Episode Description

Terry Shares her amazing transformation; losing 36kgs (80 pounds)  in her mid 40s after battling weight gain and many health issues in her late 30s.  She felt so empowered taking control of her health, and her life, when she decided to make the changes she needed to lose the weight. This transformational journey not only improved her health, it also helped Terry find her purpose, which prompted a career change that she had never expected.  She now absolutely loves helping other women achieve what she has.  Such and inspiring chat with a beautiful soul.

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Host: Dani Mondo from Women’s Fitness Education

Episode Transcript

Hi, it’s Dani here for another episode of our Women’s Fitness Education Podcast. And today I’m very excited to be here with our guests all the way from the US. It’s Terri Tattiosian. So welcome, Terri. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Dani, for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honor to talk with you today. And I’ll add in, we finally got here. We had some issues with time zone difference. And a bit of confusion, but we’re finally here. So it’s great. So for those of you who don’t know Terri, so she’s a founder of Thor Wellness. And she helps women over 35 feel empowered, get strong, and obviously get results on their wellness journey. And she’s also had an amazing transformation herself.

So after, I think it was started around 42, she was saying, she started doing a lot of weight loss. She has lost 80 pounds. And for us in Australia, that’s around 36 kilos. So that’s huge, especially to do that after 40. So congratulations on your results. And I think it would be awesome if you could start to tell us about your journey. How did that all begin? And then how did you transition into coaching other women to get results?

Absolutely. So I started off in my teens and my 20s. I was pretty fit. I was never really overweight. I did not have any kind of obesity history in my family or anything like that. And when I was 13, we ended up immigrating into the United States in 1989.

And if you know anything about immigrant families, they’re very much about working, going to school, education. It was all about work, work, work, work, work. Non-stop, right? I mean, the corporate ladder. And so my life really became about that. I worked. I started a family when I was 30. And little by little, the weight started creeping on because I never really formally got introduced to fitness. I didn’t really play any sports ever in high school or in college. I worked after school. I didn’t have time for sports. And then when I started working, full-time in New York, and I had my first child, things just progressively got worse and worse and worse. And my mindset at the time was, you know, I was 30 years old. I was like, oh, you know, it doesn’t matter. I, you know, I have more important things to do. Working out was not my priority. Yeah. And so it continued to snowball. And then I had my second child at 35. And then it continuously snowballed from there. Mm-hmm. One day in 37, 38, I realized that I was pre-diabetic. I was having heart palpitations. I was having, the doctors found a heart murmur. I ended up getting hospitalized twice and staying overnight.

Seeing cardiologists, having ovarian cysts, having extreme and just paralyzing anxiety. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Everything was going wrong, okay? I would get dizzy in the middle of the day for no reason at 37.

And I started trying to figure out, you know, I don’t want to die. I have children. I have to figure out what’s happening to me. And I went on this path of seeing all these different doctors, and nobody had an answer for me. Yeah. That I had no heart issues. I was pre-diabetic, but not enough to get, to get on medication.

You know, the ovarian cysts were something that they, you know, it was isolated. It was treated on its own. Yes. Right? Yeah. And so anxiety, again, treated on its own. Take a couple of pills, you know, and go back home. You’re fine. Everything’s fine. Yeah. And I was like, no, it’s not fine. I don’t feel good. And no one at that time told me, like, hey, hey, maybe you need to lose 80 pounds. You know, maybe carrying that extra weight around is not going to do anything. Yeah. It’s so sad that everything is treated as a separate thing when really, like, the body works as a whole system.

And often, you know, what’s causing all these things, I mean, it could be weight. It could be many different things. But you’d think that that would be the first go-to is get yourself a bit healthier.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And the bottle of wine a day was not helping. Oh, of course not. But they probably didn’t suggest not having that, right? No, nobody asked either. Yeah. That’s the shame in the system. It’s just, it’s so, one of my huge frustrations is hearing stuff like that because we know now that these things are all contributing to all those problems, basically. And obviously, removing them is going to help at least start the healing process, isn’t it?

Exactly. Exactly. And so finally, I found an integrative, holistic doctor who sat me down and the first consultation I had was two hours long. And she asked me questions that I had never been asked before. Things like, what was your life like? What was your life like before you were born? And what was your mother’s life while she was pregnant with you? And what was your grandmother’s life like? And then little by little, it became apparent that I was going through a very emotionally difficult time. And I was eating as a way to cope. I was drinking and, you know, it was escalating from wine to breakfast. And I was drinking vodka because the wine was not doing enough after a while.

And so she really kind of shook me up and said, you know, if you continue on this path, you’re going to have really big problems. You need to lose weight. But in order to lose weight, you know, we really need to get your nutrition and your movement and exercise, alcohol to get cut out of your life. And so I began on my own. I started. I started doing cycling, spinning. And I started off with, I think, my first class. I cried, literally sobbed and cried my way through it. That’s a hard thing to do.

