs and adequate fuel. And I had space throughout the day and thinking of the quality of the food that I was eating, and it completely changed my mindset, and that completely changed my body. So the other aspect of all this is not just like our body needs the nutrients, and we need to like not just not just think about food as a way to control our bodies, but as a way to nourish our bodies and fuel it, right? Like that's a really big part of it. But then especially if you want to look lean and toned and have muscle, you need muscle. Like if someone says they want to tone up, what you want to do is you want to build more muscle. Because if you don't have any muscle tone, like if you don't, you can't see that and you want to tone up, you need to build muscle. And then we also need to lose the body fat. But if you lose the body fat and there's no muscle, you just look skinny fat. You don't look toned, right? And muscle is also extremely important for our health, not just for the aesthetics. So if we want to build muscle and we should want to, or even if maybe we don't want to, which I would encourage you to want to, listen to my other episodes on this. We need to, like for health, we need to the same way that like we need to eat enough carbs and protein and fiber and nutrients for our body to function. We need muscle for our body to be able to use food well, to be able to use carbs well, to be able to have protect our bones and our body and have healthy aging. Like muscle is really important. And we can't build muscle if we're not eating enough carbs and enough calories in general. Because in order to build muscle, y'all have heard me talk about this, but we're gonna lecture a little bit about this again. Um, in order to build muscle, we need a couple of things. We need enough fuel. So if you're not eating enough calories, your body goes, What do you want me to build this out of? It's like I was explained, if you hire me to come build an extension onto your house, and I show up for the job and you bought nothing. Like there is no materials for me to build this actual extension onto your house. And you go, like, here, go work. And you're like, I'm like, I can't. I there's nothing for me to build. What do you want me to build with? And you're like, yeah, but I paid you, I paid the worker to come out and build the build the extension. And that's the exact same as like you go to the gym and you lift weights, but you're not eating enough calories and carbs for your body to be able to add that muscle to your body. It's like, why would you think the builder would be able to build that extension on your house? Why do you think your body would be able to build muscle onto your body? Especially if you're not eating enough calories, your body barely has enough to keep the lights on. It barely, like your body needs well over a thousand calories. You're not well over, like most people's BMR or like your basal metabolic rate to just like keep the lights on is gonna be if you're like super, super tiny and petite, like over a thousand for sure. But the more mass that you have, the more body weight, the more body size, the more muscle that you have, that gets higher and higher. It has hundreds of calories to that. That's just to keep the lights on, to keep your body alive. So if you are barely eating like a thousand, twelve hundred, fourteen hundred, even sixteen hundred calories year-round, unless you're like a toddler, like that's the energy needs of a toddler for the day. Like you can literally look that up. They think they've they can calculate that, they do science. Adult women who exercise and work and use their brain and their body for things. Yeah, we need more calories than that. So if you're barely eating that much, that your body needs more to function off of, and then you're also working out, expecting it to build muscle, and you're not seeing the results of that, that's why. You hired the builder, but you didn't buy, you didn't get any of the materials to be able to add to the extra part of the house. So we need enough calories to be able to build muscle. But we don't need just enough calories, we need protein, of course, because protein has the amino acids, which is what we're using to build that muscle tissue. We also need carbs. We need carbs to fuel our workouts, to fuel our recovery. Carbs are an important part of it. We're not, we're we're using fats for other parts of our body. So aside from this topic, you need to eat enough fats too. So if you're not eating enough fats, please eat enough fats. We'll do a whole topic about our whole podcast episode about fats, but like we need enough of all of those, not just a little bit, enough of all of those for your body to be able to have what it needs to build that muscle. Now, we also need, again, the workouts, because if we're not giving our muscle the stimulus, it ain't gonna change. But just working out is different than doing the proper type of training to build muscle. And I've talked about this in podcast episodes on the difference between weightlifting and training. So I'd encourage to go listen to those ones if you're not familiar with that. But essentially, we need enough mechanical tension, we need enough stimulus on that muscle. You need to resistance train, you need to train heavy, and you need to train close enough or to failure in order to give your muscle a reason to change. So little Pilates movements or