When you’ve got control of everything except your body with Katy Saltsman

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am joined by nutritionist, personal trainer and podcaster, Katy Saltsman, who is such an inspiration. In this episode, we discuss how moving your body and nutrition are important for health, but often overlooked is mental and emotional health. Looking at all of these together can help make lasting changes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Distractions as coping mechanisms
• Learn your patterns and habits
• Calories versus hormones
• Mistakes with macros tracking
• Setting realistic goals and expectations
• Self-worth and body image

ABOUT GUEST:
Katy Saltsman is a nutritionist, personal trainer and podcaster on a mission to change the conversation around health for women. Taking a total body approach with mental, physical and emotional health- helping you understand your body, so you can take your goals, self worth and life to the next level.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://katysaltsman.mykajabi.com/
Instagram: @katysaltsman
Podcast: Crying Burns Calories

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

WORK WITH CHRISTA:
Are you sick more often than you should be, have consistently low Vitamin D, B12 and iron, salt and sugar cravings, puffiness in your face or extremities, need daily antihistamines or are losing your hair but labs are normal? Food sensitivities, low energy, and skin issues can all be caused by inflammation. The ROOT CAUSE of inflammation is immune system imbalance. Bring the immune system into balance to correct inflammatory symptoms like food sensitivities, low energy, skin issues and a cascade of other “no one has the answer to” symptoms.

The ANWSER is immune resilience! It's the overarching goal I have when working with 1:1 clients.
Packages include:

• Labs
• 1:1 interpretation and personalized protocols 
• Support between appointments with weekly touchpoints
• Messaging and trainings to get the most out of working together

Past clients, if it's been more than a year since I've seen you, you're welcome to book a call! This is the last time until fall that I'm taking clients. If you want to maximize this season and bring your body into balance go to https://www.christabiegler.com/fss to book a call with me.

SPONSORS:
A special thanks to EveryDay Dose for sponsoring this episode. EveryDay Dose combines organic coffee, grass fed collagen, Lion’s mane for focus and has 80% less caffeine than regular coffee. To get 5 extra sample packets with your order click on this link, https://everydaydose.superfiliate.com/LESSSTRESSED. Let me know how you love it by dropping me a note or tagging me @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist on IG.

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Katy Saltsman: We always wanna skip the hard phase. We wanna skip the season of the messiness, where we learn and where we grow. Whether it's finances, whether it's our health, whether it's our relationship, even with ourself. 

[00:00:12] Christa: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance.

[00:00:21] Christa: Have let a lot of us down we're overmedicated and underserved at the less trust life. We are a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories. Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

[00:00:55] Christa: I have a complicated history with coffee. I love it, but sometimes it's made me jittery, anxious, and even worsen my skin because of the mold that can be present in lots of coffee. A couple of months ago I tried everyday dose, which combines organic coffee, grass-fed collagen, lions main for focus, and has 80% less caffeine than regular coffee.

[00:01:15] Christa: The results have been impressive, and that's after trying several other similar different coffee products that just didn't meet my snobby coffee standards. Here's what I noticed. Ever since I started using Everyday Dose as my daily coffee two months ago, my daily focus and concentration are better because Lion's Main is a neutropic that helps with brain clarity and focus, but unlike other products, everyday dose actually tastes like coffee and not like mushrooms, which usually taste like dirt or sit at the bottom of the cup.

[00:01:43] Christa: I've noticed I'm not jittery, which makes sense because there's less caffeine and their third party testing for mold or mycotoxins, which is a big deal. So I feel good instead of crappy from my coffee. And three, I've had no change in mood or energy right before my period starts. It's pretty common that my mood is apathetic and I'm annoyed by humans a day or two before the start of my menstrual cycle.

[00:02:04] Christa: But oddly, since I've been doing this daily Neutropic coffee, I had no mental dips like I had before. So if you wanna try Everyday Dose, do me a solid and support the podcast by using my special link everyday dose.com/less stressed. And you'll get five extra sample packs in your order. There's no coupon code, so you'll just have to type in everyday dose.com/less stressed or grab the link from the show notes and let me know if you love it or drop me a note or tag me on Anti-Inflammatory Nutritionist on Instagram.

[00:02:33] Christa: Today on the Less Stressed Life, I have a dear friend I wish you could see on camera. She's such a stunner Kitty Salzman is a nutritionist, personal trainer, and a podcaster on a mission to change the conversation around health for women. Taking a total body approach with mental, physical, and emotional health, helping you understand your body so you can take your goals self.