Oh, yes. Especially at 210 pounds. Yeah.

I was not a joke. And then little by little, you know, it was 15 minutes at first. Then I did 20. Then I got up to, you know, 45 minute class. And then I started doing two 45 minute classes. And I was I didn’t I knew nothing about weight training, strength training, weight lifting. I knew nothing about nutrition. I just made all this stuff up. Yeah, I went on a diet. You can imagine. I think I did 30 different diets, everything. I did all the diets. And I noticed that right before and right after a diet. I would gain weight the most. So I would yo-yo up and down, up and down constantly right before a diet, lose a little weight, gain it all back and repeat the process over and over again for years.

And it finally dawned on me that maybe I need a trainer. Maybe I need a coach. Maybe I need help. Yeah.

And around 2018, at the end of 2018, I found a coach that gave me a strength training, personal training program and macro-based nutrition. And that’s when my life changed completely. Yeah, that’s amazing, isn’t it? It sounds so simple.

But it takes a while for many people to get to that point, I suppose. But I having. A structured program and then the right kind of macros to follow is simple, but so effective.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it was so novel for me to cut down cardio, to lift heavy and to look at my nutrition on such a precise, in such a precise way with the macros that my mind was having little, my mind was blowing up. It was not anything I had ever done before. So I had a lot of resistance to that. I was about to ask you, did you find it overwhelming? Because that can be like so confusing for people.

Absolutely. Very overwhelming. And there is an absolute learning curve to learning nutrition and learning macros and also to strength training. And funny story, when I first got my program, it had abbreviations. So it would say D-B-R-D-L. Dumbbell Romanian deadlift, but you’re like, what? I had no clue what that was.

Oh, I remember those days too.

And then when people would say macros, because I come from a computer background, that’s what my degree is in. Macro to me is an Excel macro. Oh, yes.

See, my brain, I remember learning that back in the day, but my brain now obviously is naturally programmed to food macros. But you’re so right. It’s just would have been so foreign.

Yes, very. And, you know, there was a lot of learning that took place in the first, I would say, three years of learning macro, what worked for me, learning strength training and actually discovering that I absolutely love lifting weights. And apparently I found out that I had no idea. But also have quite a bit of physical strength to heavy things that I would would have never known up until I was, you know, 42. I would have not known that I could lift such heavy weights. Yeah, it’s I think a lot of women underestimate how much they can actually lift safely as well. And it’s the most well, my experience, you might feel the same. It’s the most empowering. To lift something heavy and then progress and get even stronger. It’s really satisfying.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it gives you this freedom and this tendance to feel that power in your own body, despite what the world is telling us. We’re supposed to be at 40 at this point. I’m almost eight. Yeah, you’re right. And be female as well, both of it, like older and, you know, female. But it’s amazing what the body can actually do. And I feel you might have felt the same on your journey once you got into it. Once you start focusing on the actual process and enjoying the training, then the results come anyway. So it’s not like. Training or trying to burn calories to get skinny or whatever people think to do. It’s more enjoy the actual process. And once you love the training part, it just all falls into place.

Exactly, exactly. And what I discovered, it was very interesting, the harder I train, the more committed I was to my nutrition. Yeah. And I felt like, you know, I’ve put such effort. And so much attention to my training that going out and eating garbage was not even something that I wanted to do after a while. My taste buds changed. What my body was craving changed. I was not looking for Nutella anymore. I was not looking for ways to cope with my unhappiness, essentially, right? Being in a body I wasn’t comfortable in. And everything just kind of trickled down and changed over time where I wanted to be the best version of who I was. I was embracing getting a year older rather than fearing it. Yes. I was looking forward to like, what else can I do? You know, what, how else can I shake and rock the boat of menopause? Yes. Exactly. And I feel like that’s how we win through menopause. Just embracing it, but also thinking, how can I, how can I do things differently? How can I almost challenge it?

Yes. Go up against it, you know. And obviously there’s days when we may not feel the greatest either. But just having that. That consistency and love for what you do makes it all easier. Because over time, it’s just your life, isn’t it?

Exactly. Exactly. And it’s so interesting because in this process of figuring out my own physical abilities, my own body, my mindset, working on my habits and my nutrition. I realized that the profession I had before, I had a computer science degree. I was, I owned a marketing firm for 20 years and did really well, but it wasn’t fulfilling. And all of a sudden I found this industry in this space where the focus was health. Yes. Yes. Yes. The focus was wellness, mindset, improving ourselves, having a growth mindset and how infectious it is to people around you and how impactful it could be and how it can literally change your life because it changed my life. I started getting deeper and deeper into becoming certified as a trainer, as a nutritionist.

