EP 86: 7 Fitness Myths I Had to Unlearn to Transform My Body After 40

0:00Hello and welcome to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better, and Stronger Over 40. I'm your host and coach, Shauna. I am 47, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. I spent almost 20 years trying to build a body that I could never quite achieve. And it wasn't because I didn't have discipline. It wasn't because I had a lack of effort. It was because I was doing things in the wrong way. I kept following advice that was never going to build me the body that I wanted. Today, I'm going to walk you through the biggest myths that I had to unlearn before I could actually transform my body.

0:32Once I understood what it actually took to change my body composition and make a true transformation, everything started to fall into place. And I'm not just talking about scale loss, but actually true changes with my body in ways that I didn't think were possible. Not just for me, but also for the hundreds of women over 40 I have coached since. Let's dive right into those myths so you can start building your best body too. Myth number one is that I thought lower my calories were, the faster fat loss would be for me. And this is something I think we can all relate to. We think if a little less calories works well, then slashing them even lower will work better or faster.

1:05Back in my 20s and my 30s, when I wanted to lose weight, I wasn't necessarily looking for the smartest way. I was looking for the fastest way. And it was also promoted. You might remember 1 ,200 calorie diets, eat one meal a day, drink all of your meals. Every few years, a new diet came along. the name might have changed, but the method was the same. Eat less and less to lose faster. And some of them worked, at least at first. The scale would move, so I assumed it was doing the right things. What I didn't understand is that losing weight and improving your body composition are not the same thing.

1:35When your calories are too low, especially if you're not prioritizing protein or strength training, you don't just lose body fat, you lose lean muscle too. And muscle is what gives your body shape, definition, that tone look that most of us are chasing. Not to mention, it's your metabolic powerhouse. It's what helps you maintain a healthy metabolism. When we spend months and months dieting harder and harder, we start to lose the very thing that would have given us that tone look to begin with. It's also not sustainable. You know, fat loss takes time. Healthy rates of fat loss are about a half a pound to two pounds every week.

2:07So if you have 20 pounds to lose, we're looking at months, not weeks. Instead of asking how little you can eat, ask yourself how much you can eat and still make progress. This is something that I talk about all the time with clients. Do the most with the least. Because if you start a diet already eating as little as possible, you have nowhere to go when progress slows or stalls. But if you start conservatively using the smallest deficit that still moves the needle, you have plenty of runway to use. When things stall, which can happen, you still have room to adjust. You can drop calories a little bit more, add a little bit more steps or activity.

2:40That's the difference between a plan that will take you through a successful fat loss phase than one that falls apart in three weeks. Before you change anything, get a baseline. Start tracking your food for a week. That tells you exactly where your maintenance calories are. From there, you can create a modest deficit, somewhere between 300 to 500 less than you're currently eating. Prioritize strength training. Prioritize protein so that you hold onto muscle while you're losing body fat. You know, the goal is not just to weigh less. It's to end your fat loss phase leaner and more defined, not just smaller.

3:09Fat loss is going to require discipline. It is meant to be a season, not a lifestyle. This is a time where you have to make some short-term sacrifices for the long-term goal. And there might be some hunger that's normal and a good sign that you're actually in a deficit. But there's a difference between being a little bit hungry and then being completely miserable. Being miserable is what makes you quit and rebound. It reminds me of paying off debt. And this is something that my husband and I recently went through. We decided we were going to get rid of all of our consumer debt. but to get there we had to be consistent and patient through the journey it was not one single payment that fixed everything it was hundreds of small decisions saying no for today for what we wanted tomorrow and fat loss works the same way you know small efforts every day eventually compound the real shift for me was trading how fast i could lose weight for how do i lose this while protecting my metabolism if you can lose fat eating 1700 calories instead of 1200 that's a much better situation.

4:04You're going to have more energy. Your workouts are going to be better. You're going to preserve your muscle and you're not going to be white knuckling your way through the entire process. Now let's talk about myth number two is that eating after 7 p.m. makes you gain fat. And I don't know where this crazy random rule came from, but somehow we all heard it. You know, don't eat after seven or eight or whatever time someone decides that your body flips fat storage mode on. But it's not true. Your body is more like a bank account than a crazy clock. Every meal is a deposit. The energy that you use all day is your withdrawal.

4:35And at the end of the day, all your body cares about is the balance of energy, not the timestamp. If you're hitting your calories, if you're prioritizing your protein, if you are strength training, eating at 8 p.m. is not going to make you gain fat. This is especially important if you are someone who works nights or a mom who finally sits down after your kids are in bed. You haven't ruined anything just by eating later in the day. These are important things for us to bring to light because every goofy little food rule that exists creates unnecessary pressure, guilt, stress, confusion, and prevents you from making real progress.

