Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show. This is a very special episode. I sit down with our lead nutritionist, Julia Mitchell. We give you behind the scenes what we do in our clinical practice. Julia Mitchell covers the top three things that you can do to achieve the body composition of your dreams. Julia Mitchell is extremely informative and engaging. We provide you with exactly the tactics that you need to take away to become the best version of yourself. If you are someone who has struggled with weight, weight gain, weight loss, whatever it is, we’ve got you covered. As always, this episode is free of charge. Please, if you like it, allow us to continue. Take a moment to subscribe. Share it. If this content is something that you’re interested in, there is my free newsletter, which you can find on my website, drgabriellelyon.com. And now, without a moment to lose, let’s get into the show.

Julia Mitchell, welcome to the show. I feel like this is a talk show host, almost slash game show moment, but it’s not. And Julia, you are the lead nutritionist in the practice, a very special human. Let the listener know about how I met you. Oh, you want me to tell that story? You know what? You tell the story. Even better. OK. So first of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s really grateful to be here.

I guess I will start by saying I was very inspired by you and still are to this day.

And one day, I was thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. And I knew I was passionate about nutrition. I knew I was passionate about helping people reach their full potential and really get over a lot of the obstacles they face as it relates to their health. And when I thought about that, I always thought about you and the content you were putting out and what I was seeing on your socials at the time. This was a couple of years ago.

And I thought to myself, man, I really want to work for Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. I want to contribute to her mission. I want to be part of everything that she is doing. So I sent you an email and said, hey, I’m a mom of two. I live in the middle of nowhere in Canada.

I love what you’re doing, and I want to be a part of it. And you actually responded, which blew my mind, and asked for a little video resume. And then I said, forget this whole video thing.

Why don’t I fly to New York to meet you? And so I bought a ticket on my own dime, and I flew to New York and kind of forced you to have a meeting with me. And it was awesome. This is now– is it two years? All coming up on two years. You know, I’m actually the lucky one. And people always ask me, how do you find these amazing people? How do you find these amazing people that help contribute to the mission? Because I’m one person. I cannot do this alone. And here’s what I tell them. They find you. We find you. I’m so grateful. And they elbow their way into your life without you having a choice. And I’m so happy. And I’m so happy, not only because you showed up in my life, but the way that you’ve showed up in the practice. You are part of the clinical practice. And also, the way that you show up and help us create amazing content. You’re so organized and so thoughtful. I couldn’t do it alone.

One of the amazing parts about you, which there are many, is a little bit about your background. You not only were always or became very interested in health and nutrition. I’d love for you to share a little bit about that. But you also did and do bison ranching. Is that the right words? – Yeah. – So share a little bit about you and who you are and how you became so interested in this. – Sure. I would say I’ve always been interested in nutrition, health, fitness, this space for a couple decades now. Since I was in my late teens, early 20s, it’s been something I’ve been interested in. Finally, when I was in my early 30s, I realized like, why don’t you just make a career out of this instead of trying to fight it? So I was a little late to the game after I had my kids.

 – And how old are your kids now? – They’re three and four, two boys.

They were crazy.

But a while ago, I was really passionate about, first it started exploring the idea of nutrition, food quality, how food is grown, where it comes from. I was really curious about all of those kind of aspects of nutrition. And I really got deep into, I don’t know if you know what this is, but permaculture. – I don’t know. – I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s a form of agriculture that is sort of, I can’t really describe it, but it’s sort of like a way of thinking in systems about how to raise food and how to design your life so that you can be almost self-sufficient.

And I became really fascinated by it. And sort of hippy and a little impractical at times, but very interesting and about sort of growing your own food and understanding the complexities around how food is produced. And that led me to opening a little, or purchasing and then sort of morphing this little grocery store in my neighborhood. So I started sort of being the purveyor of food that was grown in my local area that was local farms, people who really cared about their land, people who really cared about their animals, and raising food in a way and with a quality that really aligned with what food I would want to eat. – And when you say your town, there’s, is it 3,500 people? – The small town we live in now, shout out to Pinter Creek, is 3,500 about, but my grocery store was in a larger city, about 100,000, so. – Must make you really think about the foods that we’re eating now and how we get it, because it is, I think people don’t recognize how difficult it is to source good food. – It really is not the norm, and we’re really removed from our food. Did you learn anything that shocked you and surprised you as you were thinking about this? – The thing I learned, I think the thing that sticks out to me is just how difficult it is to be a food producer.

So think about your average farmer or rancher or someone growing food for all of us to eat. We really take those people for granted. They work so hard. They beat their bodies up. They work 16 hour days in the elements outside, very committed to providing food that we all eat, and they go really unrecognized. And yeah, that life is, it’s very noble. It’s extremely admirable, but it’s very overlooked. – And then you transitioned out of the grocery store. – And we raise grass-fed bison. Actually, my husband, we met at my store because he was a bison rancher, and I bought bison meat from him to sell in my store. And so that’s how we met. And so we’ve taken the mission that he started and grown a little meat business for ourselves. And so we raise grass-fed bison in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Canada, where I practice nutrition and work with you. And he does a few other things in agriculture too, but then we have our little bison operation. And our passion and what brought us together as a couple even is really just around the idea of producing the most nutrient dense, highest quality food there is, which in my opinion is grass-fed bison meat.

 And in a way that supports land health and is very conscious of animal welfare and land stewardship and soil health, almost like leaving the land better than when we started, than how we found it. – And again, that is very noble and amazing. Do you think that grass-fed, grass-finished is probably not available for many people? – No, yeah. – And is that because the amount of effort that it goes for to be able to produce these bison or even cattle, because I believe that they live longer when they are, would it be considered free range? How does that even, does that work? – So an animal that’s grass-fed, grass-finished would take longer to be finished than say a feedlot cow. So you’re right about that. So it does take longer.

 I think the conventional system is very highly subsidized.

 And so it’s– – And does that mean they just get more money? – Government subsidies. And the government encourages the continuity of the conventional system, produces really high volumes of food, which is really important.

 But at the sacrifice of, I think, the land health, that over time is slowly degrading to the point where we won’t be able to get much out of it. And also is not very considerate of the animal. And when I speak about it, I mean like, confined animal feeding operations and really big industrial animal systems. – And it’s tough, right? Because we have a nation and a world to feed. It just becomes, there is, it’s challenging. – It is. – Because of the amount of humans. And then we think about how do we design a diet that supports not just sustainability, but also supports our health.

