Episode #310: Your Body is Not Supposed to Look Like it Did When You Were a Teenager

Intro:

Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting. I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make foods that kids will actually want to eat. Mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where
we’re striving to steward our bodies well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy
you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Main Episode:

Hello, my beautiful friends. I hope you’re having a wonderful day a wonderful week. And I’m so happy you’re here. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I can’t wait to hop into today’s episode. If you are new around here and you are not sure what healthy Catholic moms is all about. I know you heard it in a nice long intro, if you stuck with the intro of the podcast, but you can also head over to healthy Catholic moms.com. You can see what kind of programs I offer there, how we can work together one on one or what might be a great fit for you. If that’s something you are interested in. I have freebies there too, like a free download on determining your macros. I have free workout videos on YouTube, tons of free resources, like this podcast that I tried to put out for those who are not looking to, you know, make a financial commitment at this time. There’s tons of free resources, or email us you can sign up for just shoot me an email Bernie healthy Catholic bombs.com or send me a message on Instagram. And I will add you to that. And I send out recipes workouts, tons of fun stuff every Thursday in your inbox. So we today are talking about how your body should Yes, in fact look different. Right now. whatever age you are, than it did in your teens now barring the fact that I have any teens listening to this. So I was thinking about if your conversation with the client, which is usually where a lot of my podcast episode ideas come from, or work from working in programs or working one on one with people and things that come up or things that I’m personally thinking about praying about cetera. And, you know, I am absolutely all for bettering your health, even bettering your physique and bettering the aesthetics of your body. So as with pretty much everything in the world, I think that there is danger in being not moderate and being too much one way, right. I think you can say that for a lot of things. It’s fine to enjoy food, it’s not fine to be gluttonous, it’s fine to enjoy alcohol, it’s not fine to over indulge, it’s fine to take rest and to have rest time, it’s not fine to be slothful, you know, onward. in pretty much every area that advice is usually on one extreme. So similarly with working out, you know, it’s fine to take care of our bodies, it’s fine to strive to look our best, especially those of us who are in the state of life where we are thinking or called a marriage or we are married. And that’s something I’m really passionate about is you can listen back to other podcast episodes and you might have already you know about Yes, I do work out for my spouse and things like that, because I do think, you know, that’s something that’s a funny meme or a funny reel and culture like Look what my husband got when he you know, married me and then look what he has now. And yes, that’s another conversation for another day, which I’ve had it before. So go back and listen, one of those, but you know, I, you know, there is that part where we get more comfortable with each other and we obviously want to let our hair down around that person and changes happen naturally, which we’re going to talk about today. But we don’t want to just, you know, throw it out the window like not make any effort. You wouldn’t want your husband to do that and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want you to do that to just never dress yourself up for him or throwing a little makeup or to cure, to try to maintain a healthy weight, those kinds of things. Okay? This is not a guilt or shame conversation saying if anyone you know, is overweight, you’re a bad person or a bad wife, absolutely not. We all have different struggles, that all come out in different ways. And there’s different reasons for weight and body fat struggles and all of that. So I know that was a big intro already.

But the conversation that I had with this client was more about chasing a number on the scale, and chasing like pant sizes and whatnot that they had years ago, and kinda was trying to boil down to, you know, why do you think you need to be that number? Or why is that number your goal? Like, what are we hoping to achieve there. And usually, if we really think about it, it’s not usually the satisfaction of meeting that number, say you were 130 in high school. Right now you’re 150 or 160, I’m just picking random weights here, okay. And you have in your head, you really want to get back to 130. Usually,
when I can really get down to it with myself or with others, it’s that you want that feeling. You want to feel how you felt when you were that size, maybe you weren’t self conscious, maybe your clothes fit better, maybe you felt better, like your joints didn’t hurt, you were more energetic, all those associations, you weren’t as self conscious. I don’t know if I said that or not. That’s more of what we’re going for, rather than the actual number, we want what that represents. Now, our bodies are supposed to change.

