21: 4 Levers To Pull For Better Weight Loss & Workouts

Curious to know how to make your workouts more effective? So that you finally start losing weight in perimenopause?

In this episode of The Family Fork, we're looking at four different levers you can pull, for more effective workouts and FASTER weight loss. Isn't that what we're after?

You're smart, resourceful, and driven to reach your goals. But at the same time, you feel stuck, and can't figure out to move the needle. In this episode we'll look at:

• Whether or not you have set the correct expectations with your workouts
• How your feelings get in the way of you working out (and what you're trying to avoid!)
• What to do when your family doesn't respect your boundaries for a good workout
• Why tracking everything is essential to a good workout, and ultimately losing weight

I'd love for you to drop me a message on Instagram @theashleymalik, to let me know what your biggest takeaway is from this episode!

Links mentioned and ways to connect

• Need workouts that work with all the progress you're making? Here are the ones that I swear by (and that have helped me lose 65 lbs!)
• If you can't get unstuck, and don't know what to do next, The Method is absolutely your next step

Ashley Malik is a women's health and life coach, helping busy moms lose weight in perimenopause. You can learn more, and discover how to work with Ashley, by clicking here.

*** Ready to lose 15 lbs in 10 weeks? The Method gives you all the tools to make it happen! We start April 2nd. To learn more about The Method, click here!

Transcript

Ashley Malik (00:05)

Welcome back there, my friend. I am so super glad that you're here today because we are going to talk about one of my favorite things, which is working out. But I want you to stick with me because as you have probably figured out by now, when I say that we're going to talk about a topic like working out, you know that we're going to take a different perspective on it. Here at The Family Fork,

I know that as a mom in perimenopause or menopause, you are smart, you are resourceful, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal already.

And if you don't, you probably know where to find them. You know where to find workouts. I know you can always email me for resources, but you can also get a workout program or a workout plan instantly. You can search on YouTube. So there's lots of opportunities for you to find the right way to work out. But when it comes to losing weight with perimenopause, I think that we often like to blame the fact that it's just perimenopause and

Perimenopause, it's making things so difficult for us to lose weight.

when in reality there are a lot of different levers that we can pull or things that we can control that will increase our likelihood that we can actually lose weight in perimenopause. So today I want us to dig into four different levers that you can really pull when it comes to trying to lose weight in perimenopause.

All right, so let's jump right in. The first lever that you can pull to see more weight loss with your workouts is to examine your expectations and set the correct expectations based on a variety of different factors. Now, I know you've done this before. I know I've done this before. When it's like a new year or summer's coming up or you have vacations coming up and you're like, okay.

I'm gonna go all in and I am going to make sure that I'm 100 % on my plan, doing the right workouts and eating the right foods. I am gonna lose this weight. And that's all fine and good to have that excitement and that passion for hitting your fitness goals and your weight loss goals. But what I want you to do is sit down and take a few minutes or even a couple of days to really evaluate what kind of workouts am I trying?

Are they working for me? Am I even being successful?

Or do you find that if you're honest, you're struggling and having a hard time to keep up with the workouts. When we examine our expectations, I want you to look at where you are starting. You know, not everybody is ready to just jump into the gym and throw around a bunch of heavy weights. That is not realistic for most women, especially if you are just starting or restarting a health and a weight loss journey.

You know, I know that when I first started years ago, I was overweight. had over 50 pounds to lose at that time. And I also had a bunch of other health issues that I had to contend with. had Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune disease that impacts your thyroid. I had hypothyroidism and I had really severe nutrient deficiencies. I had a lot going against me, but

I had that passion. I was really excited to get into a workout routine and find some things that worked for me. And I tried a lot of different things. one of the things that I tried was this online fitness program that, I don't know, the marketing for it was so sexy and appealing. I watched these women just shrink away. But what I don't think I realized until I got into the program and I already bought the program,

is that I was probably 25 years older than most of the women in that program. So obviously I was not their target market and a lot of the workouts that they were doing were not going to be effective for me. It too much cardio, it was way too intense. And based on my age and some of my health issues and the fact that I hadn't been working out consistently for quite a long time previously, that just wasn't going to be a good program for me.

