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In this week's episode, I dive into my own personal fitness and weight loss journey. It's been pretty unconventional and has taken longer than any quick fix that failed me before, but I am in a healthy place now both physically and mentally. Come along with me for the journey and we'll even go over some key takeaways that I learned from my experience over the last few years!
To try a free week of my signature Fit for Hiking program to get you fit from the trails (gym AND at-home options) start HERE.
To try a free week of my signature Fit for Hiking program to get you fit from the trails (gym AND at-home options) start HERE.
For next level fat loss strategies, hormone/gut health help, serious performance goals and unparalleled support, apply for Mountain Metabolic coaching. Learn more HERE.
For more free wellness resources, hiking/travel guides, and other blog posts, check out my website HERE.
What is Fit for Hiking?
Where fitness and outdoors meet. In this space we chat all things hiking, exercise, wellness, adventure, motherhood, and metabolic health from a female perspective! Get ready to learn + be inspired to live your fullest, most adventurous life!
Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a long time fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness, trail talk and adventure. Hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discuss here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the fit for hiking podcast. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the fit for hiking podcast. You guys, I'm so excited for today because we are going to be talking about something that's pretty personal to me, and I realized I hadn't shared it on here, and it's really relevant to a lot of the conversations that we're having around female health and fitness and even fat loss. And so I thought I would share today my very unconventional fitness journey and what that has looked like throughout the course of my whole life, as well as my 20s and ultimately my journey to losing £25, but not necessarily in a way that you would assume when you hear about someone losing £25. When I say it's unconventional, what I mean is that, you know, oftentimes when we hear about somebody's weight loss journey, they, like are very sad and teary and they aren't working out at all, and they start a regimen and then they lose weight right over the course of 6 to 12 months usually. Um, and that's really not my story. My life has always been pretty active. I, um, you know, I've been in sports my whole life. I've always been interested in exercise as long as I can remember. My first memory of being interested in working out and fitness. I was really young, probably like eight years old, doing Tebow with my mom. I loved just jumping in and doing workout videos with her. I thought it was so fun. And really, that's when I realized that movement and exercise kind of sparked joy for me. And it's something that carried through my entire life. In high school, I was in sports, and I was also always in fitness classes. That's actually where I learned to lift weights. I was in a advanced fitness class where I got to learn. How to lift lifting form. And that was something that was so valuable for me that carried into my college years as well as my adult life. Um, there wasn't really ever a time when I just didn't work out. And so that's been a part of my life as long as I can remember. I've never really had a period of time where I wasn't active, where I totally gave up all healthy habits around exercise. I've really done it always. And so, you know, for me, when I was experiencing the desire to lose weight and some weight gain, it was a bit unconventional because I was so active compared to the average person. I was extremely active. My job was active, I worked in fitness. That was my profession as well as my passion. And so, um, you know, my journey of of getting to where I am today is, I would say unconventional. And there's a lot of backstory here. So I just kind of want to take you through my life story with fitness, health, mindset changes, hormone issues, all of it. And ultimately what my biggest takeaways are. Um, and if you are someone who is on a weight loss journey currently, hopefully this will be encouraging to you that it's not always a linear linear, and it doesn't always look the same depending on, you know, your backstory and each individual person. Um, so. Exercise in my 20s. I kind of want to start there because that's where life starts to get real. Like, you know, you're experiencing life stress for the first time, kind of, you know, as an adult in the working world. And I started to just kind of slowly put on some body fat, um, in my early 20s, I would say, and, you know, it wasn't anything crazy, but I remember feeling extremely self-conscious because I did work in fitness. I was at that point working, you know, at the beginning of my 20s, I started out working at a YMCA. That was my first job out of college, you know, just like working the gym floor. Then I started teaching group classes. I got personal training certified, started teaching or working with clients. Um, became