Ep 60 Shifting Your Mindset with Coach Bronson
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Ep 60 Shifting Your Mindset with Coach Bronson
Carole Freeman: Hey, we’re live, everybody!
Do you want to get toned, but you’re avoiding lifting weights because you don’t want to get too muscular?
Are you focused on getting to a certain size or number on the scale instead of focusing on your quality of life?
Do you have a hard time remembering the last time you got a full eight hours of sleep?
Perhaps you’re struggling to change stubborn behaviors so that you can reach your health goals.
Well, guess what? This episode is for you. Stick around and learn how to shift your mindset for success and change the behaviors that really matter so that you can reach your health goals and sustain that high quality of long life.
So welcome to shifting your mindset for keto success. I’ve got a guest today. Coach Bronson, this is episode 60 of Keto Chat for Women. I’m your host, everyone. Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m also a certified clinical hypnotherapist, and I’m a board certified [00:01:00] ketogenic nutrition specialist.
That’s a lot, isn’t it? That’s a lot. I love it. I’ve got the six figures in student loans to prove it, too. So I am a coach near you that specializes in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss and the medical disclaimer we got to plug in. This show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only.
It is not a medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition whatsoever. If you… Or, or maybe we’re actually trying to treat your, your doldrums today. So maybe we’re going to give you a little bit of entertainment. So if you have any questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please, please, please contact your own qualified personal healthcare professional.
After saying all that now. We get to welcome our guest today, coach Bronson. We’re going to have fun getting to know each other together. He reached out to me on Instagram and I did a little bit of digging and I was like, let’s guide, I checked with a couple of people too, that I know.
Coach Bronson: And now I want to know who you talk to.
Coach Bronson’s Bio
Carole Freeman: Coach Bronson has been guiding and training people in health and fitness for over 10 years. He started CrossFit around his 40th birthday and quickly fell in love with the variety. Community coaching and results. It didn’t take long for him to realize that learning more about fitness and becoming a coach was the next pass path to his life was taking.
Basically I’m, I don’t want to bore you all with all that. I mean, not that it’s boring, but I want to, basically he’s spoken various Keto conferences. Salt Lake, they are now called, it used to be called low carb Salt Lake. Right now it’s Keto Salt Lake. It was Keto Salt Lake last time. Yeah. Okay.
Keto con and various other ones too. So anyways, help me welcome everyone. Coach Bronson. Let’s get the let’s get the clappy hands going here. Welcome. Welcome to the show. This is an interactive show too. So if you’re watching, I see we’ve got some live viewers. So go ahead and just give us a comment.
Tell us where you’re watching from. Join the show and coach welcome.
Coach Bronson: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, I saw you. I saw you did a video with somebody. Was that the one you did who you did a video with somebody? I was like, Oh my God, I got to talk to this lady. This is great. Oh, is that Maria?
Maria Emmerich or yeah, yeah, you did a video with somebody and I was like I need to reach out and have a Have a talk with this lady. I know you had Kim Howerton on a while ago I saw your video with Kim and I’m Kim and I are friends there are a couple other people so I was like, okay, we got to do something.
Carole Freeman: Ah, yeah Yeah, it’s been a while the I know for Kim from the conferences and we were We had a little triad of, of best friends. We called ourselves the Keto siblings. Oh, nice. Okay. We hang out at conferences. So yeah, love her and Maria is awesome. I don’t think I’ve ever had Maria on actually. But yeah, I know all the key, the, the keto space people.
But you’re, you’re a newer one to me. I, you know, I’ve been doing [00:04:00] this, I started going to the conferences, the very first low carb USA in San Diego, I was nice. And it’s interesting. I’ve shared this with Pam and Doug after the fact, but it was like their logo at that time. I assumed they’d been around for like 20 years.
Cause. The logo looked like it was that old. Yes. Again, I’ve told them that it was that old place. I got to plug into this because, but anyways, I’ve been you know, the conference scene since, but I haven’t gone to any conferences since the pandemic actually. So I, my last conference that I attended was a low carb Denver.
March of 2020.
Coach Bronson: Wow. That’s crazy. And I’ve done all of mine since then.
Carole Freeman: So that’s where we’ve missed each other. Yeah. That’s why I don’t know you yet. So I remember being there. And it was crazy because it was like the world was shutting down at that time. And I literally didn’t know if they were going to let me get back on a plane to fly back to Seattle.
And it was the time they were announcing everything was shutting down there locally. And we were talking to some of [00:05:00] the local restaurant owners and things. And they were just like, I don’t, I don’t have anyone to, you know, we got to shut down our doors tomorrow. And I have no idea how I’m going to pay my staff or.
You know, live or anything like that. So anyways, that’s, that’s why we haven’t overlapped her with all that. So,
well well, let’s just start with yours.
How did you go from CrossFit to getting into the low carb keto space?
And I, I know you personally follow more carnivore too. So do you want to walk us through your own journey without taking the whole time that we have?
Coach Bronson: Basically. You know, I was in my late thirties.
I found fitness first ones. Once I realized I needed to make a change, my inclination was to go towards fitness. I’d been exposed to fitness. I was more comfortable with fitness. I didn’t really have any understanding of nutrition that much. It was more, I, you know, I knew there were some things I needed to stop doing.
Right. I needed to stop eating. You know, bought baskets of French fries every day. I needed to stop eating donuts for breakfast in the morning and, you know, all of these different things and [00:06:00] pizza, a whole pizza for dinner every night, stuff like that. But in general, it was easier for me to say, I’ll just start going to the gym.
So I went to the gym, started doing some stuff, went on a cruise, met a guy who owned a CrossFit gym. He introduced me to CrossFit. I came back from the cruise, found a gym, started going and absolutely fell in love with it. Fast forward a couple of years, I had gotten certified as a CrossFit coach, ended up opening my own gym.
So I was a gym owner. We’re now, you know, I’m in my mid forties. I’ve been doing CrossFit for five or six years. And I had lost a bunch of weight initially. Was able to do a ton of things physically like my physical ability improved dramatically But then I started realizing that I was still having health issues.
I had IBS. I had bowel urgent bowels It was was my big thing and I started putting on more weight again So I lost about 40 to 50 pounds and then I started putting in a 40 to 50 pounds again. I’m like, wait a second I’m this CrossFitter guy. I’m supposed to be helping these people get in shape and be the example And here I am going the opposite direction of what I think I should be doing, what is going on.
And it was recommended to me to try Carnivore in 2018. Mostly for my IBS, urgent bowels, and the issues that I was having with my health. And the other things that happened post going Carnivore, as far as losing body fat, improving performance, injuries that I, chronic pain and injuries that I was dealing with, they all went away.
A bunch of things happened on top of. My IBS and urgent bowels also going away that really kind of made me go, what is going on? How, how important is it that the food that you eat can have such an impact on my life? Like I just didn’t understand how that, how that could be. So it really got me interested in digging into the, the hows and the whys and the mechanisms and all those different things.
And it’s been a rabbit hole that’s five years going, and I’m not any closer to climbing out of it yet.
Carole Freeman: Oh, it is. The more you learn, the more you, what, what law is that?
That you, the more you learn, the more you feel like you don’t know.
Coach Bronson: You don’t know. Yeah, absolutely.
Carole Freeman: That’s all right. So, so you just jumped right into carnivore then.
Okay.
Coach Bronson: Okay. So I was pretty much whole 30 paleo ish beforehand. So I was, I’d already gone through some. Evolution on the nutrition side. So after I did CrossFit for a while, I was introduced to, you know, going more whole foods, so I went more whole foods, got a lot of processed foods out, wasn’t reducing carbs, wasn’t reducing anything necessarily other than if it didn’t come in a, if it, I only ate it, if it was grown or killed, right, that was pretty much my, my bounds except for alcohol.
I was a three or four glass of wine, a glass of bourbon, a weak guy. And I did a 21 day detox where I didn’t drink alcohol for three weeks. And I lost 10 pounds of body fat, not total weight, just body fat. And my muscle mass stayed the same, everything else.
I literally lost 10 pounds of fat in three weeks just by stopping alcohol.
And that was what really got me going, okay, wait a second. What is this all about? And it was shortly after that I was introduced to carnivore. And then between all of those things happening kind of in that same period, it was like, there’s something with nutrition. I need to understand all of this. And, you know, we were talking beforehand.
You said keto kind of was the last piece of the puzzle for you. It was the last piece of the puzzle for me. You know, there were a lot of things about how I had tried to do nutrition things in the past that just didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t working. It was hard. It was more about my willpower than it was.
