Episode 95: The 3 Stages of Fat Loss Part III: What Do You Want to Do Next?

Healing your metabolism and weight loss might be slow and tedious BUT, when done correctly, they put you in total control of what you want to do next. 

Here's what your options look like when it comes to fat loss or muscle growth, once you've healed your metabolism. 

To book in for a (free) 1-1 Strategy Session, visit:
www.MindStrongFitness.com 

Transcript

The Becoming MindStrong Podcast The 3 Stages of Fat Loss Part III: What Do You Want to Do Next?

00:00
Welcome to the becoming mind strong podcast. And this is part three of three in the three
stages of fat loss, the same way that I opened part two of this. If you have not listened to parts
one and two, one gazillion out of 10, that's getting higher every time. Check those out first,
because if you do not understand, most importantly, the healing stage part one, if you jump
straight to the fat loss stage, because, let's be honest, that's what we all want to do, right?
Which was part two, then this part, part three is not going to make as much sense. I will say
that listening to part one before part two is the most important part in this process. But this
part today, part three is going to make a world more sense, a world of more sense if you've
listened to those first two parts. So in the three stages of fat loss. And as a reminder, I'm using
the word fat, not weight, very intentionally. If you have not listened to my podcast episode
about the scale. Go back and listen to it, because what the scale is measuring is the force of
gravity on the scale. If you chug two glasses of water and get on the scale, it's going up. And
it's comical to think, did I just gain two pounds of fat because I drank water? Absolutely not.
Bloat, inflammation, water, weight, you name it. It impacts the scale. What we are here talking
about is fat loss. So the first part we talked about the part that I see with 9998 99% of the Perry
and postmenopausal women that we work with, and that is the healing stage. If your
metabolism is not healed, it will be physically impossible for you to lose fat without a drug
glycozek, and if you go on a drug like ozempic, sure you're going to lose weight really quickly.
And I'm saying weight there because you're also going to lose a ton of muscle mass, and you're
going to be right back here asking me how to heal your metabolism in six months or a year. Do
not recommend Zero out of a gajillion.
01:58
Part One, we have to heal your metabolism. Part two, we talked about the part we actually
want to do, right people. We don't want to go through the healing part. It's it's a necessary
step. And most importantly, I shouldn't say we don't want to. We just don't want it to be a slow
and tedious most importantly, the healing stages, one and done. Once we get to the fat loss
stage, hands in there a hallelujah. There's no wishing, hoping, praying. When you follow your
plan, you will lose fat. It's how the human body is designed. What we're going to talk about in
the third part of this series right now is what happens next. I call it the from one day. I'll have a
better term for her, but I call it the whatever the heck you want to do next stage, and that's
what we're going to dive into deep today. Check it out. So what do I mean when I say, whatever
the heck you want to do
02:44
02:44
when it comes to our bodies, when it comes to nutrition, you've heard me say a million times,
when you do this correctly, there's no wishing, hoping, praying involved. The beauty of
mastering nutrition as a skill is that you are in control. You are in the driver's seat. You've heard
me say in the past episodes, I always think of this, this control board. Maybe it's my nerdy
musician days. I'm picturing little knobs that we can increase sound, decrease sound. We are in
control of those little knobs. Once we have a metabolism that is healed, we get to decide what
do I want to do next, right? You heard me talk about in the past parts of this series, that
sometimes, after the healing stage, I'll ask, well, always I'll ask people, you know, do you want
to take a little mental break? Do you want to just hang here for a little bit at maintenance?
We'll talk more about what maintenance means in this episode. Or do you want to get straight
into fat loss? The way that I'm talking about that. It's a choice, right? It's not, oh, what does my
body want to do today? It's, what do you want to do next? We're in the driver's seat. We're the
ones controlling these knobs. You want to turn the volume up, you want to turn the volume
down, right? We don't, we don't get in our car and say, Oh, I hope the car decides to turn the
the volume up today, or, Oh, I hope that it lets me turn the volume down. You're the one
driving the car. You control the knobs. This is the position we put ourselves in with our nutrition.
