358: Macros and Mindset: Why You Can’t Have One Without the Other

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 358.

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

Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm so glad that you're here because we are diving in to something really foundational and something, in my opinion, that often gets overlooked in the health and fitness world. Although I do feel like in the last several years, the term “mindset” work has come more into vogue. You know, you've probably heard that your mindset matters, improve your mindset, but have you ever really stopped to think about the connection between your mindset, the tools, and how those work together to be able to create lasting success? Because that's exactly what we're going to talk about in today's episode. 

So here's the deal. When it comes to transformation, there are really two broad essential pieces of the puzzle. There's the strategy, and then there's the mindset. It's about what you're doing, so that's the strategy piece, and it's about who you are while you're doing it, the mindset piece. And I really find that so much of the fitness space is hyper focused on the first part, things like how much protein to eat, what macros to hit, the best way to structure your workouts, how much cardio you should do. And while all of that is important, right? Macro counting is an amazing tool. I love weight lifting. I want to get more women. Those are all really helpful and important tools. It is only half of the equation. The truth is the best tools in the world will not give you the outcome that you want if you as the doer of the tools, or the user of the tools, haven't done the inner work to fully show up. You know, it's like handing someone the finest paints and the best canvas and expecting them to create a masterpiece without first learning how to paint and how to wield a paintbrush.  

And so transformation happens when the tool and the person wielding it align. And that's a lot what I'm doing with my clients inside of MACROS 101 is what makes MACROS 101 stand out from every other program out there. And so in this episode, I'll explain why how you approach macro counting matters, matters just as much as the numbers you set or the foods you're eating. And we're going to really dive into the mindset shifts that really help to fuel consistency, help you to break free from self-sabotage and help make a transformation lasting and sustainable. So whether you felt stuck, or maybe you're on the starting and the stopping rollercoaster, you know what I mean? Where you start something, get excited, have all this motivation, momentum, and then you quit, and you're like, I'm off the rollercoaster. I have to get back on. Or whether you've, you know, struggled with, how do I know what my mindset is? How do I know if my mindset needs improving? How do I know, Amber, if I need to focus on my mindset or the tools? Like if these are the two big pieces, how do I know which one to focus on? The conversation that we're going to have on this podcast today is definitely for you. So if you're ready to talk about mindset and strategy and how they work hand in hand, and why focusing on both is the key to true transformation, stick around because that's what I'm diving into today.  

Actions stem from beliefs and identity 04:08 

I want to dive in by starting to talk about the difference between the doing and the person doing the doing. So I often like to use the analogy of a tree because I think that this really helps to elicit and explain this concept in a way that's easier to understand. If you know me, you know, I love a good metaphor. That's one of the ways that I learned the best. So I use a lot of metaphors when I'm teaching and educated clients. So if we think about a tree and we think, actually, I'm like looking at a tree right now, as I'm staring out of my bedroom window recording this episode, as I look at the tree, my eyes, very first, the thing that I see are all of the leaves, right? This is a big full tree. I'm in Southern California. So even though it's wintertime, trees don't really lose their leaves because it's still 75 degrees. But I'm looking at this tree and it's full of leaves and some trees have blossoms and sometimes they have fruit. But when I look at a tree, that's what I see, is I see those things. And in our metaphor, that represents the results that you can see in your journey, right? You can see the scale going down. You can see more muscle being added to your body. You can see your clothes fitting better, right? These are results that are the things that often we can touch, we can feel, we can see, and we can tell that, you know, things are changing.  

And yet the leaves are not just floating out in space. Of course, they're attached to something. And where do they come from? Well, they come from the branches. You know, I can follow the leaves down to the branches and I can see, oh yeah, the leaves come from the branches. So in our metaphor, what creates new results? What allows you to build muscle? What allows you to lose fat? What creates new results in your life? Well, you know, inherently action does. The things that you're doing create the results that you get. If you want to, I mean, we can even make it broader. If you want to learn a new language, you have to take lessons. You have to download Duolingo. You have to practice, right? The actions that you do produce the results. And after you do those actions enough, now you have learned more of language. It's the same thing in our health and fitness journey. You know, if you want to get fitter, we need to show up and take the new action maybe of going to the gym, lifting weights, doing cardio. If you want to see fat loss, you got to track your macros, pay attention to the food that you're eating, make sure you're in a caloric deficit. So we, our brains are really attuned to understanding this link between action and results.  