 – Yeah, I agree. And unfortunately it is a bit of a two-tiered, not a two-tiered type system, but there are some people that if they choose to and they can, are gonna be able to access higher quality food. And some people just can’t. And that’s a systemic problem that I don’t really have an answer to. But I know there are a lot of people who are thinking and working about this issue, working on this issue. But it’s a complex topic that doesn’t have a clear-cut answer. – And I’m really glad you said that, because it doesn’t. And we always want, okay, well, what’s the answer? How do we do it? How do we execute on this thing? And sustainable food is a challenging, especially high quality protein sources. And listen, that and fruits and vegetables, we are flying everything all over the place. There are real challenges.

 How did you ultimately end up getting interested in treating people, seeing people for nutrition?

 – I think that’s a really good question.

I was a fitness instructor for a long time. – Les Mills. – I was a Les Mills body attack, body pump, fitness instructor. – And shout out to your sister. – Yeah, my sister did that together for a decade. – Hey sister, I heard you’re my size, 5’1″. – Yep. – Get after it. – Her name’s Allie. – Hey Allie. – She’s the best. And so I was in a situation where I was coaching and being in that world and working obviously mostly with women. But recognizing that I just loved the community around health and fitness and obviously a big component of it was nutrition. So my experience doing that combined with this food piece and my grocery store, I sort of just realized I need to be living what I basically talk and think about all day. – And it makes life easier. When you don’t have to do something else, you can find your passion, execute on your passion, people will say, “Oh, you don’t have to work” or “Go to work”. Well, if you choose a career that allows you to expand your working knowledge base in a meaningful way to do something you love, to help change people’s lives, then we’re all winning. – Right, doesn’t feel like work. – It doesn’t feel like work. Well, maybe working with me does, but don’t. – Not really. Only when you make me do pushups. – I know, pushups, cold plunge. – Gosh. – I mean, it’s a grind. – It was so fun.

 You see a lot of the patients in our practice. I’m curious as to some of the big picture items, concepts, challenges that come up that you see routinely that seems to span whether male, female, doesn’t matter. – I think the biggest challenge people have is this internal belief that the control they have over their health is external to them.

So it’s about other people telling them what they need to do, the advice coming from somewhere outside of them. When a lot of the answers are actually within them, and they inherently have a really deep understanding of what they should be doing, they’re just not allowing themselves to hear their own bodies or their own deep desires. They almost shove it down for the sake of a message they saw on Instagram that then dominates them. And so a lot of what I coach and what we talk about in clinic is really just asking questions, getting people to turn inward and really understand themselves better. I think the clients that I have who have a really deep internal understanding, self-reflective, the ability to recognize, admit, and then address their weaknesses, their shortcomings, the things that make them vulnerable, those are the people that see the most success. – That makes a lot of sense because, I always talk about this, human beings are predictable. And we are always surprised by our own human nature over and over again. And if we miss that part, it can really set us up for failure. For example, an individual who is trying to lose weight, we do a lot of body re-composition, we do a lot of weight loss, and of course muscle building, all of the things, longevity, gut health, but one of the things that happens is people will, say Friday night rolls around, and they decide that they’re gonna have beer and pizza. And then they fall off their nutrition plan, and they promise they’re not gonna do it again. And Friday night comes around again, and it’s beer and pizza. How do you help people go through the roadblocks that stop them from really actualizing what they want? Because there is this worthiness component that they have to feel worthy. – Hugely. – And people don’t necessarily recognize that, that we can design a perfect program and a perfect plan, which arguably we might, but in order to execute on that, they have to feel worthy. – Yep. I think the first step is, so we can go back to this beer and pizza example, because I really like it, but I wanna first step back. A lot of the preliminary conversations I have with clients are around their goals, and being really clear about what they want to achieve. There’s a big difference between wanting to compete for say a bikini competition, and be a figure competitor, versus being categorized as obese and needing to get to just a healthy place, or improve biomarkers within normal range. So it really depends on the individual and what they want, and what their priorities are, as it relates to their body composition, their weight loss goals, their health goals. And once you have their goals, and sort of their hierarchy of priorities, it then becomes very easy to make decisions from there. If you wanna be a figure competitor, and have 10% body fat, it’s gonna require very tight control over several variables, that requires a level of granularity, we could get to for sure. But you have to be willing to do that if that’s your goal. If it’s not, then there’s a different approach. So really, and I mean at the end of the day, I’ll say this till the cows come home, and if any of my– – Wait, the bison. – The bison come home. – Don’t you dare say cows. – I’ll say it all day till the bison come home, and any clients that I have who are listening to this are probably gonna be like, “Mm-mm.” We are really trying to find the way of eating that works for the individual, given their life circumstances, their stressors, their schedule, their demands, and their goals all put together. And your way of eating is very different than my way of eating is very different than Matt’s way of eating. We can all achieve our goals as individuals, but how that looks is so different. And I think part of what social media and the internet is getting wrong is making people believe there is one way to do everything, and it’s really leading people down the wrong path, and almost focusing on things that don’t matter, because they keep forgetting it’s about what’s gonna work for them. – Do you believe or have you experienced that there are core fundamental principles that seem to work well for most people? – Yes, I’m so glad you asked.

 – Do tell. – If there was an acronym, I would have coined it already, but I can’t, because, okay, if we were to simplify it, we talk a lot about very basic nutritional requirements. And it’s not gonna be a surprise for me to say this to you, but we talk about protein, obviously. That’s almost fundamental.

 And we also talk about fiber.

 So I would say if you just simply eat mostly meat and vegetables, you probably would never have any issues.

 But when push comes to shove, or when rubber hits the road, it’s practically a lot harder to implement, but it could be that simple. But the basics are, eat your protein, one gram per pound of your ideal or goal body weight, and aim for 25 grams of fiber a day. And as simple as that sounds, it sometimes can take three to six months of working with someone to get to that place.

– It’s interesting. I often wonder, do you think that it takes time because people are resistant to change? Do you think it takes time because there’s food addiction, or again, because the internet, they’re seeing the next hot thing come around? And I remember, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s this glass skin situation. Have you heard about glass skin? Well, then you’re clearly not spending your time on TikTok.

 There was this glass skin where you just see these girls using these products in this way, and it’s like the thing. But if you, and by the way, I tried it. Clearly, I don’t have glass skin, it didn’t work. And then you look over somewhere else, and then you see another thing, and they’re doing needling, and there’s another way in which you can achieve your perfect skin. But the thing is, is that you jump from thing to thing. And when you jump from thing to thing, you never allow for something to work. You spend four weeks doing this thing, and then four weeks doing this other thing because it’s easy to become distractible as humans. We become very distractible by the next shining object.

