Letting go of the illusion of perfection in fitness and nutrition

The podcast discusses the mindset of high achieving women over 40 and their pursuit of perfection in fitness and nutrition. It explains that while striving for excellence is commendable, it is not necessary to be perfect in order to achieve desired results. The host emphasizes the importance of understanding that doing smaller amounts of exercise and focusing on strength training can be more beneficial than doing excessive amounts. The podcast also highlights the challenges faced by high achieving women over 40, such as time constraints and multiple responsibilities, which may prevent them from dedicating as much time to fitness and nutrition as they did in their younger years. The host shares personal experiences and explains the concept of the law of diminishing returns, which suggests that doing more is not always better. Instead, focusing on strength training and maintaining overall health is key. The podcast aims to shift the mindset of high achieving women and encourage them to p Hi, my name is Beth and you are listening to the Canna Fitness and Nutrition Podcast where we are hanging out at the intersection of fitness, nutrition, and cannabis. And thank you for pressing play today. I really appreciate you listening, I really appreciate you sharing, I really appreciate your feedback. And if there's things that you want me to talk about, about fitness, about nutrition, or cannabis, or about how those three relate to each other, please let me know because I'd be happy to talk about or even research topics that are of interest to you. Today I have a topic that kind of hits all three pieces because it's more of a mindset topic. Now hear me out. They say in business that you're best qualified to help former versions of yourself. So that being said, I really, and I've always felt like I really connected to women who were similar to me in that we are high achievers. We used to be called type A. I think they've gotten away from calling us type A, but now it's the correct, politically correct term is high achieving. And so if you're a high achieving woman, especially if you're a high achieving woman over 40, then you're probably going to relate the most to this podcast. Now if you know, if you're not, and you know a high achieving woman over 40, then you might still want to listen and be able to give that woman some advice because we're going to talk today about letting go of the illusion of perfection. Here's the deal, us high achieving women over 40, we love to get things right. We love to do as much as we can. We love to get things right. We love to do as much as we can. If someone says, do something, we do all of it and more, right? We do the minimum and then more, as much more as we can, right? Because in our mind, more is better. And that's just part of the mindset of a high achiever is more is better. If I do more of X, it will get me more results. And here's the thing. We want to apply that principle to fitness and nutrition, right? If someone says, you know, run for 30 minutes, well, a high achieving woman, we're running for 35 or 40 minutes, right? We're pushing the edge because we want superior results. And this tends to happen. You know you're a high achieving woman if you do this in a lot of areas of your life, not just fitness and nutrition. If you do it at work, if you do it in relationships, if you do it with your hobbies, then you'll relate to this because we take the simple concepts and we take it to the next level because historically in our lives, the more we've done, the more success we've had. It works really well in a workplace setting where if your boss says, you know, write a report and you write the best report and the most outstanding report and you include all of the things and you go over the top and you go above and beyond, then you're rewarded, right? Maybe it's a promotion. Maybe it's a bonus. Maybe it's a raise. You know, you're rewarded in a workplace setting by being a high achiever. And I think we like to translate that into all areas of our life here. But when it comes to fitness and nutrition, what we need to understand as high achieving, high performing women over 40, that we don't really have to be as perfect with our fitness and nutrition to achieve the results that we want. And I'm going to give you some scenarios because what I see a lot of, and again, I just relate really well to this type of person because I am that type of person and I've learned my lesson and I'll share that, but I see it a lot in women similar to me. And I see that we have these expectations that we should be working out a certain amount and we should be lifting weights a certain amount and that we should be hitting these targets with our protein, fruits, vegetables, and we should be hitting certain targets. And that's all well and good. The problem is that when we don't hit those targets, we feel like a failure and we think that all hope is lost. We think we're not going to achieve our goals. And when it comes to fitness and nutrition, that's just simply not true. This is the thing, and they actually have been studying this and there's some interesting studies out there about how doing small amounts is actually really beneficial, but that's counterintuitive to our mindset of more is better, more is better. And I don't mean to exclude men from my topic today. I just relate better to women because I am a woman, that's all. There are definitely men in this category and I have worked with men in this category where more seems like better, but that's not always the truth, right? You may have heard of the law of diminishing returns, which simply means that the more we do isn't always the best. You can actually get less results by doing more instead of getting more results by doing more. So again, there is some science that backs this up and again, in terms of exercise, they've actually studied this. They're studying that and particularly, I should set this up better, particularly with people over 40, we're finding that this is a phase in our life where you tend to have a family at this