I hear it a lot. Shoot, I've said it a lot. I'm doing all the right things, I'm sticking to my diet, I'm exercising more, and I'm not losing any weight. Well, there could be a lot of reasons why you are stuck in this sort of scenario. And that's one of the biggest reasons that I encourage you to always work with a coach or a professional or a doctor. But one of the reasons that we're going to talk about today is that your diet and your exercise aren't working is because you might be doing too much. I know it seems impossible, but it's true. And so I'm going to break it down for you today. If you feel like you're doing all the right things, and it's not working. Let's talk about why. Let's go. 

Before we get going today, I want to direct you to the website Tarafaulmann.com/reboot  because starting July 19th through the 23rd I am running a totally free five day workshop. I'm calling it the reboot camp instead of boot camp. It's a reboot camp because we all need a bit of a reboot, especially I think, in the middle of summer. So for five days, we are going to work together to uncover the why behind your lack of process, we're going to figure out what's keeping you stuck, we're going to figure out what's sabotaging you and we're gonna figure out how to overcome it. I'm going to give you some of my very best education tips, tricks and tools to get you from where you are to where you want to go. In order to get into this five day reboot camp, all you have to do is go to Tara faulmann.com forward slash reboot. And registering is just giving me your name and your email address. So I can make sure all the materials and the workbooks get to you and then I'll tell you what to do from it from there. I'm super excited. It's gonna be tons of fun, send it to your friends, tarafaulmann.com/reboot. I will see you over there. It's gonna be awesome. 

Okay, so I know you've been there, we've all been there, where we're saying to ourselves, I'm doing everything right, but I'm not losing weight. If you've said these words to yourself before you, my friend are my spirit animal. Because I am a with you on this one. I have uttered these words. So many times in my life, I have to laugh about it. Otherwise, I might cry. Every time that I uttered these words, there was a legitimate reason why I wasn't getting the result that I want. I just didn't understand what the reason was at the time. Sometimes, the reasons for me had to do with disease or dysfunction, like my autoimmune disorder or low thyroid or gut issues that I maybe was dealing with. Sometimes, I had to get honest about the idea that I wasn't being as quote unquote, good as I thought that I was. I was doing things like emotional eating or binge eating even, or just mindless eating. And I had to get really honest about myself about what I was actually doing. And then to work through it, and to solve some of those issues. And sometimes it wasn't working, because I was trying too hard. I was doing too much. And that is the piece that we're going to talk about today. 

Specifically, so many of us get caught in this trap where we decide, Okay, I'm done. It's time for me to lose weight. I gotta lose these extra pounds. I don't feel good. I'm tired. Like I can't keep up with my kids. Right? Whatever the reasons are, we decide we need to lose weight. Well, what do we do every single time? We decided that we're going to start a diet and we're going to exercise more because that's what we've been told our Whole Life is what we're supposed to do, right? If I want to lose weight, I got to eat less and exercise more. This is the rule. Unfortunately, that combination can actually over stress your body, because what you're doing is adding more stress to probably an already overstressed body. And doing that is either going to completely stall your progress, or it can actually cause you to gain weight, it's sort of like having your foot on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time, you're just completely working against yourself. When it comes to exercise, there's a sweet spot that you have to hit a we have to find that sweet spot for ourselves. Because we're all a little bit different. Just like when we talk about food, and we're all a little bit different, there's not one thing that works for everyone. The same is true for exercise, we're all a little bit different, the exact same thing is not going to work for all of us. And there's lots of different life circumstances they're happening and each one of our lives that are going to dictate how we're eating and how we're moving. The tricky part is, is that that sweet spot changes from day to day, sometimes for us, right, from month to month from year to year. So we have to be willing to adapt. And we have to be aware of how we need to adapt based on what's going on in our own lives. For example, during the month if you still have a menstrual cycle, during the month, you have varying energy levels, you have very nutrition needs, you have varying desire or ability to move your body in different ways. Some days you can really get after it. And some days your exercise looks a lot more like yoga. I was joking with a friend the other day about starfish pose where you just lay on the ground, your arms, the legs spread, some days, starfish poses all you got. And that's okay. But we have to just like for food, we have to be aware of those exercise signals that our body is giving us too. 