 When you sit down with a client and you say, “Okay, the first goal is we’re gonna eat “one gram per pound, ideal body weight. “Okay, it could be 0.7 grams to one gram, either way.” How do you help them determine and what are some sources of protein that you use for those individuals?

 – Really easy things.

 So a lot of the barriers to achieving their protein goals are just the ability to be prepared.

 And that high protein items tend to be less available when time is an issue and harder to improvise. So you can’t just have a steak cooked and ready to eat. – You can if you’re at my house. – You can if you’re at your house, certainly. Or mine.

 But you can’t if you just thought of it and you have a freezer full of meat that then you need to thaw it and cook it and the whole process. So a lot of it is encouraging people to get organized and understanding why organization can’t happen for them. So okay, you’re having trouble getting your protein needs because you aren’t prepping a lunch every day. And a lot of it is just asking why and stepping back and then saying, okay, why, okay, why, okay, why? So you can’t get a lunch prep for today, why? Okay, because you didn’t take meat out yesterday. Okay, why? Okay, because I forgot to plan out my menu for the week. Okay, why? And then identifying where are you literally falling off? What strategy do you need to put in place in this particular spot to make it so easy for you to take out that meat that you can’t possibly not do it? Because if it’s not easy, you won’t be able to integrate it. If it’s a new habit that’s hard from the get go, it’s never going to stick. So it’s all about finding the easiest way possible to make something happen. And this is a lot of what I coach people about. It’s like, all right, so we’ve gone another week without you being able to really truly prep food. All right, what needs to happen? Where are you falling off? Do we need to get your husband involved and get him to be responsible for taking out the meat? Do we need to assign your 16 year old daughter to be the person who’s on meat duty? Like we literally brainstorm these kinds of ideas because it’s in the action where the real implementation takes place.

 If those habits aren’t, if you’re not able to do the things that require you to build the habit, you won’t actually be able to develop it. – Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When you’re counseling an individual on their protein sources, you’ll say, okay, we’re gonna prep for the week. Do you have them choose day one, do they cook bison and then fish and chicken? What are some of the easy sources? And then I’m thinking, okay, well, how can we make it really easy for people? And when I traveled, okay, I actually brought a hot plate with me. I don’t do this anymore. My husband was teasing me about this. Or I will stop by a grocery when I land and you can literally buy hard boiled eggs that are already in a package or you can get Greek nonfat yogurt. What are some of your favorite go-to sources? I’ll give you three of mine. Are you ready? Hard boiled eggs that already exist. Vital Farms, they make hard boiled eggs. You can get generic, doesn’t matter. Greek yogurt, easy. And then you can get some kind of jam, like a low sugar type jam to flavor it yourself. Or you can stop by and get berries on this grocery trip. And then finally, no one likes to be my friend, but sardines.

 Canned sardines, maybe even canned oysters. Please don’t open those on the plane. Life is better that way. Just, you know. – Alone in your hotel room. – Yes. – In the corner. – In the corner. Maybe even drain in the bathroom and then leave the can outside. Just be very kind. Those are my three easy go-tos. What are yours? – Okay, I have a few. Just a few.

 Rotisserie chickens. – Forgot about that one. – Very fast. They’re always in the front of the deli. Okay, they’re not my favorite quality of chicken because they’re made to be really quick. But you get an entire chicken for like, what, $10?

 And it’s basically the first thing you see when you walk in the grocery store. So rotisserie chicken is an awesome option.

 Any canned fish. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be sardines. It could be salmon. – No wonder you have more friends than I do. Uh-huh.

 – You know, yogurt is a good one. A hack for that is I will encourage people to add protein to their yogurt, protein powder. – Genius, I did not think about that. – So a cup of yogurt with 10 grams of protein now all of a sudden becomes 30, which is huge.

 And you can add all kinds of fun things to that to make it interesting for yourself. Fruit, a sprinkle of nuts.

What are other quick sources of protein? – I mean, you could, again, if you’re trying to do a meal, maybe string cheese isn’t the best choice, but there are fat-free cheeses. They’re highly processed, but okay, we live in a world where potentially we need solutions. And as you’re traveling, as you’re thinking, I’d much rather have people have good solutions than eat donuts or fall off the integrity of the plan that they have created for themselves. – 100%. And I think it’s also, it’s about recognizing you need to set yourself up and be organized and put systems in place so that you cannot improvise. Because when people are left to improvise, they tend to make poor choices, especially when they’re trying to be very diligent about their nutrition. – And especially if they’re tired or hungry. Those are all really, really good choices. Also, people don’t like deli meat or oven-roasted type stuff, but you know what? I’m fine with it. I’m fine with it in a pinch. For low-prep, immediate protein sources, we have rotisserie chicken. We have any kind of canned fish, any kind of low-fat yogurt, hard-boiled eggs. There’s also something called Egg Life. Have you ever had those? – Yep, those wraps.

My friend, shout out to Jen Gottlieb. We travel together, she brings that. And her can of chicken, also canned chicken. – Right, canned chicken, yep. – Packaged chicken. The other thing that I do is I get this on Amazon. You can order Paleo Valley, those beef sticks. You can have more than one. – There’s many brands. – Totally. – Chomps, Carnivore Crisp. There’s a lot of protein-based meat, sort of jerkies. You could just get a standard beef jerky off the shelf pretty much anywhere.

All amazing options.

You set people up for success, you have them start there. What about, and now they’re probably thinking, okay, well, I’ve got my protein covered.

They’re on the run, what kind of vegetable, how do you then begin to construct something? – Yeah, it really depends on the person.

So for a busy individual, I like to rely on things like bagged salads, pre-cut vegetables in the grocery store because the preparation of the vegetables or the fiber source or whatever tends to be the obstacle.

And so you have to just eliminate. The important part about the whole thing is when you’re thinking about your week and how that’s gonna look or even day to day, you have to identify what is the obstacle to you doing this. If it’s that week over week, you just can’t make prep happen, you’ve gotta find quicker options. So bagged salads, pre-cut vegetables.