point, you tend to have a lot of obligations, you tend to be mid-career where you have a lot more responsibility career-wise, you have a lot more responsibility at home, you tend to be a little more established, so you might have home ownership or other fiscal responsibilities or pets, kids, family members, you might be caring for aging parents. There's a lot of responsibilities that are piled on when you get to be in middle life and because of that, we're finding less and less time to work out and to take care of ourselves. Is it a good thing? No, but it is what it is in our society at this stage of life, whereas a lot of the women that I work with, or even men, will say, well, in my 20s, I used to be able to go to the gym five days a week and do kettlebell classes and I was really strong and I was doing CrossFit competitions and all these things that you have more time for when you have fewer responsibilities. So, that being said, we carry that history with us and the expectation that in order to be in good shape, we still need to be able to hit the gym five days a week and go to CrossFit competitions and do these things that we used to do in order to see the same results. And that's simply not true, but it's a mindset shift and I understand that and this is one of the things that I like to talk about with my clients because it's so important and I feel it's my job as a fitness professional and a healthcare professional to emphasize that it's not necessary to do more. It's not necessary to relive the things we did in our 20s just to get the same results now that we're in our 40s and beyond. So, again, I'm going to give you some real examples. I'll give you my own example first. So, when I was in my 20s and I was a runner, I loved to run, it was just so free and it felt so good. You know, I thought it was young and my joints were young and my muscles were young and, you know, I used to read, you know, back in the 90s, in the early 2000s, you know, the goal back then was simply to be smaller, right? That was all anybody really wanted. No one was really talking about or not yet, not quite talking about the benefits of strength training and muscle and how important that was. We were just exercising to be smaller and that's been the case really since the 80s, right? When the fitness trend really started with Jane Fonda and step aerobics and all of that, you know, people were exercising to be smaller. And so, in order to do that, what I had learned and taught myself was that, well, the more I run, the better, okay? So, I would slowly increase, I kept increasing, increasing, increasing my mileage until, and here's where the law of diminishing returns comes in, is I had increased it so much that I kept getting injured and I kept getting injured. And then I would stop and then I would start again and then I kept getting injured. And now, I look back and I say, okay, well, that's because I wasn't strength training at the same time, all I was doing was running. I wasn't trying to keep my muscles and my core and my hips and my joints protected and strong. I was just doing cardio to be smaller. And so, I learned the hard way because eventually I got so injured that I wasn't able to run at all. And if you've been following my story, you know that fast forward 25 years, you know, I wore down my joints so much so that I needed both knees replaced at 45. So, again, there's that law of diminishing returns, right? More isn't better. More sometimes is not better. And in this case, for me, it certainly wasn't. And so, I see now, thankfully, we're seeing a real big shift in society towards strength training because I think this happened to not just me, right, it happened to a lot of people. We were seeing that and we're learning through research that strength training is really the answer to keeping our bodies healthy and strong as we age. And so, it's really important to be strength training. But here's the deal. I think a lot of times in our heads, you know, and again, I see this with my clients is I'll say, okay, we need to start a workout routine that involves strength training. And I see in their heads start to go, okay, well, now I need to set aside time every day to do that. And that makes sense based on our old mentality of, okay, I need to do it every day, I need to be super consistent, and this needs to be a routine, and I need to do more, more, more, more, more. But what the science is saying is that to have benefits from strength training, which is keeping your muscles strong and carrying you into later in life, minimizing your bone disintegration, right? I can't remember the word for that off the top of my head, but, you know, losing your bone density. You want to keep your bones nice and healthy, your muscles healthy, your joints. You want to protect your joints with mobility and strength training to make sure there's lots of synovial fluid moving around in there to keep them healthy, right? So, what the science is saying is that you really only need to do that, you know, two or three times a week to see the benefits. Okay. So now, what I'm trying to say is that if you have in your mind that there needs to be some exercise every single day, or you need to get to the gym every single day to strength train, I'm telling you that you really only need to find two days to do that. Three. If you can find three, that's great. But find two days. Start with two days. See if you can find two days. But that goes against our mentality of having this more is better, it needs to be perfect, you know? And then I'll have clients push back. I remember one client in particular was like, well, I'll get up every morning and do a workout in the morning. And they meant that they would get up, you know, first thing and before they went to work they would do push-ups and sit-ups and things at their house, which is great and admirable, but it's actually not necessary. That person was suffering from what I call the illusion of perfection, where it needed to be a consistent every single day thing. And I know a lot of us are wired for routines and wired for consistency. Our brains actually