a program manager for youth, basically. You know, that's kind of where I got my start. And I always worked in fitness ever since. So being in that field, I feel like it does put a bit of, um, pressure on you and you could say it's self-imposed. But I do feel like there is this expectation that fitness trainers should look a certain way, right? They need to look toned and like, really lean and like they work in fitness. And I just didn't necessarily have that super lean body. You know, I've always been kind of more of a muscular build. Um, and it was easy for me to gain weight, to be honest. Like, it's funny because my sister is a completely different build from me. She's as skinny as can be, has never been interested in anything fitness wise, and it's always been really easy for her to stay super lean. And I've always kind of had the opposite where I've been very active. And yet it's been harder for me to stay, you know, quote unquote skinny or what people would view as, as super toned. And so that was always a really big thing for me, self-conscious, wise, um, trying to figure out how to balance being healthy, but also, um, really struggling with kind of hating my body throughout my 20s and doing so much exercise and still not feeling like that was improving at all. So, um, you know, that mindset issue was really hard for me, and it led to a lot of weight loss attempts in my 20s. And this was anything from like literally looking into weight loss pills, um, trying lots of diets, like probably every single diet in the book, um, Whole30, completely cutting carbs, paleo, um, macro tracking, um, you know, like, you name it. I really did it all. Like, I tried juicing for like a week or like a raw veggie diet. Hated my life and stopped after like a few days. I really did try everything, and, um, it was hard because I was so. I just really hated my body in my in my especially early to mid 20s. And it looks I look back now, really sad that I spent so much time feeling that way about my own body, despite being pretty healthy and working out a lot. Um, so I was kind of caught in this cycle of like, I'm exercising more and more and more and I'm trying all these diets and my body would change sometimes, like, sometimes I would lose like 5 to £10, then I would gain it back and it was just like nonstop. And I felt like I had to do a million things in order to see a fraction of progress, which is extremely frustrating. Most of us have been there if we've ever been caught in that cycle. Um, so then this kind of fed into a whole different layer of issues, which I haven't really spoken about a ton, but I experienced a loss of my period, a loss of my cycle when I was around, man, like 22, 23. And this lasted for several years. And anybody who knows anything about female health would say, okay, that's not normal. That's not healthy. A female of reproductive age should have a monthly cycle, you know, might be kind of a regular, but you should at least have a few periods a year. Right? And I just had nothing, literally nothing for years. Um, I had gone on birth control. It really messed me up. I tried a couple of different birth controls. I experienced a lot of, like, depression symptoms. Um, felt physically ill when I was on it. And so that I think had taken a toll on my body. I ultimately decided to come off of birth control right around the time that I lost my period. And I kind of thought, oh, it'll even out like things are just wonky right now, and it really just didn't. Um, so that led to me deciding to get a lot of hormone tests because I knew, you know, I was working in health. I knew that it was not normal for me not to have my period. Um, so I started seeing, um, a female doctor who was trying to help me with some labs. I ended up getting so much testing done, thousands and thousands of dollars of testing on my hormones because they agreed something's off. I should be having a cycle. Um, and what it came down to was they said that my body was reacting as if I was someone with an eating disorder. Um, as in, I was under so much stress that it was affecting my brain, which was affecting my hormones. And so everything kind of trickled down. My estrogen levels were down the dumps. They were literally like what an 80 year old woman has for estrogen levels. And so I did not have what I needed in order to have a monthly cycle. However, I was not underweight. In fact, I was, you know, you know, not my healthiest at that point as far as weight. I was struggling at that time. And so I was so confused. And the doctors were confused because they were like, why is your body reacting like this? Um, and ultimately, they really couldn't quite pinpoint, after months of testing what was going on, other than that is what my symptoms were. And so, um, they ended up giving me a thyroid diagnosis, hypothyroid. I started on medication, come to find, about a year or a few months later that I was wrongly diagnosed. I didn't need to be on hypothyroid medication, so I had to come off of that, which definitely took my body on a roller coaster. Still no period. Needless to say, this was a really frustrating time because I was going to these professionals looking for help and nothing