In the produce section of any grocery store, you’re gonna be able to find some version of that, whether it’s a tray of raw vegetables, a tray of raw fruit, that you can just take with you and keep within your mini fridge at your office or whatever it is. There are really quick options. You have to open your eyes in the grocery store to find them. But I tend to gravitate towards those things because it takes a few steps, at least one or two out of the equation. – Yeah, I love that. And what are your thoughts on fruit or having a sweet tooth? People are probably thinking, I personally don’t think fruit is bad. We eat fruit all the time. How would you position fruit or what would you tell a patient or a client? – So something that we haven’t discussed yet is really like the whole idea of macros and tracking and understanding your macronutrient needs. – Yes, please. – So for me, fruit fits as long as it fits the macros. And typically the way we do it in clinic or the way that I practice, I’m sure every nutritionist will practice slightly differently. But for me, I really only, when you’re going about, let me think about this for a sec. When you’re going about a weight loss kind of endeavor, trying to think about too many things tends to be really overwhelming. – Do you think it’s because it’s stressful for people? – It’s stressful. It’s full of emotion for a lot of individuals.

It’s implementing many new habits sometimes, not just one, but several.

It’s almost shifting, a shifting of identity, which actually we can talk a little bit more after.

So I try to take a lot of variables that are just noisy out of the conversation.

For that reason, in clinic, we really only talk about two things. We talk about total calories and we talk about protein. – How important are total calories? – Very.

 – What you’re saying is that calories and calories out matter to some degree. – You can’t walk around a room without turning the lights on, or you’re gonna hit your knees on every single table and fall over and smash your face. – Terrible idea. – You need to understand your current macronutrient intake. If you’re not in a weight loss phase, you need to turn the lights on. – People are very resistant to that. People are so resistant to tracking calories. Friends out there, the whole goal of this podcast is so that you can see the inner workings. Well, number one, to meet Julia, because she’s amazing. – Hey. – Hey, girl. Number two, to actually be exposed to how we do things in clinic and how we think about it and make it easy for people, because our patients are very successful at what their health endeavor is. This is what we do, and they really are able to move the needle.

 We believe in tracking calories. How do you have people understand initially to start? How should they track calories? To just make it simple for them? – So typically, for the first couple weeks of working with us, you will track your calories for the whole time, two weeks. – In an app, or are they just writing it down? – In an app, chronometer is the one we use, because it’s a little bit more robust. It gives us also more indicators of your diet quality. So I like that app because it includes vitamins, minerals, omega-3 to 6 intake.

 It’s just a bit more robust from a reporting standpoint than some of the other tracking apps out there. Also, it has a professional feature so that as your nutrition coach, I can see what you’re putting in. On any given day, I can see I’m watching you all. – I go in there and I check every single one of you. No, I’m just kidding. – No, she’s not. – No, I’m not. So that we can collaborate a little bit. So in session, I can bring up your profile. We can look at your nutrition report. We can check your averages for, say, a given week or two weeks. And it can really be like a collaborative thing where some of the other apps don’t allow for that type of thing. So that’s why we use that app.

 But we typically will get an individual to track for two weeks.

 Part of it is to increase mindfulness around what you’re eating because when you’re tracking, you’re inevitably gonna be more mindful. And actually, you’re inevitably gonna make improvements to your diet just because you know you have to be tracking. So partly, it’s setting the stage for a little bit of behavior change. But also, it’s because we need to understand if you haven’t lost weight over that period of time and you haven’t gained weight over that period of time, then that’s about your maintenance calories. It’s about where we start, if someone wants to lose weight, which is pretty much everybody we see to some degree.

 Everybody wants to look a little bit better, feel better in their clothes. Some people have clinical reasons why they need to lose weight.

 So we tend to deal with that for the most part.

 So then we start with maintenance calories and we work from there. And a deficit can be 25%.

 A deficit can be 10%. A deficit could be 5%.

 Or a surplus could be 3%.

 It just depends on the individual, going back to what are your goals and what are your priorities, what do you want to achieve, do you have a timeline associated with these goals, attaching a timeline, just to tell you if you have a deadline of summer because you wanna be bikini ready. – Like Matt? – Like Matt, it really changes the discussion and it changes the trajectory and also the dedication and commitment and diligence required. – Yes, I totally agree with that. One thing that we talk a lot and we talk about this internally and I think as friends and as people, I typically always recommend people don’t set goals. And I’m gonna circle back. And you know this, I think that we set standards. – I really love that. – We set standards for how we execute and then the goals become very easy to meet. Now, if you are wanting weight loss, you do need to set a timeframe, right? You calculate what you’re gonna do, how much you’re having, how many calories, what your macros are and then you reduce it by again, whatever the percentage is that you feel comfortable and it could be 250 calories a day, it could be 500 calories a day. For the ultimate outcome, right? We call it a goal, but if we continue to elevate the standards that you get off a plane, you go to the grocery, you get a rotisserie chicken, you know what your macros are and you’ve planned for it, then the goals that you meet, it’s going to be inevitable. – Yes. – When someone is going for weight loss, you slowly reduce calories, right? Depending on the timeframe. What is a reasonable timeframe if we just make up one of our patients or you could pick someone in mind. How do you schedule or think about the calorie reduction and when you should pivot, say someone reaches a plateau or something like that? – And this is gonna sound funny, but the whole point is really to try to be able to eat as much as possible while still seeing progress. So I really try to operate from that perspective. We don’t come in guns a blazing with a huge deficit and make people feel ravenous day to day just for the sake of like you’re saying, some goal of getting to a certain point by a certain time. The idea is let’s try to make it so you feel satiated, you feel happy. None of your other, you don’t have any symptoms you’re creating as a result of this deficit. So if people eat too little, they can feel lethargic, they’re grumpy, to what end? What are you trying to achieve here? Okay, you’re gonna get to your body composition, but then you’re miserable. So that’s not the point. The point is really to eat as much as possible while still seeing progress. So what I tend to do is start with a very modest deficit. And I like to use percentages because an absolute number like 250 calories or 500 calories might work for one person whose 500 calories might work for someone who’s very large that needs to lose a pound a week very quickly. But for someone who needs to lose 10 pounds in a very high quality way, make it stay away without weight regain and feel really good doing it, it might only be a deficit of 150. But instead of over three months, it’s gonna be six or seven that they’re gonna see that change.

 I would much rather if it were me to feel really happy and balanced and lose five pounds over six months, than be really miserable and lose five pounds in two weeks. – That certainly makes sense. And I’m sure the listener can really relate to that. And also one of the things that we do see is someone is going through hormone changes. And this could be men or women. It’s not just perimenopause menopause, but men go through periods of time where their testosterone gets lower. And they see that maybe they’re getting more belly fat.

 By tracking and then reducing in a reasonable way, it really sets up people for success.

 How do you think about dosing the protein? When you’re thinking about their overall protein intake, what’s the next phase?