[00:02:54] Christa: Worth and life to the next level. That mini bio speaks to my soul so much. We recently changed the tagline, probably people agree in this for the first time, we recently changed the tagline on the podcast to helping you heal yourself, because I felt like that was the right approach and right fit. And I did not even read your bio before I read it out loud to everyone if I'm just being honest.

[00:03:13] Christa: So I really love, I really love that. That's what it says. And I wanna tell you a little bit about Katie before I let her speak the rest of the time. So, Katie, I've, I've known for about a year. And then I really got to know Katie, I've seen you, I don't remember how many times if I had stopped to see you in Denver and then we had to get ice cream and go for the, we did all the things and then we ended up spending, we ended up rooming with each other in Texas.

[00:03:36] Christa: That's what it was. So anyway, I've seen you in person multiple times, getting to know you a little bit better every time. And this girl is a force. She's very inspirational. She loves on this woman and she's got an incredible story. So anyway, I hope we delve into all of those things today. Welcome, and I'm glad to have you here.

[00:03:51] Christa: Katie. 

[00:03:51] Katy Saltsman: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be 

[00:03:53] Christa: here. Yeah. So I know we wanna talk about high performance and feeling like everything is going fine, but I always think that. Telling your own story in whatever capacity. I know there's so many versions of your story you could share, so whatever you want to share.

[00:04:08] Christa: I wanna hear about kind of where, what Katie was doing, and then some story time pieces and then how that's really evolved into the women that you're helping now. And tell me about the things that we can get to know you. So we like you, we trust you, all those things before we get into some of this other stuff.

[00:04:24] Katy Saltsman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just like Krista said, there's a lot of different versions, a lot of different layers of my story, but the base of my story is really just a girl trying to fit into a box that really wasn't meant for her in life and trying to do different things to really try and. People please, I guess would be the best way to put it.

[00:04:44] Katy Saltsman: And I really started just peeling back the layers of myself and my life, and I've just evolved and stepped into this whole new woman with my business, with my personal life, but specifically business with women. I struggled my whole life with self-worth, with self-confidence, with never feeling good enough, with truly like a hate relationship with my body of.

[00:05:05] Katy Saltsman: Feeling like slapping a diet bandaid on that was going to fix everything. And what I ended up with was an overly stressed body and mind, and a girl who lost her cycle and her hair started falling out because she was just trying so hard to fix what was going on internally with physical. So what I really like to do with women is I'm a personal trainer.

[00:05:24] Katy Saltsman: I'm a nutritionist. I love health. I love teaching women how to move their body, get stronger. Eat healthy, but that's not all of it and that's not really gonna fix. A lot of us need to dive deeper into more mental and emotional work to get the whole piece of the puzzle coming together because with your health, if you're not addressing the mental and emotional with the physical, what you're going to get is only temporary.

[00:05:46] Katy Saltsman: And I think, Krista, you and I are both not interested in temporary fixes for women. 

[00:05:51] Christa: Mm-hmm. Oh, you reminded me of, uh, so many things. First up, I don't know which order to go in, but I'm gonna go reverse and go and work backwards. So I saw you writing as I was talking. Oh, yeah. I like to, I like to type ero.

[00:06:04] Christa: So I had a client recently ask me, and this is where like you kind of read into the deeper meaning of every question that someone asked, right? They said, oh, I. What would you say to someone who's not really liking their current career and has always been interest in nutrition once we get this certification?

[00:06:20] Christa: And I said, well, I could tell you some feelings about this, but this is really still gonna boil down to what else is going on. What is, what do you want your day to look like? What is your purpose? And I know like I have. Been so humbled recently because I've been doing these kind of women's retreats with some local girlfriends and, and what really struck me as a 65 year old woman talking about a near death experience when she was a teenager and been trying to find her purpose ever since.

[00:06:49] Christa: And so in that same vein, that just made me stop and think about how we are as people. And what I ultimately said to that client was, Even if I tell you this, this, or this is a good certification, you're still gonna have to deal with the underlying stuff that makes you feel like you have a gap in your life after you invest or spend money in this thing that's filling, that you, that you think you need to become whatever you want to be.

[00:07:14] Christa: Does that make sense? Like Yeah. You're, we often, and when we do this as women, we go spend money. To fill holes in our life, don't we? Right. Yeah. It's a coping 

[00:07:23] Katy Saltsman: mechanism. 

[00:07:24] Christa: Right? Right. Yeah. You brought up people pleasing and so the same retreat that I'm giving, I forget until here I am talking to you. I use you in as an example.

[00:07:31] Christa: In this speech, I say my friend Kate, cuz I talk about in evidence of reinvention and we can reinvent ourselves, and I talk about like multiple, very different versions, like a one sentence conversation. Mm-hmm. Of like this person reinvented themselves, this person reinvented themselves. And when you talk about.