So I want to give you some solutions. For this, I want to teach you how to tune into this and I want to teach you why what you may be doing is totally working against you. There is a myth out there about over exercise. And really honestly, it's pretty much impossible to over exercise unless you're like a crazy ultra marathon runner. It's very unlikely that you are going to be over exercising. So a lot of people think like Oh, I'm so tired, oh, I don't have energy for a workout, I must be overdoing it. Usually not that you're overdoing it, it's usually that you are under recovering. The problem for all of us. And for most athletes as well, even elite athletes, Olympic level athletes, is usually under recovery instead of over exercising or overtraining. Exercise is a positive stressor on your body. That means that it is stressing your body in such a way to create change your body then adapt to those stressors in positive ways, like improve metabolism, increased muscle mass, better circulation, improved glucose sensitivity, and tons more. So these positive stressors that we're putting on our body through exercise are good things. However, if you don't have enough recovery, those good things then become a negative stressor. And the negative stressor is how you're stalling your progress. Unfortunately, and also, ironically, the reasons that you might start exercising are also the same signs that you might be under recovering. So things like difficulty losing weight, increased fatigue, insomnia, trouble concentrating, anxiety and depression, all reasons that you might have said, Okay, I'm gonna start working out more and eat less, except when you are doing those things and putting extra stress on your body and then under recovering, you will then get all of those same symptoms again, it's this little vicious circle that we get into symptoms of overtraining. Again, this is not really where most of us are going to fall. But if you are an elite athlete or ultra marathoner, symptoms of actual overtraining, look a lot more like extreme fatigue, or chronic dehydration or just malaise. Like you can't get yourself to do anything, you start to have a lot of a lot of health symptoms going on with overtraining, that's not for us. What we're really talking about what we're really talking about is this under recovering. 

So when we start a diet, and we start exercising, those are two stressors, and they're not necessarily both positive stressors, but combine the two and it's highly likely that you're going to have a negative stress effect, combining too much movement with too few calories because you're on a diet and remember, every Diet is calorie restriction. That's what they all boil down to. Too much movement, not enough calories in an attempt to lose weight creates your under recovery scenario. So these two things combined are no longer positively stressing and adapting your body, they are now overly stressing and shutting down your body, which is why you are not getting the results that you want. Because here's the thing do your body stress is stress is stress doesn't matter if it's supposed to be positive or negative, doesn't matter if it's good things or bad things doesn't matter what's happy things are sad things. Stress, Stress is stress. So if you are not eating enough food for your body, that is a major stressor. If you then add on tons of extra extra exercise that you hadn't been doing that is another major stressor. Now we'll add on to that all of your other life stressors, you have stress with parenting, relationships, job, are you sleeping enough, right, all of these things add together to create a huge and chronic stress response in your body. And that stress response is hormone fluctuation. 

Normally, when we talk about stress, we're talking about cortisol, right? So all of these stressors are creating increased cortisol production in your body, making chronically high levels of cortisol. This is how good stress turns into bad stress, chronically elevated levels of cortisol lead to weight gain, sleep disturbances, increased inflammation, excess belly fat, to name a few of many things that's happening. So when you are trying to lose weight by cutting calories and exercising more, what you're, what you're actually doing, then is completely stalling your progress. So have I made the point? Are we understanding that when we don't give ourselves enough calories, and we are bumping up the exercise level from zero to 60, our body freaks out, it's too much stress, it's too much and we are not going to see progress long term. So what should we be focusing on? instead? In order to properly recover, you have to start paying attention. We've talked on this podcast about paying attention to food in terms of what do I actually need to eat? How much do I actually need to eat? What is my body telling me? Well, your exercise is the same, you need to have those "rest days". Now rest days don't necessarily mean doing nothing. I'll give you examples of what that could look like. But exercise and recovery go together. exercise and recovery are how you are taking care of your body. Part of that care should involve things like stretching, and mobility work and self care practices like massage, or foam rolling, or cupping, or acupuncture, like whatever it is for you. But those restorative body practices need to become part of the routine. If exercise is part of the routine, those two things have to come together, especially when you get up into your 30s and beyond, you need to start shifting that focus a little bit to adding more restorative exercises and practices. 