And this is where most people focus, because when most people say, okay, I'm ready to start a fitness journey, I'm ready to lose weight, ready to add muscle, ready to change my life. They go, okay, now what do I do? What do I do, Amber? What's the first step? And then they come to me and they say, okay, I want to count macros. What's the first step? How do I set my macros? How do I hit these numbers? How do I make sure I'm getting enough protein? How do I work out? What do the workouts look at? Because they innately know that doing new things is going to net them new results, right? So we, that link is very clear in our mind. But if we're looking at the tree and we say, okay, we see the leaves, they come from the branches and the trunk of the tree, but where do the branches and the trunk of the tree come from? We keep following that down the tree, we come to the roots of the tree. And the interesting thing about the roots of the tree is like, I'm looking at a tree right now and I cannot see its roots at all, right? They're underground. It's something that is not a visually, I cannot see any of those, but I know inherently that there are roots of this tree and that is what is supporting everything else. That's what supports the trunk, the branches and the leaves. And that's where the tree really starts. We want to say, where's the beginning of the tree? It was that little seed that then created that root system that then feeds into everything else. And so if we go back to our analogy and we say, okay, the leaves are the results and those come from the branches and the trunk, which are the actions that we're taking. Now the big question becomes, where do the actions that we're taking come from? And that is when we start to dive into our beliefs, how we're speaking to ourselves and the identity that we hold. So really the roots represent our beliefs about the world, about ourselves, about what's possible, and the identity that we currently hold. 

Identity and actions shape change 08:38 

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits said, true behavior change is identity change. When your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be. And a great example of that is the example of the identity of a smoker. I am not a smoker. I don't identify as a smoker. So every day when I wake up and I do not smoke, that's not hard for me. There's no challenge in that. That is just who I am. It's not a decision I have to make. It is just the identity that I hold. And so if I'm not a smoker, the actions of not smoking just flow from that. And then the results from not being a smoker flow from that. And so at the deepest level, if we want to really have long-term change, we have to be changing on that belief, that value, and that identity level. And that is, that's the roots of long-term change.  

So if we kind of can break it up, we can say, awesome. If we want new results, we have to have two pieces. We have to have the mindset shifts and the mindset change, like that identity, the beliefs, the values change, the roots need to change. And we also need to have a change in actions or behaviors, right? They are interwoven, right? They're linked together. And so when I said at the beginning of the episode that there are two large pieces that need to fit together, that's what I'm talking about is we need the mindset work. But if you even just have the mindset work without the skills and actions and behaviors, it's not going to create change. We have to have both of them. They play into each other. And I would even argue, and maybe this is where the metaphor breaks down a little bit, but that's okay, is that your beliefs and identity influence your actions and behaviors and vice versa. Your actions and behaviors also influence your identity. Somebody I like to follow is Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fyfe. And I interviewed her on episode 305 of the podcast. So go and take a listen to that episode. It's fantastic. She's absolutely one of my mentors and someone I looked up to a lot. And she has a phrase that she uses a lot that we act our way into a new way of being. So this is this fluidity between the actions we take and who we are as a person or hold as an identity and how they can flow to each other. We act our way into a new way of being, into a new identity. And then that identity reinforces those actions. And so it becomes this cyclical relationship between the two is sometimes we have to act first to become that person and that influences our identity. And then our identity in turn influences the actions that we are taking.  