[00:07:46] Christa: This, when you talk about wanting to change your body, if you wanna change your physical self, you're gonna have to change your mental self. So anyway, I know that's what we're talking about, but I just think about, I also, have you ever pulled out your people pleasing self in your body? Because I call mine dick.

[00:08:01] Christa: My, my people pleasing version is 

[00:08:03] Katy Saltsman: Richard, so you name it. I love it. I need to do that. But you're right. I feel like. So many women are unhappy in their life and they just like, you know, they want to put this bandaid on it. Like we all have coping mechanisms of different things that we're doing. For me, my coping mechanism was, my diet was changing, my body was control over that.

[00:08:21] Katy Saltsman: Mm, that was going to make me happy. For some women, it's. You know, the scrolling, the numbing, the shopping, whatever it might be. And until you start to shift your life in the way you show up in life and evolve that you're never really gonna find it. Just like you said, reinventing yourself. I mean, I really did that, you know, two years ago and it was the best thing I've ever done.

[00:08:40] Katy Saltsman: And then not all women have to do it as extreme as me. I, Kristen knows I moved, literally drove from Detroit to Denver across the country and just started a new chapter of my life cuz that's what was necessary for me. But I want women to know that they can do that in their own life in the smallest ways.

[00:08:54] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. 

[00:08:54] Christa: And I love that story, really. And wasn't there, there was obviously pain with that. That probably still hurts Steve and talk about was you, when you moved, you lost all of your things and so you didn't really have a choice and it was the worst time of your life, and then later it became kind of the best time.

[00:09:10] Katy Saltsman: Right? Yeah, it really, it was a cool moment. Like just, I guess to take it back a little bit, like I had got. Out of a pretty nasty relationship. And my biggest goal was I didn't want to repeat the same thing. Mm-hmm. And I ended up moving across the country. Long story short, hired a moving company, they stole all my things.

[00:09:27] Katy Saltsman: And I was left in a city where I knew nobody in an empty apartment with an air mattress and myself. And what was cool about that moment, and this is sort of my tagline that I say now, is when you lose everything, you gain the ability to create the most amazing life. And that was my choice. I had to face my shadows.

[00:09:46] Katy Saltsman: I had to face the patterns and the habits that I had created that were no longer serving me. And I either had the opportunity to completely, you know, have a breakdown, which I did. There were many breakdowns to breakthroughs, but I could have gone a different direction where I only used coping mechanisms.

[00:10:01] Katy Saltsman: And I said like I'm 35 years old and that I'm no longer going to do that in my life. This is my breaking point where I create the most amazing life out of nothing. And so that's what I set out to 

[00:10:12] Christa: do. Hmm. That's a big story and I love it, and it makes me, I love seeing you win on the other side of it, which is why I like this story.

[00:10:20] Christa: It's not because I had liked seeing you in pain. It was 

[00:10:23] Katy Saltsman: awful. Kristen met me when I was going through it. Like I, I wouldn't even have a mattress. She 

[00:10:28] Christa: looked good, but she was dying on the inside, which by the way, so often we can look like we have it all put together on the outside. Mm-hmm. And shit has fallen apart on the inside.

[00:10:38] Christa: Right. And how do you start to, I mean, depending on our personality type and how we present to the world, we're, we can be so good at, at covering up the parts of us that we don't want other people to see, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, and in that same vein, when we're trying to go fill those canyons or those holes or those gaps that we're feeling and in our life and our purpose, whatever it is, We may shop, we may scroll, as you said, right.

[00:10:59] Christa: We may numb. And I think the question is, to me it's, I know that sometimes when you're outside of the bottle, you can see that a little bit better. Mm-hmm. How do you figure out or find the mess that's inside holding you back? Like how do you start to unpack that and realize that, oh, these behaviors are the things that are keeping me stuck.

[00:11:19] Christa: How do you start to unpack that? With women. Yeah. I 

[00:11:22] Katy Saltsman: think it's a really hard thing to do because we live in a society where there are so many distractions and we're wired right now to distract ourself, to open up social media, to, it's just like constant scroll to, you know, we get ads all the time, we're shopping, we're on the move, and like rarely do we just sit with ourselves.

[00:11:39] Katy Saltsman: And I think getting to know yourself at a core level is number one, because when you get to know yourself, when you get to sit with yourself, when you get to sit with who you are, You start to understand why you do things. If you don't understand why you're doing these coping mechanisms and what you're trying to numb from, you're never gonna be able to do it.