I jumped into getting a few certifications on emotional eating, hormones, and so on. And women started approaching me based on my own transformation to ask me for help. And I said, I think the first probably about 10 clients I did for free. Yep. Because it was, it was cathartic. It was cathartic for me. It was like, I was going through the entire experience again with them. Yep. And it was so rewarding. I said, I said to myself, I have to, I have to do this. I, I, I, I don’t have a choice. I, I feel called to do this. Yes. Or other ways.

And that’s. I was about to use the same term. It was like your calling, wasn’t it? It feels like it. Yes. Yes. And it’s so rewarding to be able to help others. And especially with what you’ve gone through on your own journey, you can completely understand what they’re going through as well, particularly if you’re training women around your age. And when you, so you said you were in another career and did you start studying while you were still working in that career or did you kind of. What, what did. Yes. I didn’t see. Yes. Yes. Cause I, I just became fascinated with the subject and I became my own Guinea pig, right? I became my, my initial experiment because I would get my programming and I would get my macros from my coach and I wanted, like I became insatiable.

I wanted to know more and more and more about it. And I started reading all kinds of books on macro nutrition, on flexible dieting. Yeah. On how the body works, how muscle changes, the chemistry and composition of your entire body, your hormones, everything. And it just became more and more and more fascinating to me to really figure out this machine that we have. Yes. Right. They’re all systems that run in an integrative way, but it’s a natural intelligence machine that we are operating.

Oh, you don’t want to have the manual. Unfortunately, we’re not born with it. No, but it’s true. It’s such a fine tuned piece of machinery that we can either, you know, do so well for and thrive or the complete opposite. If we don’t have that education around how to be healthy and it’s not, unfortunately, it’s not the mainstream to know that. I think it’s becoming more popular. We’re starting to learn more about it, but it’s still not, it’s not the main thing that we just know. It’s not in the mainstream. And I think learning that for yourself while you were on your journey was awesome because you had that for yourself, but then you’ve got the certifications to then go on to help so many other ladies as well.

Absolutely. And it’s, I mean, I’ve had many experiences. Jobs in my life, right? So all throughout high school, I had many jobs in college. I had many jobs when I graduated, I had quite a few jobs. I worked at all kinds of firms and then I started my own businesses on the sixth one right now, and none of them gave me the satisfaction and fulfillment and purpose that this gives me. It’s the most, the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, and I’m almost 50. I know. It’s a beautiful feeling though, but it doesn’t matter that you’re almost 50 because unfortunately some people don’t even get to that ever in their life. So I guess you’d be grateful that you actually got to this point because a lot of people just do jobs forever that they’re not so happy with at all. But I think having all those different jobs. You know, they are your stepping stones and all that knowledge you can bring to this industry and this career now, and it just feels like every, like all the pieces to the puzzle sounds like they’ve all come together for you.

Exactly. That’s exactly what it feels like. And a lot of times, you know, people ask, you know, people ask the question, like, how do you find your purpose? Mm-hmm. You know, how do you know what your purpose is? And I don’t really have an answer for that because I tell people all the time, I didn’t, I didn’t find it. It found me. It found you. Yeah. Same thing sort of happened to me too. Isn’t it so interesting? And I suppose it’s just things that you become passionate about for yourself, then that sort of ignites it. Yeah. And it, if you put energy there, it just flows towards something. And I guess, yeah, you don’t get to find it, but it does find you once you find something you love.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, and none of it ever feels like work and, and I could do that all day long and feel

energized and feel happy and just keep going without it ever feeling like, um, you know, like some of the jobs I’ve had in the past felt like. Yeah. Well, this sort of tends to, I guess, helping people, especially when they’ve been stuck, it feeds your soul and it just makes you feel so, uh, content and like you are fulfilling a purpose, a greater purpose to help others as well.

Exactly. Mm-hmm. And how did you go with, um, just taking things back a tiny bit? So you lost that weight.

Maintaining, um, and you know, how long have you been able to keep it off? Is it now just your lifestyle? Just tell us a bit more about that.

Absolutely. So after I lost the initial 80 pounds, I stayed in maintenance for a few years and I have to tell you, maintenance was probably more difficult for me than the weight loss phase, because. During the weight, during the weight loss phase, you have that daily dopamine hit, or, you know, every couple of days, dopamine hit, you get on the scale, the weight’s going down. Woo hoo. You have a party. Yay. Yeah. Good. Right. With maintenance, you don’t have that and L sometimes goes up, sometimes it goes down, but you’re generally at about the same weight. And so the motivation and that excitement. Is not there. So what ends up happening during maintenance from what ended up happening for me is that I, I had to rely a lot more on my habits and not let the strings get a little too loose.

