You build from those base level of skills as you progress through your education.

We start with basic math and we get to calculus.

We don't start there.

And I think that's another thing that people need to recognize, is that they want to come into this thing as experts.

Ain't no such thing as a beginner expert.

[music] Welcome back to another episode of The Fasting Method podcast.

This is Coach Terri Lance and I am joined by Coach Heather Shuker.

Heather, how are you today?

Doing great as usual, Terri.

How are you?

I'm very well, thanks.

All right, Heather, well, I think you and I have a great topic that we're going to talk about today.

We're both smiling right now because I think we get kind of excited about this kind of stuff.

You can feel the energy.

Good thing we're not doing this on a video because then people would be like, "Why are they smiling so much?" [laughter] We're going to talk about an important theme at TFM right now, and that is September being a time to recommit to your strategies that you're doing and your goals, and to refine how you're doing it.

So, Heather, I was thinking about this and I was thinking about-- everyone knows I love to speak in analogies.

I think you do as well.

I'm still thinking about the video game analogy episode that you gave us.

I was thinking about my former career, my first career, as a middle school teacher.

Yes, I paid my penance as six years as a middle school teacher.

[laughter] One of the things I really remember about that (as we come into September) is, as much as I disliked having to let go of my summer, September was exciting because it was a fresh start.

It was a new beginning.

Now, sometimes I had to move classrooms, I had to pack, and move everything, and unpack.

There were all these blank bulletin boards that needed to be filled up.

I needed to create my theme for the year and, you know, my plans and everything, and kind of map out what the year was going to be like.

And I know that I only did it for six years, but I think that, for some teachers, it's easy to fall in that mindset of, "Here we go again.

Same thing this year as last year and the year before that.

When will it ever end?

I'm on year 22.

I've got three more." And what I remember, for me (and again, early in my career), I knew I needed to see that as fresh because they were different kids coming in.

If I treated them and thought about things the same way as the group before, we were going to be off to a bad start.

I needed to be fresh.

I needed to have new ideas.

Now sure, teaching English was going to happen the way teaching English does, but I had taken some workshops over the summer, I had taken a college class, I had learned some new strategies and things.

So I have this fresh new attitude to get the year started.

Kind of like a little bit of a blank slate, in that it's a new imprint that we're going to make, but not a blank slate in that I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

I've got tons of experience now and I've got new things that I can add to it as needed.

So for me, that was a really important way to start September.

I would go to the teacher store and I'd buy all the fun, cutout things to put on the bulletin boards.

I don't know what teachers do nowadays, they probably just use holograms or something, but [laughter] back then we still had to staple cutouts and things onto bulletin boards, but it was really an exciting time.

And that's what I want to encourage people to be thinking about as September gets moving for them, as far as their health journey, their weight-loss journey, what they're doing with their fasting and their nutrition.

LIven it up.

Recommit.

Like I couldn't say, "Well, I hope I get through this year." No, it was like, "I'm in it.

This is going to be a good year and how can I make it fresh?

How can I bring in new things that I'm learning?" I love it, Terri.

And I do think in not just analogies, but also movie quotes.

And that whole picture that you were painting (which was just so visceral and I loved it) reminds me of that old movie You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and she talks about that back-to-school season.

And I think it was a, "Bouquet of freshly-sharpened pencils," right?

Like, I feel like that smell just kind of exemplifies this time of year.

And I admit it, I still go to Target and get very excited with the back-to-school section and all the supplies.

As a perpetual student, right?

[laughs] I have several degrees.

It was just part of the rhythm of my life for so long.

So I can so relate to this analogy of the fresh start of the new school year.

And I think when it comes to things like the weight-loss journey, a lot of us can appreciate the magic of a fresh start.

I think that's why so many of us are excited about the New Year, or we want to start on Monday, like the idea, "Okay, it's a clean slate.

Let's start over." Now, are we really starting over?

We've had these bodies for a long time.

We're not actually starting over.

The body has kept score the whole time.

And so not to, you know, not to knock on that idea, but we've been in it, we're still in it, we remain in it.

We are works in progress.

