EP 71: 3 Fitness Myths Keeping You Stuck Over 40

0:00Tanisha:Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better, and Stronger Over 40. I'm your host and coach, Shauna. I'm 46, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. Most women, especially in their 40s, like me, have been taught that getting lean is simple, eat less and move more. But if that actually worked, more women would have the body that they're working so hard for. Instead, they're stuck, they're eating less, they're doing more, and they're still not seeing the results that they want. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place. Today, I'm going to teach you how to unlock your best body over 40.

0:31Tanisha:I'm sitting down with another woman, Tanisha, who has lost 75 pounds and completely transformed her body. And we're breaking down the major myths that are keeping women stuck so that you can stop spinning your wheels and start training and fueling your body in a way that actually supports it and that works. If you've been feeling frustrated with your progress or like your body isn't responding the way that it used to, This conversation is going to shift the way that you think about everything, fat loss, muscle, and what it actually takes to build your best body in this season of life. So grab your favorite drink and let's get right into it.

1:02Tanisha:Welcome to Nisha. I'm so excited to have you here today and to share your story. And then also just to enlighten more women to the real truth behind what can help them feel their best, look their best, have the healthiest bodies for any age. So welcome. And I can't wait for you to share your story and for us to help other women too. Thank you so much for having me, Shauna. It's great to be here. And it's been amazing to watch your journey and watch you blow up on Instagram and help so many women. So I really just appreciate you having me on and letting me share my story with your audience. Of course.

1:38Tanisha:I know we've been Instagram buddies for years now. And so having the opportunity for us to connect like this, but also speak to the same purpose. Because I know like myself, you have had your own journey with fitness, some good chapters and some not so good chapters, which is probably why it led you to where you are now, where you're coaching women and helping them through their journeys. There's no better place than to kind of pay it forward or to give it back is to help others that are maybe where you were. I'd love to start off there. For those who don't know you, kind of understanding how you got here.

2:12Tanisha:Now, as a woman who is fit, who has lost over 75 pounds, is that right? Yep. To maintain that for, you know, over what, 15 years? Yeah, going on 17 years. It hasn't been perfect. I'll tell you that right now. That's well, that's part of it. Yeah. But now here you are, you know, and I know along that road to success, there were a lot of setbacks and there were a lot of failures. And that's one of the things we're going to talk about today is There's some of the myths that held you back and held me back and that I know there are that are holding some women back now. So I'd love for you to just share your story, how you got here and your background.

2:49I started my weight loss journey back 2000. I would say the height of like toxic diet culture, you know, Biggest Loser. I don't know if you remember The Swan. These shows that really made women feel like their bodies weren't perfect the way they were. It wasn't always heavy. My weight gain started probably in late elementary school, throughout junior high, high school, just packing on the pounds, packing on the pounds. And I didn't have a really, I would say, a tough life. My dad did pass away, but I wouldn't say like, oh, I gained a bunch of weight because of something traumatic that I went through.

3:29I just didn't know how to eat. Mom, if you're watching, I'm sorry, but I would say that I was never taught how to nourish my body, right? Like my mom never let us go wanting. The kitchen was always stocked. She was a single mom raising us. Anything we ever wanted was in the kitchen. It's like Oreos and Cheez-Its and cup of noodles. My mom was at work. We're at home. We're just shoving a bunch of food in our mouth and are having friends over and just eating, eating, eating. And by the time I'm graduating high school, I'm over 245 pounds and I'm looking at myself like, how did I get here? When I graduated, I was like, I need to figure something out with my body.

4:10Like my body is a representation of how I take care of myself. And this isn't how I feel inside. I want my inside to reflect how I look outside. I started my fitness journey and I was like, I want to lose a bunch of weight. and in my mind, I just wanted to get skinny. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that if I didn't eat very much, I would probably lose weight. It really turned into taking you back, Jillian Michaels, Chalene Johnson, Insanity videos, jumping around in my living room, sweating my butt off. I was doing a bunch of cardio, but then I was eating super low calorie. And I'm honestly ashamed to admit that I was at points maybe eating a thousand calories a day and then doing a bunch of cardio on top of that.

5:02And the way it came off, like, you know, obviously a calorie deficit is how you lose weight, but I was on the extreme end of it. But what I didn't know was that I was restricting so much that it hit a certain point where I started binging because I had been restricting so much. But then the weekend would hit and I'm just gorging myself with whatever. I got to a point where I was just like, I can't sustain this.