And I stayed in that phase for about, I would say about a year to two years, a year and a half maybe. And then I went on a build. Mm-hmm . And try to build more muscle to add more muscle to my frame. And then I went through a couple of cycling phases. So I would do a, a build and do a little bit, you know, small mini cut, and then I would do another build and then another small mini cut. And so now the goal is for 2025 first quarter to do a competition in a bodybuilding competition. How exciting. Oh, that’s amazing. I didn’t know. I made a few, but years ago in my probably mid thirties, I would have been, but I think that that’s such a good point to point out. It is so exciting when you keep losing weight, but then what?

And this is where I think a lot of people end up putting the weight back on because they don’t know what to do from there.

And it’s still a process. It’s just a different process, maintenance. And then doing little, little, um. Yeah. Growth cycles and then cutting. And I guess that’s what it ends up being. Like it’s a journey that just continues on until I suppose you either aim for a competition or, and then there’ll be another phase after that, won’t there?

Getting back to, obviously, I assume you’re going to have to get fairly lean for that competition. Yes. Yes. So, so, uh, the plan is to get, I mean, first of all, you’re going to have to get fairly lean for the first competition.

Usually there’s a learning curve there as well for the body, especially, right? So most likely it will not get as lean as it possibly could get. So, uh, the process that, um, we’re going to follow is to get as lean as possible, but without going overboard, do the competition and then go into a reverse diet for a while, right. To get the calories back up to maintenance, hopefully the maintenance level that I’ll be at this time will be a lot higher than the last time I cut, because at this point I’ve built a lot more muscle. My metabolism is not where it was when I first started. So to give you a benchmark, when I first started losing weight at when I was 210 pounds and I got to my coach. I was eating probably about 900 to a thousand calories a day. Oh, wow. So low. Yes. And I couldn’t lose weight. And so the process was increased calories, et cetera, et cetera, big, knowing that that is my baseline. Um, the last time that, um, I did a cut and then went back up to maintenance, I was eating at 2,200 calories a day. Awesome.

Yes. Yeah. What an amazing change the metabolism can have. And this is another point, um, people say that metabolism is broken and it can definitely not be working very efficiently, but as you can see here, it can totally be reversed when, uh, done correctly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, the reverse diet has a big part of that, uh, plays a large role in, you know, slowly adding more calories back in, because one of the mistakes that I used to make before knowing anything about anything was that I would go on a diet, right? So they would be very restrictive. Maybe I was eating 700 calories, 900 calories a day doing tremendous amount of cardio. And then as soon as I would hit my imaginary scale weight that I was aiming for, I would instantly go back to just eating whatever I was eating before. So I would go from 900 calories a day to whatever it was, 2000 calories a day. Who knows? Yeah. And the weight would just explode up, right? Yeah.

The poor body just doesn’t know what’s happening when that’s happening and with such restrictive calories and then going to, you know, reasonable calories again, it’s just going to take that all in. And it’s, I feel this is a vicious cycle. It’s a vicious cycle that a lot of females get stuck in for so long until they find someone, I guess, like you who can actually guide them. And the fact that you’ve been through it, you’re perfect evidence for them of how it works.

Absolutely. I feel like that is such a gift. Like now I look at being obese, uh, when I look back at it, I’m so grateful for it because there’s really nothing. Like firsthand experience of knowing what your body feels like at that weight and knowing what your emotional and you know, your mind, where your emotions are at, where your mindset is at the negative self-talk that goes along with it, uh, looking for excuses and obstacles and everything I was doing. Oh, I don’t know what DBRDL stands for. So I’m not doing it. Right. Um, finding all of these reasons why I couldn’t do things. Or why things were not going to work or, you know, I’ve done this so many times, why is it going to work this time? And all that stuff that we do is very similar, um, from person to person and they’re the same kind of thoughts and patterns and I experienced them firsthand. So I, I feel like that was one of the biggest gifts I could have ever had. Yeah. Well, as much as it wouldn’t have been easy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s the thing that I learned from you, give you tips and tricks that value, that Because five of the things you you learned, yeah. It’s a homework, you’ve done. Absolutely. that you need to go out you can’t actually avoid going out to dinner and people say there was nothing good on the menu so you know it’s another excuse that I guess people tell themselves when often you know you tweak a few things and it’s just a very similar meal to what you could have had at home that was obviously just an example that popped into my mind but there’s so many things that we can tell ourselves to talk ourselves out of it so that comes down to mindset which you mentioned to me before when we first started chatting how do you go about overcoming these things so I read somewhere this really interesting fact

we have on average 60,000 thoughts per day well 80% of them are negative oh that’s so sad generally right like just as an average person just going about their business 80% of our thoughts are negative per day out of those 60,000 90 to 95% of those negative thoughts repeat on a daily basis yeah wow and so what ends up happening is if we’re living unintentionally or unconsciously and we are just operating on autopilot

we are not setting intention in our lives and in our day with specific thoughts and and things that we want to feel rather than the automatic response to the negative thoughts that are constantly running through our heads because I guess we were designed that way right for protection and for survival purposes makes sense but