[00:11:56] Katy Saltsman: I always say the more we feel, the more we heal and we've learned to not feel so we're never really truly healing. And when you can learn to feel through that, and that means like. I had to go through a big period while I was heal, healing from trauma, and it felt like it was getting so much worse before it got better.

[00:12:13] Katy Saltsman: But that's how you know you're doing the work. When you're actually like all the things that you've stuffed down for so long when you're actually having to work through them, it's going to feel worse before it gets better. But the number one thing to do is get to know yourself. Take time to get to know yourself more.

[00:12:27] Katy Saltsman: Take time to turn off all screens and like sit with yourself and your feelings so you're able to start to 

[00:12:33] Christa: shift things. I want to, before we move from that point, that is a concept that someone may hear and say, but how do I actually do that? So when we say, get to know yourself at a core level, and you said, turn off screens, remove distractions.

[00:12:47] Christa: What are some other tangible ways to help someone dig in, like, dig in and get uncomfortable with trying to look at themselves in a different way or look at their, their true self. 

[00:12:56] Katy Saltsman: Yeah, I think learning your patterns and habits is really important, and I think two of the best ways to do that are in the morning and at night.

[00:13:03] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. Look, throughout the day, we're busy. We're checking things off the list. Trying to get to know yourself and feel things in that moment is probably not the best case because especially like I work with women that are a lot of like high performers and go-getters and being like, take time in your day to get to know yourself, it's just not gonna happen.

[00:13:18] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. I really like to optimize mornings with women's. I think your morning is your superpower and if you can set the boundary of not. Picking up your phone for 30 minutes in the morning or checking your email or whatever, and not doing that for 30 minutes before bed. Those are the two best ways to not only set the tone for your day, but also get to know yourself a little bit better to unwind, to kind of work through the uncomfortable things.

[00:13:40] Christa: Mm-hmm. How about the conversation of when people are numbing from a feeling? Would you take this back to patterns? Like how do you start to figure out what are you trying to numb 

[00:13:50] Katy Saltsman: from? Yeah, I would absolutely take it back to patterns. Sometimes we don't even realize what we're doing. We don't even realize what we're numbing from.

[00:13:57] Katy Saltsman: But I think the biggest thing to understand is that if you are always left with the same outcome, that's not a somebody else problem. You know what I mean? That is a you problem. For example, I got out of a divorce and quickly got into a really toxic relationship and for me it was, I got out of that relationship and was like, I don't wanna repeat this pattern again.

[00:14:17] Katy Saltsman: And while there are things that weren't my fault and were out of my control, being in that relationship, like there was something that attracted me to that and that was me. You know what I mean? That was me wanting to fix other people, wanting to make other people happy. That was me not wanting to work on myself and wanting to help other people and thinking I can fix them and it would create happiness in me.

[00:14:38] Katy Saltsman: Right, but I didn't realize that till I was out of it. And I know not everybody is in the situation where like they can just like be by themselves. You know? They have kids, they have a family. I totally understand that. I had to get to know who I was. I like, I committed to 16 months of being single. Why? I had said one year, but I, I ended up being single for like 16, 17 months to date myself, to get to know myself to.

[00:15:01] Katy Saltsman: Focus on connection in my life, and I think you have to decide what's important to you. What are you missing in your life? Are you missing that true connection with other people because you have numb for so long and you have to go do that? Are you really hiding trauma that has been stuffed down for so long?

[00:15:16] Katy Saltsman: Then like, Join the club. We're all human. There's 7 billion of us. Like it's going to therapy. It's getting in the room with other people. Like I hired a therapist, I hired a self-discovery coach at the same time for six months and worked heavily with them. It's saying that like your happiness is not optional.

[00:15:32] Katy Saltsman: Like we all deserve to feel healthy. We all deserve to feel happy and thriving and. There. Majority of women do not feel like that, and you have to really figure out like what you are missing in your life to be able to do that. Hmm. 

[00:15:45] Christa: I wanna underline something that you said, which I thought was so helpful.

[00:15:49] Christa: What attracted me to that? Well, a few things. Hmm. If you are left with the same outcome, that's not a somebody else problem. That's a you problem. I actually had this. Conversation with a client recently because sometimes people come in the door and they wanna talk about weight, and I'm like, Hmm, that's not me.

[00:16:04] Christa: I'm not your person to talk about your weight. If you wanna talk about all the functional things that could lead to that, perhaps. So it came up like, so this person said, I'm your person, but yeah, exactly. Ca go to Katie. Uh, this person came in and was, and this was a gentleman and he had. Told me at the onset, he said, well, I am trying to lose weight.