This is just how things shouldn’t actually work. And keto, carnivore, understanding how these things work started making me feel like I was actually doing something to support my body’s natural function and not trying to force something because society said that’s how it’s supposed to be done.
Carole Freeman: Well, a lot of people You know, look at like, well, I could never do that.
And I I’ve had that thought myself, like, I don’t know if I could go a hundred percent carnivore, but then I hear the stories of people like give themselves a challenge and they do it for 30 days. And they’re like, wow, I’ve just feel so much better than I ever have. I’m not even looking back. Like I don’t even feel deprived.
Is that kind of what the experience was for you with getting rid of them?
Coach Bronson: Honestly, for me, like I love eating meat. I only ate vegetables because, you know, I had to, you know, like I didn’t really, I never, I never missed them. And I was, I’m also very pragmatic about certain things. And I realized that anything I liked about vegetables had nothing to do with the vegetables that had to do with what I did to the vegetables, right?
It was the oil. It was the fat and the seasonings and the salt that I put on the vegetables. That I’m writing, right? It wasn’t the, well, not even the breading, like I would love brussel sprouts. I get, you know, broiled brussel sprouts, but it was the olive oil in the seasonings that I liked, not the brussel sprouts.
Yeah. And salads. It’s about the salad dressing, you know, all of these different things. It’s not like I’m going to go eat a bunch of romaine lettuce and carrots by themselves in a bowl, you know, give me the cheese and the dressing and the other stuff on top of it. Then I can enjoy a salad. So I realized it really wasn’t about the veggies.
So I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I got to eat more. So that was the other aspect of making that change is I didn’t have to worry about. over eating because everything I was eating was supporting my bodily, my bodily function, my metabolic function. And it took a whole bunch of stress about having to, Oh my God, I don’t want to do this.
Do you want to do that? And freaking out, especially in that initial transition. For me, the initial transition was literally just what is it like to just eat meat and how long can I do that? It was months into that before I started saying, okay, Let me look at my macros. Let me look at how much I’m eating of this or that and what I need and what works and what doesn’t work.
And how does this affect my performance? How does this affect my body composition and things like that? But my initial transition into carnivore was literally just eat whatever I had and then go buy more. It was so easy.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And, and, you know, we talked before we came on air that, you know, my training was about.
You know, don’t restrict eating. That’s what causes people to obsess about food. But
my experience of this, and people who do carnivore, report that the simplicity just takes away all of that. And, and then when you’re feeding your body properly, those cravings and food obsession actually go away.
Yeah. Yeah. So the, the, with the, the, the rules and the parameters, and I don’t know if it’s Rob Wolf that said this or Peter Attia, cause I’ve read everything they’ve ever put out that they talk about how you need some guidelines. Allowing all the foods that are available on this planet is where the food obsession comes from and the cravings and the overeating.
Everything in moderation. Yeah, you can’t sign for that. So
Having rules and guidelines are what enable freedom.
Coach Bronson: Right. If we look at, you know, what would the world be like if we didn’t have roads and traffic laws and everyone was just driving all over the place willy nilly just because that’s what they wanted to do and they wanted to get there.
However, they wanted to get there, right? We are able to travel from one end of the country to the other any way that we want to, as long as we follow the rules of the road and we stay on the path. And that is how it is in our lives. Having the, having self imposed restriction and guidelines and a direction that you want to go and things that you’re not willing to give up and things that you are willing to give up in order to move forward is how you make progress.
If you have everything that’s available, then you’re going to stay in the same place because you’re not going to move in any one direction for every step forward. You’re going to move a step back to go do something else. So you’ve got to have rules and guidelines in order to help you move forward.
Carole Freeman: And you asked what it looks like if you had no roads.
Well, that literally the wild West in the U S and the what? Yeah. So we’re living in the wild West of our eating habits here. In the U S and great part of the world now with all the food moving around the world, but yes, with the wild, wild west of their eating habits, I my last episode, I had somebody request the topic of, well, how, how can I eat whatever I want and still lose weight?
And so part of it is having some rules and guidelines of what you eat. I actually covered, I think it covered like six or eight or nine different things that trigger us to overeat. But basically set up some rules for yourself of things you eat and don’t eat and there’s remove, removes the decision meal time.
Right. Yeah, I’m like, and I have cake or I’m not going to have cake. No, I don’t eat cake.
Coach Bronson: Yeah, exactly. I don’t eat cake. I don’t, I don’t eat it. So it’s not a choice where I have to figure out, am I going to do it today? No, I’m never going to do it. It’s just not something that I do. I use the analogy a lot when I work with clients.
It’s like, look, you know, if you’re at a restaurant and you see someone leave their purse behind on the table. Next to you. Is it in your thought process that maybe I’ll take that person, take it home with me? It’s not even something in, it’s not even something that crosses your mind. You think, Oh, somebody left the purse.
I need to see if they’re still there or I need to turn it in or some like that’s how it should be with food. That’s how it should be with exercise. That’s how it should be with spending time with your spouse. Like these are things that you do because that’s just. The, the lifestyle that you’ve decided you’re going to live for yourself.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And I use a lot of the analogies with my work, with my clients of CrossFit, right? So one of my, one of my ladies, one of my peer coaches has been a CrossFitter for gosh, I don’t know how long now, five, 10 years, probably at least. And you know, we can learn so much about the CrossFit model, about how to manage our eating habits, I think, right.
Because like it,
It becomes part of your identity.
I’m a crossfitter.
Coach Bronson: I love you. So glad you said that word,
Carole Freeman: you know, it also the community that’s there that, you know, you need that community. You belong. It’s important. If you don’t show up at the gym, they notice and they call you out next time. Right.
It’s part of the culture. We all do these really hard things together and yeah, it’s hard, but we’re here for each other and everyone else is doing it and that’s part of what makes it work too. So I, I, I love the CrossFit model for, you know, We’re looking at it as, you know, how do you facilitate change, behavior, change, and things that are really hard to do.
Cause it is hard to make eating habit change and lifestyle changes.
Coach Bronson: Yeah. I love that you said identity because that’s really a big piece of the whole puzzle when it comes to behavior change. And that is, you know, I was, I’ll just use myself as an example. I was unhappy in my late thirties because. I’ll tell you the pivotal point for me is my, we were at the beach, my daughter took a picture of me sitting at the beach and in the beach chair and I looked like a beached whale.
I’m sitting here looking at this picture of myself and I’ve got man boobs, I got my gut sticking out, you know, I’m like, I’m like, I don’t ever show this picture to every, like, just get rid of this picture. I’m glad she didn’t because I need it now. I use it in my, in my content to say, hey, this is where I was.
But it was the first time. That I was visually confronted with the reality that I was living and it didn’t match the identity that I had created for myself in my head. And I was like, okay, something has to change here. And I was forced to make a decision. Either I accept my reality and stay where I am or I need to redefine and clarify the identity that I want to have and start doing the things that that person would do.
Right. So I had to create this identity. Okay. The picture I have in my head of who I am is I’m active. I don’t have health issues. I don’t have injuries. I, you know, I feel comfortable in my skin. I’m not embarrassed to take my shirt off at the beach, you know, all of these different things, and then I said, okay.
What does that person do? This person is now a fictional person in my future. If I look at that person’s life and say, what is that? What are the things that person does every day? What does he do when he gets out of bed? What does he do for breakfast? What does he do for work? Who does he hang out with?
What does he do in the afternoon? When does he go to sleep? Like, you start putting these things together. And then if you start doing those things that you picture this person doing, before you know it, you’ll be that person. Right? If we want to, we like to compare ourselves to people all the time. Well, I challenge people listening to this to compare yourselves to who you want to be.
And
start doing the things that person was doing and you will start moving yourself closer to the lifestyle that you want to have.
Carole Freeman: I’m glad you shared the, the pivotal picture moment for you. Cause I’m pretty sure a lot of the ladies listen to this, have had a very similar experience where they get that one picture that they go, Oh my gosh.
My inner reality doesn’t match my outer reality. So I love that you’re okay. So this is a great thing. You know, talking about what is, what is the person that I have that I want to be? What do they do? How do you talk people through the things where they go? Yeah, but I still want to have, I still want to have that wine with my girls on the weekend and I.
I still want to do this. And what about this? Like, what kind of, what kind of mindset shifts can you give those people that are stuck with that? Like, but what about cake on my birthday? And what about on the cruise when I want to do this?
Coach Bronson: And yeah, there’s two,
There’s two key pieces to that puzzle. I think that one is emotion and the other is knowledge.
So there’s two things that have worked for me and it worked for a lot of my clients. And that is one identifying their, why are there, why not? Why do they say they want something or why or what don’t they want in their life anymore? And digging and digging and digging and digging to the non surface level reasons why they want something.