prefer consistency in routines. Our brains love routines. But we don't need to do that every single day. Two to three times of that is ample. Now, caveat to that is the more we move our bodies, the better. But when I say more, I mean more variety. I mean taking a 10-minute walk around the block one day, doing, you know, a 20-minute strength training routine the next day, and I mean stretching the next day. It's less than we think. And I just want to encourage, again, I'm really speaking to those of you that are like me, where we're high achievers, over 40, really focused on always doing as much as possible to get as much benefit as possible. And I want to encourage you that it doesn't take as much as you think when it comes to fitness and nutrition. Now, same thing with nutrition, right? I think a lot of times what I hear from women that I work with is that, well, I ate really good this day and this day, and then I blew it on this day, or I went out and that was, you know, they'll say they were bad, or they blew it, or, you know, they got off track. And all that happens, you know, I'll ask, they'll say, okay, well, tell me about it. Well, all that happened was that they, you know, went out to dinner with some friends. Like, that's not a big deal. When you have to look at the big picture, we have this perception that it needs to be perfect, 24 hours of perfection followed by 24 hours of perfection, you know, for weeks and months on end, but no one can follow that. No one can follow a, especially if you're being a little bit restrictive and trying to monitor what you're eating, then it can be really hard to maintain that for days and days and weeks and weeks and months and months on end. It's just not realistic. You want to be able to go out with your friends and have dinner. And so what if you split a pizza and had a beer with them? So what? That does not impact it as much as you think. And it's certainly not linear. So you're not, and I think, again, this is a common thing that people think, a misconception, that you're going to wake up the next day and you are going to have gained three pounds because you went out and had pizza and a beer with your friends. In reality, the body doesn't work in a linear way like that. It doesn't just come on and then make the scale go up the next day. If the scale does go up the next day, chances are, if your body reacting to it, it may be holding on to water, especially if you had a beer. That'll make you bloated. It may just be that your bowel movements weren't the right way. They weren't normal for you. And that keeps extra waste in your body. And that can make the scale go up. So there's a lot of factors. It's not linear. If you keep doing that and you decide that you're going to go out for pizza and a beer every day for the next three months, that probably is going to start to show up on the scale. But these little one-offs where people go out to lunch one day and then they have a few days where they follow their plan and they eat lots of fruits and vegetables and protein, and then maybe they go out again with some friends or go to a family party. There should be a way that we can live that and still maintain and achieve our goal weights. And the science says it is absolutely possible because we need to look at it from a bigger picture, as a bigger set. It's a whole year, really, what we're looking at. We're looking at 365 days. And when we talk about being good or on track for 80% of that, we're looking at 80% of a year. Not the day-to-day, in and out. Because if you are trying to watch what you eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and you do that for two days and then have one day where you go out to lunch with your friends, that doesn't mean you blew it. First of all, you can make lots of good choices while you're out. And second of all, even if you don't, in the grand scheme of things, that is not going to matter in the course of a year, right? That's just one small blip. And I'm going to do a little math for you to prove what I'm trying to say. So 365 days in a year, right? I'm actually going to get my calculator out so I can do this officially here. So there's 365 days a year. Now, if we are going to try to eat well and work out and be quote-unquote good, which I don't love that term, but I'm going to use it for this purpose, 365 days a year, we're going to be good for 80% of them. So times 0.8, whoops, 365 times 0.8 is 292. Okay, so let's do this. 365 minus 292 is 73. So the 20% of the days where you can really just eat what you want and go out and have fun and have a drink and do those things, that's the 20%, if we're being 80% on track, the 20% left is 73 days a year, a year, right? So let's divide that by 12. 73 divided by 12 is about six, just over six. So that's six days a month, right? That's a lot. That's a lot. That's more than one a week. So again, the little, you know, people call mess-ups, and again, I don't love that term because it's negative, but just for this purpose, let's say, you know, say you were off plan for a couple of days or day a week, right? That's fully within your 80% of a whole year. So back to what I'm trying to say is that we need to let go of the illusion that we need to be perfect and have everything perfect day in, day out, one thing after another, and we need to let go of the illusion that we need to do more. So when I try to explain this to people, when I'm working with clients and they say, if it's a high-achieving woman over 40, they'll say, well, I didn't get to do much this week. And then I'll say, okay, well, tell me a little bit more specifically what happened. And they'll say, well, I did a workout on Monday, and then I did a workout on Thursday, and then I went for a long walk on Saturday. And when they say that, they sound disappointed in themselves. But from where I sit, first of all, that's a hundred, that's 300 times more than what they were doing before, which was zero, right? So that's fantastic. And second of all, that's a lot. That's three days of movement, solid movement that they got in, which is plenty for achieving their goals. Because