5:29Tanisha:Like, I can't live this way anymore. You know, I don't always like to talk about numbers, but I got down to a really low weight where I would say it was like skinny, you know. And but I didn't feel good in my skin. I didn't like the way my body looks. I was doing so much cardio. I didn't even know muscle building was like what I should have been doing. I didn't know I should have been eating better and building muscle. Okay. I realized a couple years later after losing the weight that I needed to change some things. I thought I'm going to start CrossFit because, you know, I should try to try to build some muscle.

6:03If you know CrossFit, CrossFit is punishing workouts. You're drilling yourself into the ground. But in the back of my mind, it was still I'm going to punish myself with fitness. I'm going to punish myself by going to CrossFit and making sure that I feel like I just died after I worked. I thought that was how I was supposed to feel. And it was punishment because I had been overweight and I didn't want to go back to what I was like before. And mind you, this whole time, I'm probably yo-yo dieting like the same 25 pounds. I just still hadn't fully figured out my nutrition. I started keto. I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to low carb.

6:42I, Shauna, you name the diet, I did it. Like I've tried everything.

6:47Tanisha:I'm shaking my head along to this whole story because it literally mirrors everything that I've done. And I'm sure there are other women saying like, oh my gosh, same. Like, yes, tried it all. I just didn't realize that it could be so simple. I don't want to make it seem like it's so easy to lose weight. Well, I think the distinction is like simple doesn't mean easy. It's simple. It's not always easy to execute. Yes. I just didn't know, you know, like I wish I had you or me or someone as an example. Like my mom growing up was always a yo-yo dieter. She was athletic, but there was always talk about her body.

7:24It was to fix something, you know, not because of the love of athleticism. After CrossFit, my career started to really take off. I'm a producer. I do a reality TV docuseries. So I do a lot of TV shows that your viewers probably watch. I was on the road a lot and eating out at restaurants every day they feed you, right? And it turned into keeping the weight off, eating really low calorie, binging on the weekends, drinking an excessive amount of alcohol. And I ended up in 2019, I had just been so fed up with the way that I was living. And I decided that I was going to hire a trainer to program workouts for me while I was on the road.

8:11She was amazing, but I was still stuck in my toxic diet culture ways. And her thing was, Tanisha, stop doing so much cardio. The Stairmaster is not going to get you to your goals. But it was still this, like, I'm doing it because I'm punishing myself. Because for some reason, I felt like that was going to get me skinny or keep me thin.

8:34Tanisha:That 90s culture is just that sweat equity, like sweat equals results. But yeah, that's a hard mindset to get past. My coach had a beautiful, you know, strength training program for me. But I was doing, Shauna, I was doing 40 minutes of StairMaster or running on top of her programming, not realizing that it was counterintuitive to my goals. I was wondering why my body wasn't changing. I started studying. I started actually looking at the science. I started listening to people who were a lot smarter than me. And what it really took, Shauna, I have to be honest, is I had to humble myself. Like, I really had to take a step back and be like, what I'm doing is not working.

9:18I don't know everything. I was still stuck back in the 2000s. But the industry has evolved. And I needed to catch up with that. I started learning. I got my CPT. I know better now. Now I don't use cardio as punishment. I use it because it's good for my heart. And once I cut back on the cardio, my body really started to change. I thought I was strong then. I am so much stronger now. The definition in my body and top that with good nutrition. People say like it's lifestyle, it's lifestyle. And you don't really understand that until you build that relationship with your body. You create that lifestyle through connecting with your body.

10:06Once you start listening to how your body is reacting to food, how you feel after you eat. So many of us, when we're not eating well, we get stomach aches and we just push through it. Like, why do we do that?

10:17Tanisha:you start to normalize things that shouldn't be normal, like poor digestion, your mood, your energy dropping off. Once you start to pay attention, it gets easier to make nutrition decisions that are going to support you and not necessarily hold you back. Once you start to do that, you start to realize like, wow, this is how I should feel. I should feel energized after my meals. I should feel happy. I should feel motivated. I shouldn't have bloating or digestion issues. Stepping away from that and leaning into something different can allow you to see what food should be for you. Food at the end of the day is fuel for our bodies.

10:56Tanisha:And it can be delicious, too. There is a world that both of those things can exist for you. Yeah. And for me, it took, like, I, you know, the whole eating clean. And I don't even like to call it that either. Like, I just want to call it nourishing my body. Right? giving my body what it's craving and what it needs. And something that I haven't told anybody this before, my boyfriend's mom is in breast cancer remission and she has no idea how much of an impact, like the way that she eats has had an impact on me. But, and it's actually helped me formulate part of my method with the legacy method. And with legacy nutrition, it's this whole idea of simplicity and repetition.