So I want to lose weight. Why do you want to lose weight? Well, so that I can. Look good in a bathing suit. Why do you want to look good in the bathing suit? Well, because I feel, I feel like at my age, I want to show up. I want to show out and say that it’s possible at my age. Well, why is that important to you?
Well, because, and you have to dig and it’s because, well, when my mother. When I was a kid, my mom was always harping on how she never looked good and she always felt overweight and I don’t want to be that when I’m her age, you got to keep digging and digging and digging. If the, if the reason you say you want to do something doesn’t elicit emotion, when you talk about it, then it’s not deep enough and you need to keep digging.
Okay, your why should make you cry. And that is absolutely a very important factor in the process because You’re emotionally tied to the food right now. You’re emotionally tied to your comfort zone. You’re emotionally tied to not going to the gym because going to the gym is uncomfortable. Whatever the things are that you think you need to do to make progress, you have an emotional reason not to do it.
If your emotional reason to do it isn’t stronger than the opposite, And you’re never going to move forward. So a lot of times I, I work with people to dig and dig and dig to find that thing that makes them emotionally vulnerable to why they really want to make a change. And then you have to keep that in front of you every single day.
That’s, that’s one aspect, the emotional connection to your why. The second thing is knowledge. And understanding what things are actually doing to your body. And this happened with me, with the alcohol for the 21 day detox I did, where I lost 10 pounds of fat. This has happened for me over the period of time when I learned about other different things, fitness and nutrition wise.
But alcohol was probably one of the biggest things, my identity. And it’s hard for me now. Even today, I still identify in many ways as a bourbon guy. I haven’t had a glass of bourbon. I think in the last five years I’ve had two glasses of bourbon, right? I used to be like I said, three or four glasses a week.
I have 12 bottles of bourbon in the cabinet that have moved with me twice in the past few years, three times in the past few years that are just sitting in a box because I can’t drink. Yeah. Yeah. Fully give them away or get rid of them because it’s just, I still identify as that. I don’t drink it anymore.
I don’t drink alcohol at all because I realized, and I got the knowledge about what alcohol actually does. The immense damage that alcohol does to the human body, even in small doses. blew my mind and it literally got me to say, I’m never touching that again. It’s not happening. I just, I can’t do it.
There’s absolutely no benefits. Everything about alcohol is a net negative in the conversation. And there is nothing that I can say about alcohol to justify. What it does to me compared to the social impact or how I feel if I drink it. It just, they just don’t outweigh each other by any means. So having the knowledge of what things are actually doing and how they’re affecting your progress, how they’re affecting your life, how they’re affecting your brain capacity, mental health, whatever it may be is another big aspect.
So I think people educating themselves and understanding what’s going on and how these things affect you is a big piece as well.
Carole Freeman: That’s what one of the shift that one of my ladies made recently, she’s just said, you know, all of her family were drinking and she was having some, and then she just realized, wait, why am I doing this to my body?
Like this is poison. And so she just made that shift of like, it wasn’t like I’m missing out. I’m being deprived for me. Everyone gets to do it. Why can’t I, it was just. Oh, this is poison. Why am I doing this to myself? And then she’s like, not an issue anymore.
Coach Bronson: And absolutely. Once you, once something clicks about, wow, this is really not.
And I think one of the, the, the big mindset shifts that I work with people is to stop thinking in pros and cons. And to start thinking in net and like finances, like net positive, net negative, and start thinking about things. Because when you think about a net positive, net negative, it takes the emotional, personal bias out of the conversation.
If I’m thinking pros and cons, I can put in a whole bunch of biased, you know, emotional context and. Justification into that conversation about why I should or why I shouldn’t do something if I literally just look at like, look at the situation like a balance sheet and I say, is this going to move me forward or is this going to hold me back or is this going to set me backwards?
Am I positive? Am I balanced? Or am I negative? Where am I based on the decisions I have in front of me? And it’s a real easy way to say, because you know, if something’s in that negative, And you know, if it’s going to set you off in the wrong direction and you then get to make a choice. This is my health as a, as a financial model.
Okay. You’re probably like many people in the world today, starting from a negative balance. You are 10, 20, 30, a hundred, 300,000 in debt. And you’re wondering why you can’t get out of debt when you’re out there going shopping all the time, and you’re eating out, and you’re having parties, and you’re buying fancy cars, and you’re buying fancy clothes, these are all corollaries for eating food that’s not helping your health, right?
And your, your, your health balance isn’t, isn’t getting into the black, right? You’re, you’re always going to be a negative if you never do anything to increase that balance.
Carole Freeman: The health accounting with health accounting. Great. I want to shift gears a little bit and kind of talk. I mean, this kind of, this kind of fits too, but you know, we talk about the difference of like people that are really
Hyper focused on getting to a certain size, a certain number on the scale versus focusing on quality of life.
Coach Bronson: Yeah. Quality of life is where my focus is. And I think of all of the things that I’ve learned over the years because I’ve been through two different phases. I’ve been through the let’s lose fat. I’ve been through the let’s just build muscle. I’ve been through the let’s try to be as athletically, you know, proficient as possible.
I’ve, I’ve been through the, I just want to look good naked, all of the different phases. I want to feel okay. I want to be okay. Taking my shirt off. You know, there’s even times now where I feel like I don’t know if I want to take my shirt off, right? And I’m in the best shape of my life at 51 years old. Some of that stuff never changes, but what does change and what does impact how you live every day is.
Your physical independence, you can’t have a good quality of life if you can’t physically participate in that life and the combination of nutrition, the combination of fitness and what you need to do in order to have a healthy functioning metabolism has nothing to do with any of the specifics that a lot of people like to talk about.
And what I mean by by that is people come to me all the time and they’re like, I want to lose fat. Or I want to lose weight. Okay, great. That’s fantastic. You realize that the things that we do to lose fat do not necessarily increase your quality of life. So you can lose fat and then that fat’s going to come back.
But you haven’t done anything to actually live better. Okay. When we look at the symptoms of the issue, which body fat is a symptom of metabolic dysfunction. Okay. Okay. Metabolic dysfunction is the thing to address. Metabolic dysfunction is fuel management, lean mass, physical ability, brain function, central nervous system, biological systems, physiological systems.
There’s a lot more to it than just body fat. When we look at specific methods of doing things, I get this all the time as well. Well, I’m fasting. Why are you fasting? This is an example. Well, I’m fasting because this can help me lose weight. Okay, great. What about improving your metabolic function?
Fasting isn’t going to help build lean mass. Fasting is going to increase your BMR. Fasting isn’t going to help you get stronger. So, a lot of the… Influencers out there in the space, a lot of the information out there in the space is targeted at, and I get it because that’s what people want. So you can have to market to what people are thinking in their head they want, and you can kind of switch it on them when they get in and be like, Hey, guess what?
This is really what you’re going to get. But there’s a lot of people that are thinking fat loss is the key or weight loss is the key. Or, you know, something magic is going to happen when I get to my goal weight. , and I don’t know if you know Autumn Weathers. Mm-hmm. Watch Autumn Keto. She has a great talk that she does that’s basically talks.
She talks about if you don’t love yourself where you are, you won’t love yourself at your goal weight either. Mm-hmm. , right? Your goal weight has nothing to do with how you feel about yourself.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I gotta reach out to her. Autumn. Autumn, if you’re watching, I want to have you on, ’cause that’s a topic I want to Yes.
Coach Bronson: It’s great topic. Yeah.
Watch Autumn Keto.
She’s got a YouTube channel too. So, you know, understanding that, you know, when we talk about quality of life, that is the thing that you really want. There’s something about the, the weight that you think that is limiting your ability to enjoy life. And you think losing the weight is going to fix it, but it’s not.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I want to lose 60 pounds. Randomly, just I’m gonna lose 60 pounds now and no, there is something that’s built up over a year, two years, five years, 10 years, your entire life that has got you to the point where you think it’s time to make a change and weight loss is the change that’s going to fix your all the other things about you.
that you don’t like and understanding that that’s not the case. Building strength is going to improve confidence. Building strength is going to improve physical ability. Building muscle is going to help your immune system. It’s going to help you heal faster. It’s going to prevent you from having injuries.
Increasing your protein is actually going to help your hormone production and energy management. There’s a lot of things about doing more than what we think. When we think about, you’re getting me on a tangent now. You’re getting me on my soapbox. When we think about things other than quality of life, We’ll limit immediately start in the process of elimination.
When we think about quality of life, we think about what am I adding to my life? The mindset shift is if I’m just thinking about fat loss, what do I need to cut out? So I lose fat because I’m thinking about reducing and losing something. What if we weren’t thinking about that? What if we were thinking about how do I add to my life?
