279: From Surviving to Thriving: Transforming Trauma into Growth and Healing with Katy Saltsman

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 279. 

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 your host, Amber Brueseke. And today I have another fantastic guest, and we're talking about a very important topic. So I have Katy Saltsman on the podcast today and we're talking about healing and trauma and the experience of going through something really difficult and coming around and out of the other side of it, maybe even better than you were before, and Katy has an amazing story. You go to her podcast to listen to the full experience, but she dealt with a very emotionally abusive boyfriend and got herself out of that situation eventually, but it left a lot of scars on her. And today in the podcast she opens up really candidly about that experience, about the things that she learned about herself, learn about herself through that experience and the growth that she's been able to have and really turn that, you know, terrible experience into, you know, something that she's really proud of and a person that she's really proud of. And so I'm really grateful to Katy for coming on the episode and talking so openly about what can be such a difficult topic. One that I think we just don't talk about enough and wanted to broach that subject on the podcast. At one point on the podcast, Katy talks about being a people pleaser and how that led to some of the decisions that she made that she looks back and, and regrets. And I wanted to point out episode 253 that I recorded called “Are You A People-Pleaser? This Episode’s For You”. So if you find that you identify with some of the things that Katy is talking about with these people-pleasing tendencies and really shaping and molding yourself to be whoever the other person wants you to be, I really, really highly recommend that episode. So it's episode 253: Are You A People-Pleaser? This Episode’s For You. Now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview with Katy.  

Amber B 02:37 

Alright, I am thrilled to welcome to the podcast Katie Saltzman. Katie, how are you doing? 

Katy Saltsman 02:42  

I'm so good. I'm so happy to be here. 

Amber B 02:44 

Yes. We were just talking before we hit record about how excited both of us are about this topic. Me, because I'm excited to have this conversation and Katy cause she says, and when you're in the fitness industry, people ask you like the same 10 questions over and over and over again. And this doesn't tend to not be some of the questions that people ask. So we're gonna kind of get into a topic that we both feel is very, very important but is not talked about nearly enough, and that is trauma and healing, and that, that messy, messy process of trying to put yourself back together and, and what it can look like. So if you feel like you've had some trauma or some experience that you're trying to process in your life, you aren't alone. And Katie's so been so wonderful to come on the podcast and be able to share her experience with that today. 

Katy Saltsman 03:29 

Yes. I'm excited to support all the women listening. 

Amber B 03:32 

Awesome. OK, so tell my audience a little bit about yourself. Give us a little introduction, who’s Katy and what do you do? 

Katy Saltsman 03:38 

Yes. So my name is Katy Saltsman. I'm a personal trainer and nutrition coach, also a fellow podcaster, which I love. And I help women really step into their happiest and healthiest selves. And the reason I think this topic is so important was because you as a trainer and as a nutrition coach for so long, you focus a lot on the physical and I didn't realize how important the mental and emotional was really until I started to go through stuff in life and I started to go through trauma and I realized that I was approaching something that needed some deeper work with only the physical, and it was actually my hardest moments of my life, but the ones I'm most grateful for, because now I get to help women dive deeper into what they are going through and what's really holding them back. 

Amber B 04:20 

So good and I and I don't think that you have to go through trauma to really see that link between the mental and the physical. But I think so many women get into their fitness journey, thinking it's all just a physical. And I think they're the prize, and shocked when it, when it has a lot of those mental aspects to it and really getting clear about that and working through some of those mental things is what's going to catapult your physical success. That's what you want.  

Katy Saltsman 04:46 

Yeah. 

Amber B 04:46 

So I wanted to have you on today to talk about healing from trauma and you know, we don't have to necessarily dig into all the details. You have some really fabulous podcast episodes that we can link to in the show notes if people want to go. You like, recorded your full story so they can go to your podcast to hear that full story. But I want to give a little bit of context to the conversation that we're going to have around trauma and healing, so can you give a, a brief overview of your experience and some of your past with emotional abuse? 

Katy Saltsman 05:18 

Yeah. Absolutely. So I like, like, Amber is saying I am really sort of an open book. I tell my whole story on my podcast. But I would say the basis of my story is not living a life that fully aligned with me and really focusing on a life to try and make other people happier and getting into really toxic situations because of that. So I, there was a period of time in my life where I went through a divorce, I got out of an emotionally abusive relationship. I literally moved my life from Michigan to Denver without knowing a single person in this city that I'm in Denver now, but I literally drove across the country in an SUV to a city where I knew nobody and started a new chapter in my life. In that process, I also hired a moving company that stole all my things. So it was like..  

Amber B 06:04 

Ohh gosh! 

