Episode 87: How Long Do Macros Take to Work?

The million dollar question: how long can I expect this process to take? 

Let's talk about expectation management on this journey to health...and buckle in for what might be my best/worst analogy yet ;)

To book for in for your free 1-1 Strategy Session visit:
www.MindStrongFitness.com

Transcript

Becoming MindStrong Podcast How Long Do Macros Take to Work?

 | 00:00 Welcome back to the becoming mind strong podcast. 00:03 Now, if you've hung out here before, 00:05 you probably have a general idea of how mindstrong Fitness works, right? I have plethora of free content out there on the interwebs. We've been doing this a really long time. I've got workshops out the wazoo, you name it, it's probably floating around. And at some point, if you hit that breaking point of not another day, not another freaking second. I need to get my health under control. As of the time of this recording, I offer free strategy sessions where you and I will sit down on a zoom. We will dive deep for about 45 minutes, get a deep understanding of where you are, what your goals look like, and see if I got the keys to the kingdom to help you. Now I don't share that as a as a business plug, but on these strategy sessions, and I have done 1000s of them at this point, one of the most common questions that I get is, How long do macros take to work? Now, one of my favorite podcasts I've ever recorded is a little more general than this. It says, 00:57 How long should this take, right? And it's about general weight loss. 01:00 But I want to take this a step further, because if, again, if you've hung out here, you know that I teach macros, because I truly, in my heart of hearts, believe they are the single most sustainable approach to weight loss, if not even weight loss, general health, right? Building muscle, just getting your health in check, getting through Peri and post menopause. And you've heard me say a million times as a former teacher, I know differentiated learning is real. What I would love is to have 10 approaches to nutrition that works. So I could say to you, hey, here's 10. Let's figure out what works best for you. And in a decade in this industry, macros are literally the only sustainable approach that I believe in, because they are the only way of number one, knowing that it's guaranteed to work. They are human biology. 101, number two, they are based in psychology. They are based in neuroscience, because there's no restriction. And number three, eventually, the goal is to get to intuitive eating for most of us, and this is a training ground to get there. So I want to be really specific about how long macros 

take to work, because that's a conversation I have day in and day out, and having a deep understanding of this sets us up for success and avoids as much frustration as possible in a journey that can be slow and tedious, and we'll talk more about that as 

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we go. But for today, we're diving in. 

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How long do macros take to work? Check it out. So when I'm on strategy sessions, and you know, we go through the whole the whole shebang of what macros are, the way that we do them in such an incredibly personalized way, the reason that I believe in them because they are biology, they are psychology, they are neuroscience, they are the most sustainable approach to nutrition. Everything you just heard me say in the intro right at some point in the call the question comes, 

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how, how 

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long does this take to work? Or the kind of the offshoot of that is, how much, how much weight can I expect to lose in 12 weeks? And I like to get a little cheeky here. And my favorite, my favorite response to this is, Listen, if I told you that in six months, you are guaranteed to be a billionaire. Do you really care when the money hits your account? And that's my favorite analogy for macros, because the beauty of this, the beauty of the skill that we master here, is that there is no crossing our fingers and wishing and hoping and praying. Is this going to be the thing that finally works for you? For me? The question is, what do you personally need to stay consistent? Because when we stay consistent, habits will form, and when habits will form, and we put in enough time and consistency, macros will work. And honestly, you don't even have to answer the question of, what do I need to stay consistent? That's our job as coaches. What, what myself and what my coaches are trained in, is learning each individual and figuring out what are the tips and tricks we have a we have a bucket full of tips and tricks that make this easier and easier, and we're going to stay curious. I have a whole podcast coming up about this. We're going to stay curious about which of those tips and tricks work for you which don't, and when we learn you and your lifestyle and your tendencies and how your brain works, then we plug them into play. You stay consistent. It is absolutely going to work. So if we know human biology, 101, on the other side of this, when we've mastered the skill, it is guaranteed to work. Do we really care about that time frame? And listen like I'm saying that to be a bit dramatic, but yes, like we don't want to hear this is going to take six years to come off. But what we're really asking is we want reassurance that they're actually going to work, right? I have this conversation about price point for people too. Like, when people come to me and they're like, I've spent so much money in my health, I can't do it anymore. I was like, Look, if my program was $50,000 but I was going to BS you, and without a shadow of a doubt, tell you that you would lose 50 pounds in 12 weeks, which do not do if you're losing 50 pounds. 12 weeks, something has gone horribly wrong, and your metabolism is now shot to hell. But if there were some magic pill that I was selling and I said, Listen, my program's 