How can I improve my confidence? How can I improve my strength? How do I? Increase my physical ability to participate in activities every day. What are those types of things that I can do to increase and add and grow, which now becomes, it’s not about restriction. It’s not about limitation. It’s not about, I’m, I’m not able to enjoy the things that I’m doing because everything in that mindset is about growth, enjoyment, and, and prosperity.
And in your life, instead of just losing and restricting and, and dieting.
And that’s why I like quality of life over everything else.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, I find it’s a, it’s a soapbox topic for me as well. And it’s a really hard shift for a lot of my ladies to make, because, you know, for decades, 40, 50 years, they’ve just got this broken record in their head.
And they really believe that if there are certain size or a number on the scale, everything in their life will magically be amazing. Yeah. It’s never the case. Like there’s research that shows that people have had gastric bypass and they lose, you know, hundreds of pounds and they still are just as unhappy in that smaller body.
And then they also have often often have body dysmorphic disorder where they still feel like I just, I lost a hundred pounds and I still feel like I’m the same. Size. And it’s really because you haven’t healed, change that mindset inside of your head to realize that you’re why that you talked about, like, if it doesn’t make you cry, like remembering that.
And I have some of my ladies that have lost, you know, over 80 pounds, but they still feel like. And they’ve got amazing quality of life and their labs are amazing. And they’re like, yeah, but I still am this, I still weighed this much. And it’s like, you know, I, so then I try to do the experiment of like, okay, so what if you woke up tomorrow and the scale said, you just woke up magically tomorrow, the scale is the number that you want.
How would you, how would, would you feel? And they’re like, well, no, not really, you know?
Coach Bronson: And I’m like, see, and another thing that too is to think about is
How do we quantify quality of life?
You know, this is another aspect on the flip side of the, of the discussion is when we look at just the fat loss or looking at a weight goal where people run into walls along the way, because you’re only looking at one thing, [00:33:00] it’s like you’re, you’re walking on a sidewalk or you’re walking down the street or a path and you’re walking and you’re looking at the path directly in front of you, you run into a wall, you don’t know what to do because you didn’t see the wall coming, but now you don’t know how to get around it because you’re just looking at this little thing right in front of your feet.
Right. But if you look up and look around when we talk about our quality of life, it opens up the possibility, you know, without getting too much into the specifics, there are 20 different components of fitness and physical performance that we can add into the equation to determine progress. Right.
Instead of just thinking about have I lost weight? What about have I gained muscle? What about am I getting stronger? Do I have more energy? Am I do I have more endurance? Am I more flexible? Can I do movements and think? Can I get up and down off the ground easier than I used to be able to do? Can I go play in the backyard with my grandkids or my and my pets and not feel wore out at the end of the day?
Am I able to do things around the house without having to ask for help? You know, these are things that I would get that my ladies come back to me all the time and they’re like, Oh my God, I went to the store and loaded five 50 pound bags of mulch, you know, by myself and brought them home and brought them out to the backyard and mulch my entire garden.
And I still have energy to cook dinner tonight, you know, and this type of thing. And it’s like, and they’re like, this is what we want. They want to be able to do that type of thing when they’re 60, 70, 80, 90 years old. And that’s the goal. That’s quality of life. It doesn’t matter how much they weigh. It doesn’t matter what their body fat is.
What are they doing in their life?
Carole Freeman: That’s that’s great so you know you train mostly women. And let’s talk about this myth, right? ’cause this is, where did this come from in the seventies where it’s like women, you wanna get toned. Toned didn’t fit. And women think they don’t wanna gain muscle, they just wanna get toned. So can you break this down?
Or, you know, I don’t know if you know where it came from. It’s kind of, I don’t know where it, I don’t know where it came from. A gallon of water a day.
Coach Bronson: I think, I think it, this probably has, has its roots in feminism to a degree. Differentiation. I don’t know. There’s, there’s a, there’s who knows what it could be without getting into the sociopolitical discussion about.
All of these things between men and women. Understanding that toning yourself is the result of improving how your body works, another word for tone is fit. Okay. I want to look tone is the same as someone saying, I want to look fit. Okay. You want to look good in a bikini. You want to look good in a bathing suit.
You don’t want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nobody wants to look like Arnold. I don’t want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, okay? In order to do that, let’s just give you an idea of… If you’ve seen women on social media who are bodybuilders or did he look really muscular and you’re like, I don’t want to look like that.
Okay, great. That’s fantastic. In order for you to look like that, we’re going to break a couple of things down. Number one, you have to work out an hour to two hours every day, lifting heavy weights in the gym for, at a minimum for most people just getting started at a minimum four to five years in order to,
Carole Freeman: I’ll interject one that was not on your list.
You have to go back in time, pick different parents that give you genetics. It’s easy to be lean your whole life.
Coach Bronson: So that’s the next part of it. So you have to spend several years building the amount of muscle to look that way. That’s number one and consistently hours a day for years. Okay. Number two, you have to lock in your diet to a point.
That nobody listening to this video or podcast is probably going to do. I don’t want to do it in order to get as lean as these people do. There is a level of commitment and obsession over nutrition. Number one, it’s beyond the norm. Number two, most of them end up with eating disorders. Okay. So there’s a combination of things that you would have to do in order to get bulky.
As a woman, right? It’s not going to happen. Getting bulky working out is like saying, I’m going to go to the gym for six months. And become a bodybuilder. That doesn’t work. It’s like saying, I’m going to get my driver’s license tomorrow. And then next week I’m going to be a NASCAR driver, right? It doesn’t work that way.
Okay. You have to progress and it has to be done intentionally. It is not going to happen by accident. So understanding a couple of those things, if you want to look fit, then get fit. That’s the solution. If you want to lose weight and shape your body in a way that looks that you think is attractive and, and I think fit is probably the best, the best general description.
There’s a bunch of different other ways you could describe it, but if you want to look like you’re somebody who is physically active and capable to do things that they want to do without limitation, then train your body to be capable. And physically active so that you can do things without physical limitation.
If you get fit, you look fit. And that’s really, I think what, what most people really want.
Carole Freeman: And I think a hard reality sometimes for women that have been, you know, 80 plus pounds overweight is that most of the time your body’s just not going to snap back and look like those influencers you see on social media, there’s going to be some.
Loose, saggy skin in places and stretch marks and things like that, especially for ladies that have had children. And there can be a grieving process with kind of acknowledging the fact that the body, your body’s never going to look like it did when you were 20 or and that’s, yeah.
Coach Bronson: And that’s another reason why thinking about how it looks is so self defeating.
I can do a lot more now at 51 than I could ever do when I was 18. My body is capable on so many more levels. I can physically participate and handle so many more things because I have the experience and I have the training and I have trained my body to be versatile. That if I were to, there’s several things.
If I were to be put in certain situations, when I was 18 years old, I would have my, I would break down. I would hurt myself. You know, I was in great, I was in better shape. I was 7 percent body fat when I went out, when I got out of basic training, I weighed 165 pounds, I was 7 percent body fat. Okay. I was ripped.
I was cut. Okay. I looked fantastic. I was not as strong as I am now. I was not as physically able, able as I am now. Okay. I could run a lot and that was about it. Okay. But the things I can do now, I would much rather be the mean now who’s got a wide range of physical ability. Then ever want to go back to being 20 years ago, no matter how good I looked then.
Cause I can do so much more now. I can participate in life at a completely different level.
Carole Freeman:
Another thought experiment.
I’ll get my ladies to… Cause a lot of them are, you know, grandmothers and mothers and they love their children. It’s like, okay, so if you want to go back in time, you want to live in that 20 year old body.
That means you have to give up your, your family that you love so much. You don’t get to keep your grandchildren. If you want to be 20 live in that 20 year old body again.
It’s got other cultures around the world, like embrace. A woman’s body that’s, you know, bared children and, and has aged and, and you know, shows signs of aging as wisdom versus our culture is it’s youth obsessed and perfection and the filters and the the. The fake images. I love [00:41:00] the ones that just dispel the myths of like, this is my body when I’m just sitting and this is how I pose.
And it’s like, there’s a lot of trickery going on.
Coach Bronson: And Oh, there’s so much. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: So
What are some of the things that you do to help people make shifts in behaviors?
that are just. The things that kind of hold them up.
Coach Bronson: God, that’s a wide open question.
Outside of focusing on the why and trying to educate people, I think working through the process of what are they ready, willing and able to do. I think understanding that you can’t make sweeping changes. You have to make small changes and you have to make changes that are sustainable that you can build on.