possibly we could have had trauma in our past as well and so the brain learns how to defend and protect itself from early experiences because it wants to keep us safe but if we don’t take control of those thoughts and we don’t identify where they’re coming from and what was the initial experience that began triggering those repetitive thoughts of why we’re not worthy why we can’t do certain things we don’t deserve certain things why we’re incapable or we don’t we’re not lovable or you know whatever it may be there are many different patterns if we don’t take control of that and we don’t intentionally look for ways to to make adjustments to reprogram our machine they rule our lives right so our lives start happening in an in an uncontrollable way where we’re the victim we’re not necessarily the driver of our lives so that was what we were trying to do and that’s what we’re trying to do and that’s one of the things i had to learn how to do is to intentionally ask questions all the time when these thoughts would pop up and ask myself why and pretend that i was talking to a little girl

let’s say you know i had a slip up or i didn’t do something i was supposed to do or i did something i wasn’t supposed to do or i veered off or whatever it was i would sit myself down and talk to myself like a seven-year-old version of me and have a conversation and say you know hey so what do we need right now like what you know what do we think how can we change this work with me let’s keep moving in a direction where we’re both going to be happy and intentionally let adult me take the driver’s seat rather than child me because most of us are going to be happy and we’re going to be happy and we’re going to be happy

more emotional right yes i think um what you said they’re asking why is so important self-awareness because often people don’t either ask themselves these questions because they’re quite confronting sometimes or pretty much all the time or they just haven’t even potentially thought to ask themselves why they do certain things which are holding them back from who they want to be whether it’s to lose weight or change their mind or whatever it is that they’re asking themselves a job or be more assertive or whatever it is um self-awareness is i guess key to changing those mindset patterns would you agree with that

no absolutely i mean the the self-sabotaging behavior that comes out in this process of transforming really your life um because it’s such a scary thing to do and you know it’s not just a transformation physically but it’s a transformation as far as mindset emotionally and in some women’s cases career-wise everything gets flipped upside down um it’s a very scary time and that’s usually when all the self-sabotaging comes out because we’re we’re fearful that wherever we’re headed to may not be the same way the right direction and so we tend to sabotage a lot of the progress that takes place because we would rather stay a more comfortable um familiar place yes it’s it’s somewhere that we know whereas what’s coming is the unknown it’s the fear of the unknown even though we think we may want something so bad like people wanting to lose weight so badly or change something in their lives

but when you don’t know what that looks like it’s scary and overwhelming um just like reading a program with abbreviations that you don’t understand it’s just a lot to process so i guess it’s huge both what’s required to physically do to lose weight um mentally as well and it can really i feel what i’ve witnessed is people change so much like they evolve they like said want to change careers or many other changes occur with that physical transformation because it’s never just a physical transformation

exactly and once you start there’s no going back

and that’s scary because it opens a lot of cans of worms i think for many of us and then you know to face those things is hard but then what you get on the other side is beautiful

absolutely and you know one of the biggest things that i am also seeing um and not not something that i just experienced myself but i’m also seeing it with clients is there are a lot of things that have to be let go of during the transformation or during this process where you know potentially it is obligations or um you know previous engagements or sometimes even friends that are no longer in alignment so there’s you know quite a bit of fear that comes along with changing because then everything around you changes as well it really does you’re very right in saying that and it’s scary to let things go especially if you’re letting people go sometimes like that can be really scary and it’s challenging too to navigate those things

and potentially that fear of missing out of what you’re especially if you’ve got maybe friends or family that do certain things that you’ll no longer really be able to take part in as much and being that different person to everyone else can be a bit scary

yeah there’s so much involved sorry go ahead

yeah i mean alcohol is one of them right and so i think that’s a big part of it so when you stop drinking alcohol people ask you what’s wrong with you yes

i know look i’ve never been um much of a drinker like ever and i don’t know why i just don’t like it i just don’t enjoy it and when i was younger and going out people would think i was odd like and still sometimes it happens oh you don’t you’re not drinking and now i as at my age i don’t care what people think but it was really um

i don’t know i felt silly for being so different to everyone else um initially and then i just sort of changed my circle of people so majority of people just understood and it was just normal that i wouldn’t have anything so that that’s a huge one to deal with and i think um i’m not sure what it’s like in the u.s i’m sure it’s not that different but in australia the drinking culture is huge it’s just normal it’s absolutely not drinking

yes yes everything revolves around drinking you know all outings are about drinking and yeah and it’s just crazy to think um this is on a bit of another tangent but it’s a drug that is just accepted and tolerated when so many others aren’t i’m not saying they should be but alcohol is just as bad you know yeah it’s actually uh tossed it’s a toxic not i mean it there’s it’s a literal poison to our body where when it enters your system all other functions have to stop in order to take care of that alcohol that we ingest and a lot of times i’ll get questions from women that that say you know i have followed all my macros i have