running or cardio or things like that or workout classes where they're changing the stuff all the time and they're not progressively overloading. If you're doing those things and you're not building muscle, again, that's why we have science that shows us this is how we build muscle, this is how her hypertrophy occurs. So if we want that to happen, we have to follow what the science tells us to do. So we need the proper training, the proper stimulus on our muscles. And then we also need rest. We need enough rest so our body can take the fuel that we're giving it in response to the stimulus that we gave it from our workouts to be able to essentially say, okay, I wasn't big enough, like strong enough, enough muscle to be able to do this workout that this person keeps asking you to do. So I need to take these extra resources and build muscles so I can withstand that. And then we progressively overload to keep giving it a reason. But again, if we're not eating enough calories and enough carbs, you are not giving it the tools, but you're also not gonna have the energy for good workouts. That was like one of the biggest things that I noticed when I first started eating enough calories and enough carbs, especially. And that's one of my favorite things to hear from clients when I finally, uh when we start working together and they're really restricting calories and carbs, and I increase their calories first in the form of carbs, and they feel like a completely different human. They say, Oh my gosh, I've never had this much energy in I don't know how long. I feel strong in my workouts. We start seeing muscle definition pretty quickly. We see them progress in their weight every single week. Their motivation to train comes back on. Like carbs are so important for a lot of things, even just like mood. Like, especially like if tell me when you're hangry and you're not eating enough carbs, tell me that your mood is amazing. It's not. Um, we need those for all of that. So I love the feedback that I get from women that I'm working with in the first like just literally week or two, where they feel like a completely different human in the gym and outside of the gym because they're finally eating more carbs and enough calories for their body. And then what's also cool is I guess a couple of different things. Our bodies are so cool, y'all. So as we build more muscle, then our energy needs increase because muscle is a lot more energetically expensive than fat, meaning it requires more energy. And remember, calories are energy, they're a unit of energy, just like uh liters measure volume and miles measure distance, calories measure. Energy. So we have enough energy or we're using more energy to be able to build muscle tissue than for fat, because fat is just stored extra energy that we didn't use. Versus muscle, we're actually taking energy to be able to build that muscle and then maintain that muscle takes a lot more. So you have a lot more muscle on your body. Not only do you look lean and toned, because we need that, you also can have a faster metabolism, more energy needs. Your body is then also better at using carbs. So muscle is the most insulin sensitive tissue on your body, meaning it's the most sensitive and able to utilize carbs. So like your skeletal muscle, the muscle that we build. So the more muscle that you build, essentially your uh muscles are able to take the carbs out of your bloodstream. I say they kind of slurp them up like a sponge, and the carbs get to go into your muscles. So now your muscles have the energy and it's not just floating around in your bloodstream, which is like when we have like pre-diabetes and diabetes, your body's not able to use those carbs. So it's not that like we're intolerant to carbs or if we have a hard time with that, your body, you need to give your body the reason to be able to use carbs better. You need to help it use it better. It wants to, it has the ability to, you just need to help it. And by building muscle, that is directly going to help that. That is one of the many, many, many benefits of having more muscle on your body. A lot, and then again, the aesthetic goal, most of us are restricting calories and carbs to try to look lean and toned. But you need the carbs to be able to do that. You need the calories to be able to do that to build that muscle. And then when we are working out and we have more muscle, we're able to be stronger and lift heavier and move more weight. And now we're actually burning more energy, using more energy in your workout and to recover from your workout, which the goal from our workouts aren't necessarily to just burn calories, but they we do use calories for those. So we need more fuel to fuel those workouts so we can eat more carbs. We need to eat more carbs to fuel those harder workouts. So now we look better, we perform better, we're stronger, and our body like literally needs not just can handle more food, it needs more food to be able to continue to like maintain and get those results that you want. So it's just this beautiful like snowball effect that happens as you start eating more. So if you are someone who is struggling with this, and I want to just share a little bit more of like just some practical things to be able to help, and kind of like what I said before, you need to shift your focus. If you are someone who's having a hard time with your relationship with food and carbs, maybe the