 – Yeah, so we look at calories first and we calculate a modest deficit. And I will say if somebody you’re working with, if you’re working with a nutritionist and they’re not approaching this in a very collaborative way, asking you how quickly, what is your opinion on this? Do you agree with this plan?

 Instead giving you a very prescriptive way that they believe you should be doing this without asking you how you feel about it. That’s a little bit of a red flag because if you’re not bought in and it’s not almost 50% your idea, it’s a lot harder to stick to something you haven’t even agreed to or made up in your own mind. So I would say you need to have someone who’s working with you who’s collaborative and it’s almost like a team decision that this is the deficit we’ve chosen. You’re good with it, I’m good with it, you’re happy to execute it, you’re excited to run this experiment on yourself, you’re curious about the results.

 These are all things that really need to be in place for something to be successful.

 So once we set that, then we talk about the protein target and that can be, and this is an interesting one because we try to aim for one gram per pound of your ideal or goal body weight.

 But for some individuals that is very difficult, especially older individuals. My clients who are 70 plus have a really difficult time with this. So usually I would have a bottom, I work a lot in ranges. So I don’t ever give someone, you need to eat 150 grams of protein on the nose every single day. Typically what I will do is say, 135 to 155 is your range to work in. Giving people ranges even for calories within like 100 or 150 calories, 200 calories maybe, takes a lot of the pressure off because they know they don’t have to stick to one number every single day and meet that specific number.

 Nothing about this is precise. Even the way that we calculate someone’s base macros is all based on average population data for their height, their age, their weight, where they fall on that bell curve, we don’t actually know. – That’s right. – It’s all just a bit of a guesstimate. And so the idea that based on this guesstimate, you have to hit this exact number is completely unrealistic and adds a layer of anxiety and pressure to someone’s weight loss journey that doesn’t need to be there. It’s like you need to be within 20 grams, give or take. – Right, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be effective. – Yes, yes. And in fact, the people who succeed the most, they dig in on this process, they track their macros.

 They understand that it’s not about perfection, but it’s about almost imperfect consistency and that they have an understanding that they need to make somewhat of an identity shift to get to where they wanna go. They need to start acting like the person they wanna be and start telling themselves, instead of I’m a person who likes donuts and Cheetos, it’s I’m a person who wakes up every day and gets to the gym. It’s about the things they tell themselves and about the person they believe to be.

 I think those are the three really interesting patterns that I see for those who are really successful versus those that aren’t. – And what are the three top patterns that you see? – The people who dig in on their macros and actually track diligently and start really benefiting from the process. So tracking macros is one of the most meaningful, in my opinion, and I’m gonna get a lot of slack for this, but it is one of the most meaningful exercises you could possibly do. It gives you such a fundamental understanding of what’s what in terms of your food. You understand, okay, I put together this meal and I put it on my plate.

 Now I know that in order for me to get 30 grams of protein in this meal, I need six ounces of chicken. In order for me to get 25 grams of fiber today, I need two and a half cups of broccoli to go along with that. I know nobody wants to eat chicken and broccoli. I just needed to say that as an example. But you tend to start understanding the patterns that are required to meet your goals.

 And if you do that for long enough, which is not forever, so I really wanna put a big asterisk here, just because we’re tracking our food for a little while. – I don’t track my macros anymore. – Right, because you did it for so long that you don’t need to now. – I did. – And you really dug in on the process and you have such an intuitive understanding of what food brings to your body that you don’t need to track.

 And so when people really dig into the tracking process, they tend to get there. And it is sort of a flip that’s a switch that flips. And then so tracking macros, if someone really digs in on that process, the more you put into that process, the more you are going to get out of it, it is a guarantee.

 The second is, oh shoot, the second is this identity shift, the things you tell yourself about who you are and what you do.

 If you are someone who says, I like to go out on the weekends and drink 12 beers, but I also want 15% body fat, those are not aligned. So you have to look at that and decide, are you a person who wants 15% body fat or you’re a person who wants to drink 12 beers on a Saturday?

 You have to really decide what’s more important to you. And if the 15% body fat or being healthy or whatever that looks like is more important, then you need to start aligning more with the person that you want to be versus the bad habits and patterns that you fall into or the people you hang out with or whatever– – Makes sense, yeah. – Whatever that looks like. – And then what’s the third pattern that you see? So far four successful weight loss. Number one, you have to dig in on the process of tracking macros.

 Number two, shift your identity to become the person you want to be, take the actions. And what’s number three? – The third one I think is probably just being really honest with yourself and not being so, I guess, tied up with a specific outcome, but more digging in on the process and learning more about yourself and being curious. Actually being curious is a huge quality that I see is important to encourage because the more curious you are, the more you’re just gonna uncover about yourself. The more stones you unturn, the more stones you unturn, the more your quirks, funny food habits, maybe even some eating patterns that are not quite ideal, start becoming more obvious. And then you can address them. – Yeah, the thing that I hear a lot of is people will say, well, I don’t know why I’m not losing weight, right? And I’m sure that you hear this too, but when they become honest with their habits and they expose their habits, the truth is maybe you had three cups of rice, even though you said you had one. And actually those other two cups while you were standing at the kitchen table, eating while you were measuring your food, that counts. I mean, there’s a reason why you have to become diligent and track. And there’s also a reason why you have to become honest in your habits or even when you think about adding and training to the equation, exercise. – Yes, we haven’t even talked about that yet. – Right, you can go to the gym and say you’re going to exercise, but if you’re on your phone and doing all this stuff, it’s great if you’re training for Instagram and you’re not really being honest with the pushups or the quality of the work that you’re doing, then you’re never going to get the results that you want. You cannot be angry at anybody if you’re not getting the results for the work that you’re not putting in. – For me, if you’re not getting the results for the work you’re putting in, you just need to start asking more questions. – Or you’re not getting the results for the work that you’re not putting in. – Right, yeah. – I mean, that requires honesty. – Yes, and sorry, I wanted to add one more to this list is the acceptance of imperfect consistency. So I see this a lot. Here’s a hypothetical scenario. I ate a bowl of ice cream, 300 extra calories. Oh my gosh, this wasn’t in my food plan. I am a terrible person, first of all, a lot of negative self-talk. I’m a terrible person. I’m just going to eat the whole tub. It’s not worth it, I’m throwing in the towel. Forget it all. A person who is so perfection-oriented, that is the action that happens because they’re expecting perfection from themselves, which is fundamentally unrealistic. They let themselves down, and then they allow emotion to take over guilt, disappointment, shame, all of these things. Someone who’s accepted imperfect consistency will say, well, all right, I just ate an extra 300 calories I didn’t need. I’m gonna do better on my next meal, or I’m gonna reset tomorrow morning when it’s a new day. And they prevent themselves from then eating the 1200 extra calories that actually ruined the entire week. – Right, right. – So it is also about giving yourself grace, but in a way that is a little bit controlled. So yes, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need to be consistent enough or long enough. And a lot of black or white thinking is what gets people in trouble. And a lot of it has to do with the emotions they experience. – Yeah, and at some point, how do we eliminate the emotion so that people can have freedom? Because ultimately, we don’t want you to have to do this forever. We want you to have freedom, emotional freedom. I remember when I was in my early 20s, I was very obsessed with doing this. And I had to get it right, it had to be perfect. I wanted to be this percent body fat. And there was so much pressure that I was putting on myself that it consumed so much of my thinking. I wasn’t able to enjoy going out with my friends or just having a freedom of thinking to be able to do something else. Because I was constantly thinking, if I could just lose these three pounds, then it’ll be great. As opposed to understanding that you take the action, you do the thing, and it’s not about being a good or bad person. You made this decision or you fell off here, and then you make the next decision. – Right. When you are putting into place these macronutrients, does it matter if someone has one meal or two meals? How do you think about meal dosing over time? – That’s an interesting question. Again, with the protein, I think it’s about the individual. It’s always about the individual. Because at the end of the day, we’re designing a way of eating that works for this specific person.