So whether it’s implementing a fitness routine or changing something about the way you eat or. Looking at your schedule and making changes to your schedule to facilitate a better sleep time or planning ahead when you’re going to a party, it’s really about the habits and the way that you think about different things in your life.
So developing self awareness I think is where a lot of it starts.
So if you’re struggling and you feel like you’re not making progress. Go back to the basics and the basics are up here, right? How do you think about the things that you’re trying to do? How do you think about your, the processes? How do you think about your journey?
How do you think about your goals? If you, there’s, there’s a good chance that you’re stuck because you have a self belief or you have a perception about something in the world or yourself or a relationship or your job, or who knows what it is. That is holding you back. So asking yourself, do I have to do it that way?
Is this thought process accurate or is it just something that I’ve had and I’ve never addressed or confronted to see if it’s actually something that is true or if it’s a construct of my mind. So developing self awareness is a huge piece. And most people are not good at developing self awareness.
They’re not good at being self aware. We see it all the time. I see it all the time when a client comes to me and says, Hey, I went off the wagon this weekend. And I’ll get back on track on Monday, right? And I get this text message on Sunday morning, right? Okay. And my first response is why can’t you get back on track right now?
That’s the level of self awareness. Well, just because you went off track doesn’t mean you have to stay on track until some kind of random benchmark. The next opportunity you have to get back on track is the next opportunity you have to make a decision. I’m going to eat dinner today. Even though I messed up this morning, I’m going to eat dinner tonight.
And I’m going to eat something that’s going to help me move forward. You don’t have to wait till Monday. We don’t have to wait till the weekend is over. That’s a self, that’s a perception. That’s a limiting self, the self belief, right? I, I messed up over the weekend, so I have to wait till the weekend is over to get back on track.
No, you don’t. Get back on track now. That’s how this works. You know, that’s one example. Self awareness. If you don’t have it in the instance that something is happening, then you have to practice doing it after the thing has happened. So in that example where, you know, you, you go to a party on a Saturday night and you, and you eat something or you drink, you didn’t want to do it.
You come back in on Saturday or on Sunday morning. Spend some time and evaluate what was your thought process when this happened? Why did you do this? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that? Spend some time, journal, write it down. Practice asking yourself the questions as if you’re your own therapist.
What were you thinking? What was your motivation? What was the justification you gave yourself? What was the excuse? Whatever it may be, write it all down and start analyzing these things and ask yourself, are these things true? Are these things constructs? What’s going on here? Where did this all come from?
When you can get into a habit of doing that after something has happened that set you back [00:45:00] and build a habit and build those neural pathways and that processing, you’re going to find that the gap between the trigger, the action and the self awareness. Is going to start closing in and eventually what’s going to happen is your self awareness is going to start kicking in in between the trigger and the action.
So right now, a lot of people are something triggers me. I react to it negatively. Then I have to figure out and do a an after action review and figure out what happened. The more you do that, you can insert self awareness in between the trigger and the reaction. And change the reaction
Carole Freeman: you’re perfectly seeding one of the programs that I teach is exactly what you’re talking about.
Hey, that’s awesome. Yeah. So we’ll have to talk afterwards about if you want to help me promote, but it’s called, it’s, it’s called the pathway to end emotional eating. So I mentioned before we came on that I have a master’s degree and. I got to intern at a place one of the ladies was trained by Marsha Linehan, which people who are psychology nerds would know she’s one of the people that developed, or she’s a person who developed DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
Okay. And so I developed, based on things that I was exposed to there, I, I developed this, this whole pathway of how do you, exactly what you’re talking about, is you start to identify the things that happened. Because, like you said, the, what happens is like, all I know is my hand was in this and I was eating it.
Like, I’m completely unaware. I don’t even know. I don’t know why I ate it. And so taking the time to start to notice those things, naming feelings, emotions, noticing the patterns of what happened, that, that collapses down to the point where then you finally… There are actually, and I, I teach it is exactly what you’re talking about.
But I teach it as like, you actually get a little bit more time where you actually have a conscious decision point you can make versus now it’s like, it’s just autopilot. You don’t even know why you’re doing it. So yeah, so it’s, it’s a, it’s a program that I’m I’ve had some people, I’ve usually teach it like once a year.
And it’s the cool thing about it is, is diet agnostic. We don’t talk about food at all. It’s all about why is it used, you know, basically behavior change at the emotional level. Yeah.
Coach Bronson: The food and the, the food and the fitness are the easy part about this whole process. You know, I’ve been coaching for, yeah, I’ve been coaching for almost 12 years and that’s probably the most I don’t even know what the right word is.
Impactful thing that I’ve learned as a coach is that. 90 percent of the work that I do has nothing to do with food or, or fitness. Yeah, that’s the easy. I can give you, I can give you macros. I can give you what to eat. I can give you a shopping list. I can say, go get this and don’t do anything outside of that.
You’re going to make progress if you do it. And the same with fitness. I can give you a bazillion different fitness plans and they’re going to work for you. If you do it, getting people to do it consistently in any circumstance, that’s the hard part. And that’s all up here in that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Just like you mentioned about how, you know, autumn weather.
So that if you don’t love yourself now, you’re not going to love yourself no matter what size or shape your, your body looks. So that’s still the mindset stuff. So yeah. Okay. We talked about that and. This is what happens that I get so in the moment. Oh, I want to sleep. Okay. Oh, no, no, no. Wait, I remember the thing that I wanted to ask you about, like along the lines of what we’re talking about, like the whatever you believe, right?
If you so here’s one that a lot of people say, I’m too busy. You don’t understand how many things I got to do during the day. I’m, I’m too busy to show up to a meeting. I’m too busy to eat healthy. I’m too busy to go work out today. What, what do you, what do you say to that?
Coach Bronson: If you survey and there have been some surveys and there’s some studies and data out there the most successful people in the world, a good majority, I want to say it’s like 85 percent or more of them.
We’ll say that they have to keep a fitness routine in their schedule. Otherwise the rest of their schedule doesn’t work. There’s something about prioritizing your self care that brings everything else into picture and the reason you don’t have time is because you’re not taking the time for yourself.
Okay. The excuse, and this is another coaching thing that I learned. Every excuse that someone is going to give me, or that I hear from somebody, is actually the reason why they need to do it. Every single excuse, there is not an excuse that I’ve ever heard that doesn’t have a converse flip that says, well, that’s exactly why you should be doing this.
If you want to have more time, start prioritizing yourself and you will find and make the time and you will see how other things start falling into place.
Carole Freeman: Well, this, this’ll be a fun little thing that you, I’ll say the excuse and then you can turn it into the why. So, Oh, here we go. I gotta take my kid to his soccer practice and basketball.
I gotta take care of my kid. How?
Coach Bronson: Yeah, well, you can do that, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do something while you’re there. That doesn’t mean that, you know, and this is another limit limiting belief. Because I’m at soccer practice, that’s all I can do. You know how many clients I have that will do a body weight workout behind the bleachers while their kid’s playing a game?
Right? Or they’ll walk, they’ll bring some weights with them or a weight vest and they’ll walk around the, the field while their kids are playing a game. That’s not an excuse. That’s an opportunity. Now you have time. You’re there, you could either sit on the chair for the hour.
Carole Freeman: Or sit in your car and scroll Facebook.
Coach Bronson: Or cook, or write, or do whatever that is. Or you could actually utilize that time, multitask, get some fitness in, or let’s say this, let’s say it’s not fitness. Maybe that’s a great time for you to put in what your meal plans for the rest of the week are going to be. Or make some commitments to other things in your schedule, adjust your schedule so you can get your workout in for the rest of the week.
That is a perfect opportunity for you to do something that’s going to move you forward.
Carole Freeman: And… Your kid is the why you want to take care of yourself in the first place. You want to be there around and healthy in their life. You don’t want to be the burden that they have to take care of when they’re older.
Coach Bronson: Yeah. And you’re setting an example, right? They get to see mom’s not mom or dad. Isn’t just sitting, sitting here watching me. Yeah. They’re watching me. They’re cheering me on and you can do that while you’re doing this other stuff. Right. But they’re also saying your self care is important to you. The biggest example you can set for your kids mental health as they get older is Helping them understand by setting an example, the importance of your own self care, right?
If you set an example of self sacrifice, then they’re going to think that’s what life is about. And that’s a whole other, that’s a whole other discussion.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And it’s a, it’s a pattern I’m hearing a lot that maybe I’m just listening for it or something, but just so many different people that are talking about how important it is to have some kind of a, you know, fitness routine or some hard workout that they do to balance their mental health.