scale with your body image, you and burning calories, you need to shift your focus. I lovingly say this. I don't think we have much business focusing on a physical goal if we have a poor relationship with food. Because that is going to cause you to do things that are not only keeping you from your goal, like eating enough, but it's also hurting you. It's hurting your health, it's hurting your relationship with food, it's probably hurting your confidence, your confidence to go out and just experience life and be able to be at like social gatherings or events and feel confident with how you navigate it. That relationship with food is really important. If that's something that you are working on right now, I encourage you to please keep going. I hope that I continue to give content and help with you, help for you along this process. But that needs to be our main goal. And I'm not saying we have to completely get rid of all the things that help us with physical goals. I'm saying that we need to shift how we think about those. So food is not numbers. Like the numbers are helpful because we want to know how many calories and carbs and proteins and fats approximately, it's not a set number, but approximately our body needs to function and feel its best and work towards those goals that we have. So we we need an idea of that. Like if you had literally no idea at all when your car was filled with gas, like how much, you would either not have enough, you'd run out all the time, maybe you do too much and it would get everywhere. Um, like you need the idea of like how much your car actually needs, but it doesn't have to be the exact amount that you put in every time. That's like the best analogy I can think of right now. So like the numbers are important to have an awareness of, but we're not meant to obsess over. And food is not just the numbers, like it's the fuel for our body, it's nourishment for our body. So that's why we want to have the whole foods. That's why we want to be able to think of, okay, I'm gonna go work out. I'm not just trying to eat something. I'm not gonna eat just like protein. Like, I need carbs to fuel my lift, right? I need carbs to feel like you're even doing a run or anything. We need to view food as that fuel for your body. Think about when we're building our meals, balanced meals of protein, carbs, fats, fruits, and vegetables, and what each of those are doing for your body, how it's fueling you, how it's serving it, how it makes you feel, how you notice, oh my gosh, my inflammation is down, my energy's up, my digestion's better, my brain fog's gone, I function better, like whoa, when I'm intentional with food being this fuel, I'm better fueled and I feel better. So, like making this connection and healing that is so, so, so important. And then viewing our workouts not as a thing to burn calories and not necessarily as a thing to just like control and obsess over how our body looks. If that's the point where it is, where it's kind of almost become like this idol for you, being able to view your workouts as a place to get stronger and to challenge yourself physically and mentally. Because especially if you have a hard time pushing yourself or believing in yourself or, you know, going heavier on movements or even being consistent, like the work, your workouts are such a phenomenal place to build your relationship with yourself, your confidence in yourself, your trust with yourself, the strength that you know that you have, your resilience, your ability to do hard things, your ability to do things when you don't feel like doing them. Your workouts are such a great place for this. So even now, if I find myself in a point where I'm thinking a little too much about how I look and my workouts needing to be this like perfect thing, or I'm not gonna like look a certain way, which is what I feel like bodybuilding kind of got me into that headspace. I had to come back to like no workouts. The reason I got into this is because it was so empowering and it was good for me and it was fun and it felt like this kind of personal growth thing that I was doing. And then I saw the physical manifestations of that. Because when you see someone that has muscle, you know they had to work hard for that. They had to learn to be consistent, to be patient, to do uncomfortable things, to do things when they didn't feel like it, to have more confidence and trust in themselves. Like all of the benefits, like that's what you're seeing when you see the muscle. Like you understand what had to happen in order to get that. Like, so being able to have that be our focus, not just the aesthetics part of it. I feel like that's so freeing. I'm not saying don't have physical goals. I think they're great to work towards, but that not to be our only motivator that we solely focus on. For me, focusing on those two aspects is what helped me be able to stay consistent, even when it felt uncomfortable with eating more calories and eating more carbs, because it really wasn't comfortable at first. But being able to say, I don't want to focus on those things because I know that that's hurting me. I know that's gonna keep me from seeing these results. So I need to focus on these new things, keeping that in my mind every time I was planning out my groceries, my meals for the week, anytime I was going into the gym, being able to be so intentional with switching my mindset into that mode was so