And, whilst I love that concept, I also don't want us to forget that we have that experience, like you said.

You know, you aren't starting as a brand new teacher every single year.

As each year goes by, you have that much more wisdom, that much more experience that you earned from the previous school year that, fortunately, that new set of pupils get to learn from.

So there's that piece.

I was recently speaking with a college professor.

And so I was trying to make a similar analogy work for her, not speaking of the fresh-start nature, but on the vastness of what is required when you are out to earn a college degree, because we have some young people these days that are starting their brand new college.

I know a lot of moms that are dropping their kids off for the first time or, you know, in the middle of their college careers.

And from that perspective, it can be very daunting to think about what is required over those four years, five for some, to get through that.

What do we do?

What do we teach them?

It's like, you know, you don't do those four years all at once.

You break it down.

So you got your major and then you-- I know we used to have catalogs.

We used to have books where you looked at what the requirements were and what the descriptions for the classes were.

I think that's all changed, but still the same concept applies.

You have a degree that you're trying to earn, you break that down into credits that you need, and then you break that down into semesters.

And then, once you start school, you get your syllabuses, syllabi [laughs], and you look at the next few months as to, you know, when are things due?

When is my study schedule going to be?

How am I going to organize myself?

And that is really what is required at that level of kind of extended planning, is what is required when you have something big, like transforming your lifestyle, is concerned.

It's not, "We're going to start on Monday and see how it goes," right?

We're not going to start this next semester and just kind of stumble our way through.

We've got a big goal that we're trying to achieve.

We need to break that down by quarter and then break that down by what actions do I need to take this week?

And I think when people start to realize that-- you know, because I'm a weight-loss coach, so that's always my frame of reference.

When people start to realize, okay, it can feel very overwhelming to lose 50 or 100 pounds, but we're not doing that at one big chance, just like we're not getting a college degree in one big swoop.

We're breaking that all the way down to what do we do in this week?

And we have a plan.

We have a strategy.

We have a way to do it.

And that's what we teach at The Fasting Method.

We teach, okay, over the course of the week, can we get in three good fasts?

Can we start to work on not snacking and grazing?

Can we start to adjust our way of eating to one that is going to eventually lead us to that goal down the road?

But for now, we've just got to focus on what's right in front of us, and we have to have a plan.

And new supplies.

Yes, definitely.

Stickers and calendars.

[laughter] Get the gold stars!

One of the things I love about the way you just described that is it's taking on a large endeavor and breaking it down into doable parts.

If you were to talk to someone entering college, you would not say, "Well, four years," "six more years," or whatever, you would take this semester.

And yes, there's going to be a series of these, but we're going to chunk it, we're going to put it into more manageable parts.

And some semesters (or chunks) are going to be a little more challenging for certain reasons, and some semesters (or chunks) are going to ease up a little bit for various reasons.

Maybe they're going to take a semester abroad and they're going to get to see Europe while they're taking their studies or whatever, but chunking, I think, is a really important part of this.

And I think oftentimes people come to us at The Fasting Method with these very large goals - "I want to lose 75 pounds," or, "I have 160 pounds I want to lose." Let's look at it in those semesters, in those chunks.

Let's focus on what's right in front of us for this, whatever, length of time, until it's time to revise and do the next chunk, so that it's not daunting.

If I had thought, when I started college, if I had known in my first-- we were on the quarter system, if I had known in the first quarter, if I'd really thought how many times I'm going to have to do this again, I think I would have wanted to drop out.

[laughter] But instead to just focus on the, yes, there is a big path out there, but I'm going to focus on this portion of the path right now.

And as I go, I'm gonna (as you've highlighted), I'm going to learn things that help me on the next part of the path.

And some of the next parts of the path will still be a little bit unknown because there's new stuff for me to learn about how my body's responding to this, what works for me now, what used to work for me before that isn't working the same way now.

So I love that idea of breaking it down.

I don't know, I'm guessing you may have done this as a student.

I tend to lose my organizational skills once something really gets going, but man, when that semester started, I'd block my schedule in, and I'd highlight little squares, and I'd set up a plan of when what was due, kind of like people creating their fasting plan and their food plans.