here's the thing that I also need to point out, is that we are not in a race to make change. If you're in a race to make change, then it's probably not going to stick. It's probably not going to be sustainable. I don't love putting a time frame on people. In fact, I'm working with a woman right now, and we've been working together since November. It is now March, end of March, and she's down about 10 or so pounds. Now, it may not seem like a lot, but here's the thing. She's not killing herself to work out. She's a single mom with a big job, and so she is balancing her work, her kids, trying to get movement in. I mean, she does a few days a week where she can, workout-wise, a little bit at home, a little bit at the gym, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, a long walk here, a long walk there, making consistently good choices with her food, minimizing her drinking. So I will say, she's really cleaned up her ass a lot, but she also still has two young kids. So they go out to eat, they go to places and get burgers and fries, they go out, they have parties. She does all the normal social things that a woman over 40 with young kids would do, and socializes with her friends, with alcohol. She's living her life. But she also sent me a text message this morning and showed me a number on the scale that was down the lowest we've seen it so far. And I just am so thrilled because she's not caught in the more is better trap. She's doing what she can, and it's reasonable, and it's slow, and she's perfectly okay with that. And that's really what we really need to be okay with, is it taking time. And again, it's a shift in mentality because as high achievers, man, we want to do it fast and we want to do it the best and get the best results as fastest and as best so we get that reward. There's usually a reward. Like I said before, at work, there's usually a raise or a promotion or something that comes when you work really hard. And the reward with our body is that you feel good and you get to be a certain size, but at what cost, right? If it's not sustainable, then it's not going to be worth it. It's why I go so hard. In my example, my personal example, why keep running more if I just keep getting hurt? Because then when I get hurt, I can't do anything. So it took me a long time to really figure that out, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to do a little talk on it today, because learn from me. Learn from me. Learn, don't do what I do, and less is more. Less is more. Again, there's a great study out that I can send you if you're really interested about how they looked at short bursts of 10-minute exercise and how beneficial that was, especially for adults over 40, that it was more beneficial to do that than to do nothing. And we need to embrace the concept of the better than nothing, the less is more, and do what we can instead of getting stuck in the perfectionism. Now, I want to loop cannabis into this, of course, because cannabis has many, many, many benefits, of course, right? But a couple of things that it can do is really work and help you calm and focus your mind. So what I mean by that is, again, I'm talking to this high-achiever women over 40 group where we tend to be kind of, again, high-functioning, highly anxious people. And we tend to get a little bit spun up about doing more and more and more. Cannabis is amazing in that it can help us take a step back and look at the big picture and really embrace that math that I did where 80% of 365 is 292 to be able to say, OK, there's 70, what is it, 73 days or 78 days where I can be relaxed and I can eat what I want and have fun and socialize. And cannabis allows us to relax. It also helps work on our neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our minds to change. So if you feel like you are stuck in that high-functioning, high-anxiety, high-achieving mode and you're a woman over 40, you may want to think about trying some, again, CBD is perfect for this because it's not psychoactive. You're still in full control. But it helps your brain be open to new ideas. So if you're hesitant and you're listening to me and you're saying, OK, well, maybe more isn't better, maybe less is more, but I don't know how to do less is more because I've always done more is more, right? I get that. So CBD might open your mind a little bit to be able to understand and be willing to try less is more and might be willing to try new things. So neuroplasticity is just the ability of our brain to try new things in a nutshell. Scientifically, the explanation is a lot more detailed, but in a nutshell, it's our ability of our brain to try new things. And so CBD can help our brains with that process. And it's pretty freaking cool that it can do that even in a non-psychoactive manner, which is CBD, not psychoactive, no buzz, complete control. So just throwing that out there as an example of how cannabis can help us relax. It can help anxiety. It can help with neuroplasticity. And again, if you're interested in any part of this topic at all, which is letting go of perfectionism, trying to do less is more, trying to get into that mentality, trying to get into the better than nothing mentality, or trying to break free from the chains of anxiety and the chains of the stress and the high achieving mentality. Again, not that there's anything wrong with that. And in a lot of areas of our life, that is an excellent way to be. And it makes us very successful. But if you're like me and you relate to all of this and you want to talk about it, please, please let me know. And just shoot me an email. I am Beth at Cannafitnessnutrition.com. I am on Instagram. It's Beth underscore Cannafitnessnutrition. And I believe if you go to the podcast show, you can email me and contact me right through the podcast as well. So thank you for listening. Thank you for letting me be on my soapbox today and listening and sharing this time with me. Please share. Please rate and share with your friends. Again, if you know a high achieving woman over 40 and she might need to hear this, then please send it to her. And I will see you next time.