Katy Saltsman 06:04 

I know, I know this, it was a moving company that had like 5-star reviews, they packed up my life to move it to Denver and it never showed up and I say now that when you lose everything, you gain the ability to build the most beautiful life. But it wasn't, it wasn't that easy when I went through it, and I went through a period where my body, like, started to physically shut down on me because I was under so much stress and I had to, I was still trying to do the same thing, show up for myself, in the same way as like go on my, you know, working out five or six days a week and all of this ended and me losing my cycle, my hair starting to fall out. And as a trainer and as a coach, you think you're doing the right things, you're like what is, what is going on? Like I'm, I'm showing up for myself in a way that I always had, but I was dealing with a nervous system that was overwhelmed with trauma and overwhelmed with stress, and I was addressing it the wrong way. 

Amber B 06:58 

How were you trying to address it? Or were you trying to just sweep it under the rug and pretend like everything was fine? 

Katy Saltsman 07:03 

So part of me is like the sweep it under the rug, everything is fine. I'm really open and vulnerable. My story now, but one thing I say is I wish I would have been more open when I was going through it, but I was still very much in the phase where I was in shock and I also didn’t, I never wanted to come across negative, right, so I was just like, slap a smile on your face. Nobody would have known what I was actually going through, when I was doing it and, I don't know if anybody you know resonates with this, but I'm a little bit of a control freak. I like to know the outcome of a situation and this was completely out of my control, one, but the reason and I, I know a lot of women go towards the physical way. I was trying to address it with, like, oh, I'll just change my body. I'll just look better online. I'll just, you know, increase my business. I was trying to address it in that aspect because I think as women, we feel like, hey, something's going wrong in my life. Everything feels out of control. What do I have control over? the way I look, the way my body feels, how I can do that and then when that starts to fall apart, you no longer have control over that. You really start to kind of lose everything. 

Amber B 08:06 

Yeah, that feeling of like wanting to be in control is such a basic human desire, like to want to try and control everything and then you realize that in reality, really very, very little is within your control. 

Katy Saltsman 08:18 

Yeah. 

Amber B 08:18 

We like to have that illusion of control that we're, that we're in charge, so healing is a really broad term and obviously can look different for everybody. And so I want to talk specifically in your situation, what did healing look like for you? What did that process look like for you and what are some of the resources that you had helpful, found helpful as you went through that process? 

Katy Saltsman 08:39 

Yeah. So healing, you're right, it is a really broad term. I think healing trauma, this will look different for every single person. For me, my healing came with truly finding who I was again, which would have been, if you would have known me, you probably would have been, your job would have dropped because it's like, how does this 30-something girl not know who she is when she has a business and she's helping all these women. But the thing is, is I built a life and a business on what I thought other people would want to see and what I thought I should be my whole life from growing up really conservative to trying to be in these relationships where I was trying to be somebody that I wasn't and only make someone else happy. And I had done this my entire life, and I realized it was a pattern. And I'm not saying the emotional abuse was my fault in any way, shape or form. But I'm saying that I played a role in who I was, you know, trying to fit into a box that's full life of somebody that I wasn't. So my healing journey was like, I am 30-something years old. I have lost it all. I have one chance to really rebuild this and find who I am and I wasn't going to screw that up and for me, I hired a therapist that was trauma-informed. I hired a self-discovery coach and I went on a mission to find who I am again, who is Katie? What lights me up? What do I like to do for fun? I, I didn't know any of those answers because I had found myself and other people my whole life and I'm in a city where I'm living on an air mattress because all my stuff is gone. I know not a single person, and there's really only up from there, but I had an opportunity and I realize not everybody's opportunity is going to be this extreme, but I really got to understand what things you know, I think we tend to blame like, I thought so many of my problems were a Michigan problem and then when, or a relationship problem. But then when I came to Denver, I was like, oh, that's actually a Katie problem. That's actually something that I brought with me and carried with me. So, healing for me was finding who I am again, working through limiting beliefs and what's holding me back and finding what truly lights me up. 

Amber B 10:40 

That’s so good. A lot of the women who listen to this podcast, not all of them, but a lot of them are moms, and I hear some of the same patterns with a lot of moms where you spend a lot of your time living for other people. And when you turn that question on to them of like, who are you especially outside of the realm of the identity of a mother, it's really hard to figure that out. And, and they, they don't really have an identity out of that, out of motherhood. And so I'm, I'm curious if you could, if you could go back to kind of just the very beginning and, and think about some of those questions, maybe that you grappled with that helped you kind of start that discovery process of who you, who you are. Are there some questions that you can remember that you can give to my audience that they can start to grapple with as, as if, if they feel like they're, whether it's trauma, whether they just feel like they lost themselves because of kids or other things? What questions could they start to be asking themselves to kind of grapple with that question of who, who am I? 