was working, and I felt very helpless and I felt like it was ultimately like really hindering my progress. All the while I continued, you know, doing tons of hit classes, workout classes, running, sometimes doing two days. I mean, I was working out so much, um, and not seeing progress and really struggling also then with my relationship with food, because I was freaking hungry, I was working out all the time, and then I would end up, you know, trying to like, diet during the week. And then I would usually go all out on the weekends because I'd been so restrictive during the week. So in so many ways, I was just caught in a very frustrating cycle, not having answers about why I wasn't having a period, why my hormone levels were so off, what I could do about it, um, the whole, you know, dieting cycle through the week and then binging on the weekends and working out, not so much. Not seeing results and then just being freaking hungry all the time. So if this is resonating with any of you, I can promise you you are not alone in this. And it is exhausting. It really is. You feel like you are as a full time job trying to change your body, and it's all you think about. I mean, I was so fixated on food, I would literally just think about, like my diet and what I was going to restrict every Sunday. I would just hate myself for the things I had done over the weekend for having too much to eat, maybe having drinks. Um, and then I would just like, plan out how I was going to restrict the next week, which was then just the ultimate vicious cycle. Um, so that's kind of where I was at in my early to mid 20s. Very frustrating. Um, and then right around age 26, I ended up making a lot of changes in my life. Um. Things that were contributing to my stress. I went through a divorce, um, and just experienced a massive life change. Right? And so at that point, throughout my divorce and everything, I got up to probably my highest weight ever personally for myself and was just so uncomfortable. And I decided heading into that following New Year, that I was just really frustrated with this cycle of working out so much, feeling like I'm doing all the right things, and yet I was up to my highest weight ever. And so I decided to make some changes. Um, and that this is what I would refer to as my big pivot year when I turned 27. I think it was 2020, actually. So like obviously the whole world was in a very big pivot. We were all experiencing new things, and it was just kind of a good time for me to make some changes. I wasn't able to go into work anymore. I was doing everything virtually, and so I wasn't at the gym all the time that I worked at. I kind of pulled back on my exercise there, and I started trying to focus on intuitive eating instead of just feeling like I had to restrict all week and then ultimately then bingeing on the weekends, I changed my form of exercise to really start actually training for the activities I loved. Tried to stop paying attention to calorie counting, and just doing all of the most intense exercise I could really pulled back in that department. Um, also, through my life changes, my stress started to lower after, you know, I went through kind of like all of the stress of the divorce and the aftermath, things started to normalize. Um, and my stress started to come down. I got my cycle back during that time and I thought, huh, that's really interesting. Like after going through a lot of stressful years now, I've changed these different variables that are all kind of stress related. And finally, I have my cycle back. And across that year I started to slowly lose. 15 to £20. I wasn't even paying attention to it as the funny part. For the first time in years, in my whole 20s, I wasn't paying attention to the scale. I couldn't even weigh myself because I was stuck at home all the time during Covid. I was starting to honor my body's signals and work out less, lower my intensity, lower my stress, and voila, my my body finally started responding favorably. Um, and that really threw me for a mental loop because I was like, this is so counterintuitive to everything I've ever thought was true. You know, I always thought, burn more calories. More is better. You know, if I'm eating really low calorie during the week, surely I'll see results. And ultimately, that was not the right approach for me, especially during a very stressful season. So this is where the stress conversation comes in. Um, because what my body was doing during that time, I mean, the doctors even told me it's a stress issue, like your your brain senses stress. And because of that, your hormones are compensating accordingly and you're not going to have a cycle. It's the same effect that we have if we have an eating disorder and our body is not being nourished enough to reproduce. Um, but for me, it wasn't that I wasn't eating enough, it was that I was under so much emotional stress, mental stress and then physical stress, adding fuel to the fire of the already stressful components of my personal life at that time, by just doing hit and running and more intense, fast workout classes. And for me at the time, it was not beneficial. And so an important caveat I want to say here is that