done everything and you know i’m in a caloric deficit i’m doing all the exercises but i’m not losing weight and as soon as i start to kind of pick around the alcohol topic you know there’s an extra 2 000 calories every other day and it’s easy to rack up 2 000 calories in alcohol um because it’s just a couple of drinks it’s not like it’s it’s not like it’s not like it’s not like it’s not like it’s not like it’s not like it’s not easy like eating a lot of big huge meal worth of 2 000 calories if it was one meal that would be hard but drinking it is not that hard is it and then there’s also not just the calories that come with it it’s the fact that your whole system has to kind of shut down to deal with that so it’s not going to prioritize fat loss even if it’s a calorie deficit so it’s unfortunately such a um

it’s it’s so readily available to everyone so i think it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s available it’s so normal to drink and we’re not i’m not saying it’s a bad thing to drink but if you are looking to lose weight it’s something that really needs to be at least considered

absolutely and you know if if if you are having um you’re going through menopause and you’re not feeling well to begin with the alcohol just exaggerates it to a whole new level which is another thing i first hand experienced it everything just felt worse the more i drank the more intense it all got yeah yeah i can imagine that and would you think that because you’re it’s good with your example i mean you changed things in your early 40s and you’ve lost that weight now do you feel that your body’s coping much better with the hormonal depression or is it just that you’re not feeling well to begin with changes that are you know taking place at this time of your life

so i have a kind of a unique story um i went through menopause or perimenopause or the process completely unaware that that’s what was happening to me wow and it was during the my initial fat loss state mm-hmm that i was like oh my god i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i would get these hot flashes and funny things were happening i’d never had before and i had no idea there was menopause and i used to think oh i’m just burning up because i’m burning fat oh wow i had no clue i was too young i thought i was too young so um i actually have not seen my period for the last five years wow it goes it’s gone well it’s not a bad thing to to ghost you right it’s like if anything i i’m happy

but but you’re feeling great regardless yes oh yeah i i’ve never felt better yeah i’m i love not having my period yeah awesome i mean because you know a lot of people don’t like that or the they just feel horrible in that phase where even when their periods have stopped they’re still getting so many symptoms that they would get when you know they would normally get their period or um you know they’re still getting so emotional or uh so i would assume that getting your body in a healthier state is going to prevent all those things continuing even after you’ve lost your period yes i mean i you know everyone is bio-individual so everyone has a different

experience i can’t really necessarily generalize it and you know there’s a lot of women that are going through a really prolonged period of perimenopause mine was just fast and furious it was just a weird period where i it all hit me all at the same time all of it it was all and i had no idea because i was like i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i wasn’t even thinking that i at 40 i was gonna be in menopause yeah and then i realized all of a sudden at 42 it just completely disappeared it’s gone like it just it’s gone and i’ve haven’t really felt anything right you know even from before right so right before you get your period there’s all of this auto fluctuations and emotions and all of that and i was like i’m gonna

die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i’m gonna die i get none of that yeah that’s amazing so good and i mean it sounds like it was intense but at least it was fast-tracked because it can go for 10 years you know i feel like i’m in the phase like i’m 45 still get my period every month but i feel there’s changes happening so i think that nothing crazy but i feel like it might be a more prolonged experience for me unfortunately but hopefully when it’s done at least i will feel like i’m going to be able to do it again and i’m going to be able to do it again and i’m going

to feel like you like good about everything yes i mean and while it was while it’s happening it’s very scary and you’re like oh you know what what is going on yeah it’s just funny it’s weird it’s different it’s like oh you know you i attributed it to all kinds of other things i had i was clueless really yeah i’ve been the same i feel like you you forget your age at some stages like you you don’t even think that it could be that it’s only probably been in the past year or i’ve been like oh i could be feeling that way because you know hormones are probably changing at this point but often we forget um and then again we don’t want to blame everything on that because if we’re not in a healthy state it could be multiple things causing us to feel depressed or moody or you know bloated and all these things that come about but at least if we address the

health thing and we do lose that weight and eat better and get some movement in our lives we’ve already you know made a huge change to help our body deal with those hormonal changes that are inevitable at some point absolutely i mean my personal opinion from my perspective is that the less body fat i have i felt overall emotionally um with the hormone changes with all of it and the more muscle i built the more stable i felt not just physically but internally my internal state was a lot more stable and i could um manage and regulate a lot better um my emotional state and my mental state as well i can relate to that too the times that i’ve been leaner um i’ve been leaner and i’ve been leaner and i’ve been leaner and i’ve been uh or leanest which i know for some females isn’t healthy but i think my as we’ve said each body’s unique my body likes to be lean um i get least symptoms like barely any period symptoms even though i still get it um in those leaner times so obviously you know the body prefers not to be burdened with something else that’s not um what it needs at the time that extra weight it’s just extra work for that body