So that's why, when we get to the healing stage, we can have the conversation, what do you
want to do next? You want to hang in maintenance. You want to go into fat loss. You want to go
into a bulk and put on some muscle. When I talk about what do you want to do next? I'll talk
about what each of those mean more in a second, but this is what I mean. You are in the
driver's seat, literally. What would you like to do with your body next? So under the umbrella of
what would you like to do with your body next? We have three options. One we talked about in
the last part, we can lose fat. That is what 99.9%
04:39
of the women I work with want to do. Once in a while, I'll get someone who wants to put on a
put on muscle, which is called a bulk, which we'll talk about in a second. Most women are here
to lose fat. So we get to the end of the healing stage, I ask them, you want to chill for a bit, or
you want to get right into fat loss? They're like, Are you freaking the look they give me, we
always laugh. And I'm like, All right, I have to ask. They're like, No, like, I'm here to lose, you
know, X number of pounds.
05:00
Pounds. Let's go into phallus cool. We're going to get you into a caloric deficit. This is what we
talked about in the last part of this series. We're going to slowly, baby step your numbers
down, meaning your total calories. We're going to keep the proportions of carbs, fat, protein,
where your personal body needs it. By the way, if you have never listened to my podcast
before, do not use an online macro calculator, especially if you are trying to heal your
metabolism. I don't know. Maybe there is one out there. I have never seen an online macro
calculator that knows how to do I hate the term reverse diet, but it's called a reverse diet. Do
not use a calculator to try to heal your metabolism, it is, I don't even know that it exists. If it
does exist, it is wrong. Online macro calculators are not personalized enough. Generic formulas
do not work, okay? But let's say we've healed your metabolism. You're like, yes, I want to go
into a fat loss stage. That's what we talked about in the last part of the series. We are going to
baby step your numbers down, we are never going to go too low again. Boom, your body's
going to lose fat. It is, seems like magic, but it's not. It's human biology. It is guaranteed to
work as long as you follow your plan. I did a whole podcast episode on how long does this take.
The one thing I cannot tell you, and anyone who does tell you, is completely BS, ing, you is how
quickly your body's going to respond. I will tell you that if you are doing a lose 30 pounds in 30
days program, you are shooting yourself in the foot when done correctly, capital C, correctly,
every letter of that word correctly. Weight Loss should be, should purposely using the word I
hate should, needs to be a slow process, because we are always thinking about the health of
your metabolism. Okay, So option one is a fat loss phase. We talked a lot about it in the last
section. Option two is maintenance, and you've heard me mention it a few times here. Maintenance is a lovely place to be if you have the mindset for playing long ball, because what
maintenance means is we're not really losing weight, we're not really gaining weight. And I'm
using the word really in there, because if you've hung out with me before, you know that I will
shout from the rooftops. The scale is going to fluctuate one to six pounds every single day. If
you're someone who tracks macros, you could be 000,
07:16
which is not the ultimate goal. You do not have to be zeroing out your macros every day, but in
in theory, you could be 00, zeros on your macros. The scale is still going to fluctuate one to six
pounds every day. So putting that aside, because we've wrapped our mind around that, we
have a million conversations about it. In maintenance, the basic idea is that your calories in
match your calories out. We're just kind of hovering. We're not losing weight. We're not gaining
weight. And some people hear that and they're like, Well, that sounds awful, aren't I always
supposed to be losing weight. I mean, if you want to, but number one, it's not good for your
body, right? I talked, I talked about this a bit in the past episode, even if we're doing macros
which are not restrictive in terms of good food, bad food, allowed food, not allowed food, you're
still in a caloric deficit, and that's some stress on your body, our bodies, don't like to be under
stress, especially in Perry and post menopause, where the name of the game is cortisol control.
Secondly, you know, if it's as the time I'm recording this, we're about to go into the holiday
season. Like, do you really want to be thinking this much about food in the holiday season?
What we don't want to do is be obsessing about everything that we eat, we also don't want to
go the other way, which we've spent most of our lives doing for some of us, and going off the
deep end and making the holidays a binge fest, gaining the statistical eight nine pounds, and
then feeling like garbage come January 1, maintenance is a beautiful place to be, because we
can just chill a little bit. We have enough food. Our workouts feel great. If you're someone who
works out, we're not thinking about tracking as meticulously. We can just kind of chill. But the
difference with that chill period this time that we've never had before, and I'm going to
emphasize this because this is huge, is in the past when we're like, Oh, I'm just going to kind of
chill. Nothing about that was chill because we were ruminating. We were not in control, and we
were freaking out about what should I be doing right now, in maintenance, it's like, Oh no, this
is a conscious choice I'm making. If I want to lose fat, I could change my numbers tomorrow.