Mindset and actions shape success 11:28 

So you can't really say that one is the key, right? And this is where I really come into my big beef with the way that a lot of people approach macro counting and the way a lot of people teach macro counting, because the way a lot of people approach and teach macro counting is very much from an action behavior-oriented framework, right? Here's the macros, eat this amount, hit these numbers and sail off into the sunset with this idea that like, if we just had new actions, then that's going to change everything. And it is part of the puzzle piece. Yes. But it is missing this other very fundamental piece, which is the mental work. And the reason that this bugs me so much is because what it does is it ends up turning macro counting into just another diet for so many women. And so I hear this from a lot of people who they say, you know, I had my macro set or I worked with a coach and these were my numbers. And I really struggled because one, I struggled to hit them. That was really hard. Couldn't do it. Felt really frustrated, felt like I was failing again because I couldn't do this consistently, consistently. Or two, they feel all this pressure that like the only right way to do this is to hit your macros. And so if you go over your macros or you don't hit your macros or you're not consistent, now you feel like you feel the shame and guilt and regret. Like I just did it wrong. And I didn't count macros the right way. And then when you don't get results, you're like, well, that's just because I was a loser and I didn't do it right. And if you can, if you hear that kind of self-talk, that is the exact thing that we're all railing against with all of these other, like the diet industry, right? That's, that's what I'm railing against when I say, this is my problem with keto is that if you don't do it right, now you feel all this guilt and shame and that's not good and it doesn't help you. And so we rail against these other things saying diets are bad. We don't want to, we don't want to do diets here. Come do this thing called macro counting. It's not a diet. It's, you know, all foods can fit. And yet we bring that same mentality of dieting into macro counting and we make it really rigid and restrictive. And I hear this from people. They're like, I felt so restricted when I was in macro counting because I had these numbers and I had to hit them and I had to do it right. And if I didn't do it right, then like it wasn't going to work for me. That my friend is because you had this tool, you had the skill, this behavior, these actions, and you weren't pairing it with the mindset piece that was going to allow you to utilize that tool in a healthy way, in a way that was going to be beneficial for you in a way that was going to improve your relationship with food, not make you just feel more stressed or more restricted or more like on edge with all the food that you're eating.  

Mindset shifts enable lasting change 14:10 

And so maybe you're listening to this and you're having the aha moment that this has been one of your problems in the past is that you've approached changes to your diet, to your workouts from that mindset of there's only one right way to do it. And I got to do it right. I got to get it right. I got to follow the plan. I got to follow the program because that's what's been told you for so long. If you just followed the diet, if you just follow the workout plan, you would be successful. This seems like a you problem because you can't follow it. And that is just BS. That whole mindset takes such issue with that because again, if you're not pairing the skills, the behavior change with the identity work and the mindset work, it's no wonder that you're getting all tied up and having to be perfect and being stressed if you eat something that's off your plan or feeling regret or guilt if you don't hit your numbers. If you're experiencing macro counting that way, my friend, I lovingly take your hand. I look into your eyes and I'm just going to tell you, you've turned macro counting into a diet. And just because you've turned it into a diet doesn't mean it has to be a diet. And Wayne Dyer says, when we change the way we look at things, the things that we look at change. And that's where this mindset piece plays such a big role. And it's why the way that I present macro counting and the way I teach macro counting to my clients inside of MACROS 101 is so unique because yes, you're learning skills and you're learning tools and you're learning science, but you're also pairing that with the mindset work of how we think about things, how we approach it, the type of mentality that we bring a lot in MACROS 101. I'm talking a lot about moving away from a dieter mentality into a macro scientist mentality and teaching clients how to make that shift on the mental level so that everything I'm teaching you on the science level actually sticks, right? It's that, that, that bridge between strategy, important, mindset, important, have them together. Woo. That's when things can really change.  

How you act matters most 16:11 

Something I have really been exploring recently in my own life. And then also in my clients, as I've worked with tens of thousands of clients is that how you do something matters actually more than what you do. Okay. So let me explain that. A really good example of this may be think about a time when somebody apologized to you and you really could feel like they actually were apologized. Like it was a true apology to you. And then converse that with, or compare that with a time when someone has apologized to you and you could tell it wasn't genuine, right? Like there just something was in it. Like you could tell they were saying all the words. They were saying all the words that they were supposed to say, but you're like, that is not genuine. It is interesting because if you looked at the actual words that somebody was saying, they likely were very similar in both of those circumstances. The words that someone was giving to you is probably the same, but the experience of it or how that translated was very, very different. And that was because the way that the person did it or where that person came from, when they were saying those words to you mattered even more than the word, what particular words they were saying. And I think that this is such a, an earth-shattering moment when we recognize that how you're doing something or where those decisions are coming from or how you're making that choice almost matters more than the choice that you're making. This is something I work with my clients a lot on. How are we making decisions? How are you deciding whether or not to eat that? That to me matters way more than whether or not you eat the food. How are you making that decision? What does that sound like in your brain? What does it sound like in your mind? And then what is that experience of you deciding whether or not to eat that brownie or not?  