in no, by no means am I saying that running hit or workout classes are wrong or not good. But you have to look at your own life situation, your own season, your own stress bucket. Because for me at the time, one thing you have to know about me is I've already kind of a high strung person. I'm not like, super chill. Go with the flow. Always. Um, I would say I'm a very, like, driven type, a high strung person. So for those of us who are more type A, we're already going to err on the side of being more stressed, a little bit more anxious. Then on top of it, I was working a very physically demanding job and getting up really early for that. Several mornings a week I was on my feet all day and I was working out multiple times a day. That's a lot of extra cortisol, a lot of extra physical stress. I was also in a very stressful relationship dynamic at the time, going through a lot of emotional turmoil. Um, and just in general, my life was one giant stress bucket. But I didn't really look at that for what it was. I didn't understand at the time that when I was already under so much mental and emotional stress, adding physical stress was like the the tip of the, you know, it was like, what's the word like just adding another drop to the bucket, another drop to the bucket until the bucket started to overflow. And that's what our stress bucket does, right? If we are looking at total stress, sometimes it's just that one little area that puts us over the edge. It's the tipping point. And so it's important to look at the whole picture because your body does not separate emotional stress from physical stress. It just interprets stress. Right. So that could be like stress that you feel when you get cut off in traffic or if you almost get in an accident, this could be stress from a really crappy conversation with a loved one or a boss or, you know, work stress. This could be a really intense, stressful workout on an empty stomach. All you've had all day is caffeine, right? Cortisol, cortisol, cortisol. So while exercise is a positive stressor, most of the time when we're in immense stress already and we add that to it, without proper recovery, without proper nourishment, it's not going to be doing us any favors. Especially as women. We are more stress sensitive because we are reproductive beings, so we have to take things into consideration, consideration that men don't necessarily right, like they don't have these really intricate cycles every month where we're changing from week to week. Um, they are the same all the time, and they don't have these fluctuations of hormones to consider. And so that was something that just totally like went right over my head during that time, that it was all connected, that it was all correlated. And when I took a step back and started actually considering my stress, which was contributing to my metabolic health, it changed everything for me. So I started to notice these things and I started to learn more about metabolic health and how. Stresses. Women definitely affects us differently, and I started to change my approach more and more around exercise, work on my relationship with food, and instead of doing the whole restrict during the week thing and binge on the weekends, I started saying, okay, well, what if I just let myself have chocolate seven days a week? What if I let myself have some ice cream seven days a week? What if I let myself have a glass of wine during the week? Like, will the world end? Will I immediately gain a bunch of weight? And actually, what was happening was the opposite. Because I was no longer bingeing on the weekends, my total calorie daily intake was leveling out, and I ended up being more so in a deficit because I was actually honoring my hunger signals and not overdoing it any one day. I was just eating a normal amount of calories seven days a week, and that mindset shift for me was amazing. And I do want to say it didn't happen overnight. Like, sometimes I think we talk about intuitive eating and like, you know, healing relationship with food. Like it's just this quick like, oh, just change your mindset around it. Right? And it definitely does not happen like that overnight. But I will say starting that process and putting in the work is going to be instrumental. If you want to have a lifelong, healthy relationship with food and stay lean long term instead of doing the diet cycles. So, um, you know, that's a pretty long winded explanation of what that pivot year looked like for me. Um, but it was amazing. I mean, my hormones were leveling out. I was realizing that I could pull back on exercise intensity and volume and just eat a normal amount seven days a week. And my metabolism was happier, my stress diminished, and I lost so much inflammation. Like, it's crazy, you guys, if you look at photos of my face, um, like four years ago, it's wild to see the difference. Like, my face was so puffy, so inflamed. I was inflamed everywhere. But definitely you can see it in my face, um, to today and what a difference it is. And I'm doing less exercise, I'm eating more frequent treats, and I'm so much less like, aware and worried about what I'm eating all the time and how many calories I'm burning and things like that. I mean, it's just it's really cool to see all come full circle, that less sometimes is more, and how aware you need to be of your certain life situation, your season of life at the time when you're also trying to factor in fitness, um, and what might actually be best for you. Um, so then let's move towards pregnancy, postpartum. Um, at that point, I had slowly and steadily lost about £20, um, and was maintaining fairly well because I had really focused on putting on muscle, which is really beneficial for a healthy, thriving metabolism. At rest. You're not always just trading time for burning calories at that point. Um, it's almost like an investment, right? Instead of just constantly like making money and spending it, you're investing, and then that money's there. Just doing you favors long term. Um, that's kind of what it's like when you build muscle and focus on a healthy metabolism. Then you're not having to constantly burn so many calories. All day, every day, just to maintain. It's exhausting. And when that's how we're looking at exercise as a calorie exchange, that's what we end up doing. Um, and if you haven't yet, go back and listen to my episode about why exercise is not the best way to lose fat. Um, it's definitely a helpful look at. What this really looks like when you break it down and why? Just trying to constantly manually burn calories isn't the right approach for fat loss and will leave you very frustrated. Um, so I'd steadily lost about £20 at this point when I got pregnant, and I decided throughout my pregnancy I really, really wanted to continue trying to at least maintain the muscle that I had because I knew how important that was going to be, especially towards the end and going into postpartum, where I wouldn't be able to work out for a few months. And I was going to be trying to breastfeed all of that stuff. Um, so during my pregnancy, I was very sick. However, I did still try my best to, um, lift weights whenever possible. This looked so different than normal. I was like, horribly slow resting a ton. I mean, I was not at the gym crushing it. You guys. Don't get me wrong, I was doing the bare minimum just to try to maintain as much muscle as I could during this process and going for walks. I didn't do any cardio. I didn't do anything intense, anything fast my whole pregnancy because I was very sick and I just couldn't. And that was my limit. However, by maintaining my muscle and just doing slow lifting. And walking. I found so much success postpartum I didn't have to struggle with. Oh crap, now I've lost all this muscle. I felt really good. I was able to lose all my baby weight and then some. I actually ended up about £5 lighter than I was before getting pregnant. Um, and I was able to do that fairly easily because of the muscle that I had maintained during my pregnancy and spent time actually building leading up to that point. Um, so all of that to say, ladies, don't be afraid to build muscle. It might be the missing component in really seeing a successful body composition change for you. Oftentimes women just gravitate towards cardio machines and like it makes sense in our minds, right? Burning calories. Um, instead of doing something slow that makes you gain muscle, right? It just doesn't seem like it translates to body composition changes that would be favorable for us. What we're looking for with like a lean, toned appearance, but it makes such a difference for maintaining a healthy body composition with ease and healthy metabolism, and not having to constantly struggle. Because like during that season of pregnancy and postpartum, I was eating a lot. I was doing the bare minimum. And yet, I think really what contributed to not gaining weight and actually being able to lose that baby weight very easily and maintain it, was the fact that I had worked really hard leading up to that point and then try to maintain during my pregnancy, just getting muscle on my frame. So important. If you're always trying to burn, burn, burn, burn, burn, you're going to struggle to actually build muscle. So just something to consider. Um, so let's bring it now to current day. Um, I am a business owner. I have a one and a half year old, and I have a pretty busy life. I still like to get out and adventure. Um, and so basically what my fitness looks like now is I am going back and forth between at home and gym, I would say mostly at home. And I'm lifting weights in a pretty slow fashion about three times a week. I go for daily walks. I get out and hike or snowshoe on the weekends as much as possible, and maybe I throw in one cardio session a week, but most of the time it's really just slow lifting and walking. I don't run anymore unless I'm actively training for a half marathon, which I now do for fun and not to lose weight, which is awesome. And I don't really think about my food that often. I've found a really awesome groove with intuitive eating. And I will say a little caveat there is that it is helpful to bring some awareness around how much you're eating from time to time, if you've never done it before, if you've never kept track. I definitely do recommend doing that for a season, and sometimes I will just occasionally track for a few days and kind of see where my baseline is. But I'm maintaining a healthy weight with ease and without killing myself in the gym, without having to work out all the time. Um, and without a ton of intensity and stress added to my life, I look back on what I used to do and man, I used to spend so much time exercising. Like literally six days a week. I would do classes that were pretty intense. And then on top of that, I would try to like run or do hill sprints or something like that multiple times a week. I was doing a lot of two days and I get exhausted just thinking about it, and it's like, no wonder my nervous system was fried. No wonder my hormones were out of whack like it was too much for me. And so the less is more approach I call it with our clients, the minimal effective dose of exercise. It goes a long way. Like sometimes we end up working out so much that we increase inflammation, we don't recover well, we increase stress hormones, and then we're also increasing our appetite, which then makes us much more likely to say screw it and overeat, which makes it harder to maintain a healthy weight. Right. And so sometimes over exercising really can backfire. And so I'm really glad that I made the changes that I did a few years ago and have continued fostering that healthy relationship with food. Minimal effective dose exercise even throughout. Pregnancy, postpartum, moving, ramping up my business, scaling my business. So many big life changes because I've had less and less time to exercise, and yet I'm still able to maintain. And that's a really beautiful thing. Lots of travel, lots of schedule changes. Like lots of sleepless nights with my daughter. And yet I'm not having to break my back to stay fit and stay relatively lean. Um, yeah, I obviously don't look like a bodybuilder, and that's not really my look. I don't look, um, insanely thin or or, you know, what some people might call toned, but I'm really happy with my my body and my body composition. And I feel like I still have really good strength. I am able to crush it on the trails. I'm happy with the level of leanness that I am, and I think that that balanced place is so important, so much more important than killing yourself to look a certain way. But like hating what it takes for you to maintain it, right? So a few takeaways from this whole story. And I know it's kind of a long one, but I wanted to just give you the the full rundown because I think sometimes people simplify what their fitness journey looks like. And it doesn't look like that for all of us. Sometimes it takes a million twists and turns and there's, you know, progress and then lack of progress or two steps forward and five steps back. And I definitely know that's how it's been in my own journey. So I wanted to share, like the full drawn out thing. So a couple takeaways is that not every transformation will be 30 to 90 days and super Instagram worthy. Like I said, mine has taken years like sustainably losing £25 over several years. And really, what you want to look at is not just the weight loss, but like, are you maintaining? Like, sure, someone can lose 10 to £15 in 30 days if they really want to, if they kind of starve themselves, cut calories, do crazy intense sweaty workouts? Sure, it's for sure possible. However, I want to see them maintain that after the fact. Can you maintain that same weight a year after? Because that to me would be way more impressive than someone losing weight haphazardly in a really unhealthy fashion in 30 days. Like show me sustainable change and then I will know that it is legit. So really, to my advice here would be to stop looking for like the fast transformation and like the IG worthy transformations and really look for something that's sustainable long term. And another note of that is like if your dream body is a nightmare to maintain, is it really your dream body? Right? Like talking about body contentment, it's so easy to always feel like, oh, I could be leaner, I could be leaner, I could be leaner. I like I said, after I had my daughter, I got down to my lowest weight that I'd been since high school, and yet I still didn't feel like it was enough. Because if we don't have the right mindset around it, it's easy to just be like, I need more, I need more, I need more, and I really had to get real with myself of like, is this enough for me? Can I be content with this? Because right now I'm living a balanced life and I'm maintaining easily, and I don't want to have to live in the gym. I don't have time for that. I don't have the desire to be a slave to my routine like that. And so you have to really look at like, is what I'm doing actually maintainable? Is this going to be a nightmare for me to maintain? Because if so, that level of leanness might not be actually what I want. Like, you could always level it up more and you could always get leaner, but is it worth the sacrifice that you have to put forward? You have to get honest with yourself about that. All right. The next takeaway I have is that habits and mindset changes are definitely the long term win. Like you cannot really see things through long term with these. Changes, body composition changes. If