I'm in the driver's seat here. This maintenance is an intentional choice made from a place of
education, made from a place of control. So maintenance is an option after we get through the
healing stage. It's the one that I choose. Um, most people don't want to do it, but for myself,
absolutely, I want to. I want to chill in maintenance for a while. I want to relax. I want to live my
life. And when I'm ready to lose a few pounds, I'll go back into the fat loss stage. No harm, no
foul. The third stage is called the bulk stage, and it is few and far between that I meet women
who actually want to do a traditional bulk. What a bulk means is that we are going to
consciously put more muscle onto our body. Now, most women out there, when, again, I'm
saying women, because we primarily work with women in case that's not clear. And I'm
speaking in general.
10:00
Because I'm speaking statistically of the 2500 plus women I've worked with, most women I talk
to say I want to lose fat and build muscle. They don't actually want to do that. When we have a
deeper conversation, what they want to do is lose the fat and have their muscle on their body
be stronger and show more so my favorite analogy for a bulk is this, okay, let's say you have a
glob of clay right in front of you, and you want to sculpt it into a bust. You want to make it look
like a human.
10:30
All you need to do. You don't need to add more clay to do that, right? You just start sculpting
away. You start you take your scalpel, or whatever that's called, I think it's called a scalpel, and
you start peeling away at the clay. You can make it super defined. You can make it super
muscley. You just remove the extra clay until you have this beautiful model of a human with all
the muscle in the world that you want. Okay, that's what losing fat does. That's what a fat loss
stage does. We all have muscle on our body, and we can strengthen that muscle. Well, you
know, go back and listen my podcast about the importance of weight training, especially in
Perry Bose menopause, and I'll, of course, have more episodes like that coming up. That's what
most of us want. We have muscle under there. We want it to be stronger, and then we want to
melt the fat away that's covering it in a bulk. What that means is, let's go back to our clay
analogy. You have a lob of clay in front of you before you start sculpting, you are going to
consciously put more clay onto that blob. We are going to make that blob bigger before we
start sculpting. Now with that, if you've got that visualization in your head, you're going to gain
weight in a bulk, you have to the only way to physically put new muscle on your body is to eat
more calories than you burn. Now, there's a controlled way of doing it. I'm a fan of the
controlled bulk. Some people do what's called a dirty bulk of like, well, if the point is to get
more calories, and I'm gonna go eat double cheeseburgers and three shakes and an ungodly
number of calories, because I'm trying to put on weight anyway, I'm not a fan of that. Because,
yeah, you have to put on weight to be in a bulk. You don't have to put on that much weight. We
can do it in a controlled way where most of the weight we're putting on is going to muscle, but
you are going to put some fat on it. The nature of the bulk, the beauty is, you're going to bulk
for a few months at the other side of it. We're just going to switch gears. You're in control. You
control the knobs. We're going to go into a fat loss stage. Now we melt that fat away, we show
off all the beautifully sculpted new muscle we put on. Now I'm not, I'm going through a bulk
kind of quickly, because it is few and far between that I actually take women through a bulk. Most people who go through a bulk are either professional bodybuilders or they want to be.