$50,000 but you were gonna lose 50 pounds in 12 weeks your credit, you would figure out a way right, gun to your head, gun to your spouse's head, you would 550 grand to get those 50 pounds off you in 12 weeks. It is not about the number, right? It's not about the price tag, it's not about the time it's going to take. It's about the reassurance that it's going to work. And this is why I like that billionaire analogy, right? Because that is so true of macros. It's going to work when we put in the work to get through the learning curve. And that's why we have a coach? They are guaranteed. They're human biology, they're 

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human psychology. 

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They work for everyone. Now here's the next part of this conversation. Anyone out there who is promising you a weight loss number in a time frame, blanket statement, tattoo it on your forehead, write it on your bathroom mirror, whatever you need to do, shave it into your dog's fur. Anyone out there who is telling you you will lose X amount of weight and X amount of time? Red flag, siren, neon light, arrow pointing. They are BS, ing, you. There is nobody on this earth who can tell you exactly how much weight you're going to lose in a set time frame. I can tell you macros will work for you, but what none of us know is what's going on under the surface. So here's my favorite analogy for this. Because you know, your girl loves a good analogy. Let's say, and I do not wish this upon anyone. I rebuke what I'm about to say, but it's a solid analogy for this. Let's say that you've been with your spouse for a few years, and you know that they've been cheating on you this whole time. It's been going on for months, for years, whatever it is, and you finally hit a breaking point, and you're like, we're done with this game, right? We're having a hard conversation. We're going to therapy. We're working this out. So you guys have a couple hard conversations. You go to one therapy session, and at that point, your spouse comes back to you and they say, look, 

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we've been dealing with this for like, two, three weeks now. 

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Can we just get over it and move on? I would pay to see the look on your face, right? The answer is, Are you freaking kidding me, Boo Boo, like that is not how this works. You have spent years putting me through the ringer, and you think that in two, three weeks, we're back to solid Absolutely not. That is not the process here. And honestly, if your body could have a conversation with you, if your metabolism could have a conversation with you, this is what it would be saying. One of the reasons that macros work is they get your body to trust you, right? We talk about this a lot in the world of mind strong that for most of us, it's to different degrees. Some of us have spent decades upon decades, overeating under eating restrictive diet, cutting carbs, overeating on carbs. For some of us, it hasn't been that drastic. It's once perimenopause hit and our bodies started shifting. Then we started going to extremes, trying to get something to work. But to some degree, unless you came out of the womb tracking macros, which is a weird thought of babies, tracking macros, zero out of 10. 