[00:16:21] Christa: My doctor's not doing it for me or something. It was some it wasn't. That's not the exact words. Mm-hmm. But that's how I interpreted it. I'm like, Ooh, juicy. And then of course, that presented again later, you know, like, Hey, I'm not losing weight. I'm like, Hey. Remember those things that have to happen? Yeah.

[00:16:37] Christa: Before you could even be comfortable or your body could feel good enough to lose it. But anyway, we're left with the same outcome. It doesn't have to be in body composition. Right. It could be relation. You're, we, you just use it. Relationship. I like to think about the five Fs, right? Like family, right.

[00:16:51] Christa: Friends. Mm-hmm. So different types of relationships, finances, fun, and. Maybe it's faith, but anyway, like I like to think about the, these are like different areas of life where people have to kind of agree about things. So when I think about, when we're trying to figure out where are we trying to compensate, what attracted me to that?

[00:17:08] Christa: You said me trying to fix others versus fix myself. Mm-hmm. Really insightful, right? Because so often, yeah, like as soon as you said that, it made me think of so many examples, either for myself or for someone I love where, for sure. Right. It's like we're trying to just bandaid it by projecting we're all projecting our own wounds inside of 

[00:17:26] Katy Saltsman: us.

[00:17:27] Katy Saltsman: Absolutely. And we're trying to get these, these quick hits and these quick fixes. And I'm not even just talking about diets, I'm talking about with everything, with all the things that you just named. Somebody used the analogy once, and I love it, is that they told me that I'm skipping over a hundred dollars bills to pick up pennies.

[00:17:44] Katy Saltsman: You know, I'm trying to search for these like quick fixes. So an example of that, if we're talking about diets, would be like women wanting to. Go vegan when they're not even eating plants in their diet in general. Mm-hmm. Or women wanting to go on some crazy 30 day diet when they're picking up their phone first thing in the morning.

[00:18:02] Katy Saltsman: They're not getting any movement and they're drinking coffee for breakfast. You know, it's like there's so many amazing things you can be doing in your life and those we always wanna. Skip the hard phase. We wanna skip the season of the messiness, where we learn and where we grow, whether it's finances, whether it's our health, whether it's our relationship, even with ourself.

[00:18:22] Katy Saltsman: I wanted to skip that phase. I wanted the quick hit of happiness, so I was instantly jumping into another relationship and the honeymoon phase, trying to fix that person instead of understanding. What was going on with myself. And so I love that analogy in every aspect of life is like, stop skipping over a hundred dollars bills to pick up pennies cuz you will never get to where you wanna be.

[00:18:42] Katy Saltsman: You'll never create wealth in any aspect Doing that. 

[00:18:45] Christa: Yeah. Oh, that was a good one. Okay. I know we're talking about this in context of how it manifests in our body sometimes, or how we feel about our body. So here's something that I saw on your podcast, which we haven't mentioned. You have a podcast and.

[00:19:01] Christa: Right now it's called crying Burns Calories has been called that since the beginning of time, but I know you are feeling to evolution, so I'm just opening the door. I don't know if it'll always be named that or not, but it's a beautiful, I love like you, you go after all these hard topics and I saw a title that said that I think was so valuable.

[00:19:17] Christa: I want to heal my relationship with food, but I don't want to gain weight. Ooh, yes. Loaded, right? Yes. Okay, so let's say I am this high performing woman. I am doing all the things, and it has occurred to me that what I'm doing is not working and I'm succeeding everywhere except for like in my body stuff.

[00:19:36] Christa: And I realize I must have some healing to do or some, some things to do. Mm-hmm. And I, I realize I must heal around that, but I don't like the idea of gaining weight. Let's walk through what has to happen 

[00:19:48] Katy Saltsman: here. Yeah, absolutely. This is a topic that I did and the reason I did it is because it was a real life topic that I went through.

[00:19:55] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. When I got out of that massive, like, terrible relationship and had moved across country and shifted my life, I ended up being under an immense amount of stress under my body, and I again, lost my cycle. My body quickly started showing signs of big stress. I got blood worked on. I had like super, super low progesterone.

[00:20:15] Katy Saltsman: I had no energy, like even getting out of bed was hard, and so I couldn't be the trainer that I wanted to be. I couldn't be doing strength training four to five times a week. I couldn't be in a calorie deficit. Those were not my goals at the moment. My goal was, How do I feel healthy again? And the only option to feel healthy again, was to be able to take a step back from the things that I thought were health, which was really physical.