Katy Saltsman 11:36 

That's a really good question. So I, obviously I don't have kids, I have nieces and nephews that I'm absolutely obsessed with, but for me, so much of my life and my identity was tied to being a trainer and working out and having a perfect body. And when I was going through all this trauma. I, like I said, I lost my cycle and hair and I had to stop working out for three months. I was only allowed to do walks in the sunshine. I put on about 15 pounds, which was very hard for me to wrap my head around. I went from training six days a week teaching classes all the time, you know, teaching 10 classes a week, this high energy person to barely being able to get out of that, losing my identity, losing who I am, all of my things, and I had to really, like, untie my identity from the things around me and really like dive inward. So one of the questions that my self-discovery Coach asked me and she said, Katie, what do you do for fun? and I was like, oh, we still have that like,  

Amber B 12:33 

What's fun?  

Katy Saltsman 12:34 

I'm like, so I work and I work out and she was like, let's take working out in your business completely out of it. What do you do for fun? And I, I genuinely didn't have an answer for her, and I sat there and I'm like, how do I not know what I do for fun like that, that is wild. So I'm not really a drinker, like I'm like, I don’t know, I go for coffee and a walk, like is that an answer? So I had to dive deep and I was like, well, when was the last time I actually had fun? And I started to remember these times when I was like, younger and dancing with my friends. And that to me, was fun. And if you watch any of my reels or stuff online, I'm always being silly and dancing and and part of the reason is going through this journey. So I decided at 37 years old I was going to sign up for a beginner hip-hop class. And let me tell you that like their turn beginner it, it is not a beginner class. It was like, if this, it was on video I would pay to have like somebody burn it forever because it I was so out of the element but it was really cool in that moment, as I did have fun and I grew, and I actually ended up going back. And now it's one of the things that I do all the time is dance because it brought me so much joy. So I, I think the question would be untying yourself from all the things around you is: one, what do you do for fun? what brings you joy? how can you create that in your life? And two, one of the questions that she asked me that was really helpful was, how can you find magic in the mundane? So you're living on an air mattress, you're in a city where you know nobody. You feel alone, and and whether that's like, obviously, that's nobody's scenario that's listening, but a lot of times I think we feel alone in life, and we feel like we've lost who we are. And it's also like, how can you find magic in your day-to-day, you know, we're not just here to check things off a to-do list constantly and being able to find magic in those moments and do things for yourself and put yourself first in the small ways to find who you are again, to find that person that you lost, I think is one of the most important ways to not only start to find who you are, but start to heal the parts of you that need to be healed. 

Amber B 14:27   

So good, so good. So I was listening to one of your podcast episodes recently, and you said healing is not for the weak and I, I loved that, I love that statement. So can you expound a little bit more on that? 

Katy Saltsman 14:40 

Yes. So healing is not for the weak. And I think that on Instagram, healing is glamorized like it looks like rainbows and butterflies and like healing is a lot of like days where you're sneeze away from an ugly cry on the kitchen floor and you can't get out of bed and you don't know what to do when you're not motivated and you're working through things you're actually feeling feelings and the reason I say it's not for the weak is because we are so conditioned to cope with emotions and push them down. We're conditioned to numb. We're conditioned to scroll, to have a glass of wine, to relax. We always have a TV, a screen, a podcast on, which look some of these things can be positive additions to our life, but a lot of times they're just coping mechanisms to not feel and heal what we actually need to, so healing isn't for the weak because it requires you to get uncomfortable on a consistent basis. It requires you to face your demons to actually understand what's going on. I say it all the time. I say the more we heal, the more the more we feel, the more we heal. And a lot of times we're not feeling the emotions that we need to we're not, we're afraid to be too much, too emotional to this to that. And it's like we actually have to get those things out, it's the reason one of, you know my, my Podcast is called Crying Burns Calories. I'm always talking about how there's like nothing better than an ugly cry sometimes. But I think as women, we need to support that like we have to be able to feel these emotions and we live in a world where it's so easy to cope and numb, and it is a hard thing to do to not do that and actually face what you need to face, but also what's on the other side of that is the most like beautiful growth. 

Amber B 16:14 

So one thing I think that women don't understand about healing because I think we say the word like healing and healed as if it's a one time event that oh, you crossed the finish line and you're now healed, Congratulations and you've been really open about sharing that. There are still circumstances and experiences that trigger you and that, and you know, just because you feel like you've done all this work and and had a healing journey, it doesn't mean it's over or that it's never gonna crop up again. So can you share a little bit of, of what that has looked like for you and kind of normalize that part of the journey. 