And then also it’s so powerful for offsetting the food addiction behaviors, right? So Anna Lemke is the one I believe that, that I think her book is dopamine nation where she’s found that for her. She works with she’s a therapist that works with, and I think she’s actually like a psychiatrist, but she works with people that have all kinds of really intense addictions and she’s found that, you know, Oh, yeah.
Workout ends up being one of the most important things.
Coach Bronson: And then I was, well, it’s, it’s, it’s almost two times as powerful as any medication. Physical, intense physical activity has so many benefits from a mental health perspective. It’s absolutely phenomenal. And we’re learning more and more and more about it, right?
There was a study that came out a couple, a couple months ago, I believe that said that physical exercise is one and a half times more successful and more powerful than every psychotic drug on the market today. Like what? That is crazy. SSRIs don’t do anything. Exercise is better.
Carole Freeman: Like what about the side effects?
Coach Bronson of exercise,
Coach Bronson: the living a better life, feeling more confident, having more energy, reducing risk of injury, better body composition. I did the, the side effects are amazing.
Carole Freeman: You got to have a warning label on the side of the, the machines of like, may make you look, may make you feel more confident, may make you improve your mood and feel more balanced.
Coach Bronson: Well, yeah. And then have you heard of mood, the mood chemicals, mood hormones? No, it’s I’m trying to think of the word that they use the phrase hope hope molecules Is what there is so hope molecules? myokines basically are Amino acids that get, that get, get released by the muscle when you exercise that goes straight to the brain and improve your mood.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s fun.
Coach Bronson: Right? So if anybody’s interested in looking into some of the benefits of exercise, look at, look up hope molecules and what those are all about. If you want to dig into a rabbit hole. I will. And then BDNF, right? Brain derived nootropic I always forget what the F is. Not formula. Factor.
Factor. Thank you. BDNF is another thing that is stimulated by exercise, right? So we increase neuroplasticity, we increase neurogenesis, we improve overall brain function, our ability to learn, and our ability to remember increases when we exercise. Because we’re moving our body, we’re building neural pathways, and we’re making our brain work as well.
So there’s so many good things about it.
Carole Freeman: What would you say to somebody then that, cause I’m always the type of person that I’m just asking for you to give some advice here because I would say, you know like somebody says, oh my gosh, but after I work out, I’m ravenous and I like can’t control. You know, my appetite, I just want to shove food in my mouth.
What, what what would you say to those?
Coach Bronson: I would say you’re probably not eating enough in general. That’s usually a sign that you’re not eating enough in general. You should not feel ravenous after a workout unless you’ve been starving yourself.
Carole Freeman: And I think it’s also a sign that your body, and this was something we wanted.
I. We need to talk about to metabolic flexibility. If your body’s yeah, your body’s stuck burning carbohydrates and it hasn’t become fat adapted, that also can trigger that. Like you’ve depleted all of your carbohydrate and in your body just does need to refuel that way. So let’s, let’s, that’s a good transition then to,
Coach Bronson: yeah, that’s something that I hear too, when people are cycling carbs, cause they think they need carbs exercise, which you don’t.
So
Metabolic Flexibility is misunderstood and often misused by a lot of people.
And it’s really frustrating for me in many cases to hear it because I have to explain it to people all the time. Metabolic flexibility is not. about what you eat. It’s about what you don’t eat, and it’s about what your body is doing within its own internal processes.
Okay, the term metabolic flexibility of the way is used in many cases is you want to eat some carbs so that your body is is is good. As good as processing carbs as it is processing fat. That’s a simple way
Carole Freeman: People, you’ve eaten enough carbs your whole life. Your body’s fine at eating carbs. You don’t need to eat carbs.
Coach Bronson: Well, here’s the, here’s the thing, and this is, this is, it goes beyond that because that’s what, technically what we’re talking about there is we’re talking about digestive flexibility. That’s nothing to do with an, with metabolism. Or with energy metabolism. Okay. What we’re talking about, if you have to eat some carbs in order for your body to get good at processing carbs, we’re talking about your body’s ability to digest carbohydrates.
That has nothing to do with metabolic flexibility. Metabolic flexibility is the result of being zero or low carb, where fat is your primary source of fuel and your body has to utilize it. Internal resources via gluconeogenesis to create glucose for your body to use as energy. So what happens is, and this is something a lot of people don’t know as well, gluconeogenesis is not just burning protein and turning protein into glucose.
Gluconeogenesis is an umbrella of multiple processes that primarily utilize the byproducts of ketogenesis.
So your body takes fatty acids. It breaks it down into ketones. The stuff that’s left over, acetoacetate, acetate, pyruvate, lactate, all of these byproducts of the ketogenic process outside of ketones, right? We think of BHP, that’s the main product of ketogenesis. All the other stuff? Gets kicked into a bunch of other processes that our body utilized to make ATP and glucose that process Everything that happens from being ketogenic Supports all the other systems in our body to allow fat ketones sugar glycogen glucose to all be created from The stuff we already had inside of us, that is metabolic flexibility.
The minute you introduce carbs from external source, you shortcut that entire process and you are no longer metabolic and flexible.
Carole Freeman: You got to dispose of the carbs before you can get back to bring the other stuff.
Coach Bronson: Yeah. Yes. Your body is going to utilize and create the fuel that it needs from the things it already has.
And all it needs to do that is protein and fat.
Carole Freeman:
Riles some people up when you say that carbohydrates aren’t essential.
Coach Bronson: They’re well, I don’t know why, because it’s not. I mean, even the even basic nutrition textbooks say carbs aren’t essential, which I think is hilarious because they say in one page, it’s like carbs are not essential. And the next phase, but you need them to do this and that and this and that.
It’s like, which one is it?
Carole Freeman: They’re sponsored by bleep insert, big food company here. Who’s not sponsoring the show, but does sponsor some of the credentials of the nutritionist in see, I’m so in the moment of what we’re talking about. I like think of another question and then I’m like, yeah, go for it.
You want to ask? Let’s see. Okay. Oh, we need to talk about sleep because that goes along with the, like, I’m too busy. I don’t have enough time to sleep. Let’s talk about how I personally, I think that sleep and stress maybe are the.
Most underrated things for how bad they are or important, you know, stress management, adequate sleep for health and longevity.
So we didn’t even put stress on the table.
Coach Bronson: Well, let’s start with sleep, let’s start with sleep, but we can start, we can talk about stress a little bit too, because everything we’ve talked about is all about stress. Okay. I just, before we get into sleep, I want to couch this idea because it’s something I’ve been working on for a little, for a little bit, and it may be a rabbit hole that over the next year or two, I really dig into, but that is.
Life is stress management. There is not a single aspect of your life, mental, emotional, physical, philosophically, biological, physiological, neurological, nothing is absent of stress. There’s good stress and there’s bad stress. Everything that we do is preparing for stress, managing stress, or recovering from stress.
Everything, right? If we look at the general adaptation syndrome, we look at that, that whole process, it is literally stress. Stress management is life. Okay? The problem comes in is when we don’t actually manage it. We try to avoid it. You can’t manage something if you’re not willing to face it and change [01:01:00] the things that are stressing you.
You have to determine the good stresses and the bad stresses. And one of the ways we do that is by getting more sleep. If you prioritize sleep, which is still a stress, it’s a hormetic stress. Okay. It causes some systems in our body to activate. It causes other systems in our body to, to kind of chill out.
Okay. So the more sleep we get, we, we are increasing our body’s efficiency at. Rest and recovery. We’re increasing anabolic processes. We’re increasing balancing hormones. We’re increasing our ability to grow, reduce stress and a bunch of other things. So sleep is an important factor in managing stress. So if you’re not, it is like, honestly, it’s probably step number one in the whole stress management book handbook, right?
If you’re not getting sleep, anything else you do to manage stress is going to be harder than it should be.
Carole Freeman: No, but I got these pills from a CVS. They’re going to manage my stress for me. Right?
Coach Bronson: Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. Maybe for a couple of months and then they’re just going to go down in tank. So sleep is super important.
Particularly the more your body is going through changes. We have, you know, I have a lot of women. Who struggle with sleep because of the changes their body are going through. It’s more important to prioritize it, particularly in that perimenopause post menopausal phase, right? Getting into what can we do to improve sleep?
Some of the things that you can do, increase your protein, increase your electrolyte intake. Increase your physical activity, right? That tell your body that I’m doing things that I need to recover from, and I need to use this time for that to happen. Increase your IGF, increase the different hormones in your body that help you recover.
And it’s something that again, it goes back to the self care. If you don’t prioritize your own self care, you will not be able to take care of the people that you think are more important than you.
