5 Mental Shifts for Better Body Results
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Girl, are you frustrated that you aren’t seeing results? Are you working out SUPER hard and on point with your nutrition but are still SO confused about why you AREN’T building the body you want?
And I get it! You’re working out hard and eating clean...
Shouldn’t that mean you should be building the body you want by now?
You would think!
However, there are some flaws in this tactic. And because of these flaws, you’re going to continue to struggle to see results.
In this episode, I’m going to share a few mental shifts for you to make in your weight-loss tactics that will make a drastic difference in the results you’ll see.
Let’s dive into the five mindset shifts I want you to make so you can FINALLY start building the body you want!
P.S: If you need help figuring out what your macros are, you can check out my FREE ebook that gives you the formula for getting started. All you have to do is click here.
Also, if you want to start working out at a healthier intensity, without overdoing it, my Movement with Julie workout app will really help you build a healthier relationship with fitness. You can get access to the app by heading over to sale.movementwithjulie.com
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey there, beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get it. Let's go.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Embrace Your Real podcast. I know you might be frustrated that you aren't seeing results. You're working out super hard. You're on point with your nutrition and yet you're so confused why you aren't building the body that you want. I know many of us as spring break is coming up and summer is quickly approaching, we are looking for that strong girl summer. And like I said, you're working out hard. You're eating clean. Shouldn't that mean that you're building the body that you want by now? You would think so, but there's actually some flaws in this tactic. And because of those flaws, you're going to continue to struggle to see results. So in this episode, I'm going to be sharing with you a few mental shifts that you can make in your weight loss or toning up tactics that I believe can make a drastic difference in the overall results that you see.
But before I dive in, I wanted to share this review of the day. It comes from Gooberface. And she says, "I love Julie's podcast. For so long I've tried to lose weight the wrong way. Extreme caloric deficit that left me fatigued and unmotivated. Julie has showed me not only the proper way to lose weight, but encourages all women to love themselves in each phase of life. She gives us a dose of real talk for real lives." I love this so much. She gives us a dose of real talk for real lives. I might even put that in my Instagram and TikTok bio. And I might credit you, Gooberface.
Thank you so much for this review. I appreciate every single one of your nicest reviews, whether you leave them on Spotify or you leave them wherever you tune in on podcasts. If you could, scooch over to Apple Podcasts, that is where we are able to rank the charts, which basically just means that we're able to reach more people, because this is a part of my business that I do every single week that I love. And it's free. It's completely free education for you. It's completely free empowerment for you. And I just want this message of Embrace Your Real to spread to the ends of the earth. So if you could go over to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review, it really does help us out.
Let's dive into the five mindset shifts that I want you to make so you can finally start building the body that you want and get that hot girl summer. I mean, strong girl summer. All right. Number one, shift your mindset away from having to workout super hard all the time aka cardio-based programs to learning to enjoy and honor your body with all different types of movement. Let me explain this one. I know that so many women are cardio junkies for a lack of a better term. The high that you get from the sweat pouring down your face makes you feel like you got a good workout in. And so that keeps you coming back for more and more and higher and higher intensity workouts. But if you have the right amount of exercise at the right intensity at the right time, you train, you learn, you get healthier and you get stronger. But on the flip side, if you're exercising too much with too much intensity too often, you'll strain, you'll stress, you'll shut down and your body will eventually break down.
I actually got the following analogy from Precision Nutrition, and I loved it so much that I had to share this with you. Our bodies are super smart. In fact, so smart that our bodies have a complex feedback loop and elegant shutdown system that actively prevents us from overreaching or pushing ourselves too hard. Now here, there are two systems at play, our CNS, which is our central nervous system, and that actually essentially acts as a car engine regulator. If the engine on the car revs too high for too long, it shuts down. Similarly, if we exercise too much, our brain tries to protect our muscles by reducing the rate of nerve impulses, so we can't or don't want to move as much. And we certainly can't work as hard. Our second system at play here in our body is our local fatigue. The result of energy system depletion and/or the metabolic byproduct accumulation, which makes your muscles feel really tired, lethargic and weak.