You can't get away with in your 40s what you did to your body in your 20s.  Let me give you an example from my personal experience and life. Through my younger years, I always was an athlete, I was a high school athlete, college athlete, and I pushed myself hard, I pushed myself hard with all of the workouts and the sports and everything that I was doing. And that is just my personality type, right? I'm zero or 60. There's not a lot of middle ground for me and a lot of things. So the things that I was doing in my 20s, my body could handle in my 20s, that if I tried to do those things now in my 40s, it's not going to work, I'm going to shut down real fast. So for those of you who are in the 30s and older, I just want you to take a step back for a sec and just be okay with the idea that your body changes and that you can change along with it. Okay, if I tried to go out and do the workout schedule and regiment and things that I did back then my body would quickly say no, and the way that it would say no, it would either shut down and I would get sick, or I would get injured. Those are the two ways that it's going to show me very quickly. This isn't gonna work for you, Tara. So listen to what your body is telling you. If if it's telling you I'm tired, this is too much I can't do this. Listen to it. Don't keep pushing through because you're trying to quote unquote lose weight, right? We can't keep playing this game with ourselves can't keep punishing ourselves. We have to love that body. Listen to it, respect it. So adding those restorative exercises, exercise plus recovery need to come together in your Movement regimen. 

The other thing I really want you to think about is sleep. Now sleep is when all the restorative magic happens, all the cleanup, all the repairing, all the balancing of hormones, all the repairing of tissues, like in your brain, your muscles, your immune system, all the good stuff, all the healing happens while you're sleeping. Now you should be and I don't like to use "should", but I'm going to use should when it comes to sleep, you should be getting seven to nine hours of sleep at night, less than seven hours is going to be not enough, more than nine hours is going to be too much. There's actually lots of studies that show negative consequences when you get more than nine hours. So seven to nine for adults is that sweet spot, that's what you're shooting for. You must be getting that amount of sleep. If you are finding that you need to drink a lot of coffee in order to exercise or you need to have a pre workout in order to have enough energy to exercise, I want you to look at your sleep. Instead of finding the next best pre workout you could try, I want you to focus on getting more sleep at night. Sleep is the single most important thing you can do to restore your body. If you want health, and long lasting weight loss. And to maintain a healthy weight for your body, you must be getting enough sleep on a regular basis period, there is no way around it. 

The other thing I really want you to focus on is the food. Now remember, our scenario here is that we decided to start a diet, which means we're restricting calories, and we're exercising more. The problem is now you are likely not eating enough food in order to recover from the exercise that you just bumped up to doing more of you need the nutrients in food in order to repair your body especially protein right you need to have the protein so that you can repair those muscles. When you go and do resistance exercising, you are stressing your muscles stressing your muscles means you cause teeny tiny little injuries in them. Well, how are those injuries repaired, they are repaired with protein at night while you sleep. Like that's mostly when this is happening. So you need to give your body the chance to do that. And you need to give it the building blocks and the nutrients that is required in order for it to repair and rebuild itself. carbs are the other thing that you might be missing. If you're cutting calories. The first thing most people cut is carbohydrate rich foods. Well unfortunately, those carb rich foods like veggies are the place where you're getting the most nutrients that you need. So you might consider adding more veggies, you also are going to want to replace those those glucose stores in your bodies. So eating enough food is very important to your actual results. This is why I'm constantly preaching on this podcast, that diets don't work because diets restrict your calories. If you restrict your calories, you restrict your nutrients and you need those nutrients to survive to be healthy and to be able to do the exercises that you are trying to do. So what I want you to focus on instead of the diet is focus on the nutrition, focus on eating nutrient rich food. We're not eating so much processed food, even processed health food, right like the bar or the shake, or like this pre made shake I got at Costco, don't get me started. There are some gross stuff out there. So instead of trying to eat a bunch of diet food, let's just try to eat food food, right? We're just going to eat nutrient rich whole food as much as possible. 