Carole Freeman: Hmm, I’m going to make a statement and let’s see if you agree with it. Here’s a test to know if you’re not getting enough sleep, if you have to get up with an alarm in the morning, you’re not, you’re not getting enough sleep.
Coach Bronson: That’s very, that’s, that’s probably more true than it should.
Carole Freeman: Then I’d like it to be because my, my, my, my personal goal with my, you know, my business and my life is to. Not have to have an alarm to get up in the morning. And so days that I have to have an alarm to get up means I didn’t go to sleep early enough.
I didn’t schedule myself because your body will like so many things. If you, if. If it’s working correctly it will fall asleep when it’s time to sleep. And it will wake up when it’s had enough.
Coach Bronson: And getting sleep is, is often I work with a lot of women who are putting their work or their [01:04:00] family ahead of their themselves when it comes to going to bed.
Right. They’re up late cause they got laundry to do. They’re up late cause they got extra work to do. There’s a project, whatever it may be. And at some point you have to make a decision. And this is something that everyone has to go through. You come to those crossroads of. I understand these other things are important, but I have to prioritize at some point in time.
Something’s got to be a priority. And right now I’m at the bottom of the priority list. I’m killing myself that way. Something has to change. If you put yourself at the top of the priority list. It’s not selfish. Okay. And that is something that a lot of women deal with. A lot of my clients have had that conversation of saying, look, you know, just because you’re prioritizing your ability to function, which literally is what we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about going out and get a mani pedi every Friday. Okay. We’re talking about going to bed on time. So your body doesn’t break down. There’s a big difference. Okay. So if we’re talking about doing what we can to adjust your schedule and prioritize yourself so that you have the health, the energy and the physical ability to take care of those things that are important to you, that is not selfish.
That is actually preparing yourself to give more. Because now you have a full bucket at the start of the day, instead of starting the day and your buckets almost empty already.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, it’s so true. And I’ve, I’ve had one client that we kind of uncovered this pattern that, so she wasn’t getting enough sleep because she liked to stay up really late at night.
And. Then had to get up in the morning and do all the other care for everybody else in her family in the morning. And we discovered that it was that that time at night, after everyone was in bed was the only time that she was getting to herself. And so, so she thought, well, I don’t want to change my daytime stuff because that’s selfish.
[01:06:00] If I do that, that’s selfish. So then we came to. I helped her come to the realization that she was being selfish using that time at night for herself, but we had to shift it around because it’s not selfish if you’re taking care of yourself, right? So you mentioned something about there’s this misconception that self care is mani pedis and massages and going out to brunch with the girls, right?
Self care literally means taking care of your basic needs as a human, right? So we think of child care. Yeah. Self care is just taking care of your human needs. It’s not indulgent pampering. Pampering is different. That, you know, that can become care of yourself. But pampering and self care are very different.
Self care is literally feeding yourself, getting enough sleep, enough water, nutrients, electrolytes, salt. So we have to take the word selfish. Out of self care those are two different things and like you said, yeah. So if you think of like, if you feed your child, is that indulgent and pampering your child is, is you know, making sure your child takes a bath and gets to bed on time, is that indulgent and spoiling them?
No, that’s basic childcare. So I I’m, I’m getting riled up about this. Cause it’s so true. Is it so true? Well, it’s selfish if they take care of themselves, it’s like, yeah.
Coach Bronson: When we talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of need, right? If anybody’s familiar with that, go look it up. The basics, I was at five. I’m looking, I just pulled it up real quick.
Five, five needs of every human being, right? When we start with physical, physiological needs, you need to breathe, you need food, you need that kind of stuff. You need safety and security. You need shelter. You need loving and belonging. Like the things that fall into those basic levels of basic human need.
I love how you said that. Are the things that a lot of times my clients are giving up to give those to someone else. And you can’t get to self actualization. You can’t get to feeling good about yourself. You can’t get to feeling content with your life. If you’re giving away the foundation of basic human needs to other people and you’re not getting any of it yourself.
And that’s where unhappiness comes from.
Carole Freeman: And you’re modeling that for children, that that’s the only way to live your life and be a parent role model for others, right?
All right. Stress sleep.
Well, I think that was all that was on my list. We kind of, we got peaked and then We got any questions, we got any questions from people? I haven’t seen any come in. So if you’re watching, got some questions for coach Bronson. Also, you know, give us an emoji if this has been impactful in any way, because I can see that we’ve got some of you that have been hanging around for this whole time.
And thanks for hanging around guys. Yeah. Most of you on YouTube. You know, share, comment, give it, you know, if, if you don’t have anything you think you want to say, give some kind of just a random emoji, you know, whatever the top emoji is in your phone right now, just give us that one. So we know you’re here and listening.
So, you know, and if any of this has been like a big ah ha for you, I dare you to type H A A, ah ha, ah ha, you know, or, or the, the mind blown emoji, if you can find that one as well, that would be fun if anybody shares that, so but such good stuff, and such good messages, I’m so glad that you care about me.
Our female species that much to be able to share this message. Cause it is, I mean, it does, I mean, some, some men fall into this pattern. I mostly work with women, so that’s why we’re talking about women and you know, 40 plus, so this kind of a pattern that I see with the ladies that I work with, exactly what we’re talking about here is that.
They put everybody else first and they feel like they don’t have time to take care of themselves. They feel guilty. They feel like they’re being selfish if they do that. And really we need to turn that completely on its head. Oh, we got a heart remote react on this one. So yay. Good, good. Awesome.
Coach Bronson’s Grandmother’s Health
Coach Bronson: Yeah. My, my, my background and the reason that I really got into this like really connected with my why, you know, after I had kind of gotten into it was two, two things.
One, when my grandmother passed. The process of watching her deteriorate to a point where, you know, the last time, the last time I spoke to her before she, before she passed away, she was so weak. She couldn’t, she was laying face down in a bed. She couldn’t even turn over to sit up to say anything to anybody.
I had to hold her hand and talk to her with her face swished down in a pillow because she, you know, and, and say goodbye to her. And that was the last, you know, not even, not even being able to hug her just literally just hold her hand because she was so weak. She couldn’t sit up. And then, you know, I started working with my mom who just turned 69.
I started working with her when she was like 60 or 61 and watching her go through the process of, you know, reversing osteoporosis, falling in love with fitness, enjoying the things that she can do as she’s improved her physical ability. As she’s gotten closer to 70, right? She started at 60, not even being able to jump in a foot forward, much less any height in the air.
And now she’s, you know, one of her favorite things to do is box jumps on 18, 20 inches. She loves to deadlift. She loves to do, she does burpees with me. Like her, her worst extra, the exercise she hates the most is wall balls. Like she has, she has an exercise that she hates. She has exercises. She loves to row.
She loves the rowing machine in her basement. So knowing that my mother’s experience, when she gets to, when she gets ready to pass is going to be a 180 degree difference than what I had to go through with my grandmother. That’s why I do this. So that’s where my passion for working with women comes from because I, I’ve experienced both ends and I think the more people I can help experience what my mother’s going through at almost 70 years old the more powerful everything’s going to be like, it’s just, we need, and I wrote, I wrote a chapter I have a chapter in my book titled, we need strong women.
And that is, I think something that we’re missing in society today.
Carole Freeman: Oh, we got, we got Lynn says really love everything you’re talking about, especially question your why to cry. How do I deal with failure? I won’t commit to eating plan and exercise because I never stick to it. That’s a good one. That never worked before.
I was never able to stick with it.
Coach Bronson: Why should I even try? You’re not able to stick with it because you’re afraid you’re not going to stick with it. Right. So understand, and this is something, this is that self awareness, I would ask you, why are you afraid of failure? What is it about your past experiences that’s got you afraid of failure?
Because failure isn’t anything unless you, failure, failure is An opportunity to correct and move forward. Okay. That didn’t work. What is going to, what can I try this time to try again? The only way you actually fail is if you don’t do anything. So, you know, I, the analogy that, that I, that I’ve heard before, I’m not quite sure if it fits this exactly, but you get kind of get the point is if you get one flat tower, one flat tire, you’re not going to pop all four of them.
Okay. And that’s the mentality. A lot of people have, well, I blew this, so I might as well just go off and not do anything. Well, that that doesn’t make sense.
Just hit all the cars on the road.
Carole Freeman: Well, something you probably like this, the Dave Feldman at one of the conferences when I I don’t remember which one we were at that he had an analogy that I loved.
He talked about how you know, if you, if you’re driving on the road and accidentally hit a car, you don’t then just smash into every other car on the road. Well, I hit one. Might as well just hit them all, hit them all. Yeah, we’re not, we’re not laughing at, we’re laughing at the analogy. And this is a very true, like emotional thing.
