Ep #125: Surprising Realizations That Come from Changing Your Habits

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #125.

There are some surprising realizations that you’ll make when you do the work of changing your habits. Let’s talk about them.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland.

Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here, we are going to talk about the surprising realizations that my clients have made when they get into the work of changing their habits and changing their lives.

There are some recurring themes, that have come up over the years, that I’ve been coaching around habit change. And finally, while in a session with a client earlier this week and hearing her say what I have heard so many clients say before her, I decided that I want to put it out in the world.

So I’m going to share with you evidence from my clients about what they discover when they get into the real, sometimes dirty work of changing one or all of how they eat, move, and think. And yes, I recognize that this is my own small anecdotal experience, and I’m taking a risk by sharing this.

You know I like science, I like evidence, and I will be the first to admit that my observations and what I’m sharing with you today are not the same as a scientific study. This is not a randomized controlled trial. This is not a meta-analysis, and I am not the New England Journal of Medicine. I get it.

However, I do feel that these themes have come up enough times and for enough clients that it bears stating out loud. And the reason I’m making an entire podcast out of this is because I want anyone who is listening, I want anyone who is considering making some changes to his or her life, to hear what others are experiencing.

Let’s talk about the realizations that so many of my clients have had, and the realizations that you yourself might discover on your path to changing your habits. All right? Let’s go.

First: The first realization that comes up quite often for my clients is this, planning works. Planning for your habits, it works. And I’ll use the word that so many of my clients have used when they make planning part of their routine. They describe planning as “essential”. I know when you hear that it may sound obvious, but let me take it a step further. Often, when I work with a client, she’ll say that she has a plan for how she’s going to eat, or she has a plan for her exercise routine. But then, if I ask her to tell me about it, she hedges. And it’s not because she doesn’t have a plan per se, but most often she’ll tell me she’s got it in her head. She hasn’t written it out. She hasn’t put it on paper, or she hasn’t typed it into her phone.

The plan exists in her head. She knows she needs to eat less processed food and more whole foods. She knows she needs to find time to exercise. Unfortunately, that is not enough of a plan. Based on my experience coaching and getting coached myself and realizing this for my own life, a plan in your head is not enough.

So if you’re going to change how you eat or move, have a plan, like a real legitimate plan, and take the extra step of writing it out, okay? I don’t just say that to add work to your already full life. I encourage it because there is science behind this. Writing out your plan is more highly associated with success than not writing out your plan. And this is also in the science, but people who describe their goals with vivid descriptions or pictures are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them than people who don’t describe them.

So you might be wondering, why is this? Why is this the case? Why does it matter that you pull out a pen and paper, or even a Word doc, and write out your plan? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

First, when you write out your plan, it’s out in the world. It’s external. It’s no longer nebulous or vague in your head. When you write out your plan, you have something to refer to. You’ve got something to come back to. And it’s a lot easier to remember your plan if you have a visual cue to serve as a reminder than if you’re just trying to remember what you thought of a few days ago.

But there’s more to it than that. There’s another process that happens when you write out your plan, and that process is called “encoding”. Encoding is a biological process. It means the things that you see and perceive travel to your brain’s hippocampus for analysis, and then your brain decides what gets stored in your long-term memory, or encoded, and what gets tossed.

Writing improves that encoding process. So, in plain English, when you write down your plan, you see it in front of you, it travels to your brain and it has better odds of being remembered. To make it abundantly clear, there is neuroscience to back up the utility of planning. One other nerdy concept here to help convince you of why writing down your plan matters, and that is the generation effect.

The “generation effect” is a psychological phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively generated or created by the individual, instead of read or passively received.

Again, in plain English, you will remember material better if you write it down yourself versus passively consuming it in your head. One process is active and one is passive. And the active process will serve you better when it comes to reaching your goals.

All right, so now that I’ve gotten the nerdy science out of the way, let me share with you other reasons why having and writing out your plan is essential. When you create a plan for how you will eat or move, it requires that you make some decisions ahead of time. And you know what that adds up to, right? Discipline.

Discipline is making decisions ahead of time and then following through on those decisions even when you don’t want to, even when it’s hard. Discipline is keeping your word to yourself. And it’s easier to keep your word to yourself when you write it down than when you keep those words hidden in your head. Honestly, when I really dig into this with a client, this is often one of the most common reasons she doesn’t want to plan. She doesn’t want to have her plan out in the world because then she has to follow it and she’s not ready to commit to change. That may be because she’s made the plan too difficult or too drastic that she knows she’s not going to be able to follow it.