So when you are thinking about where you're starting out, just be honest with yourself. You know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about the brain and our feelings and our thoughts around certain topics. And we have a lot of thoughts around, where am I starting? Oftentimes, I'll hear women say this. We'll go back to our college days or our high school days. We'll say, well, you know, when I was in high school, I was playing lacrosse four days a week and I was running.

So I should be able to do that now. Friend, can I just remind you that high school was like 20 or 30 or more years ago? Like it was a long time ago. So how we were then is not a realistic expectation anymore. So when you are examining your expectations, I want you to think about where you are starting today and be honest with yourself. Don't be afraid to say, I am starting from ground zero.

I have ambitions of doing more than what I'm doing right now, but I am literally starting with nothing. I'm not walking during the week. I'm not working out. It's okay. This does not mean anything about you. It doesn't mean that you're not capable or that you're not eventually going to lose the weight. But if you start where you are today and are honest with yourself about where you really need to start,

you're going to have so much more success in finding a program and a routine that's really going to work for you.

When you're evaluating where and how to get started, I want you to make sure that you're doing the right workouts based on your weight loss goals. When I work with clients, we often talk about this threshold of if you have 30 pounds or more to lose, you're gonna start working out in one particular way. You're gonna have more movement. You're definitely gonna do strength training, but it's probably not gonna be as heavy as if you had less than 30 pounds to lose.

If you have more than 30 pounds to lose, you should be putting in a combination of low impact cardio and building some muscle with some small to medium weights. And then you're probably adding in some walking. That's going to be a great way for you to lose weight overall. When women have less than 30 pounds to lose, they're ready to build some significant muscle. Cause when they start building that muscle, especially in perimenopause,

it is going to be so much easier to rev up that metabolism and help reduce and shed some of that fat. So when you have 30 pounds or less to lose, you are losing scale weight, but it becomes much more important to pay attention to the composition of your body.

how much muscle you're increasing or adding, and how much fat you're losing. There are workouts for whether you have more than 30 pounds or less than 30 pounds to lose, but again, you have to set the right expectation. Now, if you haven't been doing any kind of workouts and you're not really walking very much, and you go into a gym expecting to just start doing like really heavy deadlifts and a chest press, you're gonna struggle to keep that up.

you're really gonna struggle to make that a part of your everyday routine. And you might even kind of feel like a failure. It is important to set those expectations appropriately when you're starting a workout program with the goal of losing weight. You have to be honest with yourself of where you are starting and then start with the right workouts that are based on your weight loss goals.

I personally love sharing that I use this wonderful streaming library of workout programs, partly because I want to work out at home. That's just easier for me. But this library has so many different programs. It's a great way to get in and say, okay, I am starting right here. I've got 45 pounds to lose. But then as you lose the weight and you get to that place where you're like, Whoa, I've only got 25 pounds to lose. You still

have the right programs to choose from without a lot of difficulty in finding them. They're just there for you.

They're perfectly curated, designed by expert trainers. It's just super easy. I'll drop a link in the show notes if you're curious for what I use and you want to check that out. And again, it's great because this library lets you work out from home, which is going to remove yet another excuse of why I don't want to work out.

All right. Another lever that we can pull when it comes to effective weight loss with our workout is looking at our feelings. Yes, feelings. You heard me right. I know that not everyone believes or thinks like, yeah, my feelings have an impact on my workouts. But let's dig into this a little bit because I want to share with you that they do. Part of the work or actually a significant amount of work that I do with clients is around

feelings and the stories that we tell ourselves that allow us to either achieve goals or not achieve our goals.

So one of the ways that this comes up with workouts is how many times have you said, okay, I'm gonna get up tomorrow morning, I'm gonna work out before I have to go to work or go to the office or before I drop the kids off at school, but 5.30 in the morning rolls around and it's dark and your bed is so cozy and you don't feel like working out. I get it, believe me. If you have listened to some previous episodes, you will know I am a morning person.

But trust me, that does not mean that I want to get up and do this like heart pumping or heavy lifting workout. It doesn't. I would much rather just leisurely wake up and enjoy the sunrise.