Really giving yourself that structure.

Rather than, okay, you know, "Buckle up because here we go," really giving yourself that set plan of how to do this next portion.

Yes.

And so that you're not just day-by-day just kind of flailing around not knowing what to do next.

When you have yourself organized in that way and you see, okay, today is a fasting plan and tomorrow I'm having two meals, you just follow the plan.

You don't want to wake up every single day and have to figure it out again.

It is so much better to wake up and know what you're doing, and be able to just execute, and not have to think of it and execute all on the same day.

[music] [promotion] Coach Terri here.

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There will also be journaling or reflection prompts to keep you steadily integrating your evolving mindset and behavior strategies throughout.

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[music] When I'm talking to people that are trying to lose a significant amount of weight, unfortunately, there's a high failure rate.

And I think the two biggest reasons that I see that people don't hang in there and get to goal.

Number one is poor stress management and number two is lack of planning.

And so exactly what we're talking about here.

When people neglect that piece, they think that they'll just kind of wing it, they're not successful.

The people that are more successful are the ones that at least have some idea of what's coming up and what their plan is.

They're the ones that get out the calendar, look at their social events, plan their fasts around them.

You got your A students who have a complete meal plan, and it's all portioned out in the fridge.

That was never me!

But they at least have an idea of what they're going to eat the next couple days.

You know, they have a fasting friend on hand in case they get into trouble and they have hunger that they can't otherwise manage.

And so that level, like that base level of looking ahead at what's coming next is, I think, required.

As you mentioned, it gets easier over time.

As you habituate, as you learn the rhythms of fasting and changing your way of eating, it becomes less-- just brain energy is required to think about it.

It just becomes, "Oh yeah, got it, got it." Your grocery shopping changes and that becomes a new habit.

I fasted Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so I just knew it's Monday, I'm not eating and I didn't have to think about it.

That just becomes the rhythm of your life.

So what you were talking about with things building on each other, that's exactly right.

I was actually in a Community group meeting this morning, and we were talking about food order.

And a member said, "You know what?

I'm kind of early on, and that's overwhelming.

I'm trying to think of all this other stuff and now you're adding this?" No.

We start with the basic building blocks.

It's almost like you start out with, you know, psych 101, freshman year, and then you move on to abnormal psychology, you move on to early childhood development, or what have you.

You build from those base level of skills as you progress through your education.

We start with basic math and we get to calculus.

We don't start there.

And I think that's another thing that people need to recognize, is that they want to come into this thing as experts, ain't no such thing as a beginner expert.

So you've got to start with skill level one.

That goes back to our video game, right?

You're gonna start with learning those basic skills and practicing them until you can advance through your program.

Well, I'm gonna take your video game analogy and I'm going to raise you...

[laughter] No, this does go back to my college experience.

I was in the Honors College, but I went to a small high school that did not offer-- I had never even heard of AP classes and taking an AP test to comp out of some classes and take more advanced classes and things.

So I got there and, yeah, I was a kind of a top student in my high school, but now I was with all the honor students from all the schools that have all this advanced stuff.

And I got placed into math 110, because where does a beginner of college start?

In the 100 level classes.

So I got placed in 110.

I'm like, okay, that makes sense.

And then I lived on the honors floor and I'm listening to my floor mates and they're all like, "Yeah, I'm in math 310." And I thought, what?

What's wrong with me that I'm not there?

They did math 110 back when they were in seventh grade.

They still did it.

They didn't skip it.

There's no hurry, skip everything else, and get to where you want to go.

They just, for whatever reasons, were in an environment where they did it at a different time in their journey than I did.

And I often hear people in TFM, in the Community, in the Facebook group and things kind of comparing themselves.

"Well I heard so-and-so's doing 66s so clearly I need to do 66s," but they haven't yet mastered the 16 hours.

66s are not going to work if you haven't gotten good with the 16s.

So try not to jump into that mindset of, "There's a place I need to get to quickly, and I hear some other people are already there." You've got to go with where you are and build the skills and move up, and then build those skills and move to that next level.