 If it’s one meal, we try to make that meal as good as it can possibly be. – But friends, that’s not ideal. – Not ideal. – We don’t want you having one meal a day, ideally. – No. But maybe there’s a day of the week where that actually happens. Then we start working on, okay, if you’re put in a position where this is a kind of an unavoidable reality, what does your meal need to look like? Because then you have a plan. But really, it’s like three meals a day is probably where we’d start for most people. I really personally, as a practitioner, don’t love skipping meals. I think it’s a lost opportunity to eat protein, which is a lost opportunity to gain the benefits of protein from a muscle perspective. I just fundamentally think that a lot of people think not eating is the way to weight loss. – It backfires. – It backfires. It always backfires. When you put yourself in a position where you’re in either extreme calorie deficit or you go too long without eating, your body has a really intuitive and almost uncontrollable way of setting you back to homeostasis. You’re going to overcompensate on the other side. So not allowing yourself to get in those situations where you get either hangry or you’re not eating enough. – Never happened. – Or you’re going too long without eating is probably a good sort of way to be. That’s not to say that you can’t feel hungry sometimes. I think those two things are really different. I don’t think, if we think, I think a lot about what our ancestors have done, what have hunter-gatherers done, we wouldn’t have always had three square meals a day with 30 grams of protein and eight grams of pyropermium. – We don’t? – Yeah. So I do think there’s something to be said for letting your digestive tract rest and not always eating. I think I read somewhere that now we spend, I think it’s 17 out of 24 hours eating. So that means that you’re only giving yourself, what, seven, eight hours of digestive rest. I think there’s something to be said for shortening that window, maybe 12 plus hours where you’re not eating, especially a little bit before you go to bed, is probably a good habit to get in, just allowing some time where your body’s not allocating resources to digestion so much. – And it makes sense, right? Circuiting and training. People talk a lot about light, and we’ve talked about light on this podcast for setting these biological rhythms. One of the big setters is food. – Food and exercise. Both can influence circadian clock or muscle clock. – How important is consistent meal times?

 – That’s a really good question. I think it does help people because once you get into a structure, it’s a lot easier to adhere to.

 It’s sort of like a circadian rhythm in a lot of ways. So if you go to bed at eight o’clock one night, 12 o’clock the next night, seven o’clock the next night, your growth hormone production, the coordination of all of your cells in terms of its cyclical rhythm, it’s unpredictable. So nothing is going to be optimal because it doesn’t know whether you’re gonna go to bed at eight or midnight or what. And so I feel like the same is for food because it entrains your circadian rhythm. Getting into a little bit of a schedule, I think is probably a good thing overall. And also from an execution standpoint, it makes things a lot easier when you know you’re eating at the same times every day and that your meals need to look more or less the same every day. You can mix it up in so many ways within that framework, but I do think from a practical aspect, it makes things a lot easier. – I agree. The less chaos, the better. – That’s so good. That’s so good. I’m gonna steal that. – Go right ahead. – The less chaos, the better. – The less chaos, the better. – How do you think about dosing carbohydrates and what kind of carbohydrates are you comfortable with? – Okay, this is a good one. So back to the macros, we talk about total calories, and then we talk about protein. And then between carbohydrates and fats, we don’t really, you know how I said I try to keep it simple and only get people to think about the things that really matter? – The big picture. – The big picture. If calories are in check and you’re not in a state of overfeeding or excess calories, the mix of carbohydrates and fats, it doesn’t really matter too much. It’s like really negligible in terms of its impact on your overall trajectory for weight loss especially, but just in general.

 I think it comes down to food preference. Do you love eggs? Do you love avocado? Do you love snacking on nuts here and there? Or do you like oatmeal? And crackers alongside your do sardines or whatever it might be. So I think it is a lot about food choices. I think once someone gets close to their ideal body composition, where they’re starting to think a bit more about performance and training optimization, then we dig into calories a little bit more. – Do you think that there’s a carbohydrate threshold for people? Would you say overall maybe you start people at 130 grams? I don’t know if that’s too granular. The average American is eating 300 grams of carbohydrates. How do you begin to balance and titrate carbs? – So I would say the person who’s eating 300 grams of carbohydrates, their total calories are not in check. So by putting a ceiling on the total calories, it keeps carbs at a manageable level. Because if you’re hitting your total calories, you’re hitting your total protein, there’s only so many more calories to fill in. – Easy, not that hard. – It is really, it makes it so easy. So most people wouldn’t even be able to eat 150 or even 200 grams of carbs in a day, if they’re hitting their total calories and they’re getting their protein. There’s just not enough calories in the day.

 – Right, unless you’re really finding that Friday night pizza. – Yeah, but then you’re not meeting all your macros. – Absolutely. – Or you’re not meeting your calorie and your protein criteria. – Absolutely. – The carbs that you would choose, do you care if it’s from rice, from bread, from fruit? How do you think about, and how much do they have at the first meal versus say the last meal?