So going off of this car analogy, it's sort of like running out of gas. Training too frequently and intensely again without prioritizing recovery means that the stress will never subside. We never get a chance to put gas in the tank or change the oil. We just drive and drive and drive and drive and drive, mashing the pedals harder and harder. But if you were to essentially lift the hood into our body, you might see the following: Poor lubrication, our connective tissues are creaky or afraid. Our radiator overheating, which is more inflammation in our body. The battery drained, feel good brain chemicals and anabolic buildup hormones have gone down. And the rest, catabolic just means breaking down. And essentially the cortisol hormones have gone up. And as a result, you might experience blood sugar up and downs, depression, anxiety, racing thoughts, trouble sleeping, early wake-ups, food cravings. You might even have trouble controlling your eating. Lower metabolism due to decreased thyroid hormone output. Disturbed sex hormones, which basically just means less mojo overall. In women, irregular, missing menstrual cycles. Yada, yada, yada.
So you can see here that training too frequently and intensely without prioritizing recovery, that just means, like I said, that the stress never really subsides. And here's the thing. You don't get to decide if you need recovery or not. Your body will decide that for you. If you don't build recovery into your plan, your body will eventually force it. The more extreme you're over-training, the more you'll pay via illness, injury or exhaustion. And the more severe the payback, the more time off you'll need from exercise, which is a bummer. So what do we do instead? Like I said, really shifting your mindset from going super hard all the time to really enjoying and honoring your body with all different types of movement. So I'm going to give you kind of an example based on two different scenarios as to how much output you would like to do on a weekly basis. When it comes to exercise, balance is so important. So you got to mix it up. Work hard sometimes, but also relax, unwind and recover at other times.
So first scenario, let's say, for example, you have committed to five hours of movement per week. A breakdown per week could look like this. Three hours of resistance training. That would be about four 45-minute workouts, or three one-hour workouts, 30 minutes of interval training. So that could either be one session for 30 minutes that week, or it could be two sessions of 15 minutes of interval training, whether that's hit body weight cardio, cycling, running, whatever type of interval training you want. I know boxing is another one. One hour of active recovery. So this could be hiking, walking, yoga. And then the rest of the time, just for fun stuff that can be based around movement. Most people will fall into either that camp of zero to five hours of movement that you can commit to every week. Or if you want to be a little bit more active and you feel like you can commit to five to 10 hours of movement a week, a breakdown could look like this.
You could do three hours of resistance training. Again, that would be four 45-minute workouts, or three one-hour workouts. You could do 30 to 45 minutes of interval training per week. So again, that could be about two sessions of 22-ish minutes of interval training. So whether that's hit body weight cardio, cycling, running, boxing. And then two to three hours of active recovery, so hiking, walking, yoga. And the rest of the time can just be fun stuff that's kind of based around movement. But overall, it's a simple shift in your mindset of incorporating and honoring your body with all different types of movement, versus just thinking the time to move is only in your workouts and you go super hard then. So again, like I just mentioned earlier, you have to learn to prioritize recovery. And so that simple mindset shift you guys of I'm going to structure my life around honoring my body with movement and incorporating it in so many other different ways, versus just going super hard in your workouts and not allowing your body time to rest and recover.
Number two, shift your focus from working out being the primary tool for building the body that you want to shifting more on your nutrition as your primary tool. Believe it or not, nutrition is really what's going to make or break your results. You can crush all the workouts that you want. You can be super consistent in honoring your body with movement. But if you're not nourishing your body with what it needs, you're going to struggle to see results plain and simple. If you skipped your entire week of workouts but kept your nutrition dialed in, you would likely not lose any strength during the week. In fact, you could even be making progress towards your goals. Yet on the flip side, if you workout every day but skipped nourishing your body and ate way more calories, carbs, fats than your body needs every day and repeated that over and over, you're not going to see results plain and simple.
Now I know that was an extreme example, but on an ongoing basis, if your nutrition is dialed in consistently, remember not perfectly all the time but consistently, you can weight train three to four times a week for about 30 to 45 minutes and still build the body that you want. That's just how important nutrition is in the formula for building the body that you want. So I want to challenge you to commit to your nutrition. Stop overdoing it with your workouts. And instead, really focus on educating yourself as to how to properly nourish your body, which leads me to point number three, shift your mindset away from eating clean to nourishing your body. These are two totally different things. I know so many women who are trying to eat clean, but the foods that they think are clean don't fit the macronutrients that their body actually needs.