Now, I was an English major, so I never made it to math 310, fortunately.

[laughter] I think I had to go to like 112, so there was probably three courses that I needed to take, but it was similar in other types of classes.

When I started taking my English classes, I didn't start in English 482, I started in the 100s.

And as I knew how to write better and know how to think differently, I could move up through to the 200-level classes, and then the 300-level classes.

So using September as a time to do a kind of audit of where you are.

What do you know how to do?

What can you do right now based on what's been happening?

Let's say, for example, I've been really off track for the summer, spending time at my lake house, everyone bringing all kinds of food, and I just feel really off track.

It doesn't matter that I stopped in May doing two 48s, I'm going to have to rebuild some of those skills.

So in that video game, I'm going to replay skill levels one through nine, and then I'll be back to my previous level of fasting.

But to really check in with yourself.

Where am I now?

What makes sense to be doing now?

Floundering like I was for the summer?

That's not okay.

I'm not going to keep doing that.

We're here.

It's a fresh start.

Do I need to do some fat fasting?

Do I need to refocus on TRE and not even plan any longer fasts yet?

So using September (as the title kind of encourages us) to think about to recommit, audit where we are, and then refine it as we go.

Refine what we need, what we know hasn't quite been working yet, or the next step that we're ready for, and keep adding to that skill set that we have.

Oh, I love that so much.

And I also want to pull out something that you talking about, which is the pace issue, right?

When you're seeing other people in the 300s, where you see other people that have already lost 40 pounds and you're like, "I gotta go quick.

Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick." I think it is so common for people to focus so intently on how much further they need to go.

They just don't do a great job at looking back and seeing how far they've come.

So that's issue number one, is people not giving themselves the credit for, you know, finishing math 110, like getting to where they are now.

When I hear people say, "Oh, I just did a 24," and they're just kind of downplaying that fast, which, as you mentioned, some people have to work up to a 16.

And so once we've kind of gone through the first few layers, it's almost like they didn't even count.

We don't give ourselves the credit for that level of advancement.

That is why I'm such a huge proponent-- I mentioned earlier, the gold stars.

I am such a huge proponent of keeping record, keeping track so that you can see that progress, because there are other ways to feel like you're making progress and moving forward than just the darn scale.

It's a lagging indicator, it is not an input/output machine in the way that we want it to be, and so it can sometimes be discouraging.

Whereas if you set up a plan for yourself and you said-- like, you know, I'm sure you set yourself up for the semester-- yes, I used to have a grid and I think it was 16-week semesters.

And so it would be every single week, and I would have little blocks, and it would show when my tests were due, when my papers were due, and I would cross them off as I went ahead so I could see myself progressing through the semester.

And I think that is what we-- as a faster, I also did that.

I had my little F's.

And then as I fast-- on my calendar and, as I fasted, I would give myself a gold star and I would write how many hours that fast was.

I still have the receipts of all of the fasts that I did, and I have the gold stars for all of the exercises that I did.

I can look back for decades and see the progress that I made and the effort that I put forward for myself.

And I think that that's an important thing to have so that you can say, "Okay, the scale is not doing what I want it to.

Maybe I had a whole lot of insulin resistance to push through before the scale is going to respond, but I showed up.

I am doing what it takes." And when it comes to this process that we're talking about, you actually need those reps to transform your behavior.

You need that consistency of behavior if you want to have any chance for sustainable change.

So it's not like it's wasted if the scale doesn't move.

All those times that you showed up for your TRE, all those fasts you showed up for, all those daily walks that you showed up for, all of that is not lost energy.

Those are all reps.

Those are all votes for the person that you are trying to become, as James Clear would say.

And so that's not nothing.

And if you not only do it but then track it and you can see that progress building, I think it can really be wind on your back when times are tough, and it's not a fresh start anymore, and you're just in the middle of it.

You got a lot of exams coming up and papers due, and it feels a little miserable, you can see like, "Well, hey, I've gotten this far.

I want to keep going," and that can really be the push to help you stay on track.

Absolutely.

