Program Diet Mas Didit

[Jacqualine Henington]

Helloand welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey! Welcome back to an episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke and we are bringing back an old series. So, if you've been a loyal listener of Biceps After Babies Radio, you know that back in around the two hundreds we did a series called the I did it series and the whole point of the series was to bring on MACROS 101 alumni to be able to share about their transformation, with the idea that the more stories you can hear, the more variations you can hear, the more women in their 60s and 40s and some with autoimmune diseases and some with six children and all of the variations in between. If you can hear them and how they've been successful, that maybe, just maybe it'll be possible for you to start to believe that your success is inevitable as well. And just like any journey, when we can talk to somebody who's been through that journey and learn the lessons from them ahead of time, that can make our journey a little easier as well. And so the whole idea was for the MACROS 101 alumni to come on, share their aha moment, share their breakthroughs, share what's made a difference for them in their journey so that you can start to apply it to your journey as well.

Well, we did that series for a while. They were actually extra Friday series like Friday episode. So we did a Tuesday episode and then the Friday episodes were that I did it series and that was awesome and I got really burned out. So I was like having to produce two episodes a week. And so we stopped the idea of the series, mostly because I didn't have the bandwidth to have two episodes come out a week. And so we got that kind of died out and I decided that we're going to bring it back and I'm really excited about it because I was telling somebody else that we were deciding to bring it back, she was like, Oh my gosh, I love the idea of series, so I know that it was a fan favorite and if you enjoyed it, well, we're going to have some new episodes coming in the future, and if you like it, you can go back and listen. There's a whole bunch of them back in the two hundreds. Like I said, if you're if this kind of format is something you want more of, you got tons of them back in the in the two hundreds.

So anyway, the I Did It series is back. We're not going to be doing them every week, they'll be kind of interspersed with our other episodes. So a little bit more reasonable for me in terms of timing and time commitment, but I am really excited to kick it off with a fantastic interview that I had with Ashley Spontarelli and she like she's fantastic. Her story is such a good one because I find that reverse diets are so mentally challenging for so many women. And so when I can get somebody who comes in and is committed to that process, even though they're afraid and then has the outcome that she had of being able to add so many calories and have such an amazing transformation not in terms of the scale, but in terms of so many other aspects of her life, which we'll talk about during the episode. It's just so exciting to be able to share that so that those of you who are teetering on the edge of of a reverse diet, or thinking maybe that's the next step so you can start to kind of see what's available to you on the other side of of that very real fear that a lot of women feel.

Now if you have zero idea what I'm talking about when I say reverse diet, you are not alone. This is a term that a lot of women don't know. It is probably the best kept secret of like the weight loss industry and by best cap I mean like worst kept secret because it's not a secret anybody should be keeping. It's something that needs to be a part of your journey if you want to be successful in the long run and not just lose weight, but want to lose weight and keep it off. You need to cycle through the phase of a reverse diet and maintenance and eating more calories. It cannot just always be about, be about eating less. So if you want to learn more about reverse dieting, I have a couple of podcast episodes that I direct you to. Episode 266 is a really good one where I talk about the different phases of macro counting. Episode 170, Episode 9, where I talk about the nuts and bolts of reverse dieting and Episode 42.

So 266, 170, 9 and 42 would be the episodes that I would direct you to in order to learn more about reverse dieting and why it's such an important part of your of the phases of your journey, and when you need to start thinking about and considering starting to reverse diet. OK, well, without further ado, let's jump into Ashley's experience with her reverse diet.

Yes, I was just telling her before we hit record of how excited I am to be able to share her experience because I think it's going to be very relatable to a lot of women and maybe something that maybe you don't want to hear, but that may be helpful to hear some of the lessons that Ashley learned. So let's start. I want to kind of start way, way back because I know that a lot of what we bring into adulthood was modeled for us as a child. And so I would love to learn a little bit about your upbringing as it relates to health and fitness. Like what was taught to you early on in terms of Nutrition and exercise.