There are so many nutrient-dense foods out there that are great for fueling your body, but just because they're "healthy" doesn't mean that it's exactly what your body needs. Most often when women tell me that they are struggling to see the results that they want and they're eating clean and I ask them to track their macronutrients with zero judgment and not changing anything about what they're eating in their daily intake, they're absolutely shocked by how off they are from what their body actually needs, versus what they're eating on a day-to-day basis. Again, eating clean still doesn't mean you're giving your body the proper amount of calories, carbs, fats and protein that your body actually needs.
And without giving your body the macros in the right proportions based on your body, your activities, your activity level and your goals, it doesn't matter how clean you're eating if you're still overeating on calories, carbs, fats, no matter how clean these sources are, you still won't see the results that you're looking for plain and simple. If you don't know the amount of carbs, fats, protein, essentially the macros that your body needs, I have a free macro counting ebook. It's called Macro Counting for The Everyday Woman. You can head over to juliealedbetter.com/free-ebook. In the short ebook, I will give you the formula for figuring it out yourself. So no more needing to go to an online calculator. That's confusing and doesn't actually teach you the step by step calculation. I will do that in this ebook for you. So you can either go to juliealedbetter.com/free-ebook or I will include the link in the show notes so that you can easily go click that and download it now.
Number four, shift your mindset away from weight loss to getting stronger and feeling great in your body. I believe that the more that we focus on losing weight, the harder it actually becomes to lose weight, or whatever it is, insert whatever goal it is that you have. Because if you wake up every morning, you step on the scale or you stare at your body in the mirror and you're constantly feeling and checking your body throughout the day, the harder losing weight is truly going to become because you're becoming obsessed about it. When we focus on weight loss, or we focus on insert whatever goal it is, it's like watching water boil. We can't focus on the end results. We need to focus on the process and finding happiness in the process. We need to focus on feeling more energized, feeling happier, feeling stronger, feeling more confident. When we focus on these things, losing weight will simply be a byproduct of these things. And most often you'll realize that weight loss wasn't really what you were actually looking for in the first place.
What you were looking for was to feel good, feel happy and feel confident. And this is so true. Over the last eight years, I've worked with thousands of women and the overall consensus is this. When their journey is focused on weight loss, it goes by so slow. They're so discouraged. They give up. They have that toxic cycle of starting and stopping and starting and stopping, versus really shifting the narrative of their journey and saying: Okay, I am committed to an overall lifestyle re-haul, if you will. And essentially, that's focusing on what I like to call deep health. And I got this from my Precision Nutrition certification. They talk a lot about the importance of deep health versus just physical health. And when you focus on deep health versus just physical health, the actual physical results, it's more sustainable. And there's actually six dimensions of deep health.
There's relational, so being connected and authentic with others, feeling supported and feeling like you belong. There's existential, which is feeling a sense of meaning and purpose in life. There's mental, so being alert, focused, competent, thoughtful, learning, remembering, solving problems, all of those things. There's the physical obviously, so feeling vibrant, energized, thriving, performing and functioning well. There's emotional, which is experiencing a full range of emotions and expressing them appropriately. And then lastly, there's environmental, so knowing your everyday surroundings support your health and wellbeing. Now every dimension of deep health influences our eating and our exercise behavior. And this honestly is a whole other topic, a different podcast for a different day. So I'll keep it brief and just remind you that in this journey, when you put your weight into proper perspective, meaning you focus overall on your deep health, you'll be able to see so many other variables that are important to you, which typically leads you to the ultimate desired results that you are looking for in the first place.
Number five, shift your mindset away from restriction. If you're chronically under-eating, avoiding the foods that you love, cutting out all the carbs and constantly restricting yourself, you will not see results plain and simple. I've heard so many women say: I can't stick to a healthy diet for more than a week, yada, yada, yada. They're not seeing results. And this is likely because they're equating a "healthy diet" to restriction. Of course, you're not going to be able to stick with it. A healthy diet is a diet where you're eating enough food in the right amounts that include both nutrient-dense and less nutrient-dense food that actually nourish your soul. So when your diet looks like this, you will see results because you're actually able to stay consistent and more important, actually satisfied. So we need to start redefining what a "healthy diet" looks like.