especially if you’re quite a small frame naturally which i am short and small so for me for example like any even five kilos extra on such a small frame my body just feels so sluggish and that’s where i would feel those extra symptoms kick in each month whereas when i’m lean and active i barely notice anything and that’s i guess motivation to stay in good shape isn’t it

yes exactly and and keep building that muscle it’s yeah holy crap it really is are you finding that with yourself and your clients that this is you know as we know it is but is it a huge factor in them feeling better build boosting their metabolism especially as they’re aging

absolutely and it’s incredible because it really blows my mind i’ve had some clients within five months uh they would um i don’t know if you guys have a dexa scan we do yeah yeah so some clients most actually most of my clients they’ll do a dexa scan baseline before they start working with me and then four or five months into it they’ll do another dexa scan baseline and almost most are gaining four to five pounds of lean muscle weight and that’s a huge factor in that in that short period of time because from having the right nutrition the right amount of protein the right amount of carbs and then strength training their body is finally getting all the

nutrition and the fuel and the right minerals and vitamins and getting exercised it’s just blooming yeah and thriving muscle i’m like wow that’s a lot that that’s that’s really mind-blowing especially when they say we can’t grow muscle as we get older or it’s really hard and of course it might not be as easy as when we were 20 but it’s still totally achievable with the right formula

absolutely and and it’s you know undeniable it really is because you cannot you’re looking at two dexa scans four months apart and there it is in black and white clearly stating that you have increased muscle mass and you have decreased body fat and you know the the women they feel it they they can feel they can see it they they um have better sleep they have better movement patterns they’re hungrier than when they first started so that’s another really big one most women that start with me they are they have no appetite at all yeah i know and that’s not a good thing at all because if you’re not hungry it means your body’s

really not burning through the fuel you’re giving it yeah and i think the dexa scan is a great way to show them as well even though they feel good it’s proof of all their hard work and that it’s absolutely working for them i think that’s that’s key here to having some way to measure progress other than the scales absolutely yeah so progress photos are great and i think that’s a great way to measure progress other than the scales that we look at the composition changes that are happening in the body and then another way is the measurements right so measuring your bust your waist your hips and your thighs and from men usually the bicep as well um because a lot of times you won’t see any significant a couple of months but you will see mind-blowing

inches changing um in the measurements and the progress photos look very different the clothes fit really differently um you just look completely differently yeah yeah it’s a body composition change which is very different to just weight loss isn’t it and that’s why it’s important to have so many different ways to measure that progress rather than just the scales which can be really disheartening if that’s not shifting much while gaining muscle it’s not going to shift a whole lot and um that’s that’s a really good point for our students and i guess other trainers to hear different ways to measure progress and i was gonna also just quickly touch on how have you found the transition from your previous career to uh becoming a trainer apart from it being fulfilling has it been a huge learning curve like obviously you you had lots of skills from your previous jobs but what has been good what’s been challenging any insight there

it has been absolutely amazing i cannot say enough good things about the process because

when you are aligned with what you choose as your profession and when you you’re called to do it everything kind of flows seamlessly things just happen without you trying without it feeling like a struggle and when you put yourself out there that that this is what you love doing and you have um evidence to show that a you’ve gotten your certifications you have passed your courses you’ve studied you know your information you have practical knowledge you are actually going to the gym and you know how to do uh the different exercises with proper form you know how to give cues to people to explain things uh metaphorically in a way that makes sense to different people with different communication styles um you know that’s really a

where the mastery um i feel like i spent a lot of time in that zone trying to find ways to explain what it feels like in my body but also how they could envision it how it would feel in their body um learning different movement patterns of different people right so that that’s a bit challenging because different bodies move in different ways yeah and learning how to how to adjust with different variations for different body types is you know you can never stop learning that i feel like right no it’s we can get become masters at our own but each person does move very differently and learning how to cue them and give them variations that they can work around injuries or just you know uh limitations in certain things that they because you know we all have different length limbs

so this is something you constantly learn because you get different clients i suppose that are going to need different things exactly and and that aspect of it i feel like is the the most challenging one is that when you have a client you have to cater uh things specifically to them you can’t just do a blanket all the size uh you know once you have a client you have to cater uh to them size fits all type of um approach because everyone is so different so being in the gym getting your hands practically on clients is a huge stepping stone to honing your skills in the first year um and really finding your unique approach and your personality in the space of how you your methodology um

how you approach things um which takes time of course it does and i feel like it’s you’re constantly evolving in that respect in your own um career path because what you thought you might do at the beginning might be very different a few years down the track and that’s just it comes down to experience and time doesn’t it absolutely absolutely and really you know like one of the things that i found to be one of the best things about this is i really enjoy people in just general and this puts the person at the forefront of what it is that you you’re doing right you’re looking fully at your client as a human being