Another reason that comes up when my clients are resistant to writing a plan is because she’s concerned that she’s not going to perfectly follow the plan that she creates for herself. And because she’s afraid that she won’t follow it perfectly, it’s easier to just not have one in the first place.

For my overachievers or my perfectionists out there, this is a common phenomenon. If you are used to getting a 100%, A+ on everything you do, it may be hard to create a plan and put it out in the world when you’re not certain that you’re going to follow it.

And so here’s what I would offer if you have resistance to creating a plan for changing your habits. Make your success inevitable. Okay? Make your plan so doable that you feel like it’s almost not hard enough. Now notice what I said, “almost”. I’m not saying you should take the easy route here, but what I am saying is to make your change small enough that it almost feels like nothing.

Make it so small that it almost seems ridiculous but it’s not. It’s not ridiculous. So here’s an example. I had a session with a client earlier this week and she was frustrated with herself because she wasn’t strength training with any regularity. She was skipping it. And when we got into the weeds, I learned that she decided it needed to be three days a week, at least 45 minutes at a time, of straight strength training. Forty-five minutes. She wanted to go from zero sessions, zero minutes per week of strength training, to three sessions of 45 minutes per week of strength training.

So it made total sense that she was not following through. That is a pretty big leap. Most of us are just not able to make a big sweeping change like that, and she said exactly that. She said 45 minutes seemed really daunting, but that was what she decided to hold herself to. So, in response, she wasn’t strength training at all.

Instead we took a smaller step. She set a goal of strength training three times per week, minimum five minutes. And we talked through what exactly that could look like. It could be alternating three sets of 10 biceps curls and triceps extensions for a total of five minutes. It could be setting a timer for five minutes and doing an EMOM workout, Every Minute On the Minute, 5 to 10 pushups.

None of those are big or wild or taxing, and that’s exactly the idea. It has to be small, but doable. Often, I find that you have resistance to planning because you make the plan too hard for yourself to follow. So make it so small that it seems too easy, almost like you’re cheating, but not too easy because otherwise you would be doing it already. Make it small. Make it doable. Write it out. Having a plan, a real, specific, written out, actionable plan is essential. And my clients have said this over and over again. Even my clients who are resistant to it at first, they see the utility in planning.

And this may be you. You may think you don’t need to write it out. You may think that it’s fine to just think it through in your head and you can do it. But I would argue respectfully, no. Put it out in the world. I respectfully challenge you to put some skin in the game, write out your plan, make it real and tangible, but small and practical, and then practice following through on doing what you say you’re going to do. All right?

Next. The next realization that many of my clients make is that habit change is a grind. In fact, one of my clients said exactly that this week. She said that eating healthy and waking up early to do strength training and changing her lifestyle in general, she called it a grind.

Here’s the thing. While even using that word “grind” may have a negative connotation, I want to shake that up. Because changing your life and changing your habits doesn’t have to feel like a grind. Okay? It all comes down to how you think about it, right? It always goes back to your mindset.

You can choose to think of the grind as a painful and thankless uphill battle, or you can choose to think of the grind as the path you take to becoming your next best version. One way of thinking about it is going to feel a lot better than the other, and you get to choose how you think and feel about the process of habit change.

And no, this is not to say that you trick yourself into thinking about rainbows and cotton candy while you do the hard work. You are not BS-ing yourself here. Instead, you can acknowledge that what you’re doing is hard. You can recognize that habit change is challenging. You don’t let the grind stop you, because you get to choose how you see your grind. For me, when I think of fitness as a grind, I think of consistency and discipline. And those, in my mind, are two positive practices that I myself choose to pursue every single day.

Changing your habits, it is a repetitive process. It requires discipline, or doing what you say you’re going to do even when you don’t want to. And changing your habits also requires consistency. Remember what consistency is: behavior, repetition, and frequency.

So you do the behavior, you eat a salad and protein for dinner. You repeat the behavior and continue having a salad and protein for dinner. You do it with enough frequency, or within a meaningful enough time frame, that it results in true change.

So that is consistency: behavior, repetition, and frequency. And it is essential for any habit change. So in fitness, “the grind” refers to the daily, sometimes monotonous routine of planning, exercising, eating mostly healthy, sleeping, drinking water, and on and on.

But “the grind” also includes persisting through whatever physical or mental barriers that come up along the way, so that you keep up with those habits, in order to achieve your long-term goals. When you think of “the grind”, think sustained effort, discipline, consistency, and resilience. You put in the work even when you don’t want to or don’t feel like it, and you keep going even when you have failures along the way. That is “the grind”.