Now I'm totally picturing my folder or binder or whatever I had at the start of each quarter because I would.

One, I was probably doing it as a distraction for myself while sitting in class, but I would make a little chart of how many times I had to come to this class, and then I would start checking them off.

I would be like, "Hey, I only have to go for more times." But I did do that while I was fasting.

Mine was not very elaborate.

I just had a little page on my phone, and I would just write the week, and then I would check off each fast that I did, but it was really helpful for me to see that.

So I love that reminder for myself.

Heather, you mentioned something in that last piece that I wanted to hop on because it's like, what are you recommitting to?

And I think sometimes we think, "Oh, I'm recommitting to something that's really hard," and we get all bogged down in that.

What if you look at it as something more long term.

Something you're going to need all the way to maintenance and beyond is, "I'm going to commit to consistency, not perfection.

I'm going to commit to consistency." The payoff is in the consistency, like you said.

It's not just the number on the scale, but it's all of those other changes that are happening when you are engaging in consistent behavior.

I had a talk with a client a week or two ago, and she's experimenting a little bit right now and eating primarily carnivore for a month or so because she's had high insulin resistance, a lot of cravings, and a lot of hunger that have just made practicing some of the other skills really complicated for her.

So, when I last met with her, she had been doing more carnivore eating for two weeks and she was just on cloud nine, like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe my hunger is so much different, my cravings are gone.

I can't believe the food freedom that I feel." And then I could hear the pause and she said, "But what if I do this for a month and I don't see the weight loss?" Like, already second-guessing this out of fear that that marker might not change yet.

And I just had to kind of encourage her, "Look back at all the good stuff you just shared with me.

Look back at how much better you feel about how you're going to navigate each day because the food noise got quieter because you feel satiated.

What if that number on the scale doesn't move yet in a month?

Aren't all of these things worth it?

And these, again, will be the consistency that eventually makes those other markers move." But so many of us, we're looking for that one so much that we abandon the efforts when we don't see it.

And so really targeting, as you highlighted, those other things that show us, "Wow, I've been able to do TRE for 39 days now." And as you said, that's not nothing.

That's really impressive.

Keep it going.

That's the win right there.

Exactly.

When it comes to what I talk to people about - weight loss - I always start a client relationship beginning with the end in mind.

Going off Stephen Covey, right?

Because ultimately, not that it's a waste of time to lose the weight (because you still earn a whole lot of skills when you do so), but if you get to that goal weight and you have done nothing to fix your relationship with food, to kind of reestablish your patterns, your identity, etc., that scale is going to be like a rubber band and go right back to where it was.

And so part of the process that I'm working on with my coaching clients is not just getting them to their scale weight.

Yes, I say, "I'm a weight-loss coach," because I know that's what people want to hear.

That's what I wanted to hear.

But ultimately, I'm a health coach.

I want people to reclaim the health that is their birthright and get them to the highest level that they can, and weight loss is usually part of that path.

But if people only fixate on the scale and only are like, "By any means necessary," it doesn't even stay off, right?

So a big piece that I'm working with people on is like, okay, well, when you're in a social situation and you need to practice eating a certain way while there, the scale's probably not going to move, but you're earning that experience and that wisdom that's going to serve you, right?

When you are in a circumstance where fasting is not on tap for you because you're stressed out, do not fret about the fact that the scale might not move those couple of weeks.

Be grateful that you have those couple weeks of TRE that are going to serve you in the end.

So there is always an opportunity to practice all of the skills that you need long term in the midst of this journey, no matter what comes at you.

No matter what stress, no matter which holidays, no matter which vacations, all of those are going to keep coming for the rest of your days, there's always skill advancement.

And sometimes that skill advancement and those reps don't move the scale, but that doesn't mean that you aren't getting closer and closer to where you will eventually need to be.

I'm going to tie that back into my middle school teaching analogy, and I feel like it would be me looking at my students writing-- I taught English and we had a writing-based curriculum.

It would be like me looking at their writing every week and evaluating if I had been a successful teacher.

They're developing.

They're growing.

They're learning.