[00:20:39] Katy Saltsman: Now I realize that my health is so much more, but in that process I had to put on about 10 or 15 pounds, and that was a really hard thing for me, especially as a trainer. I, I just think in this society, when you view somebody as a trainer or a nutritionist, like you feel judged on your body, and I realized a lot of that I was putting on myself, but it was a tough phase for me to go in.

[00:20:59] Katy Saltsman: But it was a necessary phase. And it's the reason I did this podcast because I work with women so often that I. We're so hyper-focused on weight. We're so scared to see that go up a pound, but it's having the honest conversation that if you've been doing all the things that you think are going to get you weight loss, yet you've been consistently staying the same or maybe consistently gaining weight over time.

[00:21:20] Katy Saltsman: It takes breaking down the barrier of understanding that weight can't be your focus and that will happen. If that's your goal, that will happen. If we can put the other things in place, you know, if we can focus on the stress and the sleep and the foundations and slowing down and nervous system work, but the weight will never get to where you want it to be if you don't do that right.

[00:21:44] Katy Saltsman: If you don't take that time and that season, it's a season that none of us wanna go through, but it's a necessary season to set our health up for success. You know, if you wanna be one of those women that naturally lives at a healthy weight and doesn't weigh themselves and doesn't obsess, and it becomes easy, you have to understand that you've primed your body for the opposite for the last 15 years, which means it's gonna take some work on the front end to be able to get there.

[00:22:08] Christa: Well, I'm happy to have you unpack that with us, but what I think about when, as you talk about this is it feels like we have worked against our body for so long that it takes some relearning, resetting, yeah. Understanding, slowing down to work with it. There's a couple, yeah, there's a couple ways to think about this and, and I understand this as well.

[00:22:29] Christa: I had this period of pretty elevated cortisol, and when you have elevated cortisol, you gain abdominal adiposity. So you. Gain belly fat under, under stress, which is a delight. And so, and that's can be also because, you know, under stress your thyroid can't work. Right? Right. And so you have essentially weight loss, resistance and things like that happening.

[00:22:49] Christa: So this all happened to me as well, and I had to really stop. And feel good. Cuz if I was trying to do things, and people say this all the time, like once they get past their thirties they say, well, what I did in my twenties, I could like, I could be restrictive and and exercise more and it would work. And in your thirties it doesn't happen cuz you've already been putting in under stress for a long time.

[00:23:08] Christa: So you're like, yeah, shit, that doesn't work anymore. You know, in my thirties, forties, et cetera. Right. We have a different body composition where, but I, I think of it as like we create a lot of friction when we're trying to work against and hate on our body, which is like, We've literally been the anthem of the last several decades.

[00:23:23] Christa: It's like, let's hate on our body and not like it the way it is. And that feels kind of woo, and people don't really like to hear that. But I wasn't able to change my body composition sustainably until I worked with my body in instead of against it, it, and that's what you saw 

[00:23:37] Katy Saltsman: too. Yeah, absolutely. It took me, I would say 12, 13 months of really earning trust in my body again, before I was able to start to see composition change, which is the phase that I'm in now.

[00:23:50] Katy Saltsman: And that's the best way that I describe it to women is you've broke trust in your body and that's okay cuz a lot of us have done that. Just with what we've been conditioned to do, what we've been taught, and what we've learned is the right thing to do. And then when we realize it's not the right thing, sometimes we're 10 years into it.

[00:24:07] Katy Saltsman: And it's, it's a lot of frustration, but it's understanding that if you had somebody in your life that you didn't know what they were gonna get, you know, most of us don't, our bodies don't know what they're gonna get from day to day. Am I gonna get a thousand calories? Am I gonna get 3000? Am I gonna be stressed?

[00:24:22] Katy Saltsman: Am I not gonna be stressed? So if you had somebody in your life that was a little bit of a firecracker and you didn't know what they were gonna get, And maybe they had consistently broke trust with you. If you think about a relationship where you consistently break trust, that takes time to rebuild. And our bodies work the same way.

[00:24:37] Katy Saltsman: You have to start thinking of like your relationship with your body as a true relationship and nourish it and love it and give it what it needs and earn trust back in it. And those things take time, even though we don't want to think it take time. It's actually in the long run, if you compare it to what you've been doing, it's actually the fast track.

[00:24:56] Christa: Mm. Yeah, for sure. So, couple places we could go here. And I don't know if we covered some of this. So one of the bullet points I have here is weight loss in terms of calories versus hormones. We were just talking about cortisol as a stress hormone. Mm-hmm. Um, what else do you wanna say about this topic?

[00:25:15] Katy Saltsman: Yeah, I get this question a lot and I just did some content on it as you have two sides of the internet, right? One side of the internet is like if you want weight loss, you have to be in a calorie deficit, and the other side of the internet is like, if you want your body, you know, to work properly and you want the eventual weight loss, you have to only focus on your hormones and nourishing them.