But one of the things that you can do in this moment is decide that you are going to work out even if you don't want to. Because here's the deal. Your brain will always come up with a million excuses as to why you shouldn't work out. You were up late last night, you didn't sleep very well, you've been working out for a week and you haven't seen any results, so why bother? You can easily talk yourself out of any workout. But I will tell you,

The biggest transformation comes when you are able to consistently push against your brain and the thoughts that it's telling you and just go do your workouts anyway. This, this is when that change happens. The struggle is that it takes many, many days and weeks and months of being consistent and all of that time of pushing aside that thought of, I don't want to get up and work out.

I don't want to do it because I was up too late last night or I have an early meeting so I'm not going to be able to squeeze in my workout first thing in the morning. You have to learn to push against those stories. you your brain, your brain wants you to believe the thoughts like that they are so true. I mean, it is true that you have to get up an hour early if you have an early meeting and your brain wants you to really believe that nope.

there is no time for a workout. But guess what? You could do a 10 minute workout. You could do a 15 minute workout. You could split your workout up and do half before your meeting and half after your meeting. But your brain does not want to get creative. It doesn't want to come up with solutions. It just wants to conserve energy. And this effectively stops you from doing a workout when you don't want to.

This is an area that I teach women to master in the method, which is my weight loss program for moms and perimenopause.

There are often deeper reasons as to why we don't want to get up and work out or why we don't want to stop at the gym on the way home from the office. And a lot of it comes down to our brain's desire to avoid frustration and avoid shame. I mean, I've been going to the gym for a week or two weeks and I haven't seen any weight loss and I haven't seen any progress. that just feels kind of shameful and frustrating.

So when two weeks goes by and then the third week starts and you're telling yourself, yep, gotta get up, I gotta go to work and then I'm gonna hit the gym after work, your brain says, no, no, it's not working. We're not seeing results. I'm embarrassed that I'm putting in all of this work and I'm frustrated that I'm not seeing results or any movement on the scale. So your brain will continue to convince you that your workout after work just isn't worth it.

But like I said, so much of this comes from these deeper feelings. It's not just that you don't want to work out. It's that you don't want to be frustrated because frustration is an uncomfortable feeling. Frustration, shame, embarrassment, defeat, those are all heavy feelings. And our brain would much rather avoid those feelings.

So when you're considering whether or not you should do a workout, I want you to hear my voice and hear my words and remind yourself that the transformation happens when you consistently push against those stories and thoughts and just do the workout anyway, even when you don't want to. I know it doesn't sound fun. It is not sexy, but if your goal is to lose weight,

and to have lifelong health, you have to learn how to push through those feelings, okay?

Another lever that we can pull if we're really going after our weight loss goals is learning how to manage our family. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you will know that family has absolutely everything to do with our success in hitting our weight loss, our fitness, our nutrition, our health goals. We love them. We really do love them. But our family is constantly getting in the way even when they don't mean to.

I wonder if you've ever heard some of these things from your family. So maybe your husband or your partner says to you, but honey, you just look so good already. Well, I get it. That's really nice to hear, right? But it's not super encouraging for you when you're already feeling resistant to doing a workout you just don't wanna do.

when your partner says to you, you just look so good already, you think well okay skipping one workout day won't matter and two days won't matter and before you know it like a month has gone by and you haven't worked out. Another thing that you might have experienced, this one totally is for me. So again I'm an early riser and my husband is not, he is a night owl, I'm a total early bird. At 4 30 in the morning I just wake up automatically now but

If an alarm were to go off, he would half wake up and he would snuggle me tighter and he would say, no, no, just sleep in with me. It's so cozy inside here and it's cold outside of the bed. Let's just sleep a little bit longer. Well, that's not gonna help me get into a workout. Or maybe you're on the other spectrum of things that your partner wants to go to bed early, even though you're committed to getting your workouts in.

So you just say, okay, 20 more minutes. I just need to get my workout in. And their response is, no, come on, it's time for bed. Let's just get to bed, it's getting late. The challenge here is that you have to let your family feel the way that they are going to feel about your workouts. That cannot dictate whether or not you get your workouts done.