with many aspects of their lives and you get to appreciate who you are and who you are and who you are and who you are and who you are and who you are and who they are what they’re about and how you can help them with your unique gifts have a healthier better life and that has been one of the best parts of this yeah and that really hits home as in treating each person as an individual case because that’s what it is there’s no you know there’s lots of similarities between clients especially if you you have a niche that’s you know female over 35s or over 40s yes there’s similarities but then no one you know no two people are the same especially how their brain works so getting to really know them is the best you can do to help them get a result because then you’ll cater it to them as well um would you agree with that absolutely i mean a lot of times

your coach is one of the most um emotionally intimate relationships you’ll have with somebody else because you’ll tell your trainer about your life your family your job where does it hurt you know what does this feel like what is this food or oh no i had pizza or i drank not you like it’s a mixture of your coach your therapist your um holistic practitioner it’s it’s everything and it’s such a privilege to be able to have such deep connections and deep relationships with clients which makes it a really fulfilling type of uh profession i think yeah we definitely have to wear many different hats for clients but it is like you said it’s it is an honor to be able to guide those people to a their better self for them to feel better both mentally and physically and there’s nothing more rewarding than that in life i feel anyway absolutely and so before we finish up what is some advice or a tip that you would give a new trainer or someone who’s thinking of even studying to become a trainer is there anything that you feel you wish you were told when you started

um

yeah so so one of my

top tips is to find your own true self in this process and to look for ways to improve your own trauma your own relationship with food your own body image your own perception of how things work because what i have found is that when we do not heal our own relationships with food our body the world etc we tend to bring that into the coach and client relationship and in a sense kind of almost projected yeah so for example if if uh someone has a

fat phobia for example right and they are helping people to lose weight that vibe is going to come through into the relationship in my opinion so one of the the best things that we do as coaches as trainers is to truly work on embodying our best true self and bring that into the coaching relationship um the other tip i would have is to listen to the clients right they they are the masters of their body they know what’s happening in their body in their mind and their feelings better than we would right it makes sense yeah as there’s a lot of tips and cues and clues that a client will tell you that will

guide you to find find a way to help them even if they don’t necessarily know that that’s the clue like in my example when i first started out i had i i had no i i had never touched the dumbbell i didn’t know what a db was right and so if i had said that to my coach you know that would have triggered an instant response like oh okay we need to scale down the program so that she can actually understand what it is that she and of course encouraging the client to communicate with you and to tell you these things a lot of times i’ll tell clients you know i want you to

message me every day i want you to tell me what you’re thinking what you’re feeling and did you get your workout in did you get your water in every single day because i want to know what’s going on with you on every on every level right so we could get better um yeah the other thing is learn right learn every day invest time to learn uh get more certifications get more specializations get um get a coach yourself have a mentor have a group where you can a mentorship group where you can ask questions from people that have more experience and continuously look to improve your own skills whether that’s hands-on in-person training

or if it’s virtual training or if it’s maybe a particular specializations like um recovery exercises and things like that that you can help people um you know fix certain injuries or uh uh recovery exercises and things like that that you can help people um you know fix certain injuries or uh uh work on particular body parts that may have been um injured and then the last thing is invest in the nutritional um knowledge yes right because a lot of time trainers will only do the training aspect but they don’t necessarily have a nutritionist um education or experience and so i have found that pairing the two together is when you get the best result is the nutritional i 100 agree i mean they go hand in hand with each other and i think that’s a really important part of the

and with that yes you can get to a certain point with one and not the other but really if you want the magic to happen it really has to be both so i love all those tips for different reasons the communication between clients and and their trainer is so important because that’s how you do get those cues to how you can help them better and getting further education i mean we’ve got to learn constantly because things change all the time and working on ourselves well it’s a constant work in progress but with you’re right we do project things onto clients if we have not addressed them in ourselves and i feel it’s kind of

a thing that evolves as we get older as well you naturally learn a bit more about yourself and then you know the trainer i was when i started would be very different to how i would approach someone now as well so they were all awesome tips and it’s been such a beautiful conversation i thoroughly enjoyed everything that was spoken about i think it’s been a really great conversation and i think it’s been a really great conversation we’re very much on the same wavelength with many things so i’m very grateful that you’ve been here um i know it’s your night time over there so thank you so much and i hope that our students really get a lot out of this conversation thank you for having me danny it was a pleasure speaking with you i absolutely loved every second of it and i’m looking forward to seeing you succeed and getting more coaches and more trainers out in the world because we need it we do and like we’re so passionate here at women’s fitness education to get females through and teaching them to be certified to actually help females further because we’re very passionate about women’s health

i love that there’s nothing better than that so thank you i’m honored and i’m very grateful to have had this conversation with you today you’re very welcome and hopefully we can um organize another one down the track as well

i love it thank you thanks so much

thank you bye.