And it’s up to you how you approach it. You can approach it with resolve and groundedness, or you can approach it with entitlement and irritation. I’ve seen both. My clients who come in with resolve and groundedness succeed way more often than those who feel entitled to results and get irritated when they don’t see them fast enough.

And really, at the end of the day, describing habit change as a grind simply highlights reality. Fitness truly is about hard work and delayed gratification. Really, that’s how I see it. It’s hard work and you don’t see results right away. You may feel awesome after your workouts, and you may feel better eating whole foods instead of processed foods, but you may not see the difference in the scale or in the mirror for some time. But if you’re committed to the grind you will learn to be okay with this.

This is in contrast to short-term effort with the expectation of instant gratification. If that is your approach and in your mind you’re thinking, “I’ve been at this for eight weeks, show me the money,” well, that is going to leave you running in circles, extremely frustrated. Because if you’re aiming for fitness, weight loss, or any habit change for that matter, you’re playing the long game.

Committing to the grind, even when you’re bored or tired, is what ultimately gets you progress on your health and fitness goals. There is a reason for the phrase, “fall in love with the grind.” All right?

Next. I wanted to make this one separate from “the grind” because I do think these are different, independent realizations that many of my clients have made. And that realization is that habit change is not fancy. Okay? Losing weight, changing your body composition, changing your fitness, whatever your goal is, the process of getting there really is not fancy.

And I think the reason this comes up so often is because we’re often led to believe, through social media, TV, influencers, and loads of empty promises, that there is a different way. Or that fitness has to be fancy, that there’s a trick to it, that changing your weight or your body composition has to be totally scientized with Keto sticks or continuous glucose monitors, or measured with an Apple watch or an Oura ring. When in reality, none of that stuff really matters.

Often, after a few weeks of working with me, a client will be surprised by that and realize, “Hey, this really is not fancy, but it works.” And I agree, this is not fancy. Okay? We’re talking about eating less restaurant and fast food and takeout in exchange for eating more whole foods, like fruit and veggies and lean protein. We’re talking about drinking water instead of sugary drinks, like soda and fruit juice.

We’re talking about moving your body. And I don’t mean five HIIT sessions in a week. Walking counts. Okay? Getting sleep, managing stress. Honestly, that’s what this is about. If you want to change your lifestyle, those are the habits to aim for. That’s it.

When I work with clients, I don’t get fancy on them. I don’t have a wild macro split that I suggest. I don’t have a secret strength-training plan. I don’t suggest a grapefruit diet or cutting out all carbs. I don’t promote you getting Keto sticks or CGMs. I don’t have a supplement that I’m peddling. Okay?

I refrain from doing all those things because, one, I know they’re not necessary to change your lifestyle. And two, habit change is not meant to be that complicated. Forget about the fancy plans, the latest drinks, or the shake systems, or the newest workout equipment. That stuff really does not matter.

Now, to be clear, I also don’t want to oversimplify. Because fitness, body recomposition, and weight loss, they are all certainly deeper than simply eat less, move more. I’m not going to be naive and make a blanket statement like that. At the same time, your eating and moving cannot, and should not, be complicated if you want to legitimately change your habits and change your life for the long haul. In fact, the less fancy and complicated you make your change, the better.

I had one client who really wanted to incorporate exercise into her life. She was talking about rejoining Orange Theory, but when she got into the weeds of it and got into the details, she realized that in the time it took to sign up for the class, drive there, do the class, drive home, and get herself ready for work, she would be spending way more time than she wanted to on her fitness.

So instead, she decided that she could do a strength training routine at home, online, in her basement, and save half the time. She kept it simple, not fancy. I had another client who nearly every week came to our sessions concerned about her macro split. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how many carbs, or how much healthy fat, or how much protein she should be having. She was reading tons and tons of articles, listening to countless podcasts about it, and nearly every week wanted to change how she was eating. And while I am all about educating yourself, the thing to know with science is that it can be a rabbit hole. No one agrees. There is loads of conflicting misinformation. And there is just not one right way to eat. So it can get to a point where there is information overload and it becomes too much.

The ironic thing here was that she was not following any of the macro splits that we talked through. She would have numbers, and grams of fat, and all the details ironed out. But then she would go off the rails and eat whatever, whenever, and essentially not follow her plan at all. It was fascinating.