When your family is saying things like this, they're actually saying a couple of different things that we kind of don't hear. What they're probably meaning is, you know, I see you working out and I see you starting to eat healthy. I'm not doing those same things. And I kind of feel embarrassed that I'm not doing those because I'm watching you get healthy. If it's your spouse that's saying these things, what they're really saying is, I don't like that our routine and habits are changing.

I don't want you to feel better than me because I feel like I'm not living up to my potential. I'm not doing the things that I could be doing to be healthy and to lose weight. So it's like that old saying of misery loves company, not that your spouse or partner wants you to be miserable or that they are, but they're stuck in one space when it comes to health and fitness. And if they see you moving out of that space, out of that predictable structure or boundary that you guys have together,

They're going to want to pull you back in. And what you're trying to do is push outside of that boundary and saying, no, I think I can have more. I can feel better. I can do more. So there's this mismatch in terms of expectations.

And so your family, love you, but they might be holding you back a little bit. One of the best ways to manage family is to be very clear with what it is that you're doing, the goals that you're hoping to achieve, and then ask for what you want.

Do you want your spouse or your partner to push you out of bed in the morning when your alarm goes off? Do you want your family to wait for dinner until after you're done with your workout? If you aren't super clear about what you need from your family, it's gonna make it a million times harder for them to actually support you. So are you starting to see that we can do a lot more to make our workouts more effective, more than just increasing weights or doing more cardio?

you need to set your expectations and you need to be clear on your feelings around working out. And then when it comes to managing your family, you can say very clearly, you know, I am just starting this weight loss journey and I need some support to make sure that I'm getting my workouts done in the morning. So that means not asking me to stay in bed and snuggle, not telling me that I already look good enough, but encouraging me to get the workout done.

Really, truly your family, they mean well, but in order to get what you need from them, you have to be very clear and have that conversation with them. I also find that when I work with women, I encourage them to have a very open conversation with their partner to say, you know, this is what I'm trying to do and I would love for you to come along with me, but if you don't want to, that's totally okay. I don't love you any less and our relationship isn't any less important.

but this is important to me. I find that having that open conversation allows the couple to be able to change what their relationship looks like, to change and adjust the expectations they have of one another. And at the end of the day, that really helps you to reach your weight loss goals.

All right, one of the last levers that you can pull so that you can really have some effective weight loss when you're working out is to track everything. If you listened to episode 20, you will know that I track everything, but I want to talk about why this is so vitally important. When we're talking about tracking for weight loss, we're tracking a lot of different things. The time of day that you work out, the length of your workout,

Was it like 20 minutes or an hour? Did you work out three different times for 20 minutes each? This is important information. I want you to track the weights that you're using. Even if you're doing small dumbbells like two and a half, five pounds as you get up and running, I want you to track those weights. It's so important to watch yourself making progress.

And if you don't track, it's really easy for you to forget. One day, you'll look and say, my gosh, I started these bicep curls with 2 and 1 pounds, but now I'm doing 10 pounds. You want to see that progress written down somewhere. It'll happen before you realize it. But if you're not tracking, it is going to be difficult for you to remember just how much progress you've made. And by tracking it on a spreadsheet or something like that, you'll be able to see your progress over time.

I want you to track calories consumed and calories burned. This is also super important. I use an Apple Watch, and I use the fitness tracker. And directionally, it tells me about how many calories I've burned in a day. And then on the other side of that, I use my fitness pal to track the calories that I consume. Again, I'm not doing this to be obsessive. I do it to collect data.

When we put all of this together, your time of workouts, the weights you used, calories consumed, calories burned, your scale weight, your measurements, you have this like beefy, juicy set of data that will give you a ton of information about what your workouts are doing for you and how you can actually make them more effective. So quick little story for you about what happened to me just this year, just a couple of weeks ago.

So for the new year, I decided to start a new type of program. All of last year, I was lifting really heavy weights. And I thought, you know, maybe I should just shake things up a little bit and add in a significant amount of Pilates. So I was able to do this from home. Again, the workout programs and library that I used, they had an option for Pilates at home. So that's what I picked. I did the Pilates for a little over a week.