Okay, there’s again, I think big movements that are like mommy’s like, embrace your stretch marks and like, show us your stretch marks and whatever. And that’s fine. That’s great, because stretch marks. And, you know, lots of different things are part of having kids and part of your body changing. I had stretch marks before I had kids just from going through puberty and whatnot. So this is just part of our bodies, right? growing, changing, we don’t stay stagnant. And that’s totally fine. You don’t have to be rah rah, like, I love my loose skin and stretch marks, but then again, the other side to be chasing perfection. It just really, if we’re coming from a place of knowing that everything we have is a gift from God, and we’re supposed to be stewarding it well, but it’s also old to serve, puts it in a totally different context, right? We are supposed to truly be a living sacrifice. And it even comes down to our bodies. And I think it’s pretty evident when we think about pregnancy. And those of us who nurse after having babies like you are truly making a sacrifice of your body and in other ways to women who don’t carry children who adopt or don’t have children and whatnot. There’s other ways that you make your body, you know that you sacrifice your body for your kids, if you do have kids that you didn’t have biologically and whatnot. But you know, just other ways that you are making a sacrifice of your body. So, especially though, again, when we’re going through those actual physical changes of pregnancy, or nursing, like, Okay, you might want your earplugs in, I’m going to talk just about like female anatomy a little bit. So if you’ve little ears in the car might not be the best time to listen to this one. But truly, if you’re thinking, Oh, I don’t want to nurse because I want to keep perky breasts, you know, until I’m hopefully 60, 70 Whatever, chill age has dropped naturally, that, you know, I would maybe take firm again, not here to judge anybody or say everything, you know, that kind of thing is a personal choice. I don’t think there’s a big moral morality in and of itself of the decision to nurse or not to nurse.

But it’s the intention behind it, if we’re trying so hard to preserve this body. Like we don’t want it to have a single wrinkle, or a single stretch mark or cellulite, or sagging breasts. Like it’s, that’s not the point. You know, the point is, we were given this body to live in to us to serve. It’s it’s like anything else. It’s like the parable of the talents is how I take it. I know a lot of this is interpretation today and just my thoughts I’m sharing with you. But you know, the Parable of the Talents where the servant is supposed to take the talent he has been given and make a profit on it. And when the master comes back, it’s like you buried it in the ground, you know, you did nothing with it, or the servant that made no profit on it, whatnot. I don’t know if anybody I guess that one made no profit. And then I think the other one was a little and the other one made a lot. But we don’t we should look at our bodies like that. Like it’s not just a thing to be preserved to be looked at. And then I think too if if we’re inclined to think that way, if we are inclined to just want to get don’t get it to absolute perfection, get rid of every imperfection or blemish. I think we also have to be real with what our intention is there is is your intention to be, you know, as attractive to your husband as you can or is it for other beings BS, like attracting other people’s attention, other women’s attention, other men’s attention, other, you know, getting those compliments, and how great our legs look in those shorts, or oh my gosh, your abs are so flat after you have the baby, all those kinds of things, you know, because it is true like motherhood, you’re giving so much of your body. And again, I think there are lots of gray areas and decisions here. I know this comes up for a lot of people that I work with in that window after having a baby if they’ve decided to nurse because you do your body does clean to fat while you’re nursing. And it can get to a tough point of should I just, you know, switch to formula. So I can start losing some more of this body fat, especially people who want to have another child hopefully really close together, and they want to lose some fat before getting pregnant. Again, these are hard decisions.

And I think that is personal. And you can take that to prayer, take that to heart and factor it in. But the overall theme here your body should not you should not be chasing. Even for those of us who are like having subsequent kids, maybe you looked a certain way after you had one baby. You don’t have to chase that after your second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, whatever. Or at differing ages.