And so there are two takeaways from this. One, do not feel the need to overcomplicate your nutrition by nickel-and-diming yourself to the gram of carbohydrate because you will drive yourself bananas. And two, often the bigger, much deeper issue at hand, is that we have to deal with why you overeat in the first place. We need to dive in and figure out why you are not following the plans you create for yourself. Those issues are the real issues at hand. It is not about finding just the right macro split, because that is not it. So I like to get to the root cause of a problem versus simply treating a symptom.

When you get so bogged down in the diet itself, whether that’s your macro split, or doing Keto for the fifth time, or restarting intermittent fasting again, that, to me, is more of a symptomatic treatment. And most often that is not getting to the root cause. Most often the bigger issue to address, and the one that will result in actual long-term change, is addressing why you overeat in the first place.

If you emotionally eat, if you rely on food for pleasure because you don’t have enough joy in your life, or if you eat when you’re bored, then we need to address those issues first. And then we may need to address what to do if you create a plan for yourself but you’re not following through. And neither of those have anything to do with how many grams of carbs you’re eating. Neither of those will be solved by sticking a continuous glucose monitor on your body, okay?

The key takeaway here is that the actual diet itself is really not super important. It’s really not. Because this process is just not fancy. Eating more whole foods and less processed stuff, drinking water, getting sleep, moving your body; those are the basics. Those are the foundational habits that are essential for improving your health. They are not fancy. They are not complicated, and that’s the point. Trading french fries for salad is anything but fancy, okay?

All right, next. The next realization that many of my clients make in our work together is that strength training in fact counts as a workout, okay? Strength training counts. But here’s the thing. When I’m talking about strength training counting, I mean real, legit strength training. As in, you go and you go hard.

There is a big difference between an arms and abs workout, where you hurry up and race through your reps with a light weight before you have to get in the shower, versus a focused, legit strength training session, where you lift heavy and give your muscles adequate time under tension and adequate rest between sets. There is a big, big difference there.

If you want to build muscle, please hear me, you don’t need hours in the gym. But you do need to give yourself enough time to work up to heavy weight so that you’re challenging your muscles. You also want to make sure that you’re getting in the key foundational strength training moves, the moves that are compound, big, multi-joint exercises that involve multiple muscle groups.

Those are your big five, I mention them all the time: squats, deadlifts, chest press, rows, and overhead shoulder presses. And no, that’s not a ton of moves, but they are enough to work your muscles. And if you get really good at those, and work on going heavy with those, you will see progress.

So to be clear, your strength training session counts. Okay? I understand that when you’re done you may not be dripping in sweat in the same way that you would after a run or a spin workout, but the impact is still there. The gains are still there.

And the women who understand this and really go after it with their strength training, they will see results. Strength training, when it’s done properly and with focus and intensity, it most definitely counts as a workout. It is just as important as your cardio session. I know that was a short point, but I want to make sure that I mentioned it because it comes up all the time. And it is just one more reason to start strength training now.

All right, next. The next realization that many of my clients make is that when it comes to changing your weight, diet really does matter more than exercise. Diet matters more. Okay? Even though I just said that, I will say that for many women, and maybe for many of you, there may be some trial and error before you make this realization for yourself.

It may be that previously, like when you were younger, if you felt that you were gaining weight, or if your clothes started feeling a little too snug, maybe you would start running for a few weeks or a few months and things would be fine; you would lose the weight, clothes would fit again, and you could back off the exercise until the cycle repeated itself. I cannot tell you how many times someone told me that was their approach in college, or after college, or during grad school, or in early adult life. And it worked. But then, as you get older, maybe you have kids, get super busy in your career, become more sedentary and eat differently, you may find that ramping up your exercise no longer works.

Increasing your exercise leaves you hanging because when you were young, exercise might have been enough. But as you get older, it isn’t. But that doesn’t stop you from trying. And while it’s great that exercise might have worked to control your weight when you were young, unfortunately, for many people, it sets you up for a negative relationship with exercise in your adult life.

You may start to view exercise as a means to an end for weight loss, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re aiming for. And despite me saying over and over again, don’t use exercise to lose weight. Many people I work with will still try to do it.

I use this example often. I had a client who swore up and down that she just needed to get back up to running six miles again, and she knew that the weight would come off. But then she got to six miles, and instead of losing weight, she just found herself more hungry. She was not losing anything. In fact, she was just straight up hungry. There are many more examples of this. In fact, for many of the women I coach who ramp up their exercise, they find that it makes them more hungry, and sometimes they even end up gaining weight. I just had this conversation recently with a client, who went from very little exercise when we started to running and jogging and riding her Peloton multiple days a week, along with adding strength training three days a week.