11:43When I see the way that she eats, it's so simple. She doesn't have to think very much about it. It's just healthy, simple, not a lot of doing a lot in the kitchen. There's not 17 ,000 ingredients. I don't want to spend three hours in the kitchen, but I saw the way that she ate and it just really inspired me. I'm like, Like I need to develop habits today that are going to take me until I'm 80. Like what I'm doing right now, and this is why I call it legacy nutrition. I need to be able to teach my business. I need to be able to take this, make this my legacy that it just, it lasts. It's not complicated, repeatable.

12:25Anybody can do it. It's very easy, right? Healthy and full meals that I can take to the grave. Easy.

12:33Tanisha:Yeah. Yeah. I don't think about it. Right. And that's that's the key is, you know, making everything habit. And again, it's simple. It's not always easy where developing these new habits, getting proficient with them can take some effort and take some time. But once they are habits, then that's when you're no longer on plan or off plan. You're just living. And then this is your new lifestyle. And like I said, a lot of my story mirrors what you've been through when it comes to not knowing about nutrition. I packed on a lot of pounds in my 20s and the only way I knew to get them off was to start to sweat more and eat less.

13:09Tanisha:And like you, I got to like where I was eating about a thousand calories a day. My cycle stopped, hormones crashed. I was a mess physically, mentally, and took, you know, learning a different style. But even when I started to put the pieces together, I still had that old belief system that was, you know, really encouraging me to sweat more and eat less. So even with the incorporation of weight training and even with the incorporation of some more protein, I was still restricting. I was still overexercising and still working way too hard to not see the results that I wanted to. And so, you know, leaning into something different like you did, deciding like how many times am I gonna try the same approach and get like, you know, expect a different result.

13:52Tanisha:You know, that's the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting something different. It's scary to lean away from the things that you think are what you're supposed to be doing. But I always encourage women now that I'm coaching, if it hasn't worked by now, it's not going to, you know. So, you know, learning to understand what your body actually needs to thrive, not just be thin, to be energetic, to have good hormone levels, to look good and to feel good for the decades ahead. It's going to look and feel a lot different than most of what you've done before. but you get results and you're going to keep results most importantly.

14:31And it's that whole idea of sustainability. And I know you teach this to the ladies. Like, I think we get so mixed up because we do, sometimes we do these extreme things or we go into these, which it's, I wouldn't even call it a fat loss phase when you're not doing it properly, but we've all lost weight, right?

14:50Tanisha:Like we've all done it before. But the key is keeping it off and making it sustainable. And I know you teach this, like you fat loss phase, it's a tool. It's not something that you stay in for years on end. And that's what so many women are doing because we had some success with it for a short period of time. But that's the thing. It's not meant to be sustainable. Yeah. Yeah. And if if the methods that you use to get results aren't sustainable, then your results aren't going to be either. Whatever you're doing to achieve your results, you're going to have to do to some level to maintain those results.

15:28Tanisha:Having that understanding is important before you start another workout plan or another diet program. Like ask yourself, can I do this for the next 30 plus years? And if the answer is no, then run. Yes, exactly. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Tanisha. And I know our goal with this episode is to also share three biggest myths that held us back and that are probably holding back other women on their fitness journeys. Let's dive into those now. Fifth number one is that cardio is not going to get you toned. I want to preface this by saying I'm not demonizing cardio. I think it's amazing.

16:05Tanisha:And if you are someone who's just trying to get active, I'm not going to discourage you from doing any sort of activity. However, I think it's important to distinguish what cardio can do for you and what it can't do for you because a lot of times we're using this method thinking or expecting that it's going to turn us into these chiseled sculpted goddesses when in fact that's not true it's great for cardiovascular health it can increase your caloric output so if you are trying to lose weight can help with putting you into a small deficit without having to decrease your calorie intake But your body does adapt to cardio over time.

16:43Tanisha:When you first sign up for a cardio class, when you first start running, you're going to burn a ton of calories. Over time, your body adapts to that. That's something that you want to understand is that your body gets better at cardio. So the other piece here is that cardio cannot tone. That's just not how body composition works. You change your body composition by having more muscle tissue and having less body fat. If you are not doing anything to build or preserve that muscle tissue, it doesn't matter how much you sweat. It doesn't matter how many calories you're burning. You're not going to have a sculpted, defined body at the end of it.

