Episode 342: Eating Healthy According to Your Lifestyle

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 food 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, beautiful people. How are you? I hope you’re having a wonderful month and just a good day. Whatever you’re doing during the night, I know a lot of you’re working out. Maybe you’re doing laundry or driving or whatever you’re doing. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I’m super excited to get into our topic of eating healthy according to your lifestyle. This is so important because anything else you know about health and fitness like is irrelevant if it does not work for your life. Dave Ramsey says and I know there’s a lot of feelings about Dave Ramsey. Some people love them. Some people are like, I don’t like any of this stuff, or somewhere in between. But Dave Ramsey says that personal finance is 80% behavior and 20% head knowledge. And I think that’s so true. For the majority of us with health and fitness like I do think yes, there’s absolutely a time that maybe we have no idea what is truly good for us or not because we’ve been handled a lot of messages from diet culture and push to eat low calorie and do a lot of cardio and those kinds of things. But I do think if you’re a person, especially who’s been around here for a while, has been a part of the healthy Catholic moms community for a while maybe we’ve even worked together, you know what to do. It’s the actual doing it. And I think a lot of times we get caught in this like guilt, shame cycle, failure, guilt, shame, all that because we know what’s quote, unquote, healthy, but then we’ll how we try to go about it doesn’t fit our life. So then when we fail, we blame ourselves and we’re like, Well, come on, I’m just stupid. I just can’t do this. Like, why can other people do it? And I can’t. And a lot of times, it’s like, it’s just not working for us. It’s just not an example would be if at this time in my life, I was trying to go to the gym five days a week. I’m like, Okay, I need to hit five workouts a week. That’s what I’m shooting for. Maybe I say I’m even working with somebody, I’m not but I’m working with somebody, they told me, I need to be working out five days a week. Okay? So that’s my plan. But then things keep happening. My husband gets home from work late, and I can’t go to the class that I was gonna go at night. Go to at night. Let’s say like, in the morning, I was going to get up and go, but a kid had a nightmare and I was up with the kids. So then I missed my early alarm. Like, I would feel frustrated, I’d feel like I just couldn’t get together when in reality, the whole getting outside the house five days a week maybe just isn’t fitting for me right now. or Now the way that we’re gonna talk about this today. Same thing with if you’re like, Okay, I just need to eat the certain way. I just need to plan my meals and then eat my meals. It has to fit your life and it has to be something you enjoy. So overall, we’re talking about today.
If it’s better, or what you know, is ideal. Is it better to eat five small meals is it better to eat three kind of like square meals we think a more rounded out meals. Now, before we even go further on this. I want to say you can do your own research of course, but research is very much spend this idea, you’ll have some fitness professionals and nutritionists say, It’s better to have three full meals and spaced them out so that your body has time to digest in between. And that you shouldn’t snack because it’s better for your body to just have a whole meal and then have a break from digesting, then you’re going to find a whole nother camp of fitness professionals and nutritionists who say that it’s best to have small meals throughout the day to keep your blood sugar high or you know, reasonable, but we don’t want to spike it, we don’t want to spike and then crash to keep it stabilized, I should say. And there’s a lot of mixed messages again, like I just talked about mixed messages. My takeaway my opinion, and based on anecdotal research from myself, and my clients is that it doesn’t matter as much which method you go with. But it matters more what you can adhere to, in my opinion. And from my point of view, what matters most is your overall calorie allotment. If you are trying to burn fat to lose fat, I should say lose fat, not necessarily burn because we’re all burning fat. But say you’re pursuing fat loss, you want to be in a calorie deficit, which is taking in less than you are burning, okay? If you’re trying to just be in maintenance, that’s awesome. That’s my goal for you. I want everyone who is currently in fat loss mode to one day get to maintenance, so that you’re not always trying to chase last five pounds or whatever, say you’re at a healthy weight, healthy body fat you’re trying to maintain, you’re good to take in what you’re burning, okay, so it’s more about your calories over the whole span of the day. So say, and this is totally dependent on your own caloric needs. If you want a little bit of help with this, I have a free download on my website that helps you figure out your overall calorie needs and your macro targets. And if that sounds Greek to you, go get the free PDF, and it will make a lot more sense I walk you through that. That’s where it unhealthy Catholic moms.com right on the homepage. But say, arbitrary number here, you get 1800 calories a day. And that is your deficit, you’re trying to lose fat. It’s more about you being able to stick to that 1800 And your macros settings, then you trying to like eat specific meals. And then if you miss one freaking out over eating under eating, it’s more about the whole span of the day. So what I want you to do is to do what works for you, and what you can stick with long term. Now how to get there like okay, well Brittany, how do I decide which one you have to take into account both your preferences, what you actually like to do, but then also what your life actually looks like, okay, because I could say, Oh, I love to snack. And you know, I love snacking. And eating small meals like I don’t like waiting between lunch and dinner. I like to have some like nots and an apple or something. But in reality, I’m barely even getting my meals in because I’m so busy, then I’ve got to tweak things around. So this depends on where you’re at in life. And I would urge you to like reconsider it in different seasons. Because I will say for my own personal self and experiences, my preference is to do kind of smaller meals, not small, but like normal sized meals, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then having two or three snacks throughout the day. You know, maybe between breakfast and lunch, I like to have an after dinner snack like I don’t often just eat dinner and then go to bed. I often have something else later on whatever. But I do have periods, usually kind of like freshly postpartum, like, it’s usually not in that first three months, because I remember to eat then. And I’m really focused on it. But it’s usually when my babies like three to nine months, that