Recommend, unless you've spent a lifetime tracking macros, you have not been fueling your body the way it needs to be fueled day in and day out. You have been putting your body through some version of a roller coaster. And again, that roller coaster might be a kitty ride for some. It might be the world's greatest roller coaster at the world's greatest amusement park for others. But at the end of the day, what's happening at some point, especially when we get to this perimenopause and beyond age, is your body stop trusting you, right? So, so we start the skill of macros, and we start fueling our body the way it's meant to be fueled, the right balance of carbs, fat, protein, and the first thing you're going to notice is your energy is going to skyrocket, right like the first few weeks of this, you will notice changes in your body. What's not going to happen for most people. It happens for some and we'll talk more about why in a second is the melt the fat's not going to start melting off overnight, and in a second, I'm going to walk you through my glacier analogy that I've used before. And I love it because it's so representative of this and it's a great visual. But my point in this analogy is this, you have spent a lifetime, decades upon decades upon decades, to some degree, putting your body through this roller coaster, and now you've started fueling it the way it needs to be fueled for a few weeks, and then what do we do? We get impatient. We're like, Well, how long is this going to take, right? I love you, but you're that cheating spouse who's like, get over it. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, and your body is like, I love you, but I'm gonna need a bit more time than that to trust you. So we have to understand, and this is so much easier to say than to really digest pun intended, because I've been doing this for a decade, right? I have 2500 women, plus, including myself, of brain data saying yeah, macros absolutely work for everyone. It is physically impossible for you to learn this skill, for you to master this skill. People and have it not work. If you're new to Macros, you're trusting me that that's true, and then in that case, I mean, go look at our website, and you kind of trust the other 2500 women, unless I have a great like marketing scam where I'm paying all these women for before and after pictures. But that is not the case. I digress. Here is the second part of this conversation. So the first part don't be that cheating spouse. Buckle in. Understand we're gonna love relationship with our body. We gotta, we gotta earn some trust, and that takes time you are not gonna undo decades upon decades upon decades in a couple of weeks. The second part of this conversation is the visual of a glacier, right? Have you ever seen the million and five self help posters of glaciers where they are icebergs. Icebergs is an iceberg or a glacier. I'm going to stick with glacier where, you know, the poster will say the hard work nobody sees. And there's like a whole world under, under the ocean. And then there's the little tip of the, no, I think it's actually an iceberg. There's the little tip of the iceberg sticking out. And it's like the part that the world sees, and it's true, right? Like people see, wow, Rachel, you've grown a successful online business, because they're seeing the tip of the iceberg. And I have, and I'm very proud of that, and I'm very proud of my team. What nobody has seen, and they don't have to see, is the amount of blood, sweat and tears and falling on my butt and getting back up and money invested under the surface, right? That part is not relevant to the public. What the public sees is the successful business that we've built here, beautiful. And the same is true with weight loss. I'm going to use that same analogy. When we think about weight loss, we're looking at literally the tip of that iceberg, a tiny fraction of a tiny percent when it comes to how our clothes fit, maybe the scale, if we understand what the scale is or isn't right inches, if we're measuring ourselves, that is the tip, tip, tip of that iceberg, slash glacier. I'm going to stick with iceberg so I can stop being repetitive about this, what we don't see and what nobody can measure. And this is where I'm tying it back to any company out there telling you you'll lose X amount of weight, X amount of time, they're BS in you, because under that surface, what's happening under that ocean is we are building trust, right? We are being that such a terrible analogy, but we are being that cheating spouse trying to earn trust back. We are giving it the time and consistency and what we can't measure to a science is how many years you put your body through the wringer, how many years you spent restricted dieting, how many years you spend cutting out carbs. So for some people, yeah, if you have a larger amount of weight to lose, it happens a lot that you start tracking macros, and the weight sheds off. For a lot of people, especially Perry and post menopause, where we're dealing with building trust and balancing hormones. In the first few weeks, you're going to notice changes. You're going to start to feel more 

energized. You're going to start to see your your energy skyrocket. You're going to start to feel more fueled. Your sleep is going to increase. But the weight loss part, that is a slow, tedious process, and I don't sugarcoat that, because if we're here for a quick fix love and light, you are in the wrong spot. And this leads me to my last point, and this is kind of a hashtag, bigger life statement, but 