17:16Tanisha:It's important to understand what cardio can do for you and what it can't. It's great to have as a part of your routine, but it's got to be the sidekick. The main character has got to be building muscle. I totally agree. And, you know, I just I think longevity, right? I am not going to be jumping around doing crazy cardio when I'm 80. I will be able to lift a weight though. That's going to be my goal. I want to be able to do things that I can sustain. But going back to wetting your butt off and thinking that is somehow getting you somewhere. It was so ingrained in us that that punishment was doing something, but it's not doing anything.

18:00I was so cardio conditioned. I could run miles on end. Oh, I could bust out a K in less than 30 minutes. Why is my body not changing? Like, why do I still have no muscle definition? I wasn't putting the pieces together.

18:16Tanisha:Yeah, same. That was my story. I still do cardio. I have a step goal and sometimes I'll increase my step goal or do some zone two cardio. But muscle has to be the primary focus, you know, so that we can have everything that we talked about. Hormonal health, metabolic health, longevity. The cool thing is, once your plan is muscle-centric, you are training to support muscle growth and your nutrition supports that, you're going to feel better. But the aesthetics come as a byproduct. You're working smarter, not harder. And it almost feels, I'm not going to say it feels easy. But compared to the hours and the effort that I used to put into cardio or programs like we talked about versus what I'm doing now, three days in the gym lifting and I'm walking most days, that's like the effort is so different.

19:05Tanisha:But the outcome and how I feel is by far so much better. And like you said, it goes along with nutrition. But when you actually start to see that muscle definition, not only are you seeing muscle definition, but you're getting stronger. Your metabolism is functioning better. It makes keeping weight off easier, the more muscle that you have. And you're just in the gym, you're looking good, you're feeling good, you're confident. I always say like, don't tell me I'm skinny. Don't tell me I'm fat. Just tell me I'm strong. Okay. Tell me I'm strong. Tell me I can lift a house. Okay. What I want to be.

19:42I want to be so strong. I want to have so much muscle definition. It's womanly, you know, I look strong and it's sexy to me.

19:50Tanisha:I love it. I agree. I couldn't agree more. What else is sexy is like being independent. I'll be 47 this year. I want to make sure that I can climb stairs, that I can pick up my son, that I can pick up a bag, that I can, you know, get myself out of bed, like say 30 years, 40 years from now. So those are the kinds of things that muscle will provide you. The cherry on top is that muscle makes you look like a baddie, but it's also just going to keep you healthy and make sure that you can do all the things that you want to in your life ahead. But it's the perfect transition now. The second myth we want to touch on, because I know a lot of women fear that they're going to pick up a dumbbell and all of a sudden they're going to have an explosion of muscles everywhere.

20:33Tanisha:And I wish building muscle was that easy. You know, after being in the gym intentionally applying progressive overload, lifting heavy, I can tell you it's not that easy to grow muscle. You really have to be intentional with it. But as a female, we don't have the hormones to support copious amounts of muscle growth like a man or like someone who might be on some sort of PED. You don't have to fear getting bulky. The other thing that I think can happen, though, is as someone's starting to grow muscle, if there's still a layer of body fat over top of that muscle, you know, that's what can start to make them look or feel a little bit bulky.

21:13Tanisha:It's a little bit of understanding how body composition works and then knowing how to dial what you need to so that you can recomp your body in a way that matches your goals, meaning you're reducing your body fat and increasing your lean muscle tissue. When you look at a pound of body fat and a pound of muscle, they weigh the same, but fat is going to take up a lot more volume and muscle is very dense. It's very compact. When you have more muscle on your frame, you're going to look smaller, tighter, toner. And sometimes as you're recomping your body, the scale doesn't change that much, but you physically look different.

21:52Tanisha:You look tighter, toner, more defined, more sculpted. And that's only going to come from muscle. And muscle is only grown when you lift with intensity, meaning you're using weight that brings you close to failure. And then you're applying progression where week to week you're focusing on the same workouts, same exercises, making sure you're getting stronger. And when you do that, that's when you start to see those changes in your body that you didn't expect or didn't see possible. You're not going to get bulky. I think that's one of the things we just want to drive home is that lifting weights isn't going to make you bulky.

22:24It really is the way to look your most defined, sculpted and lean. Yeah. When my clients say that, like, I don't want to get too bulky. And I'm just like, girl, don't flatter yourself. Okay, really? You got to be doing like it. It takes, first of all, the dedication to get to that point to these fitness models and bodybuilders. Like, that's not what we're going for. You've been doing two pound dumbbells. It's totally different. But with heavier weights, like you were saying, like I love the idea of molding and sculpting our body. Like how exciting is it to know that we are the artists of our bodies?