They want to do a bodybuilding competition once just to see what it's like. Then, of course,
you're going to go through a bulk you have to or someone who's underweight right now, and
not only do they want to get to a healthier weight, but they want to consciously put on muscle
while they're getting to a healthier weight. The 99.8%
12:55
of women that I've worked with do not actually want to bulk what they want. Yes, we want lean,
sculpted muscles, but that comes from strengthening those muscles and then carving away the
clay, so to speak, losing the fat on top of it. But for the purposes of this episode, what I want
you to understand is, once your metabolism is healed, the reason I call this the whatever the
heck you want to do next stage, there's no wishing, hoping, praying, right when I do take
people through a bulk, I will tell you behind the scenes a bulk is a mind game you ever
consciously tried to put on weight, it is not comfortable. I do this for a living. As of the time of
this recording, I've been doing this for a decade, and there have been periods I put myself
through a bulk, and I have to talk myself down from it almost every day, because when you put
your genes on and they're getting tighter, it doesn't feel good. No matter how long you've been
doing this, it doesn't feel good. And the conversation I have with myself is, cool, you're doing
this because you want to put on new muscle, but if you decide, if you truly, right now, do not
want these genes to feel tighter, you're in the driver's seat. Let's switch our macros. Let's get
into a fat loss stage. You want to do that? And then immediately it's like, no, no. The whole
point of this. Put on muscle cool. So flex your patience muscle. Buy some bigger jeans for the
next few months. If you have to get through your bulk, and we're in the driver's seat, we're
going to switch our macros. Once we've been in this stage for a while, we're gonna go into a fat
loss stage, like I have that conversation with myself every time I've done a bulk. In the rare
instances that we do have a member wants to go in a bulk. I tell them that upfront, we're
gonna be talking all the time, and it has nothing like, yes, it has to do with your numbers, but
90% of this is about the mindset, because it is not fun consciously putting on weight, and we
have to remind ourselves it's for choice. But you hear the words I'm using right, like, choice,
this is a choice, and the reason we have the choice is because we are in control. And the whole
reason that I started this company, mind strong fitness is because I want to put you in control
when you have the education piece, when you are in the driver's seat, you will never wish and
hope and pray and guess and say, Oh, I hope this is the thing that we're.
15:00
Works for me. It's like me saying you forget how to ride a bike. If you know how to ride a bike, I
don't know how you could forget. You can't unwire your brain from that skill when you have
mastered nutrition as a skill, once your metabolism is healed, what do you want to do? Right?
What the heck? What the heck do you want to do next? You want to lose some fat. You want to
coast and maintenance. You want to put on some muscle in a bulk you choose. And we're going
to stay in one for a few months, and then we're going to choose again. But you are in the
driver's seat. You understand how and why. And if you're sick of doing one and you want to
switch to another, you know, we want to stay in one for a few months at a time. This isn't sorry
to tell you. Can't bulk one day and cut then go in a caloric deficit the next, right? It's not like, Well, I really want to have two pizza pies today, so I'll just call it a bulk, and tomorrow I'm
gonna, I'm gonna go in a deficit. That's not how it works. These are stages that we stay in for a
few months. But you are in control. You are making choice, a choice, and you can make that
choice because you're in the driver's seat. And this is why everything that I teach and ignite our
12 week program, everything that I stand for within Mind, Strong fitness, is this education
piece. Because just like riding that bike, when you are the master of this skill of nutrition, when
you know your personal body inside and out, you will never wish, hope, pray again. It's just a
matter of, what do I want to do next? But for the purposes of this three part podcast, we have
to go in this order. You cannot skip the healing stage unless you've come unless you're one of
the rare people who comes to us and there's not an issue with your metabolism. It happens. We
have people who come to us. They're eating, you know, 2200 calories a day, and they're not an
extreme athlete, and it's like, okay, your calories are too high. In that case, we can jump right
to the fat loss stage. And it's actually, it's a lot easier, both for them and for coaches, because
we get to skip the healing stage. But if you are someone who's already eating 1100 1200 1300
1400 calories a day and not losing fat, I'm I hate to have to tell you this, but the good news is
it's a one time thing. We have to go in this order. You have to heal your metabolism first, then
we can get to fat loss, then we can get to whatever the heck you want to do next. The beauty
is, with all of this, you've heard me harp a lot on the fact that healing your metabolism is a one
time thing, learning this skill, mastering this skill is a one time thing. Once you understand the
skill of nutrition and how your personal body works, that's it. You don't have to come back to
me or whoever you choose as your coach and relearn this every year you've mastered the skill.
Now it's a question of cool. I'll never have to heal my metabolism if I never go that low again,
which I hope you won't. So do I want to go to fat loss? Do I want to go to maintenance? Do I
want to go into a bulk you don't need to hire a coach. Every time you do it, you are in the
driver's seat. You are in control. There is never any wishing, hoping, praying involved. Ever
again. Do.