Now, I am not someone who gives you a lot of rules. I like to give you guidelines, I preferred guidelines, rules, I don't like because we break them and then we feel bad guidelines. Right? If I give you good food guidelines, then sometimes we're gonna stick to it. And sometimes we're not and both are going to be okay. So really focus on the nutrients that you're getting. Think about it that way. I'm not focused on calories. I'm not focused on macros, I'm not focused on points or anything like that. I'm focused on getting nutrients into my body. And how am I going to do that? I'm going to do that by eating whole foods and eating a variety of Whole Foods, especially those veggies. And sometimes this requires kind of a mindset shift for us. When you go to eat, instead of thinking, is this going to make me fat? Right? Because then we've created good food bad food. instead think if I eat this and then left for a workout, would this fuel my workout? Or would this give me energy? Or would this slow me down or even make me sick? For example, if I want to go eat a turkey sandwich, I could ask myself okay, if I eat this turkey sandwich, and then I tried to go take a walk or a jog or a workout or anything, would I feel good doing that with this turkey sandwich in me or I would I feel bad, you probably feel fine, right? conversely, ask yourself, okay, if I eat all this chocolate cake and then I go work out am I gonna feel good when I try to go work out? Probably not chocolate cakes, probably not gonna sit very well. So when it comes to being able to exercise, what you're thinking about in terms of food is, am I getting enough food. If I feel hungry all the time, I'm likely not eating enough food. If I'm not eating a food, I can't go work out. 

So just like we talked about in the last episode, think about performance. If I want to perform in this workout, I'm going to have to eat in this way. If I want to be someone who has a body who can perform a five mile jog, then I'm going to have to fuel my body in this way. Right? So instead of diet and exercise, we're shifting our mindset to thinking about performance, and fuel. How do I want my body to perform? And how do I need to fuel it in order to make that happen? Okay, if I fuel my body with chocolate cake, it's going to perform poorly, no matter what I try to do. If I fuel my body with turkey sandwiches, it's going to perform better, right. So instead of diet and exercise, think about using the words fuel and performance. And since I know we started this whole conversation, because you wanted to, quote unquote, lose weight. Remember what we talked about, if I focus on performance, or the function that I want to perform, form will follow. So if my goal is to jog five miles, I am focusing on that performance goal. I'm also thinking about food as fuel in order to fuel that performance goal. And in the process of reaching that performance goal, the way my body looks will change, my body will change to look like a body that can perform a five mile jog. Do you see how this works? So we're always focusing on the wrong thing. We're focusing on the weight all the time, the weight, the weight, the weight, the weight doesn't mean shi*t. Weight means nothing to you. What the focus really should be is how we perform, how do we get there, if I want to be someone who can go to that kickboxing class and kick ass, right and feel good when I'm done and like really get after it when I'm in there. If that's a goal, that's a performance goal. Okay, well, I need to then create fuel and eat fuel that's going to fuel that performance. And in the process of performing that kickboxing My body is inevitably going to change. That makes sense. If we change the focus, everything else starts to fall in line. And that's how I want you to shift your mind. No more diet and exercise, focus on performance and fuel. Cool. 

Okay, the last thing I really want you to think about in terms of, am I doing too much, am I stalling out my progress, am I causing negative stress effects in my body, instead of positive stress effects, I need you to think about yourself as a whole. Okay? This is not just you, who's dieting and exercising, who's less calories in more calories out, right, because that's what we're always told that that's not happening in a vacuum that's trying to happen in your life. So I need you to consider your entire life into this formula, you have to consider your whole self. If you're more stressed than usual emotional stress, physical, maybe you're recovering from an illness or an injury, you're getting poor sleep. Again, you're restricting those calories because of diet, you're going to need to choose exercises that are more restorative than intense restorative exercises will help keep that exercise stressor, a positive one instead of a negative one. If you are not sleeping well, not eating enough calories, because you're dieting, you're stressed out at work, your kids are crazy, all those things together. And you're stressed out because it's summertime and you don't feel like you look good enough in your shorts. And you have all this mental stress, right? All these things combined. And then you try and go out and run two miles because you think it's going to help you lose weight, what is your body going to do? It's going to give you the middle finger, it's going to give you a giant f-you because it's not going to do that, Oh, this is becoming negative stress now. So now I'm going to hold on to fat. Now I'm going to make you tired. So you have to stop, I'm gonna make you injured. So you have to stop, I'm going to make you sick. So you have to stop. Okay, your body's smart. It's not going to play these games with you anymore. So you have to listen to what your body is telling you and take the entirety of you and your life into consideration and move accordingly. 