 – I think about this in terms of satiety for the most part. We really don’t, I don’t dig in a lot on what foods are good or bad in clinic. I think intuitively everyone knows what foods are good or bad. We don’t really need to spend a lot of time making food lists of yeses and nos because the foods that are highest in satisfaction, nutrient density, satiety, are the good ones. And once people start choosing those foods to align with their total calories and to hit their protein, there’s just not a lot of room for, you know what I mean? – Yeah. – But my favorite carbohydrates are more complex, mostly vegetable based carbohydrates. And if you’re gonna add some other stuff in, I like white rice, I like sweet potatoes, I like regular potatoes. – Same. – I really love bean based pasta. If you love pasta, which a lot of people do like noodles and pasta, I like the more legume based ones. They have protein, they have fiber, and there’s still that satisfaction of getting what you crave, which is sort of like the pasta kick. So yeah, I like to keep it pretty simple in the carbohydrate department. – Yeah, and I can appreciate that because you’re not saying that foods are good or bad. We know that a ton of packaged cookies might not be good, but whether you’re choosing an apple over berries, yeah, their fiber content might be different. Maybe their fructose or sugar content is different, but if you are thinking about food globally as a big picture of how you are designing a diet, then there’s a lot of room for preferences.

– And if you are tracking your macros diligently, which we are trying to encourage, if you eat six cookies and you put those in your tracker, you will very quickly realize they do not help you meet your goals for the day. And that’s where this level of understanding and education from tracking really becomes apparent. And it’s only when you start doing this, will you fully understand the meaning of what I’m saying, because for people who’ve never tracked, maybe you can’t conceptualize this, but when you have a snack of six cookies and it puts your calories up by 600, but doesn’t contribute to your protein target at all, and only adds more calories from fat, and then you can’t actually, for the rest of the day, make it work, you realize how skewing that kind of behavior is, and also how kind of not great you feel after you have those six cookies, because you’re still hungry five minutes later.

 – Three, three minutes later, say someone eats their cookies, they go overboard, and now they have no more calories for the rest of the day. How do you tell people to manage that? Do you say, okay, well, you’ve already exceeded your calories by 600, I still want you to have your last meal, or do they have to change for the rest of the week? What’s the, okay, how do they balance that? – Yeah, and this sort of goes back to the whole idea of guilt, shame, perfection. What do we do about this scenario? To me, I would say it’s in the past. It’s 400, 500 calories you did not necessarily need, but your next meal is your next choice, and so what I would say is you’re gonna be over for that day, it’s inevitable, but make your next meal, hit all the boxes, get your 30 grams of protein, try and get a good dose of fiber, meat, vegetables mostly. For some clients, I like to use the two strike rule, so no two strikes in a row. So if you have five cookies, don’t let that be sort of your gateway drug to then having ice cream that night, because two strikes in a row is then a pattern. A pattern leads to habits, a habit leads to that slippery slope back into what people are trying to get away from, and so I say no two strikes in a row. So if you know that in the back of your mind, you’re like, all right, I just had five cookies, Julia’s told me no two strikes in a row. Okay, I’ve had my strike, my next meal is my next opportunity to just get back on track, put my train back on the tracks, and keep going like I know I should, and then that five cookies become something you look in your rear view mirror, and you see going way by you, and you forget about it. – And that’s good advice. Have a short-term memory for the things that don’t necessarily go well, or are in accordance with your plan, but to continue to shoot another arrow at yourself is just, I mean. – Yeah, it’s about imperfect consistency. – That’s right. My husband calls it the flat tire syndrome. Basically, if you get a flat tire in the beginning of the day and then all of a sudden everything else is terrible. – Right. – Right, it just ruins your whole day, as opposed to, okay, you got a flat tire, you fix the flat tire, and you move on. – You move on, yeah. – What other does fat fit in? Are you adding extra fat?

 What kind of fats are you choosing? How do people think about fat? – I’m looking at their omega three to six ratio, and we want that to be four to one, three to one is really good. Anything higher than that probably requires an omega supplement. Most people need an omega supplement anyways, but I’m definitely looking at that in terms of fat quality that they’re getting, but ultimately I don’t get too tied up in the details. If someone’s diet is very high in saturated fat, it may not be a problem, but it really depends on the individual. So I have some clients who have genetic snips or kind of pre-existing conditions that may warrant us watching that and keeping it 10, 15% of their total calories, but that would be a unique scenario.

 But beyond that, I just look for fats that come from really healthy sources like olive oil, nuts, grass-fed butter can be really good, yogurt.

 But one thing about fat is it is over double the calories of carbs and protein. So people become hyper aware when they start tracking how impactful a high fat diet can be when you’re really trying to move toward weight loss or even manage your calories in any way.

 Those tend to be the big impact foods like avocado and nuts. If you’re having two avocados a day, that’s a lot of fat, and avocado is not a bad food at all. – And it’s high in fiber. – It’s high in fiber, it’s got so many micronutrients. It’s actually very incredible food, but it does pack a lot of fat calories. So if your goal is to, again, be a bikini model and have 10% body fat, avocados may not fit into your framework for a time because it’s not going to allow you to manage calories in a way that’s gonna get you to that particular goal.

– Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. Where does, we’ve covered macronutrients, we’ve covered changing identities. We recognize that if you’ve taken nothing away from this conversation so far, you have to track your macros. You have to track your macros, you have to dig into the process, you have to have an identity shift of to become the person you want to be. You have to be honest, and you have to have a short-term memory for behaviors that don’t suit you. We know about the protein, we know about the carbohydrates, we know about fat. Where does exercise fall in this equation? – Yeah, so I would say there’s, I mean, and maybe I can ask you to echo this for me, but there’s only really two ways to simulate muscle. Maybe three if you count growth hormone at night within like the first couple of sleep cycles, but there’s only two ways, and it is dietary protein intake and resistance training.

So to me, if you’re not resistance training, you’re leaving a huge opportunity on the table. It doesn’t actually matter if you’re trying to lose weight or not. It’s good to do in and of itself. Same with eating healthy, by the way. All of this we’re talking about in the context of weight loss, but don’t forget everything is good to do in and of itself, eating healthy and exercising.

But training is a big piece of it. – Yeah. – Huge. – And I see, I mean, we, there’s a handful of patients that I’m thinking of. A lot of our patients are very fit or becoming very fit. And we have one woman, she is, I think she’s in her sixties. She trains with Carlos, and she is amazing, and she’s more mature. And what we do for her, I know you know who I’m talking about, is we have her meals and we use a shake. We use certain things to help keep up her protein. She trains very intensely and she’s lost. And again, she’s in her, gosh, her sixties, she’s strong, probably stronger than me, and you, maybe me and you combine. She’s lost, gosh, maybe she’s lost six to 10 pounds. Of body fat.