Mindset shapes decision-making experience 18:11 

So when we relate this to the saying, you're sorry, there's a difference between saying you're sorry and feeling sorry. And that gets communicated. And there's a difference between not having a brownie because you're restricting yourself and choosing to not have a brownie. Now, if I'm watching somebody, let's say I'm spying on you. I'm watching you at the counter trying to decide whether or not you're gonna have the brownie. All I can see from the external is like, either you have the brownie, you don't have the brownie. That's all I can see. But again, what matters more to me is not whether or not you have the brownie in the moment. It is how do you make the decision about eating the brownie? That's something I can't see because that's the mental internal work. And there's a big difference between someone who doesn't have the brownie because they tell themselves, I can't have brownies. If I have a brownie, it will make me fat. If I have a brownie, it's gonna throw me off my plan. If I have a brownie, then I'm a bad person, or I'm never gonna be able to be successful if I have this brownie. That is a very different experience than somebody who looks at that brownie and their conversation sounds like, huh, do I really want the brownie? How am I gonna feel if I have that brownie? Is this something that is gonna make me feel better or is making me feel worse? Do I actually even really want it, or do I just think I want it? Is this something that fits into my plan? Is this something that I wanna do? And then they make a decision from that place. Can you hear the vast difference in that experience?  

The first woman is really thinking from that dieter restriction mindset, that external control. Someone else is telling me, even if it's just a part of your brain, telling you, you can't have that. It's not okay. It's not right to have that. It's not good to have it. That's not healthy, right? It's that external pressure on you. And that makes us feel restricted. And we, as humans, hate that. We don't like people telling us what to do, even if it's ourself. We're really funny like that. Whereas the other woman is thinking more in what I term a macro-scientist mindset, where she is asking herself better questions. She is free to eat whatever it is that she wants, but she's able to really lean into that question of, do I really want this? Is this something I desire? Does this fit? Do I wanna eat this? And that is a much less restrictive mindset. And so again, whether or not both of these women eat the brownie or whether both of these women don't eat the brownie does not matter so much because you can already start to see that the woman, the way that she's thinking about it, is going to be a sustainable, healthy, long-term way that she's gonna be able to live her life in a way that feels good and that she's gonna be much more successful than someone who is trying to white knuckle and just hold on for dear life to be able to make “the right choices” that are gonna get her the results that she wants.  

Mindset makes macro-counting effective 21:03 

So macro-counting is a great tool. It's a fantastic tool, but how you approach the tool matters. How you use the tool matters. And oftentimes when people come to me and say, well, macro-counting didn't work for me, it's because they were trying to use the tool without simultaneously doing the inner work required for the tool to be really successful long-term. If you're counting macros without the mindset work, it's like using that tool without heart.  There's another story that I heard recently that kind of speaks to this as well where there was a young violinist who, I don't know hardly anything about violin and music, so if I butcher this story, just be patient with me, but I have heard that Suzuki is a big name in the violin industry and this young violinist was playing for Suzuki and it was like a really simple song and they were like playing this song and Suzuki had them play it over and over and over and over again because even though they were getting all the right notes, Suzuki kept saying, there's no heart in it. You got to bring the heart to the music. Yes, you can play all of the right notes. You can hit all of them perfectly. The timing can be right. All the notes can be right. But if you're not playing it with heart, people can feel that. That's the difference between good music and great music is the artist's heart is behind what it is that they're doing. It's not about just like strumming the right strings or I don't even know what you do with violin, whatever, right? It's not about doing it exactly perfect. It's about bringing your heart into it and I think the same thing when it comes to macro counting. I think a lot of people are counting macros without the heart behind it and then they're wondering why it's not successful and why they aren't getting results when it's when you pair the mindset work with the tool that it really is transformative. 