Conversely, if you are eating a really great well balanced, nutritious diet, you're fueling really well. You're getting good sleep. You are managing stress through yoga and meditation and prayer. And you're feeling pretty good about your life and then you go work out. You're going to kick ass, right? You're going to kick ass every time. Why? That workouts gonna be a positive stressor, it could be super intense, but it's still going to be a positive stressor. Why? Because everything else was still okay. In the stress department does that make sense? Your whole life matters. What is a restorative exercise or restorative exercise looks like yoga, or Tai Chi, or just taking a walk, anything that is kind of low impact, and focuses on movement. There's a lot of great trainers out there who have mobility programs, a mobility program is a great restorative exercise. Yoga is like that Yoga is mobility and strength. 

And I want to draw a distinction for you to between exercise and movement. So restorative exercises would be really focused on the movement. Exercise is what you normally would think of as working out, taking a class going to the gym, lifting weights, whatever exercise or working out is something that you're doing probably for an hour or less, three to seven days a week, you know, whatever your routine is. But movement is something that you're doing all day long. So when we're thinking about exercise, becoming a negative stressor, because it's just too much stress, I'm not going to tell you to stop moving, but I might advise you to adjust your exercise. So you might need to adjust the frequency or the intensity with which you're exercising, but you do not want to stop the movement. Okay, so the movement is just how I'm moving my body throughout the day, walking up and down stairs, I'm picking up grocery bags, I'm mopping and vacuuming, I'm cleaning, I'm mowing the lawn, I'm taking walks with my kids, I'm swimming in the pool, like whatever the movement, things that you're doing all day long, keeping active all day, those are actually going to help reduce stress, that movement is going to help reduce stress. What I'm specifically talking about what I'm talking about, sometimes you need to do less is the exercise part of the workout part that kind of more intense exercising that you're doing, I just really want to make sure that there's a distinction there because I'm not going to tell you to stop moving. But I might tell you that you need to cut back on the exercise a little bit more and focus on more restorative exercise instead of intense, that makes sense. So wanna make sure you understand the difference there. 

So bottom line is that if you are trying to diet and increase exercise to lose weight, you might be completely working against yourself. So I want you to take into consideration your whole life and the stressors within. And I want you to start paying attention to there's a line between stressors being positive stressors. And then if we crossed that line, they become negative stressors. And it's working against me. Positive stressors working for me crossed the line. Now it's working against me same stressors, right, but sometimes it's just too much. So take your whole life into account, take in your movement, take in your exercise, take into account the food that you're eating, how much and what take into account how much sleep you're getting taken into account all the other stresses in your life, add that together and decide if you are crossing the line into too much. Okay, if it's too much, you're gonna have to cut back, you have to cut back a little bit on that exercise part. Does that make sense? I hope this was really helpful for you guys. I hope that it helps you get unstuck. I know in my life at different times, I have felt very stuck, like I wasn't moving forward in the way that I wanted to. And what I was doing was workout harder, workout harder workout harder. And in the meantime, my body was like, dude, I'm trying to heal an autoimmune disorder right now. Like, will you stop? And then it would stop me. Right? I would be bedridden for a week, right? It would totally shut me down. So if you feel like that's the path you're on right now, then I'm going to ask you invite you to take a look at all the things together and start scaling back where you need to scale back and be real honest with yourself about it. Okay, if you have any questions about this, the community group is back up. So it is@ community.nononsensewellness.com Oh my gosh, you guys, so many things happening around here. So get into the reboot camp program free for five days, it's going to be so awesome. You get live coaching with me every single day. And then get into the community group and start hanging out in there and meet new people and having some fun and getting your questions answered. I'm just so excited for where all of this is going. And I just thank you so much for being a part of it. All right, my friends until we talk again.  Be Well.