[00:25:35] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. And I think both sides are right. There's no question that you have to be in a calorie deficit in order to see weight loss or the composition change you want. I'm not arguing that, but how your body handles that calorie deficit, your hunger levels, your energy levels, your sleep, your stress, all of that is dependent on your hormones.

[00:25:55] Katy Saltsman: And most women that I work with aren't in a position where their body can handle a calorie deficit really well. So when they say it's not working, Or maybe you've been in one and you feel absolutely terrible, it's cuz you're not focusing on your hormones and maybe you've been focusing on your hormones like crazy and all of that's in place, but you're in more of a calorie maintenance, you're not gonna see it either.

[00:26:14] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. So I think both equally play a role and it's understanding and making a decision of where your body is at right now. And I think this is the value of working with a coach because we can meet you where you're at and really put the pieces of the puzzle together of what your body needs instead of trying to listen to influencer X, Y, and Z online and create your own plan.

[00:26:35] Christa: Mm-hmm. I think this makes so much sense. Your body can handle certain things. If. It's not completely under stress. So we're, I'm just kind of emphasizing or underlining, can your body even handle changing its composition? If those basics, if those am and PM patterns, et cetera, don't make it feel safe. And this makes me think of some, a client asked me this recently and she was like, oh, I am gaining some weight.

[00:27:00] Christa: Do you think I should be concerned about this? And knowing her history, which was so deprived in so many ways, and like literally malnourished, I mean, she was. No other way to say it. Just literally malnourished. And what happens is so much, so much can happen, but I sometimes use this, and this is a bit of a buzzword because we all like buzzwords, but there's this corner of the internet called pro metabolic, and I don't mind it because it's all about nourishing.

[00:27:25] Christa: Adrenals and thyroid, and they talk a lot about, Hey, sometimes in order to nourish and get to that long game, you might gain weight along the way. Like your body needs this in order to feel as it tries to figure out where it feels good. Like it needs something to work from, by the way. Yeah. In order to do what you're asking it to do.

[00:27:45] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:27:47] Katy Saltsman: And I think a lot of times when females hear the word hormones, they're like, oh, my sex hormones. And it's like, this isn't just your sex hormones. Mm-hmm. We're talking about your blood sugar. We're talking about your cortisol. We're also talking about your hunger and your fullness hormones, right?

[00:27:59] Katy Saltsman: Mm-hmm. Or your body's ability to feel full will start to decrease when stress is high. And you know, if your, if your stress is high, your blood sugar's off, you're going to crave more carbohydrates like how your body functions. From an internal perspective that is like, you won't be able to be in a calorie deficit and feel good if all of that is off.

[00:28:17] Katy Saltsman: It's just, it's, you're working against each other. So I think it's really starting to just understand that, like you said. Let's 

[00:28:22] Christa: talk about another bullet point, which comes up a lot and I'm sure you see it, and not exactly about it, but we've talked about the pros, cons of looking at macros, et cetera. I'm not a macro.

[00:28:33] Christa: Tracking person, but some people, and for some people this is like a great fit for them. But a bullet point I have for you is about building lean muscle without tracking macros. So let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah. Because I've seen, I bet you've seen people that tracking macros was not a good fit for them because it filled a perfectionist.

[00:28:55] Christa: Tendency or patterning for them, and then they were working again against their body instead of with it. So I think we can pervert or make, uh, something that could be useful for some people to making it not useful for other people, depending on what kind of other things are going on in the person. Yeah, 

[00:29:14] Katy Saltsman: makes total sense.

[00:29:15] Katy Saltsman: I feel like the way we've been taught to track macros is totally off base. We use it as like the main tool in the toolbox instead of a guide or something to help teach us about nutrition. And I always take a step back with women if that's a route they wanna go. Cuz not all clients want to track macros, but.

[00:29:35] Katy Saltsman: Here's where it can be really helpful. And here's the mistake that most people make is they go, they get their numbers from like an online calculator or even maybe a coach, and they try and hit those numbers perfectly, but they're missing this huge phase that's called awareness and understanding where they're at.

[00:29:51] Katy Saltsman: So what I have women do is if they want to track, I'm like, awesome. I want five days of where you are at right now. No judgments, no trying to change things. For me. I'm the least judgemental person. I just want an accurate idea of what your body and metabolism is functioning off of. So gimme those happy hours.