They're learning where to implement those new ways of thinking and ways of putting it together in their writing.

And I have to celebrate those wins when I see it.

Like, "Oh, look how you use the dialog here.

That really worked well in your piece.

Let's work on the punctuation a little bit and let me show you how to do this part." But if every week when I looked at their work and thought, "They're not where they need to be for ninth grade," yeah, this is month two of eighth grade.

I've gotta look at them where they are and see the successes, and see the developing skills, and the developing successes, not just keep checking in, "Are they there yet?

Are they there yet?" Because that's going to be really defeating for me as a teacher and it's going to trickle down to them.

They're going to feel really defeated because they're going to hear me, "Well, you're not there yet," you know, versus, "Oh my gosh, look at how you did this.

That's awesome." Can I get a huge, loud amen over that because one of the quotes that I love and I keep repeating is that failure screams and success whispers.

And that is exactly it.

We are so focused on how we're slipping up, how we're not being perfect, how we're not there yet, how we don't-- we haven't had everything perfectly on track this week, and so we're not doing the absolute most that we possibly could at any given moment to go as fast as we can and get to go a little- oh, my gosh, like, can we please give ourselves credit for what we're doing?

And like you said, okay, the punctuation is not on board, but look at that dialog, right?

We've got something to work with here.

So many times I'll meet with clients-- and I start my meetings with, "Tell me your wins," because I realized that people would just immediately start going on about the mistakes they made and wanting to tell me every last bite that they took.

The confessional.

Exactly, exactly, like I'm a priest.

I am not ordained.

I cannot absolve you, nor do you need to be.

You know?

I think it's hard because I don't think it's human nature.

We are negativity-bias people.

We latch on to what we're doing wrong.

So it's something that we need to practice.

We need to look for those wins, just like we would in children, just like we, you know, try to give a dog a treat when it does what we want it to.

You know, we want to catch ourselves winning, as it were, so that we can build on that.

We want to build on our wins.

We don't want to hyper fixate on what we're doing wrong.

And again, that college student-- you know, I'm guessing many of us, if we went to college, we had a class or two that we didn't do so well in.

You know, it's the one area in our report card or our grade point average that, yeah, we took a little hit there.

We struggled in that class.

I look at some of the classes that I struggled in early on in my journey and realize it was partly because I didn't yet have the skills for it.

You know, I took a course on Beowulf, an English class on Beowulf.

I was so proud of my final exam essay that I wrote, and I got it back and the instructor said, "Next time you write an essay about the book, you might want to spell the title right!" [laughter] Oh!

Okay, so maybe I needed to work on some basic skills.

But anyway, the places where I struggled the most is where I was stretching myself.

And yeah, it didn't look so pretty at first, but I was pretty pleased that I could take that class on Beowulf, this, you know, old piece of literature and pull something from it.

So just giving ourselves that credit.

Even when it doesn't look pretty, even when it doesn't feel easy or great, knowing that we're doing it.

I shared with you when we first hopped on today that I had just come back from my workout this morning with my personal trainer.

It was a really hard workout.

I cannot not go into whining voice as I talk about it.

It was so hard, but I'm so glad I did it.

And it didn't look pretty.

It didn't look pretty at all, and it didn't feel nice, but what an accomplishment.

And I hope people carry that with them.

You're going to struggle some in September as you're recommitting and refining what you're doing.

And that's okay.

We're not meant to do it all pretty and perfect.

It's work.

It's challenging.

So get dirty with it, you know?

Make it not so pretty, but engage it.

Right.

And stick with it because it's worth it.

You come out the other end with a sense of accomplishment and, in terms of what we're talking about, better health.

That's right.

You don't have a better asset.

There's nothing better than good health.

It's worth every bit of the effort and worth fighting for.

Absolutely.

Well, Heather, again, I'm pretty sure you and I could keep going back and forth with this for a long time because it's something we're both really invested in, thinking these ways.

I hope this episode really lands with people and really gets you working on recommitting to what you're doing and refining it as you go.

And we will be back with another episode soon.

Take good care, everyone.

Make good choices.