And it was a mix of Pilates and strength training, but I was definitely going lower in weights for the strength training part than I had been all of last year. So I don't know, was about day 10.

About day 10, 11, 12 into the program, I'd been tracking, I've been tracking my calories consumed, calories burned, my weight, my measurements. And I looked at my scale weight and I had actually gained a pound. So here are my thoughts. Like I have been putting in the work every day, getting up for whatever, like 10, 11 days in a row and literally nothing was happening. And worse yet, the scale had gone up.

And I wasn't feeling good in my clothes. I was feeling sort of puffy. I kept thinking, my gosh, what is happening here? I know I'm in menopause, and I know that has an impact. And it must be, I don't know, because I've dropped down the intensity of the weight training that I'm doing. And I'm not burning as many calories. And surely, it just is the program. The program's not working for me, right? This would be a logical conclusion. But when I dug into my tracking sheet a little bit more,

I saw what the problem was. In reality, I actually hadn't been eating that well. I track macros. This is again, just where I am on my fitness journey, but I tracked my macros and I realized that on most of those 11 days, I had marked them as high fat and high carb, which meant I had gone over in my macros and having higher carbs and higher fats based on the workouts that I was doing and the calories I was burning.

It was not going to let me lose any weight. So it's not that anything was wrong with the program, right? We all want to say that. Nothing's working. I'm doing everything and nothing's working. But the tracking allowed me to see the data that showed I'm having too many carbs and too many fats for my goals. And therefore, of course, I'm not losing any weight.

Now, this is where this gets tricky because it is all about our feelings. I could have felt, and actually I did, I kind of felt like a failure. Like this is so frustrating. I've been doing this for years and I lost weight last year. Why can't I lose it now? I started telling myself all of these stories.

What you have to learn to do in this moment is turn off your brain and say, brain, I'm looking at the data and the thoughts are not accurate. This is why the tracking is so important. Again, it's not to be obsessive, but it's to say, I need to prove my thoughts wrong. When my brain says to me, well, it must be because the program is bad and it's not going to work for you. It must be because you're in menopause. And then I look back and I realize, oh,

I was actually eating more carbs and fats than I needed for my goals. And so I didn't lose the weight. This, the tracking, the data, it helps your brain to say, okay, there's something different going on. That's why tracking is one of those levers that you can pull if you want to lose weight, because you have all of this data in front of you. It makes it really easy for you to say, maybe the program is working, but I just need to dial in my nutrition differently.

Or maybe the program is working, but I need to add an extra walk or two. So I'm burning some additional calories. Without tracking, you don't know any of this information. And in just 11 days, I mean, I'm a seasoned person for when it comes to working out and weightlifting and just 11 days, my brain offered me the same thoughts. It's not working. I'm doing everything and it's not working. And really none of that could be further from the truth.

So when it comes to effective weight loss and being able to lose more weight with your workouts, I want you to really pay attention to the levers that you can adjust. You can set the right expectations around what kind of workouts to start with. Is it the right skill level? Are you at the right fitness level for that program? How are your feelings impacting your workouts? Are you just not wanting to work out? Why? Why are you not wanting to work out? What's getting in the way and keeping you stuck?

Again, I really encourage you to jump into the method if you're really feeling stuck in this part, because learning how to get unstuck is literally the key to unlocking all of your progress, your weight loss, your workouts, your nutrition, all of it. Understanding your feelings and how that is impacting your results is truly transformational and will absolutely change your life. And we do all of that in the method.

and managing your family, how is your family impacting your ability to work out or to get the right types of workouts in? And how is your tracking showing you that your workouts are either working for you or you need to make some adjustments to what you're doing right now? We have a lot more control over our progress than we give ourselves credit for. And hopefully this has given you some areas where you can evaluate and reassess.

so that you can finally start hitting your weight loss goals. I would love for you to reach out on Instagram at the Ashley Malik and share your biggest takeaway from this episode. And I might even feature your comment in an upcoming episode.

Thanks again, my friend. I will see you next week.