I’m like, Oh my gosh, it’s two o’clock. And I’ve had one protein bar this whole day. So it’s not reasonable there for me to be like, Well, my preference is to eat snacks, like no, I need to worry about getting meals in and about beefing up my meals to make sure they keep me full and get enough calories in because I probably am not going to have time to eat again until the next meal. Okay, so it’s kind of like knowing yourself and knowing what your schedule actually looks like. And this goes for my stay at home moms but absolutely for my moms who work outside the home too, because I’ve had clients who want to be the snackers but then I’ll look at their logs and like you ate 800 calories today like what happened and they’re like, Oh, well I’m a teacher and I didn’t get to that one snack because whatever and I work you know, I saw a lot of patients that day and I didn’t have time to have in between. So then you have to that’s a cue that you need to up the calories you’re eating at your other meals. If you get a half hour break for lunch or again, you’re at home and you’re gonna at least try to pull something out of the fridge like have it ready to go and make sure it’s like 500 to 700 calories so that it fills you up for your next meal. That’s another thing we are it’s ingrained in us to go low calorie, low calorie you need to use up your calories. I just said if you’re working off 1800 calories a day If you’re eating three meals a day with no snacks, your meals need to be 600 calories. Don’t think, oh needs to be 300 calories is enough for a meal. It’s about what your body needs. Okay, so go off what your preferences are, and then what your life actually looks like what’s actually occurring? Like, even if you have decided this and you think you have one way it’s gonna work well look at it over the course of a week or two, like, are you eating on average the right number of calories and macros a day? Or has it been wildly fluctuating because you sometimes don’t get it in. And overall, that is what the two approaches are the three larger meals, or three smaller meals and two snacks or looking at it and what I how I’d encourage you to to look at that as more as five small meals. Because here’s the thing, when we hear the word snack, we think processed food, it’s true. Like okay, so that’s three meals and we’ll think like, okay, like eggs or whatever. And then lunch would be like a chicken salad or something and then dinner, you know, okay, we think meat, potatoes, vegetable or something like that. And then snack, we
think, protein bar, or this process who did that process food where,
if you think about it as five small meals, you’re gonna think more like, when I was teaching full time, middle school, I remember I would have usually get always varied, sometimes I do a protein shake for breakfast. Or I would do honestly a lot of similar things that I do now. overnight oats was a heavy phase. And I usually hit that again, as a heavy phase, I would do overnight oats in the morning. And then my snack air quotes here between breakfast and lunch was too hard boiled eggs and a link of chicken sausage. So that might not be something you consider a normal snack. But it was a whole clean food. It wasn’t you know, it’s like slightly processed that will think. But it was lots of protein. It fueled me to keep going it’s not what we would typically think of as a quote unquote snack. So I actually encourage you to think about it as either three full larger meals or five smaller meals. Now, I do recommend making sure each meal has a nice balance of carbs, fat and protein. We talked about that a lot here. Because it’s you know, you can have variety to this. It is cool to be able to make your macros fit your lifestyle, where if you know you’re going to have pizza for dinner, you can go later on the carbs for breakfast and lunch. However, for most of us to stay full all day, to be our best energy all day, we want to round out those meals more so Okay, having Waffles Breakfast is still going to make us if they’re not protein waffles or something like just your generic, really high carb, but low fat and low protein waffles at breakfast, it’s going to make you crash by lunch and you want it to be more rounded out. So having a quarter of a waffle and or half a waffle with some eggs and bacon would be a much better choice. So even with those snacks, you know, if you’re having trail mix and an apple like put those you want those together, I just did an episode really recently on food pairings to combat energy crashes, something along those lines was the title. And that’s important because if you are trying to split things up, you still want it to be working for your optimal health and energy. And last tip here is once you’ve figured out what works really well for you and like, again, don’t try to set it and forget it like you never have to revisit this because I’m always switching this up in different stages like Okay, I’m back to being able to stack now I can go back to having my night snack and I want to save some calories for that and all that rocket and don’t feel bad about it because I’ve had so many clients tell me, I did really well this week eating Bruni, except that I had this one thing past 7pm There was like one night my husband I had a drink and you know we had some food or we had this idea that you don’t have to live by anybody’s arbitrary guidelines. And you might just have some set in your head from seriously what you’ve heard or what you’ve read in fitness magazines. And it is more about the overall calorie allotment not only of the day, but of the week, and what most of your days look like you’re not going to die and you’re not going to gain fat from eating something at 701 instead of eating it at 658 Okay, so do what works best for you I just shared I do like to have something after dinner. So typically I am not closing out my kitchen. Right after dinner. It’s usually I try not to eat right before bed. Most researchers can agree that that’s not ideal for sleep and digestion. But I do like to usually have something in the hours after dinner so get rid of that guilt. Get rid of that shame like that has no place here. You get to decide how you’re going to use your calories throughout the day. Again, just stick to some of these guidelines. Try to make sure macros are rounded out and take it from there. Right, I hope this was helpful. Go check out their free download if you don’t know what your calorie allotment and macros would look like. And I have coaching calls available on my website too if you ever want to work this out together, come up with a plan together that’s on the work with me page right at the bottom is my coaching call calendar, and all that good stuff. I love this stuff. I could talk about it all day. So I pretty much do here. All right, next time speaking of we’re gonna talk about removing the obstacles that are in the way of your fat loss and maintenance. It’s gonna be a good one. All right, talk to you then have a good rest of your day.

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