Okay, this is something that I’ve really wanted to talk about lately is our bodies are naturally supposed to gain a little bit of weight and a little bit of fat as we age. Now, again, I don’t want you to take that here and be like, Oh, see, it’s just because I’m getting older, or OC, Brittany even said, it’s fine. If we gain weight, there is a difference between gaining weight because all of a sudden, you’re sliding a lot in your nutrition, having a lot of highly processed foods having a lot more, I always advocate for 80% whole clean foods, 20% treats, and maybe it’s slipped a little bit and you’re looking for 70/30, that’s different, but a natural, slight increase in fat and in weight is normal is natural.

Now, obviously, again, like your doctor will be looking at your charts and talking to you about this at your appointments and whatnot. And you don’t want to see a big jump here to your right. I know I don’t. But even if you look at body fat skills, I’ve talked a little bit about body fat on this podcast before that is what I think is a really good indicator to follow instead of pounds. Or instead of BMI, don’t worry about BMI. But the body fat scale actually goes up like the range changes.

According to ages, I know I have an episode out there about what your body fat percentage could be looks like whatever, I’m gonna just try to pull this from memory, it might be a little bit off. But if memory serves here, it was up to 30 years old women like 18 to 30, I believe was the cutoff. 25 and under is considered really good. And then the with the range increases past 30 like 30 to 40. It was like 30 and under or 35. And under. So it’s not huge. And again, we don’t want to have these like 20 pound jumps every year. But it’s totally normal to gain a little bit of weight as we age. And you know, I think some of these things we could just fester on so much, especially if you spent if you have a big background in not being comfortable in your body and always pursuing fat loss, it can be hard to shake the mentality that we always need to be pursuing fat loss. There are really sad studies out there. That’s like, you know, out of X amount of women polled, you know, how many percent said they were comfortable at a comfortable weight. And how many percent said they could stand to lose 10 to 15 pounds. That category. I’ve seen this study a couple times. That’s always been the bigger categories not like 100 plus pounds. So people who probably actually might have somebody to lose, it’s almost like it’s the biggest category. And the studies I’ve seen are always women saying they could stand to lose five to 10 or 10 to 15 pounds. I feel like there is a standard or a I don’t know what it is just like a stigma out in our culture that we could always lose a stand to lose a little weight or we should always be pursuing, like that last five pounds. Way back when I did an episode called Do you really want to be 70 or 60 or whatever and trying to lose the same 10 pounds. And a good claim friend had texted me and said wow, I didn’t expect that episode to go that way. Because she thought I was going to harp on like just lose it. So you don’t have to worry all these years about losing the 10 pounds. It’s not about that.

That was not the message of that podcast episode if you haven’t listened to it encourage you to go back and listen to it. But the gist of it is you’ve got to be able to get to a point where you
are not hovering and obsessing over your weight over your size of your skill. I know this is easier said than done. And I know for some of us it is a lifelong process. But it’s one of those things where if you do have significant body fat or body weight that would be healthy for you to use to lose rather, yes, pursue fat loss. That’s totally great. you’re bettering your health,