5:07Forget about what time you should be eating and instead ask yourself, did I hit my protein? Did I stay within my calories? Those are the things to pay attention to and those are the things that are going to help you see progress. Myth number three is not a new one for any of us, and that is that carbs make you gain weight. And this one started years ago with the low-carb craze. You know, we had Atkins and South Beach. Those were all the rage, and I did them. I followed them, and they did work until they didn't. I cut out bread, rice, potatoes, even fruit, and I did lose weight, and I assumed it was because carbs were the problem.

5:37They weren't. I was just eating fewer calories. Removing carbs put me into a calorie deficit. Every diet with a name works the same way. it puts you into a calorie deficit. Things like fasting just reduce your eating window, so naturally you're going to eat less. Replacing your meals with a shake, again, are just going to reduce your calorie intake. And keto removes a whole macronutrient, which inherently is going to reduce your calorie intake. All of these things have different names, but they work on the same principle, the same mechanism. They are putting you into a calorie deficit. The problem with some of these approaches is how do you maintain them long-term if you want to stick with them long term.

6:14Then you have no way to manage your calories in a successful way to maintain your results. And this gets even more confusing when you do decide to bring carbohydrates back in because immediately you start to see the scale change. This is not to do with the carbs themselves, but it could be because you're back in a surplus by eating more calories. The other thing is that carbohydrates, as in the name, help to hydrate your body. Your body holds on to more water when you do have them. And this is actually a good thing. But immediately we see a change in the scale when we cut them out or we introduce them.

6:44And that scale fluctuation is not fat. It's usually just water. That distinction is really important so that you can start to make better decisions and stop fearing food. Carbohydrates offer us a lot of different benefits. They fuel your body when you're trying to build muscle. They're your body's preferred energy source for strength training. Having carbs before and after your training is going to help you push harder, get a little closer to failure, get one more rep, and that matters over time. And they also do a lot more than just fuel your workouts and help you grow muscle. They regulate cortisol and they support healthy thyroid function.

7:13When I brought carbs back in, I got stronger. My workouts were better. I had more energy. I recovered faster. I built more muscle. What's important to know is there is not one single food or macronutrient that causes you to gain fat. You gain body weight by consistently eating above your maintenance calories over time. That's why tracking is so powerful because it allows you to have balance with your meals and include things that you enjoy. still make amazing progress. Now onto myth number four is that lifting weights will make you bulky. If there is one thing I wish I could go back and tell myself that is not true, it would be this.

7:46I remember years ago when I was first starting my fitness journey, my husband asked me to go to the gym with him and I had zero interest. I thought that was where I was going to get bulky and I wanted to get lean, defined, and toned. So he went to the gym and I stayed home with my Jillian Michaels videos. I was there sweating, exhausted, and convinced that that was the path too lean and toned. Then I came across this woman on a fitness magazine and she looked exactly how I wanted to look. She was lean and strong and athletic and not bulky at all. I bought that magazine. I took it home. I read her story and lo and behold, what she did to look toned and not bulky was lift weights with progressive overload.

8:23And that was what it took to convince me to actually try it. You know, fitness culture loves convincing women that we need special workouts to tone muscle or to make it long and lean. But muscle only does two things. It can grow or it can shrink. You don't tone muscle. You can look toned by having enough muscle and having low enough body fat to see it. But in order to build muscle, you have to be strength training with progression. You have to be challenging yourself. You have to be adding reps and adding weight over time, training close to failure so your body has a reason to adapt and grow lean tissue.

8:55I understand the fear because I had it too. But building muscle naturally is hard. It takes years of consistency, eating enough, training with intention, and allowing recovery. I promise you, you will never wake up accidentally looking like a bodybuilder. You know, women who carry that much muscle have usually trained specifically for decades, or they're having a little bit of help. But what can sometimes happen is when you do start to lift, you might feel bulkier at first. That's not the muscle itself. You are building lean tissue underneath that layer of fat that's still there. A pound of fat and a pound of muscle weigh the same, but muscle takes up much less space.

9:33As you keep training and gradually lose fat, that's when your shoulders are going to look more defined. Your legs will look sculpted. Your shape is going to change in the ways that you want it to. If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be to stop being afraid of muscle, lift to grow it, because it's going to change your body in the best of ways. Now on to myth number five is that more is more. longer workouts, more workouts. Those are going to be what help you see results. I thought the more I was in the gym, the better my results were going to be. If an hour was good, then 90 minutes would be better.

10:02If four days was good, then six days would be better. But here's what I didn't understand is that muscle growth is a two-part equation. You need the stimulus, but then you also need the recovery. Stimulus is your training. It's lifting with intention, getting close to failure, tracking your lifts, progressively getting stronger over time. Recovery is the other half that I ignored. You know, your muscles grow after your workout. When you are sleeping, when you're getting proper nutrition, when you're taking rest days, when you skip the recovery, you're missing half of the equation. I felt like a rest day meant I was falling behind until I had my son and I simply couldn't spend two hours, six days a week in the gym anymore.