healing and it allowed me to stay consistent because it no longer was needing to obsess and control the scale or obsess and control every little thing about how my body looked. And that was really freeing. And I pray that more women are able to experience that. Because again, I think diet culture just it did a number on a lot of us when it comes to that. And I do also want to touch on the scale a little bit for a second here because a lot of times when someone starts eating more carbs, they see the scale go up a little bit and they freak out and they immediately go back to the restriction. And I want to let you know, first of all, that's normal and that's not body fat. There's no way that that's body fat. Like, especially if you didn't increase by that much, that's like physiologically just not probable of what's going on in that situation. So when you are not eating enough carbs, like I mentioned, your body is meant to store carbs in your muscles. We call it glycogen, it's a storage form of it. Um, when you're not eating enough carbs, I would say it's kind of like a bank, like your savings account. If you are barely able to afford rent, barely able to keep the lights on, you can't put any money in savings. You want to build your savings, but you can't because you're not making enough to be able to put some in savings. It all has to go towards just paying rent, bills, keep the lights on. The same thing is when we're barely eating enough calories and carbs. Your body barely has enough, like I said, your BMR to just keep the lights on to keep you functioning. That's why we can even lose our menstrual cycles if we're not eating enough. Our body says, this is a luxury we can't afford right now. We have to get rid of this. Um, where a lot of health things can come from. Our body doesn't have enough to afford those. It's just the essentials to keep organs functioning, keep the lights on. We don't have enough to put into savings. We're not eating enough carbs, we barely have enough to keep us functioning. We don't have enough to use towards all the other like building muscle things that we want, but storing them in your muscles. We're meant to. We're meant to store glycogen in our muscles to have that energy. So our muscles can readily pull from that energy when it needs to use it. But if we are not eating enough, it can't put any into savings. So when you finally start eating enough, like you finally start making more money, now you can afford bills and you can put money into savings. That's healthy, that's what we want to do, right? The same thing for our glycogen in our muscles. We are finally eating enough to be able to use for all the things our body needs carbohydrates for to fuel us for. And now we also have some to store in our muscles for that energy for when we need to use it, just like savings for when you need to use it. So then we're in our workouts and we're able to use those carbs and have better workouts. Uh, when we are storing the carbs though, we are going to see that reflected on the scale because that is going to have mass and the scale reflects just mass overall, not body fat. So when you see it go up, the scale doesn't going up, doesn't mean body fat. The scale going down doesn't mean body fat. It can, but it's not, it doesn't inherently mean that. There's many other things that cause it. So when we start eating more carbs, we're able to store glycogen. And for every one gram of glycogen that you store in your muscles, you store about three to four grams of water with it. So now your muscles are properly fueled and hydrated like they're meant to. I want to like so have they are meant to do this. So if you're like, no, I just want to restrict and deplete myself just to weigh less, your body's meant to have the fuel and the hydration in your muscles to function. That's how we were designed. That's how we function optimally. So I would encourage that we don't just say, hey, let me just not let my body function optimally. Let me sacrifice my health just to restrict and look to a certain way because I'm scared to go this way. Like I get it, I get it, I get it. But that was one of the things that helped me feel a little bit more convicted to go towards doing that. Because I was like, this is actually kind of hurting my body and going against what it's meant to do. And like I'm sacrificing my body and my physical and internal and mental health with this to just look a certain way. When there's a different way that I can look that way, that's a lot healthier. And maybe it's a little uncomfortable, may take a little bit longer, but then it's actually lasting and healthy for me. That was really helpful for me to get through all of that. But when you see the scale go up, it's because of those cards. And you're also probably able to finally build muscle now. So you're also going to see that reflected. So I would encourage, don't obsess over the scale. Maybe don't even use it if you're going to get so in your head over it. Take a break from it. I have a podcast episode talking about the scale. Um, actually, it might just be a YouTube episode. I don't know if it's a podcast episode. I have it somewhere, I'll link it down below. Um, talking about the scale and healing that mindset with it. And that's just so important because if that is dictating your decisions, you're always gonna lose. Like that's never a good scenario to begin with. That so we might see that