Inconsistency signals mindset misalignment 23:02 

So how do you know if your mindset needs work? If this is a piece of the puzzle that maybe you're currently missing and there's a couple ways to know. One way, if you're starting and stopping something and then restarting again, that is clear indication that there's some work that needs to be done. This would be a form of self-sabotaging behavior. There are obviously other forms of self-sabotaging behavior. People who struggle with consistency, that's a red flag that there is mindset work to be done because like I said earlier, when something becomes your identity… Wait, what was that James Clear quote that I read before? Let me pull it up again. He said, true behavior change is identity change. When your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You're not trying to change your behavior, it's just a natural byproduct of who you are. So if you're struggling with consistency on something, that is a clear indication to you that your identity is not fully aligned with that behavior, that there's still identity work to be done, mindset work to be done, values and belief shifting to be done to be able to help you to settle that. So if you find yourself struggling with consistency or you find yourself doing any sort of self-sabotaging behavior, starting and stopping, those are all clear indications that your current identity does not align with the results that you're trying to create. And so that's clear indication that there's some mindset work to be done.  

Lack of results signals growth 24:32 

Another broad kind of sweeping generalization is if there are results that you want that you don't currently have, that is an indication that there is likely mindset work to be done. Because if you had the identity, then the behaviors and the results are the natural byproduct, right? It just flows naturally into that. Now I will kind of couch this a little bit, that you can do the mindset work, you can have the belief shifts, you can have the values shifts, and then there can be time between when that happens and when the results show up on your doorstep. So that's definitely a factor. It's not like immediately when you have made that shift that the results show up. There is time associated with this. But in general, if there are results you want that you do not currently have, that's an indication that there is root work to be done to be able to help you to reach that end destination. Now, I will say that what I have found through my own growth and my own experience is that this never ends. You can look at that as a good or a bad thing, but this never ends. That you will do the inner work, you will do the mindset work, you will do the identity and the belief work, and you will grow and you will expand. And then there will be new levels and there will be new devils. And as I've gone through my own personal expansion and growth, things that I feel like I have surpassed or worked through will often show up in different ways later in my life. And I'll realize that those blocks that I thought I had overcome are still there on some level. It's just a deeper level or a different level. It looks a little bit different. And then I have to come back and I have to do some more of that work to be able to continue to progress and continue to grow. And I said it kind of jokingly that you can even look at that as a bad thing or a good thing. I think for some people that's really discouraging that there's always going to be a new level and a new devil. I look at it as amazing because that is, to me, growth is never ending. The whole purpose to me of this life is growth, is my growth and growing as much as possible. And as I grow, I'm able to expand and help other people to grow. And as a collective, the more each of us individually grow, the more that we as a human population grow and are able to have better lives. So I really believe in this idea of growth is never ending. We don't grow and then be like, I made it. I'm at the top of the mountain. It is a life experience of growing. And so I see it as new level, new devil. It's just part of the process. It's part of the experience of growth and how wonderful that I'm able to have these lessons be presented to me in a way that continues my expansion and continues my growth. Because if there's no problems, it's really hard to grow. If everything's hunky-dory and there's no issues, it's really hard to grow. It's kind of like trying to go to the weight room and not adding any more weight to the bar. You're not going to grow. You're going to just kind of stay flat and stay similar. So problems are an opportunity for us to be able to continue that expansion and continue that growth. And that's really what I'm here for. And hopefully it's what you're here for as well. 

Strategy plus mindset creates transformation 27:46 

So to wrap all this up, I hope that you're seeing how important it is to have both pieces. To have the strategy, to have the tools, and then also to have the mindset work so that the tools stick. Right? We're focusing on not only the doing, but we're focused on the doer who's doing the doing. And that's you. And that's you, the inner work that can be so powerful and transformative.  

So this is something that is piquing your interest, something that's resonating with you. I invite you to come join us with our next round of MACROS 101, because this is the kind of work that we get to do together, where we get to pair the science, the tools, the techniques with the inner mindset work that allows it to stick and allows you to create that transformation from the inside out. If you want to come join us on our next round of MACROS 101, you can get on the interest list by going to bicepsafterbabies.com/waitlist. And you will be the first to know when we open doors to the next round of that program. I would love to coach you through all this stuff inside.  

That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Baby's Radio. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything. 

Outro

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