A few things came of it. One, she went from a pace of 0 to 60, and it was too much, she couldn’t sustain it. And two, she found herself really hungry from all the extra physical activity. As you would imagine, she was eating more, and the net result was a 1 lb. weight gain.

And it makes sense. When you ramp up your physical activity, you will be more hungry. If you eat more, you may not lose any weight. So the answer is not to add on more exercise to help you shed weight. Absolutely not. That is a setup for resentment towards exercise when it does not deliver on the results that you’re looking for. Instead, a slow and steady approach to exercise is much more sustainable. And, in turn, will make you less hungry. While, yes, I know I talk often about the benefits of exercise, and I want every person listening to this podcast and every person I work with to find exercise they enjoy and do it, the goal is that it’s a gradual approach.

All the while, we have to look at the impact that adding that physical activity has on your hunger and eating. And so, with trial and error, and unlearning beliefs from when they were younger that have kept them stuck, my clients often see firsthand that the greatest change to their weight comes from changing their diet.

They see for themselves that exercise just does not have the same impact on their weight that changing their diet has. And I will say that for many, this is not a fun realization to make because then it means we have to look critically at her diet. Time and again, my clients find that it is harder to change the way they eat than it is to just add in exercise. This comes up all the time.

And it makes sense. It’s easier for you to add in a habit than it is to adjust or change a habit that already exists. That’s when it gets tricky. But when you realize this and get really committed, you’ll discover that the most change comes from changing your diet because your diet matters more.

Next. I’m super pumped to share this one because so many of my clients have had this realization, and I think it’s an important one. The next realization that so many of my clients have made is that eating more protein in their diets really makes a difference in their weight loss efforts.

I cannot tell you how many times a client has told me that by eating more protein, she feels better satiated, she feels less hungry later in the day, and she feels less inclined to snack. It really is so cool. In fact, just this past week, I had my second session with a new client and one of the first things she shared with me was that she made it a point to eat more protein in the week between our sessions and she noticed a difference.

She noted that she had a decreased urge to snack. And in particular, she was not doing any after-dinner snacking, which she was really thrilled about. She said that she felt satiated. She wasn’t stuffed, but she was noting that she was satisfied for longer. And I have many, many other examples of similar observations from other clients.

And my point here is that protein matters, okay? Protein matters and it makes a difference not only for building and maintaining muscle, but also for weight loss. I have extolled the virtues of protein many, many times on this podcast. But in case you are new to the podcast, or if you need a reminder, here’s why getting more protein in your diet is so important.

Protein is considered the most satiating of the three major macronutrients, the other macros being carbohydrates and fat. That means protein keeps you fuller longer. This is, in part, due to the impact of protein on your hunger hormones. Protein reduces the hormone that tells you you’re hungry and increases one of the hormones that tells you you’re full.

Protein also takes more calories to digest than either carbs or fat. That means that 20%-35% of the calories that you consume from protein are used to digest that protein. Now for comparison, 5%-15% of the calories you consume from carbohydrates are used for their digestion. And then for fat, it’s anywhere from 0%-5%. So again, of the three macronutrients, protein requires the most calories to digest.

Protein also reduces activity in the parts of your brain that control cravings and food reward value. This is one of the mechanisms that contributes to protein’s impact on decreasing your snacking. And increasing protein intake, in and of itself, has been shown to help maintain weight loss over the long term.

This is thought to be due to the cumulative impact of protein on your digestion, reduction in overall calorie intake, and decrease in food cravings. So not only can protein help you lose weight, it can also help you keep the weight off once you do lose it.

And it is so cool when clients start experiencing these benefits for themselves. Because it’s one thing to read about the impacts of protein in a scientific journal article, but it is so much cooler to see a client experience these changes in real life. And this is something that usually happens pretty quickly after she makes some changes to her diet. It generally does not take long for a client to see a change in her appetite and a decrease in her snacking shortly after she increases the protein in her diet. So it is super rewarding when I meet with a client and she experiences for herself what the science suggests.

I know I talk about protein often here, but it’s really so cool to hear a client talk about how much this subtle change to her diet affects her bottom line. Not only in her weight, but in her hunger and satiety level. This is huge. So again, this is just one more plug for you to really look at your protein intake.

If you’re not eating at least 80 gm of protein per day, but ideally more like 100 gm of protein per day, I would really aim for more. And you can do this in a stepwise graded approach. You do not have to suddenly load up on protein, but if you’re not paying attention to your protein intake, I would strongly encourage you to start paying attention to it.