I’m gonna be the first person to tell you that because I think a lot of times our culture can really blow up this body positivity to be glorifying being obese. And it’s just not healthy, you are at risk for a lot more obesity related diseases, heart related diseases, diabetes, things like that, that, you know, are not a risk factor when you’re at a healthy body weight. So yes, absolutely, if you have significant weight to lose, it would be great to pursue strength training, and get a good balance in your macros going. And just do the slow, steady way and try to get to a place where you are comfortable to maintain that for the rest of your life. I know that is like I made that very simplistic. And you might be hearing that be like Brittany, I’ve been yo yoing my whole life or I’ve struggled with weight my whole life, I get that. So it takes a while to get there. And I know that that might be a lot of years on your journey, right of just trying to get to that point. But then I think a lot of us live in the we are pretty healthy state. You know, we are at a healthy body weight, we’re at a healthy body fat. But it’s kind of never enough. You’re still chasing being a little bit leaner, obsessing a little bit about, you know, wanting to feel a little more cut in your clothes, like so a little, you know, seeing more definition in the mirror and things like that, or being a smaller size. And I just kind of ask you to what out and because are you going to be at and be thinking, you know, I’m so glad that I was so shredded for all those years, or are you going to be thinking about all the great times and experiences and things you had, I was just talking with my sister the other day about she’s just chasing greatness, group workouts, and she listened to the podcast, so shout out if you’re listening. And she was talking about how she had almost nailed all her workouts that week. But she skipped one because she wanted to have breakfast with her husband, because it was a really busy day. And they weren’t, they were just gonna be missing each other a lot and a busy weekend. They have a lot of kids. So you know, life’s crazy. And she was like, You know what I just traded it in for kinda the greater good that day of a workout will be great. But, you know, having breakfast with my husband today, and like the 20 minutes we’ll be together is more important. And I could not agree more like yes, sometimes there are things like that, like, if I’m playing do a workout and a neighbor stops by unexpectedly, I’m not going to do my workout, I’m going to invite them in for a cup of coffee or cup of tea in Yes, maybe inside of it. This was rough timing, you know.

But those are the things like, these are the things that matter. These are the things that just go so far beyond being the perfect physique or maintaining the absolute perfect physique. So that is my challenge for you today to kind of sit with this, too. Maybe this gave you a little bit of freedom and a little bit of okay, like, I don’t need to always get back to or get to a certain place. I think that these middle years, I might be just totally speak for myself here. But like 20 to 50 I want to say like this, this window of 20 to 50 year old, that it can be tempting to always try to get back to quote unquote, when we think we were the healthiest. So whatever age that was, maybe if you’re like 45 listening to this show, like for me, that was 25 or for me, there’s 30 what we should be doing is trying to be the healthiest versions of ourselves at the current age that we are because it sounds ridiculous. If you keep scaling that up for always chasing, looking like we did 10 years earlier. You know, you’re not going to be 85 and trying to look like you’re 35 you just will have accepted it hopefully at that point thinking, yeah, it’s normal that I wrinkles. Yeah, it’s normal, that I’m losing some muscle, my skin is sagging, you’re like this is life. This is how our bodies work. I know it’s hard to actually watch. I’m not, you know, on this throne pontificating over here. I have gray hairs that pop it up. I have the number elevens between my eyebrows like I have more cellulite than I used to have like all those things, I get it. I’m here with you. And again, I’m not the person waving the flag saying embrace it. And glorifying it, but I’m also like, okay, that’s that’s how life goes. It’s not my time to have no no gray hairs like this is gonna just continue in this way. And it’s fine and it’s normal. We don’t need to be chasing this mountain of views. So be healthy. At the age and stage you are except the fact that your body was made to have some wear and tear. It is a living sacrifice. We’re offering backup. We’re supposed to use what we’ve got. And I’ll be I would be pretty embarrassed if you know, the Lord comes back to Earth and he’s like Brittany, why does your body still look like you know when I gave it to you have it well, because I spent three hours a day trying to preserve it. I’d run six miles a day and then I do the sauna and then I dry brush And then I got liposuction and then I did this and that. I mean like to what and what what good did that do anybody truly so be the healthiest that you can be within reason at the age and stage you are, use what you got and rocket. All right, that’s my message for you today. I hope this was helpful. I hope someone out there needed to hear this because this was not what I planned to talk about today. But I decided to go a little bit rogue so if you did enjoy it, I would love if you’d rate and review the podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can usually just do that right at like the homescreen of where you find the podcast and I would appreciate that very much. Now next episode ironically, we are going to talk about if you have diastasis recti Dr. Whatever you want to call it that ABS separation from having kids we are going to talk about how you can work to close that gap further. And what that looks like what exercise is that look look looks like? Not just for vanity sake.

Okay, but for the fact that our core is the powerhouse of our body and formed just really getting that to work optimally. Alright, so that’s next episode. Until then I hope you have a great rest of your day. I’ll talk to you then.

Time stamps: