1. You’re Probably Not Eating 1,200 Calories

When someone signs up for 1:1 coaching with me and claims they’re eating around 1,200 calories, it’s an immediate red flag. The main reason is that 1,200 calories is not enough to sustain current body weight for any grown adult. The first thing I follow up with is, “Have you lost a lot of weight recently?” If their answer is no, then they aren’t eating 1,200 calories unless they are a very, very, very tiny person that could be blown away by a gust of wind.

Yes, there is truth to “metabolic adaptation”, which means your metabolism eventually adjusts to the calories you feed it. If you really do eat 1,200 calories for an extended period of time, your metabolism down-regulates to that, meaning it stops burning as many calories throughout the day. Over time, 1,200 calories becomes close to your new maintenance, and to lose any more weight you would have to cut below that or increase overall activity, both of which would put you in a deficit again.

At this point I’ve coached over 475 women and have yet to find someone who was eating 1,200 calories on a consistent basis. Here is what is happening instead.

Maybe a few days, let’s say Monday and Tuesday, really are 1,200 calorie days. But then Wednesday and Thursday they have that 1,200 calorie mindset, yet in reality are consuming around 1,500 calories because they let a bite slide here and a few things went untracked there. Then the weekend hits and they are really hungry because they’ve been eating low calories for four consecutive days. So Friday through Sunday they eat less nutrient-dense foods that are higher in calories. They never feel too full because the foods they’re eating are more processed and less filling. Unfortunately, not feeling too full doesn’t mean you aren’t consuming a lot of calories. A weekend of eating out puts you easily over 2,000 calories each day, and that doesn’t even include alcohol. So this person is much closer to their maintenance calories than they realize.

Many women who come to me think they are under-eating calories, when in reality they are under-eating protein. When you replace processed, low-protein but high-calorie foods with nutrient-dense, high-protein options, you are going to feel way more full on way fewer calories. Because these women finally experience real fullness, their brain thinks they are eating more calories, but they aren’t. That’s how someone who thinks they’re eating 1,200 calories comes to me, we get them eating the calorie deficit I’ve calculated for them, let’s say 1,600 calories, and they lose weight. If they lose weight eating 1,600 calories, they were never eating 1,200 consistently. They just thought they were.

You may not be under-eating calories. You may just be under-eating protein while not tracking as precisely as you think you are.

2. You Don’t Have to Get It Perfect. You Just Have to Get It Going.

Progress only begins when we get into motion. Nothing great comes from standing still, and at some point you’ve got to start doing something. Perfection kills more great ideas than anything else.

The gap between having the desire to change and taking action on that desire is so crucial. Don’t let so much time pass that the desire wavers. Experience the desire, and then immediately take action. The quicker you get moving in the direction you want to go, the quicker you will see small wins add up. Those small wins create initial momentum that then stacks into much larger wins and progress over time. Then, like I always say, you’ll look back over six months and feel unrecognizable from the old you, but in the best way. All because you decided you don’t have to get it perfect. You just have to get it going.

3. You Don’t Have the Energy to Work Out Because You Haven’t Been Working Out

You haven’t been working out because you don’t have the energy to do so. See how vicious that cycle can be? It seems like a catch-22 until one day you decide to wake up and just start. Once you start, you’ll realize that exercise is more energy-giving than energy-draining.

And when I say one day you just wake up and start, I don’t mean that from that day on the decision will always be easy. It is still, every single day, a choice you have to make. Some days will be easier, and some days it will feel SO against what your body naturally wants to do.

Several years ago I used the phrase “force it till you feel it,” kind of like fake it till you make it, but different. At the root of it, forcing it till you feel it means that actions lead and feelings follow. It means I’m going to do what I said I was going to do even if it’s the last thing I want to do.

Discipline isn’t white-knuckling to the extremes. Discipline is having enough self-respect to follow through. You already have things in your life that you take this approach with. The question is, what are those things and what are your non-negotiables?

• If you’re currently doing nothing, you can make progress with 20-minute bodyweight workouts.
• If you’re currently doing bodyweight workouts, you can make progress with 10 lb dumbbells and a set of resistance bands.

The great thing about making exercise non-negotiable is that it takes way less time and way fewer resources than you think.

4. “Body Goals” Is a Good Thing

If you have a body goal in mind, good for you. The body positivity movement on social media wants to almost shame you for wishing to change your body, but there is nothing wrong with having a desire to change your physique. Here is my take on why that can be a good thing.

To become fit, you have to consistently do the things you probably don’t want to do, and that creates unshakeable confidence in yourself. When you say you’re going to do something and follow through, you’re laying a brick every single time. Or as I like to say, you’re adding a penny in the jar. You’re becoming a person who has self-respect and is mastering the skill of follow-through.

The person you become while chasing a body goal is someone who does what they say they are going to do, and that often trickles positively into so many other areas of life. The steps you take to improve your health become keystone habits that make everything else around you better. You can’t wing it when it comes to losing weight or getting fit. You have to plan for it to happen, and that planning then becomes a habit. This is why body goals can be a really healthy thing.

5. Winning Is Within Your Control

When you absolutely refuse to give up, you will eventually win. This is GOOD news. Keep showing up and you give yourself no choice but to change. But continued progress doesn’t mean uninterrupted progress.

Will life happen and try to derail us? Of course. We should expect that to happen, because when we expect things to come up it removes their power. Don’t be surprised when the minute you try to make positive changes you feel MAJOR resistance.

I like to think of flexible discipline as the way to approach it. Be disciplined enough that it happens regardless, but the only way it happens regardless is if you are flexible enough to react when life does. Here is what that looks like in real life. The rigid version of discipline sees just 20 to 30 minutes to get a workout in, decides that feels like not enough time to make a difference, and skips the whole thing. The flexible version of discipline does the shorter workout. Scaled versus skipped. Over a year, the person who scales instead of skips is in a completely different place.

Kids and schedules can’t be an excuse anymore. Can they make things harder? Yes. But are you going to sell your kids? No. Are you going to dump everything off your plate and only make time for exercise and meal prepping? No. So what does that mean? We need systems to make these things more likely to happen, and systems are only possible with a plan.

Systems are what make the right thing happen when you’re tired, busy, and unmotivated. A plan for workouts is something you can offload to someone else versus spending 20 minutes scrolling or walking into your gym with no idea what to do. This is where fitness apps take the guesswork out completely. A plan for meals, and if your budget allows, meal prep services are an incredible tool. If the budget doesn’t allow for that, find three to four meals you love that are easy to make, make those every single week until you get sick of them, then rotate them out. We talk about this in episode 5 of the podcast.

All in all, winning is within your control. When you absolutely refuse to give up, you will eventually win.

6. The Habits That Got You Into the Debt Cannot Get You Out of the Debt

In this context, the habits that got you here cannot get you there. The habits that caused you to feel tired, depressed, and unhealthy cannot lead you toward energy, peace, and health. We are what we repeatedly do, so how do we break that cycle?

Some will say mindset comes first, but I disagree. Simply taking action comes first. The tiniest action can be seen as a win.

• Wake up 5 minutes earlier? WIN.
• Drink 8 more ounces of water? WIN.
• Work out 10 minutes versus 0 minutes? WIN.

The snowball starts out as just a snowflake. That snowflake stacks onto another, which is you keeping that habit for consecutive days. Before you know it, that snowball gains traction and rolls downhill. Then you wake up one day unrecognizable because you simply took the smallest action six months, one year, two years ago.

It can feel daunting, and that’s why I’ve built programs that give shortcuts. You can Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT the answers on your own, but it’s not knowledge holding you back. It’s the application of that knowledge. Research doesn’t equal results.

7. You Do Not Know Better

If your current behaviors are not moving you closer to the person you want to become, you do not know better. If you struggle with losing then gaining those same 10 lbs year after year, you do not know better. If you do not have muscle, but are trying to build it yet the program you’re following doesn’t seem to be helping, you do not know better. If you cannot seem to stay consistent with hitting your macros and every weekend derails the work you put in Monday through Thursday, you do not know better.

Here is what blows my mind. When someone hires a coach, that coach gives them a custom roadmap based on their goals and lifestyle, and then the client who hired the coach thinks they know better.

• What do you think about this?
• What if we did that?
• I don’t think I want to do that.
• I can’t seem to stick with that, what if we tried this instead?
• I tend to drink too much yet I have no desire to stop drinking.
• I can’t seem to lose weight yet here I am with all these ideas about what we should do.

YOU DO NOT KNOW BETTER. And if you find yourself hiring a coach for that custom roadmap and layer of accountability, trust that they know better than you do. Trust that even if the path leads to discomfort, that discomfort is good for you. Because the current path you’re on, the trajectory isn’t good. That’s why you hired a coach. That new path is going to feel uncomfortable, hard, and at times scary, but only because it’s unfamiliar.

This year I hired my very first business coach and paid him $15k for six months of coaching. You’ve heard me promoting this workshop. He has me shouting it from the rooftops. I am posting on social media WAY more, sending daily emails, and running my first-ever paid ads. It ALL feels uncomfortable. It ALL feels cringe. But guess what? He knows better than I do. At the time of this recording there are over 200 people signed up for this workshop. I would have never gotten that many registrations if I marketed at a level that felt comfortable to me.

Here is my take. Why in the HECK did I pay him $15k if I wasn’t going to do everything he suggested? If I truly knew better I wouldn’t need a business coach. He scaled his own coaching business to multiple seven figures and is now teaching other coaches how to do the same. So he knows better than I do, and I might as well listen to him. And someone out there who has gone and achieved what you hope to achieve, they know better than you too. So you might as well listen to them.

To close out on this final point, one quote from Myron Golden’s book said when you PAY you PAY MORE ATTENTION. When you financially invest in something you put more on the line and are more likely to follow through. I’ve seen that play out in my own life.

• Maybe for you that looks like hiring a business coach.
• Maybe that’s a personal trainer at your local gym.
• Maybe it’s hiring a nutrition coach to help you lose weight.

Whatever it is, they know better than you, and if you pay them you’re more likely to pay attention.