scale go up, but that's normal. And I want you to expect that and understand what's happening and know that that's not body fat, and that's necessary for your body to get what it needs to give you the result that you want it to give you. And some of my favorite messages that I have gotten from clients over the years is well, I've only been working together for a short period of time, like maybe a couple of weeks. And they'll say, like, oh my gosh, Laney, I just had a bagel with honey this morning at like 6 a.m. before my workout, or I just had a rice crispy treat like a 6 a.m. before my workout, or just like I had a big bowl of pastas and I didn't freak out about it. Like I wasn't worried and I didn't stress and I let myself have it. And I couldn't tell you the last time I had a bagel, the last time I had honey, the last time I had pasta. I don't know when the last time was that I had that because I was so scared of carbs, I wouldn't let myself eat those things. Cause I thought that's way too many carbs, that's too many calories. There's no way I would just get that. And being able for them to say, just so shortly into eating more and seeing the benefits of it, for them to say, this is incredible. And I'm so grateful that I trusted myself enough and I trusted the science and the process enough to do this because it's so freeing. It's so freeing. And then they finally see the results. Cause especially if they've been lifting for years and they don't fully look like how they think they would, we get their results so much faster. Like the timeline is so condensed compared to what they did before, because we finally give the body the inputs and the resources that it needs to change and give us the outcomes that we want of all of that. And if you are someone who's in the process of this, if there is anything that I can do to support you, I love, love helping women understand how to fuel their bodies and how to exercise and how to navigate all of this. Because if I struggled so much from the misinformation, I know that I'm absolutely not alone. And there are millions of other women that are in the same boat. And if I can just give you as much of my knowledge and my experience as possible and my encouragement, like I want to be able to do that. Like it saved me from feeling like I was in literal AG double hobby system. And I just want to help other women out of that too. So if you want to, I have other content that talks about this on my various socials. I always include down below. I have uh I have an offer. What I'm currently doing now, I don't know when you listen to this, if I still do it, but we'll do a one kind, one time macro setup where you go to my website, I'll link it down below, and I set up your macros for you. You just give me a little question, uh, you fill out a questionnaire, you give me some examples, and I set up your nutrition, especially if you are scared to eat more, how to go through that process. I walk you through that. I type out, I go a little overboard, a little bit of an overdeliverer, um, like a five to sometimes over 10 page document of like where to set your macros, but like how to progress. So whatever phase you need, let's say you need a reverse diet, focus on building muscle, the entire thing of what you do, how you adjust your nutrition, when to know, what to do, all the little things. I talk about training, um, a lot of other aspects within that. You can write out your day of eating. So I can audit that for you. And I just want to give you as much clarity. And it's honestly um way underpriced and overdelivered, is like what I was going for with this, essentially, just to make it accessible for more people. So you can go down below, and if it's still an option, you can go ahead and get that. And I would love to set those up for you. Um, I'm also co-owner of an online fitness coaching company. I don't always take new clients, but we always make sure that we have coaches who have the same philosophies and education and processes as myself and my husband Alex, who runs it with me. So anybody that comes to physique revival, they have these same ways that we go about this to give everybody those incredible jobs that they want. So I'll also link the application for one-on-one online coaching with Physique Revival down below. And you can learn a little bit more on our website there too. And I have some other things coming out soon. I can't say it just yet, but I've been working on something and building something and pouring literally all of my knowledge, all of my free time into this. And I can't wait to give people to help them understand this Morgan with deeper knowledge and understanding and transformation when it comes to their relationship with food and feeling their bodies and exercise. So stay tuned for that on here on my socials. Um, and hopefully in the upcoming weeks, I'll be able to share that with you guys. But that's all I have for you guys today. I hope that this shifted something in you, that this maybe just confirmed something in you, that this empowered you to stop fearing carbs and calories, take that power back, and finally get the give your body the fuel that it needs to give you the result that you want to, that you are so, so, so capable of. So please go eat some good fuel today. Nourish your bodies. I love you guys. I'll see you in the next one. Now go do something that your future self will thank you for. Bye, guys.