It is not restriction. It is not cutting out carbs. It is not cutting out fats. It's not going on a very low calorie diet. And I know so many people know this. They hear it now. It's a more common and trendy thing to say like: Don't eat low carb. Don't eat this. But when it comes to your mentality, are you still holding onto that? Are you still believing it? Do you still fear food when you're putting food in your mouth, or thinking that it's going to make you fat if you go out for one meal with your friends and family and you get a hamburger and french fries? You have to learn and redefine that you have to have both nutrient-dense and less nutrient-dense foods. That is so critical. And I will preach that till the day I die because I'm telling you, the diet where you are literally only eating this clean nutrient-dense, high nutrient-dense, never going off of it, never eating a less nutrient-dense food, you're going to fail.
It's a matter of time. It's not if, but when. But when you learn how to properly fuel your body and when you figure out what macronutrients your specific body needs, you actually realize that you can live in abundance. The opportunities you have to fill those macronutrient goals daily are endless. It becomes fun exploring the different foods and actually enjoying the food that you're eating on a day-to-day basis. You can put sauce on your food. You can eat the donut. You can have the chips. You can eat out. You can have the margarita if you want. And you can enjoy so many things. There's no more restriction and so much abundance. And most of all, there's an abundance of satisfaction and joy because you're able to eat whatever you want and you learn how to do so in moderation.
Okay. So let's recap this episode. If you're struggling to see results, you need to stop focusing on working out super hard all the time, fitness as your primary tool for weight loss, eating clean, weight loss and restricting yourself. If you really want to see results, if you really want to aim for that strong girl summer, you're going to have to focus on not overdoing it with your workouts, really learning to incorporate movement into your day-to-day, honoring your body with movement, eating what your body actually needs, feeling good in your body, and having that abundance mindset when it comes to not living in restriction mode. When you make these shifts, you will see results. I can promise you that. You will come to summertime because okay, here it is. We're in March, April, May, June. We have about three to four months until it's like the heat of summer.
If you truly want to feel your strongest, start today. Don't start tomorrow. Don't start on Monday. Don't start next month. Start today. Start small. Start with where you are at. But if you do it in the right way, I'm telling you, you will absolutely feel your best this summer. Again, if you need help figuring out what your macronutrients are, you can check out my free ebook that gives you the formula to help you get started. All you need to do is head over to the show notes for the link, or you can check out juliealedbetter.com/free-ebook. Again, that's juliealedbetter.com/free-ebook. And then also, if you are wanting to learn to honor your body with movement and you're wanting to incorporate resistance training into your weekly schedule, but you don't really know where to start, you don't really have a structured or time-effective or efficient program, I want to invite you to join my Movement With Julie app.
Inside this app, I give you five brand-new workouts every single week. And there are two options for you every single day. So depending on what your time constraints are, you either have a full workout, which will take you anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, or if you're short on time, there's always a variation of the full workout that you can do, which is just a 30 minute workout. It's a giant circuit. It's killer. And they're so effective because all you truly need is your body weight, a small space and a pair of dumbbells. You can learn more by going to sale.movementwithjulie.com. Again, that's sale.movementwithjulie.com. I will link it in the show notes below. But if you sign up or you reinstate your subscription, you get 50% off your first month.
So go to sale.movementwithjulie.com and learn more there. And I look forward to having you join our community. That is all that I have for you. I hope that these mental shifts will really help you get into the right mindset as we head into the warmer months. I love you so much. If you have a friend or a coworker that you feel like would benefit from this episode, you can either screenshot this and post it up on your social platforms, or you can simply just text them the link to this podcast and say: Hey, check this out. I really appreciate you guys sharing out this message. I love you so much. I mean it. And I'll talk to you in the next episode.
All right, sister, that's all I got for you today, but I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you are not already following me on the Gram, be sure to do so, juliealedbetter. Yes, it's with an "a" in the middle for that daily post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks, and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world. And I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface. So go out there and embrace your real because you're worth it.