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it absolutely relates to this. In everything in life, there's light with the dark dark, there are pros with the cons. There's the the things we love with the things we hate. That is true of everything, right? Relationships are some of the greatest joys in life that make our heart feel like they're overflowing, and they're not easy. They come with tough conversations. If you have emotional depth and deep connection in your relationship, it is a lot of work, and you can't have one without the other. Right? The flip side of that is you have a very so superficial relationship without a lot of depth, and you probably don't feel as fulfilled, and it's a lot easier. You can't have both, right? You want the body of your dreams in terms of lean, sculpted muscles, you're someone who's super into lifting, which, as we know, you don't have to be to lose weight, but let's say your goal is to be a professional bodybuilder and get on stage and have veins popping, muscles out the wazoo? Well, guess what? You can take steroids all you want if you're not actually getting your butt to the gym and lifting, it can't happen. You can't have one without the other. We're always making choices, right? We do a lot of work here around the power of choice. I'm going to be recording some podcasts specifically about this coming up. But I am not a believer in pushing, pushing, pushing yourself, right? I'm not that coach is gonna have you doing burpees till you puke. I am a believer in weighing the pros and cons. The world is not gonna end if you don't go to the gym today and you can't have both you, you're probably going to feel like crap on the other side of it. You're not going to reach your goals, and you don't have to, but it's all about weighing the pros and cons and making your decision. Now, the reason I'm saying this is, when it comes to the quick fix versus playing the long game, you have a choice, right? If you want to go on these. Weight loss pills, these weight loss injections, if you want to starve yourself. Well, starving yourself is not going to work once you hit perimenopause. But if you're not at that stage yet, and you want to put your body through that, by all means, you have every right to and you can't have a world in which your metabolism is going to be on fire for the long game if you're doing that to your body, right? I'll give you one more analogy. It's the day of analogies. Your goal is to get wealthy. There's a couple ways you can do it. Number one, you can learn about investing, and you can go the slow and steady route. Every month you put a certain amount of your paycheck into a long term savings account. You learn about investing, you lower learn where to put your money, and you sit tight and you trust the process and you ride it out. That is the guaranteed way. If you do that, and
 you make smart investments, and you've worked with someone who knows how to do this, you will accumulate wealth. It is math, and the math has to math. Now, it's slow, it's tedious, right? There's things we can do along the way to speed it up. But for the most part, we're thinking long game. Or you can decide, no, I need to be wealthy by next week. I don't have time to do that. So you can go
 rob a bank. You will get really wealthy in a couple of hours. And not the greatest long term solution, because statistics are going to show that's not going to end well for you, but by all means, you have that choice. And it is the same conversation with weight loss, what I teach, and I do not sugarcoat this for people, because if they're going to come to me every week saying, How much longer till I lose? How much faster do I lose? How do I make this go faster? You're going to drive yourself nuts. You're you're not, you're not going to stick with it, because we are pleasure seeking creatures, and you are going to give up. What we are here to do is master a skill, and when you master that skill, it is guaranteed to work, and it is going to be slow, it is going to be tedious, and we're going to learn every mindset, set hack in the books to stick with it, because we know on the other side is the holy grail. And yeah, there's ways we can speed it up, right? We this is why macros have to be so personalized. This is why workouts are not necessary, and they're icing on the macro friendly cake. But what we 

have to understand is you can't have both. If you want to go do a quick fix, go do a quick fix, but I promise you, beyond a shadow of it out that you're going to kick yourself a month, six months from now, eight months from now, maybe a year from now, if you're lucky, because not only did you gain the weight back, but now your metabolism is shot to hell, and you've dug that hole 10 times deeper at some point in life. If you want to think long term, we have to draw that line in the sand and say, I'm done with the freaking quick fixes. I've spent decades trying the quick fix route. I mean, let's zoom out for a second and think of this logically. If you had looked buckled in and learned the skill of macro tracking 20 years ago, where would you be now? Right? If you had taken let's say it took a year. It does not take a year. I teach people the skill in 12 weeks, and then, depending how much weight you lose, you know, you stay consistent. I I always refer back to one of our members who lost 120 pounds. She did that in a year like if your weight loss goal is 120 pounds or less, and you're consistent again, I can't tell you a time frame. Nobody can, but that's a good a good gage right now, knowing that if you had started 20 years ago, where would you be now? But instead, what most of us say is, I don't want to invest the money. I don't want to wait that long. I don't want to do the the slow, long game. I want now, now, now, now. So we do that, and 20 years later, not only have we not hit our goals, not only have we dug our metabolism deeper and deeper and deeper into the ground. But one of the most heartbreaking statistics I know, and you've probably heard me say this in other podcasts, is the average woman in the US spends $25,000 on diets, and on the other side of it still doesn't know how it works. So if fear of investment is your thing, cool. Go spend $300 here, $400 here, $80 here. Accumulate that over 20 years, you're no better than when you started, and you spend 25 grand, or you hit that breaking point and say, I'm so breaking done with this. I'm going to draw the line in the sand and think of the me 1020, years from now. What would I wish I would have done? Right? Did I take the one financial hit now to make it happen, or did I spend the next 10 years digging this hole deeper and deeper and deeper, jumping from diet to diet, spending cash here and there and not seeing results? The number one thing we hear from people that go through our program is, where was this 20 years ago? And my favorite expression to say to that the best time to start was 20 years ago. The second best time to start is right now. So how long does this take to work? I don't know, but if I promise you, you're going to be a billionaire in six months. Do we really care? We can buckle in. We can flex our patients muscle. We can do the steps we need to. Do. And it is the same thing here. What I can promise you is that macros are biology, 101, when you learn them correctly, capital C correctly, and you stay consistent, which, if you have a good coach, they're going to learn you, and they're going to help you use those tips and tricks to do it. They work for everyone you.