And I have a lot of ladies that are like. You know, it’s never worked before and I like to talk about it. It’s like we have the fantasy. We’re told this lie that like you know, changing eating habits, getting fit, engaging in exercise is just like a light switch. It’s a straight line. You just decide to do it and it’s easy.
And then you do it. And it’s really not. The truth is that almost everybody that I work with. The, the, the weight loss is messy, you know, there’s starts and stops and that’s most people, some people, some people make the change. It’s a light switch. They just do it and they don’t look back and they don’t have, they don’t have this, the, the failures you’re talking about, but it’s much more common.
And frankly, one of my peer coaches she is the average woman and 60 pounds in five years, but she beats herself up because she says she says, I’m not where I want to be. I’m, I feel like I’m a failure because I’m not. I’m not at my goal weight yet. And I said, yes, but in the five years. You’re a, you know, a net 60 pounds loss.
Where would you be if you had given up, if you actually give it up? And so she looks at these like, well, I failed here and I, I went off path here and I lapsed there and it’s like, yeah, but you didn’t give up, you didn’t fail. You’re just learning things along the way and you’re still on the path and the path isn’t straight line.
That’s much more normal.
Coach Bronson: Yeah. When you were a baby, Lynn, ask yourself this question. When you were a baby and learning how to walk, if you fell down, did you just say, screw it, I’m never trying to stand up again. That’s what this is. It’s the same process. It’s the same process. You have to keep going and keep trying.
The, the, where people get stuck is they keep trying the same thing. Okay. Keep trying doesn’t mean just keep doing the same thing over and over and over. If it’s not working, you have to find out ways to make changes and adjustments and do things differently. Maybe it’s up here. Okay. I would highly recommend if.
Again, this is the food and the fitness are easy. If you’re not doing it, I would say, get a coach, get a therapist, get somebody that you can go talk to and work through the stuff that’s up here to help you think about things differently to help you connect more with your why, to help you understand what is a limiting belief, why you’re afraid of failure.
What is it, the thing that’s keeping you from taking this step and being consistent. Right? Because it’s not, it’s not the nutrition plan. You already know what to do. It’s not the fitness plan. You already know what to do. You’re just not doing it. So that tells me it’s not about the solution. It’s about the thought process.
So figure out what that is. And then you might see some progress.
Carole Freeman: Thank you for the question. Lynn. Great question. Great question. Common one. Yeah. Well, if anyone else has any closing questions or more questions.
Coach Bronson: And we could do this like once a week if you want.
Carole Freeman: I love it. It’s great. This is important. It’s really, really important messages because I mean, especially I think most women these days and Michelle Welford Wolf is one of my favorite comedians.
And she has this phrase about how women are told you can, you can, you can have it all. You can do it all. But the truth is We have to do it all. And I’m sure this is similar to the women you’re working with. Is it like they wear a thousand hats in their life and they work, you know, they work full time and they’re very successful and they run their household and they take care of the kids and you know, and.
You know, take care of all their family members and they run their family members to all the medical appointments. And they maybe have aging parents that they’re taking care of as well. And then they run the PTA and then they, you know,
Coach Bronson: there’s also the, the, a lot of big percentage of the women that I work with are at that phase now where.
Their kids are gone and they’re kind of trying to figure out, okay, I don’t know how to take care of myself. I don’t even know what to do. Like what does it mean? What does self care even mean? And now they’ve got the time to do it. And now the struggle is they’re, they’re so used to doing things for other people.
They’re making up things to do. They’re finding busy work. They’re finding things to be stressed about because they don’t know how to live without the stress. Cause it’s just a whole other, it’s a whole other thing.
Carole Freeman: They get two new puppies instead of, yeah, right. So Lynn says that actually makes a lot of sense.
Gives me hope to try something new. Yay. Look at that. You found the hope molecule on the, on the podcast today. That’s great. Well, anything else in closing coach Bronson that you were hoping I would ask about or that?
Coach Bronson: Oh my god, we could go on for hours We’ll have to do it again because there’s literally I mean, there’s so many things to talk about we could talk a lot more about You know Maybe we could do another another chat sometime and talk about finding individual context and filtering information And understanding how to apply all the stuff that’s out there to your specific situation Without being confused and being set on track, understanding that experimentation is okay.
Again, failure is okay. You have to be willing to try. Otherwise you’re never going to move forward. That’s a whole another topic and talk, principles, principles over protocols. 100%.
Carole Freeman: Nice. Yeah. And, and individualization. I think that that’s. I’m missing in a lot of nutrition and behavior and fitness programs.
It’s like, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems with nutrition research too, is they’re looking for the one answer.
Coach Bronson: Oh yeah. Don’t get me there. Starting that understanding. Well,
The term bio-individuality really ticks me off.
It’s a hot button for me because. People use it incorrectly and it’s not about bio individuality.
It’s just about individuals and it’s not the biology that’s different. We’re all humans. We all function the same fricking way. Okay. If we weren’t, if we, if we, if bio individuality was a thing, the way many people talk about it, modern medicine wouldn’t work because no medicine would work for the same person twice or for two different people, the same way.
Right. Nothing would work. We’d all have different color blood. Who knows all the different things, right? Bio individuality does not mean that humans function inherently different across the broad spectrum of society. Bio individuality is the combination of the individual, the experience, the exposure, the environment.
The goals, the mentality, the limiting beliefs, there’s so many things that go into that. It’s not because humans are different across the board. That is not what bio individuality is. That’s another soapbox of mine.
Carole Freeman: Trisha’s got a comment here. I think that self care is selfish concept goes further than role modeling.
It’s about loving and respecting yourself. And why would family and friends love and respect you if you don’t love and respect yourself?
Coach Bronson: That’s powerful. I love it. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Carole Freeman: Thanks for sharing that, Tricia.
Coach Bronson: Sounds like that goes into a whole other discussion where we talk about, about setting your boundaries and training people how you want them to treat you.
Don’t just take it like, you know, it’s interesting how you see. Parents who don’t set boundaries with their kids who then get mad because your kids treat them a certain way, you know, and we do that. We do that too. We just do things and then people expect that’s how we’re going to do things. And then when we try to change it, they get mad.
It’s like, look, we got to make a change. So you might have to sit down with your family and say, look, guys, I haven’t been prioritizing myself enough. I’m falling apart. I need your help. And that may be part of the process of you bringing this to your family. Don’t just do it on your [01:22:00] own, right? Get your family involved.
Carole Freeman: I just realized there’s another type that this this type that we’re talking about that isn’t taking care for themselves because they’re doing things for everybody else. Another one I know. Is the control freaks, they, they need to do everything because they’re too, they don’t trust anybody else to do anything.
Right. So they end up taking on every role and they’re just going to talk about stress overload. So they’re going to, we’re going to have to write a book about this because I think we’ve identified some archetypes that are. Self care isn’t selfish. There we go. There’s our book title. There’s the book title.
There we go. We’re going to have five or seven archetypes of the people that won’t take care of it.
Coach Bronson: I love it. Yeah, I love it.
Carole Freeman: This is great. Well, let’s wrap this up for this time and we’ll, we’ll schedule another time. And if you’re watching the replay hashtag replay in the comments and I’ll tag coach Bronson for any questions that you’ve got in the future for him here.
Coach Bronson. com. Is that, am I getting that right? Yep. Let me add that banner in here. Yep.
Coach Bronson: CoachBronson.com. I’m on YouTube at Coach Bronson. My Instagram is Coach Bronson and you can get my book on Amazon. It’s the Ultimate Ketogenic Fitness book.
Carole Freeman: Nice. All right. And I have to recommend that because one of my clients is working with a personal trainer and they keep arguing with her, telling her she needs to And so I’ll, I’ll tell her to get your book and then, cause she’s like, I think they don’t understand.
And I’m like, you can’t argue with them. You can’t change with them. I know.
Coach Bronson: And, and, and remind, okay. For anybody who’s got a trainer that they are paying money to go to. And that they’re arguing with their trainer about their nutrition. Tell your trainer, shut your mouth or I’m going to fire you. There you go.
It is not your trainer’s job to try to push their nutrition philosophy on you. You are the one paying them.
Carole Freeman: All right. That’s, that’s great. [01:24:00] I’m going to, I’m going to tag my, I’m going to share this with my client and give her those words to say, be quiet before I fire you and hire somebody else that won’t tell me what to eat.
Yep. Great. Well, thank you again for being here, coach Bronson. Thank you everyone for watching, listening now and in the future. And this has been wonderful. So I appreciate being here. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. We’ll see you all next time. That’s it. Bye now.
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