you're not willing to really do an overhaul of your habits and mindset. I've had to do this so many times. Yes, it's the super not fun, not sexy part behind the transformations that you see. But if you want that maintenance, if you want to be able to maintain with ease and not let this stuff rule your life, then you got to start with your habits and your mindset. The next takeaway is that more is not always better. As you could see from my my own personal story and from the story of so many of our mountain metabolic clients is that sometimes more is not better, and you have to look at what is actually potentially hindering your progress. Could be trying to do too much, whether it's because it's increasing stress too much, it's throwing off your hormones, it's throwing off your cortisol, it's increasing inflammation. Or maybe it's just making you really dang hungry. And it's and and it's inhabiting inhibiting your progress there. So more is not always better. 1s Um, the next? Is that what your favorite influencer or fit bestie does? May not be best for you or right in this season. I think we're so quick to like, compare and then try to copy the people that we see that we're like, oh my gosh, her body is amazing. Like she's so toned. She looks so great. She looks so fit. Um, what is she doing? Okay, I'll do exactly that. And this is super dangerous for a couple reasons. One, because you actually have no idea what they're doing behind the scenes. To, like, fitness is really a small part of the equation of how lean somebody is. And so much of it's going to depend on their habits outside of their exercise, such as their food intake, protein intake, daily Neet, their non exercise activity expenditure and um and their sleep quality like stress management. There's so many different areas outside of exercise. So yes, you could do the same workout program as somebody and not get the same result at all depending on how much they're eating versus what you're eating. Um, genetics do play a role. Stress management, sleep, walking outside of your workouts, all of these different components play a massive role. Um, so we don't want to just look at these people and say, oh, what they're doing is definitely going to work for me. Also, we have to look at your total stress bucket and your season of life. If you are in a massive life change season, if you're going through a lot of emotional trauma or turmoil, if you are a very high strung person in general, or if you've had a very traumatic childhood, a lot of these things can affect how our nervous system handles stress. Also, if you're just not regulating your stress well, if you're never taking deep breaths, if you're in a heightened fight or flight, stressed out state all the time walking around that way, and then you're adding hit classes or like F45 or Orange Theory. Some of these like really fast paced, high intensity, high cortisol classes that might not be right for you, whereas someone who is more of like a type B personality, they're super easygoing, they're not very stressed out. They're in a really chill place in life. That might work just fine for them and it might not like, you know, be the final drop that makes their stress bucket overflow and cause these symptoms. So that is why we don't want to just assume that what works for somebody else is automatically going to be right for us. So many lessons over the years. My 20s were just like a massive time of learning so much about myself, my mindset, my relationship with food and exercise. And I really hope that parts of this story, or maybe the whole story, has been helpful for some of you guys listening today. It's not always linear. It's not always this picture perfect story of, oh, I just started exercising and I lost £20. Like, maybe you are listening to this and you've been exercising for years, and maybe your story sounds kind of similar to mine. Um, if that's the case, and you are still in a place of being stagnant and struggling and in a vicious cycle, then I definitely encourage you to reach out in regards to our mountain metabolic coaching. Now is a really great time to get on on board because we are onboarding clients for the new year, we're going to have limited spots heading into the new year. It's definitely a busy time for us. So if this is resonating and you feel like you could use some support to really troubleshoot some of these areas and find the right approach for you, that's personalized, then I definitely recommend applying at the link in the show notes. Um, that's the first step. And then we'll take it from there and we can get you started in January of 2024. Um, that is all I have for you today, guys. I hope that you've enjoyed and gotten something out of my own personal journey. Um, and my own fitness journey over the years. Thanks so much for tuning in today, and we will see you in the next episode. 1s Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the fit for hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at Ponytail Underscore. On a trail that's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at Fit Underscore for hiking, and find more free resources at ponytail on a trail comm. Happy and healthy trails.