To be clear, this is assuming that you’re healthy, you’ve got healthy kidneys, and there are no medical or other reasons for you to not eat that amount of protein. All right?

And last, the last realization that so many of my clients have shared with me, is that mindset work is no joke. All right? I’m not sure how else to put it, but it’s something that comes up all the time. I saved it for last because it’s a big one.

Mindset work, it is not fluffy. It’s not woo. In fact, it is legitimate work. So working on your mindset or really practicing your thinking lays the foundation for all of your other changes, like eating and moving. Remember that eating and moving are external. They are actions. And while your patterns of eating and moving are most certainly not easy to change, they actually pale in comparison to changing your thinking. Because how you eat and move is ultimately a reflection of how you think about yourself.

If you do not believe that you are capable of change, if you do not believe that the possibility of a different life exists for you, if you believe that change is too hard or too time consuming, well, those beliefs will become your reality. What you believe about yourself is what you will go out into the world and prove true.

So I would argue that it behooves you to practice believing that you are capable, that you are strong, that you are empowered, and then go out in the world and make it true. But that’s not always easy to do. If you have spent years or decades telling yourself all the reasons that you will fail, or all the reasons that what you do is not good enough, or all the reasons that you’re stuck, then you may find it really difficult to change your life.

And that is where the real work is. Changing the way you think, or going inside to do the mindset work, it is not for the faint of heart, okay? It’s not easy. It’s not always fun and it’s definitely not a fast process. In fact, it can get harder before it gets easier.

Because often, for so many of us, we operate more or less on autopilot. We take our limiting beliefs as fact, remain trapped by perfectionism, worry too much about other people’s opinions, or fail to set boundaries. And I could go on, because this is just scraping the surface of the many different mindset obstacles that get in the way of you making true lasting change to your life.

But those tasks, which admittedly are not easy, that work is where all of the growth is. And that’s what we’re looking to do in a coaching relationship. We’re in it to see you grow and reach your massive potential. And so here’s what I want you to know. If you do not change the way you think, any changes that you make to the way you eat and move will be temporary, okay? Please really consider that when you take on the work of changing your habits and changing your life.

It is not enough to try to strong-arm yourself into eating salads when you use cookies or cupcakes to cope with a bad day. It is not enough to just swear off carbs when you in fact love them and your family loves them too and continues to eat them. It is not enough to grind through another HIIT workout when the underlying reason you’re doing it is because you hate the body you live in and you actually despise HIIT workouts.

Change does not work that way and your habits will not last. It all has to match up. You are not going to create a new life with the same thoughts that are keeping you stuck in your old one. It just does not work. So please be prepared that whatever work you’re looking to do, whether that’s to start exercising, eat healthier, lose weight, change your physique, whatever it is you’re looking to change, it has to come from a clean place.

And that means it has to come from a supportive, kind, focused mindset. I want you to be prepared to dive in and unearth whatever beliefs you have about yourself that are keeping you stuck and be ready to pull them apart and unravel them. I want you to be prepared that this work is not simply eat less and move more.

I want you to be prepared to see things about yourself that you may not love, but you treat yourself with kindness and self-compassion anyway because you can like and accept yourself, and want to change yourself, all at the same time. This work is significantly more challenging than saying no to a friend who catches you off guard with a cupcake. This work is more challenging than getting up at 5 a.m. for a morning workout. This work is more difficult than making time for meal prep on the weekends. But this work, this work I would argue, is essential. It’s been essential for me in my own life and it’s been essential for my clients.

And it’s only once we get into it that this realization becomes apparent for so many of them. So let me spell it out very clearly for you, and I can only do this thanks to the many clients who have shared this discovery with me. If you want to change your life, be prepared to change your mind first.

Mindset work is a non-negotiable. Working on your mindset will give you awareness and it will give you the tools you need to change your life. And if you want help with this, let’s go. When you coach with me, you’ll address both your habits and your mindset so the changes you make last and become your lifestyle.

Check out my website. Send me a message at www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact and let’s talk about how changing your habits and changing your mindset will change your life.

Thank you for hanging out with me, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Hey, if you’re looking for your next great read, I’ve got you covered. Head over to CarrieHollandMD.com/books and download my list of most favorite reads. I’ve got two collections waiting for you. One is all about work-life balance. The other, is a collection of books that have changed my life.

I’ve referenced many of these books in the podcast, and now you can access those titles all in one place.

Again, that’s CarrieHollandMD.com/books. Check it out and find your next great read.

Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.