Yeah. So I grew up in the 90s, so my mom was constantly careful about what she was eating. I grew up in a home where she wrestled with an eating disorder in high school. So that kind of always followed her. And I think she tried to cover it up a little bit, but definitely was very obvious to me that she was always. I was like I can't eat that or oh, you know, I'm going to have that this time, but never really like showing me that moderation. It was more just like labeling foods good and bad. And that's how I came up. Like, definitely remember times in high school sneaking out of my room and getting ice cream and then like taking it back into my room and eating it alone because, like, I didn't want to feel like ohh, I ate the ice cream, you know, like, yeah, I already ate a big dinner. I don't really need the ice cream, you know? So that's kind of where I grew up with. And then in turn just a like followed a lot of yo-yo dieting, a lot of restriction like oh, maybe if I cut out sugar then this is going to work. Maybe if I just like very much that less is more mentality throughout my entire life.

Awesome. So then let's you know, skip ahead many years to when you joined MACROS 101, like what? What made you, what brought you to that point? What were you struggling with? What were you hoping you know, to get out of the program?

Yeah. So I have been on the wait list for MACROS 101 for a while now and never really like pulled the trigger. This time around I actually had a knee surgery back in November. I've always been like super active. Well, I shouldn't say always more later in life. I've been like super active and use kind of exercise as kind of that crutch to get keep my maintain my weight, but I had to have knee surgery in November and with that, I put on like a couple pounds, like super quickly, even though I was still like not having to be like sedentary. But like super cricket came on and just kind of realized with that I thought that I was being proactive with my nutrition, but it was always like cut, cut, cut, you know.

Realizing like I was eating pretty low calories and my body was like still in that like if I took off of the break from exercising for like a second I'm going to put on all the weight, you know, and definitely I wasn't. Like not like overweight, but they had some like, you know, aesthetic goals that I was working towards. So at that point, I just realized like. Man, something that, like my body is not happy with what I'm doing right now and I need to listen to it and that was when I just realized like, Oh, I think I need to do because I think I need to reverse and I know I cannot do it alone because it was really a scary realization, yes.

Yeah. How did you realize that? Because. Because I like that realization that maybe a reverse diet is like the next thing I need to do. It sometimes takes women a really long time to be able to get there. What made you realize it? Do you do it? Was there a moment where you kind of have that realization or how did you even come to even know what that was? I'm always so interested because reverse diet is so foreign to so many women.

Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I've learned it from you. Like following a lot of your free content. Excuse me, but just realizing I was so hungry all the time. Like, so tired. And the thought of like having to slash my calories even lower to meet my goals. So really daunting. I'm just thinking like I love the feeling of being strong. I love weight lifting. I love exercise, but getting to a point where it was a little bit unhealthy in the way of like punishing my body like oh, I had this, you know, like I ate more yesterday. I should do a lot of cardio, you know. And not wanting to be on that hamster wheel anymore, like everything was so emotional, feeling like I just wanted to know the answers of like, what works for my body and how can I take the emotion out of it and like, not be like up and down all of the time.

So good. Yeah. And you said something. But I think it's really important to to point out, because I I see a lot of women get stuck in the cycle and that is what you said like as the reactive cycle, which is like we are, we are super reactive to, Oh, the scale went up. I need to cut. Oh, I'm like, you know, whatever. Like, I ate that bad thing. Now I need to go work it off. Right. It's like this very reactive sense of our health and fitness rather than this like proactive of like what do I, what do I want to do next week? Or like maybe I maybe I wanna do a cut, but I'm gonna plan for it three weeks from now because that's a good time to start cut right, so many of us get stuck in that cycle of reactivity of and and and emotionality kind of as you were speaking to. And you know, I really love to help clients get out of that reactivity out of that emotionality and be able to like, let's take a step back, let's make a really good decision about this and we're going to always make better decisions from that place than that, that place of reactivity. Do you know how many calories you were eating back when you were saying I was feeling really tired. I couldn't imagine slicing my calories anymore. Do you know about how many calories you're eating?

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