10:39That truly was a blessing in disguise because it forced me to get intentional and I got better results, not because I was doing more, because I was doing better. Today, I train three to four days a week, straight hard sets, five to six exercises a session, not 15, not supersets all over the place, but with intention. Doing four exercises with hard sets closer to failure versus six to eight exercises where you leave five reps in the tank is going to work far better. The signal to grow muscle is not created by how much you do. It's created by how hard you challenge the muscle. This same approach has helped so many different clients of mine.

11:15I've had many clients that are used to tons of exercises, lots of supersets, circuit workouts. And when we shift from that to a strength training program where we have five exercises, we're taking them close to failure within two to three sets, they're seeing much better progress. This all comes back to that same principle of us working smarter, not harder to build our best bodies over 40. Now on to myth number six, which is the more calories that you burn during your workout, the better it is. I love data and there are some important data points to pay attention to, but calories burned during your workouts is not one of them.

11:47But I used to think the same way. I thought if I was drenched in sweat, my heart was pounding. I must have had a great workout. But most of these smart watches aren't measuring your calorie burn. They're estimating it from your age, your weight, your heart rate, and your movement. And those estimates have been proven to be wildly inaccurate. Let's say your watch tells you that you've burned 600 calories. So you eat back those 600 calories, but maybe you've only burned 300. Now you went from being in a deficit to being back at maintenance. A few weeks later, you're not seeing the changes that you want to and you're thinking that it's your body, but you're just tracking the wrong thing.

12:19Just because you're sweating more doesn't mean you are burning more fat. Fat loss comes from your overall energy balance over time, not from the calories burned during one workout. Instead of tracking calories burned, start to track what's going to move the needle forward. Your steps, your workouts, your weights. Are you getting stronger? This shift changed how I approached my relationship with exercise and with fitness. I stopped using the gym to burn and started to use it to build. And that's when I saw my best results. Now on to our final myth, myth number seven, and that is you can spot reduce body fat.

12:49And I say this one for last because it's the easiest one to believe. You know, we all have that stubborn area of body fat. For me, it's on my thighs. You know, my upper body can be really lean and I'll still have cellulite on my knees, on my thighs, which I want to say, by the way, is completely normal. Every woman has it.

13:09So comparing yourself to flexed bodies, posed bodies, edited bodies. Often when I'll share my before and after photos and someone will message me and say, what did you do to get rid of your cellulite? And I immediately tell them, I didn't get rid of it. It's still there. It looks so much better because I have more muscle, which should only encourage you to do everything that we're talking about today. But be kind to yourself. You know, get stronger, but don't hold yourself to a standard that doesn't exist. All right, let's get back to the topic at hand. Years ago, before I understood how fat loss worked, I used to search for workouts or videos that promised to melt away my belly or get rid of my cellulite.

13:46And I believed that they would work. And when you're searching for these things, you will find them. But I want you to know it doesn't work that way. Fat loss happens systemically. You don't choose where your body pulls fat from. Genetics and hormones often do. There is no one exercise that's going to tell your body to burn fat from one specific area. It just doesn't happen that way. Trust me, I wish it did, but it doesn't. The best thing I ever did for my thighs wasn't a magic workout. It was building muscle so that they had some support there. So they actually look toned and defined once I lost body fat.

14:21Think about a roll of toilet paper. You know, that cardboard tube is your lean, sculpted, defined, beautiful body. Every sheet of toilet paper around it is body fat. You know, you can't reach into one specific sheet and remove it. You're going to remove them one sheet at a time until you get to the middle. And your body works the same way. You cannot choose where your body is going to burn fat from first. You just have to keep removing those layers. Be patient. And then eventually it's going to reveal that beautiful body you built underneath. Once I stopped chasing small and I started to chase strong, everything changed for the better.

14:54I built more muscle. I lost body fat. I helped my metabolism. I stopped starting over because I finally built results on a solid foundation, not a flawed fad. Now my passion is to help you do the same. If you're tired of all these myths holding you back and you're ready to build your best body over 40, check out my free Master Your Metabolism class linked below. I go through all the things we talked about today and more and give you a guide to follow so that you can start making real progress and have the right foundation of habits that will continue to help you make progress for the years to come.

15:27If you want to work with me personally, I will put information on my one-on-one coaching or my Strong by Shauna membership in the description as well. If you found this helpful, please subscribe and stick around because every week I share practical-based strategies to help women over 40 build their best bodies and get results that actually last. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I genuinely hope you found it helpful. If you did, please leave a rating or review. I'd be so thankful. Until next week, keep getting stronger and I will see you in the next episode.