[00:30:07] Katy Saltsman: Gimme the perfect days. Gimme a weekend day. Let's understand where your body is at, and then look at ideally where your body should be and make the connections. But if we're never learning what's going wrong in the first place, like maybe we're like way under fueling with protein or we're not getting nearly enough fiber.

[00:30:25] Katy Saltsman: If you miss that awareness phase, then you just have numbers to hit and then you don't learn anything when you're just trying to hit numbers. You know, you're, you're maybe gonna stick with them for a week or two and then you go off. What I do is I create awareness, kind of give an ideal perspective of where their body should be.

[00:30:42] Katy Saltsman: And then meet them in the middle. For most women, you know, let's say they're, they should be getting around 120 grams of protein a day. If they're at 60 right now and you're just slapping this generic, you know, these generic numbers at this woman trying to tell her to increase 60 grams of protein a day.

[00:30:57] Katy Saltsman: That's wild. Mm-hmm. Nobody wants to be force feeding themselves chicken breasts. So it's like for that, it would, I would be like, how do we get 20 more grams of protein consistently? How do we get 80 to 90 grams of protein consistently for two to three weeks, maybe even a month, and then we increase it from there.

[00:31:12] Katy Saltsman: It's not what you can do short-term, it's what you can do long-term consistently. 

[00:31:17] Christa: I. I love that. I thought that was really useful, and that's exactly what it is. It's like sometimes you're like, okay, I've got this booklet and it will solve all my problems. Let me figure out what I'm supposed to do, instruction manual, and let me just go ahead and rearrange my life.

[00:31:31] Christa: And then people are like, I hate this. This sucks. Right? Yeah. If you don't kind of gradually figure out the pieces, but you brought up what I think is probably the most important phase of all as well, which is awareness. Without awareness. Yes. You don't go anywhere new backside. 

[00:31:44] Katy Saltsman: You don't go anywhere. You just, I get you try and hit those numbers and then you go right back to where you were.

[00:31:49] Katy Saltsman: And if you're not educating and learning and empowering yourself along the way, it's not gonna be long-term change, which, like, why are we even putting effort in if it's not long-term change? Mm-hmm. I 

[00:32:00] Christa: love that. Man, there has been some really great nuggets in this already today. I think we covered, we covered just now creating awareness when talking about macro, like the way to start with macro tracking and mistakes we make.

[00:32:11] Christa: We talked about, uh, different pillars of being high performance and then, but your body being out of control because working against it. We talked about calories versus hormones. We talked about numbing and scrolling and patterning. Yeah. Traumas. Anything else that you think that we should talk about or share or make sure we cover with listeners today?

[00:32:34] Katy Saltsman: I think the biggest thing is always coming back to sort of my tagline around changing the conversation around health is that I want every woman listening to know that you deserve to feel good. You deserve to have high self-worth and self-confidence. You deserve to feel happy and healthy. And we live in a world, in a generation where we've been conditioned that not feeling good is normal.

[00:32:57] Katy Saltsman: That feeling stressed and anxious and not loving the way that we look every single day and not feeling good in our body, and feeling super sluggish. All of these, you know, lineup of how women feel every single day. We've normalized this. We joke about it, we have accepted it, and I want you to know that that isn't how it has to be.

[00:33:16] Katy Saltsman: And it's never going to be the drastic things that change it, but when you start to get to know yourself and dive in on a deeper level and start to understand that your health is just as much mental and emotional as it is physical, your life will drastically change. And try not to focus on the all or nothing, just like one foot in front of the other, forward motion, consistent movement in the direction, and you won't even recognize yourself in a ear in the best kind of way.

[00:33:44] Christa: Yeah, so many good ones. I see why I'm so attracted to you, aside from you lighting up the room when you walk into it and being like such a really authentic, genuine cheerleader, uh, for the humankind of women especially. But I have a tagline that's like, you deserve things without whatever. And so I like, I just, when you speak, I'm like, yes, yes, yes.

[00:34:05] Christa: Thank you so much, which is why I'm happy you're here. And if you love Katie's vibe, I want to encourage you to go check out Crying Burns calories. Where else can people find you online, Katie? 

[00:34:15] Katy Saltsman: Yeah. Crying Burns Calories podcast. I love podcasting, so I'm, I'm so happy that I'm on here. And then my main platform is Instagram, so you can find me on Instagram.

[00:34:24] Katy Saltsman: Just my name, Katie Saltzman. Feel free to send me a dm. Say hi. I love having you a part of the 

[00:34:30] Christa: community. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on today. Yeah, thank you. Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission. To help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story, just go to review this podcast.com/less stress life.

[00:34:50] Christa: That's review this podcast.com/less stressed life, and you'll be taken directly to a page where you can insert your review and hit post.