– Just from training. – From training and adjusting her macronutrients. Simple. We’re not talking about hormone replacement, we’re talking about any of this external stuff other than diet and lifestyle. What is another, when you think about exercise, with your clients, what are some of the biggest needle movers in terms of exercise, cadence, effort?

– I think intensity.

 I don’t really know if people understand, and again, it’s all the context and your goals that you want to achieve. But for most people, they really want to look fit. They really want to feel fit. But there’s a little bit of a disconnect between that and what’s required to get there.

 – Meaning what do you mean? It’s much more difficult. – Meaning how hard, yes, how hard that process is, and how hard you need to work, and how seriously you need to take your training. I often say, okay, do you have someone in mind that you would like to look like? And they’ll say, of course, everyone says, yeah, for sure, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. – I can’t believe to say that. No, I’m seriously friends. – And then I say, okay, whoever that person is for you, everyone has someone they try to aspire to be like, or they want to look like, you need to find out what that person is doing and do the same. Because there’s no way you can look like the person you want to look like without taking acting the way that they act, and doing the behaviors that they do. So there’s nobody that I can think of in my mind who is fundamentally looks extremely strong and fit that doesn’t work out with an intensity that is probably seven, eight out of 10 on the regular basis, three, four times a week, loves working out, takes it very seriously, tracks their progress over time, like is writing down the weights they’re using. So yeah, we often start there. It’s like, is your resistance training progressive? Is it occurring two to three times a week? Is it something you enjoy? And are you getting your heart rate up to the point where you can, you’re having trouble breathing at least once a week? It should be once a day, to be honest, getting your heart rate up to where you have trouble breathing. That could happen once a day for most people. – And it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Let’s talk about kind of, so Julia has been here staying with me for the week. Let’s just kind of run through a day that we had. – We’ve had here, yeah. – Yeah, yesterday, I don’t even remember what we did in the morning yesterday was– – We worked out. – We worked out in the morning. We worked out Wednesday. We also worked out in the afternoon. – Yes. 

– You worked on your lifts. You worked on optimizing your, maybe that was Monday. – Yay. – No, that was Wednesday. – Yeah, that was yesterday. My snatch, I worked on my snatch and my deadlift yesterday. – Right, and you worked on those things. I did, who knows what I was doing, calisthenics or something. Nursing a hamstring. But then in the afternoon, we finished work and we decided that it was time for some intervals. Wasn’t a long time. We spent– – 20 minutes? – 20 minutes. We both threw on a IOM vest, though that was a compression vest. You guys had spelled A-I-O-N, if you’re interested. Julia had a half vest. I had a full vest and it was lightweight. Maybe it was, maybe mine was a little over five pounds. Yours might’ve been five pounds, maybe mine was. Six pounds, a compression vest that we could move in. This wasn’t a heavy rucksack. It added a little bit of extra weight. We knocked out, we didn’t do full out sprint intensity. We did high intervals. We were around 80% and we kept that up for as long as we could hold the RPMs above 75. We did the airdyne. And we did that for multiple rounds until both. – I mean, we did four or five rounds. – Yeah, I mean, it was somewhat of a max effort. I thought I was gonna vomit at the end. Doesn’t have to be where you kind of feel like you’re gonna vomit, but we put that in. We also did, I’m sure we did pushups at some point yesterday, just throughout the day. And ice bath, walked, constantly moving around during the day. I think before we jumped into this podcast, there may have been some pushups, some movement. There was an incorporation, not just in that hour you were working with Carlos at Sigma, but throughout the day. Getting outside, doing all kinds of things. – Yeah, that’s easy. – It’s a little bit, so for someone who is going from sedentary, that shift can take time. And it’s really, again, back to priorities. What do you want to be? You need to start working on the little things that are gonna allow you to do that. If you have a desk job, okay, you’re stuck at your desk. There’s a few options, treadmill, exercise snacks. Exercise snacks are awesome, guys. I’m gonna say that. – Wait, what do we call it? We call it mini micro movement. – Micro movement, it’s like get up from your desk and do 20 air squats and then sit back down. But those little things take time to start implementing and integrating into someone’s life. But just being more mindful about moving more is awesome. I often use the analogy of a sponge for people. So how often are you squeezing out your sponge? And I think about muscle like this in a lot of ways. I think you’ve used the analogy of a suitcase, but I use the analogy of a sponge where you have to squeeze it out and let it refill a lot. The more you squeeze it out and let it refill, the more efficient it becomes at doing that. So I sometimes say, did you squeeze out your sponge this week? – I love that. – Has your sponge been squeezed fully? Did you really wring it out? Because that analogy allows people to know that’s sort of how it needs to feel to train is to wring out your sponge. Almost like you have nothing left in there and then let it refill, refill in the sense of eating really healthy, nourishing high protein foods and then squeeze it out again. And the more you do that, actually that process is called getting fit. – I love that. I love the process of getting fit. I love the process of staying fit. And I think that Julia, you do an amazing job at inspiring people to be fit. You’re very positive. The patients love you and you live the life that you’re teaching others to. It is wonderful. You know, in this podcast, we’ve covered a lot. We’ve covered a lot of nutrition. We’ve covered a little bit about your background, how people can really move the needle and squeezing out the sponge. – Squeeze your sponge. – Squeeze it out. What if you could impart one piece of advice to people before we close out the podcast? What would that be? – Honestly, and this is an shameless plug because I don’t, I mean, I do care if it’s us, but if you are struggling with losing weight on your own and you feel like you’re hitting your head against the wall, you need to get help from someone who knows more than you. And it can’t be Instagram. It has to be more meaningful. You need to work with a practitioner or someone who’s going to consider your individual context and help you develop a way of eating that is gonna work for you in your life and move you toward your goals, whatever they are. Because the influencers online do not know you. They don’t have your context. They don’t understand your history. They don’t know your medical concerns. They know nothing about you. And so the idea that you’re relying on that as your sole source of information of how you need to live your life and develop your wellness plan is just not gonna lead to success over time. So I would say find a practitioner that you can develop a relationship with and that really can start to get to know you and that you can leverage to then move you forward. – It’s wonderful advice. And Julia, you are an amazing resource for people. We will actually link where people can find you, of course, if they wanna reach out, they can find you through the website. – Through the website. – You meet our team, you can book a discovery call. – Yeah, all of the things. Julia, thank you so much for your time, attention, and energy. – Thanks for having me.