Katy Saltsman 16:48 

I think healing it, it is a constant journey 100% and we're always like shutting layers of ourself and evolving into new versions of us. And I always thought there was an endpoint and an end goal, and now I don't want that because if I've ended that journey to me, I've ended my growth. So the fact that you're still on a healing journey, I I, you know, work with so many women that are like, yeah, but this happened five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. And you have to understand, when you start healing and you become intentional about these things, like when I was healing from the trauma that I went through and the experiences that I went through that shook my life completely upside down. I wasn't just healing from that. I was healing to why I got into that. I was healing childhood trauma. I, you know, you start to unleash these emotions and it's like peeling back the layers of an onion. And all of these things that you start to recognize. So a lot of times on your healing journey when you dive into it, it gets a lot worse before it gets better. And then when you feel like it gets better all of a sudden you're on the kitchen floor ugly crying your mom, like I was three months ago, and I'm like, I don't understand, this happened 16 months ago. Why am I still crying about this? But you have these moments that remind you of something that was a trigger or that was a moment or a memory and the thing is, is as you go through the healing journey, the more again, you lean into those, the quicker you're going to get through them. So before where that ugly cry would have knocked me out for two weeks now, it was like just one call to my mom. And I felt better and I got it out and I was able to get up and keep going. But it's understanding that there will always be those times and moments and that's OK. It doesn't mean you're not healed, but actually means you're healing. 

Amber B 18:21

That’s so, it's so beautiful. And healing, I love this idea of healing rather than healed, because I think it does really speak to that idea. That it is, it is a lifelong process. I think it's just like growth. It's, it's not like, oh, I grew personally, and now I'm done. Like you said it, it is a, it is a continual journey. It is a continual process that doesn’t end. 

Katy Saltsman 18:41 

No and and I think we always look at it as such a negative thing and and one thing I do, I think it's really important to talk about healing. As we talk about healing and like the messiness of it. And I think that's where a lot of women get stuck to where, why they're not seeing the growth that they need to see. So for example, part of my healing journey was myself discovery Coach, my therapy, diving into triggers, you know, going through, talking through situations that I had went through an abuse that I had went through. But that is just 50% of it. The other 50% is what, is what your life looks like moving forward, is the life that I want to create is the fun, and the freedom is the new patterns that I'm developing. You know, I went through a period of time where I was single for 16 months, where I actually wanted to focus on myself. These things are so important, and it's the other part of healing that we don't talk about is the growth, is the life that we want to create. So I think it's important to remember that like, yes, healing is a journey, but it doesn't always have to be, like stuck in the muck. It doesn't always have to be the ugly stuff, it can also be like hey, part of your healing journey is finding who you are again and the life you want to create. And that's the really exciting part. 

Amber B 19:48 

That's really awesome. So I have kind of a, I don't know, an interesting question. I'm just curious about your perspective on this because I kind of heard you mentioned it earlier when you talked about, your role in the experiences that you had, right? So there's this balance between recognizing and not blaming the victim when it comes to some sort of abuse situation. And yet I heard you kind of mention it in a way of like somehow taking some responsibility without taking their responsibility but but being able, just like get out of the victim role of of saying all these things, just all happened to me and and taking a more empowered role without getting into like it's all my fault. So I'm just curious if you have any insight into that, that balance, that walking that balance between victim blaming, blaming and taking ownership for what you can control in your life and if you've seen that play out for yourself and how you found that balance as someone who was a victim in abuse. 

Katy Saltsman 20:39 

Yes, that that's a really good question because I think for a while you do want to only blame the other person. And while I do put, I guess a lot of focus on not blame on him, like he's responsible for his behavior. 

Amber B 20:53 

Yeah, of course. 

Katy Saltsman 20:54 

It's also that I went through wildly abusive situations right at somebody showing up to the house with a sledgehammer and holding you up against a wall and and then you're dealing with a woman, me, who takes somebody back after that consistently time and time again. And it's like, what about me? Did I believe that I wasn't able to walk away from this? You know, why did I think, why did I accept the bare minimum? And why did I believe somebody that only showed me something different? So that was my responsibility. OK, so this happened to me. I can accept this. I'm not blaming anybody for this, but also, how do I not repeat the same pattern? And this can be in any aspect of your life with abuse, with trauma, with the way you approach your health with your morning and nighttime routine is you have to take part responsibility on why these things are happening and if you don't want them to repeat, then you have to change something about the way you're behaving as well. I can't control his behavior at all. I never want to, but I can control mine to never get myself in that situation again. So I had to dive deep into what parts of me do I need to fix to make sure that I don't go through that again. 

Amber B 22:03 

Yeah, so, so, it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is almost like he is responsible for what he does to you and then your responsibility starts there for what you're going to do in the future. It's like how, what can I do to not continue to repeat this pattern in the future? So it's not necessarily blaming you for anything that happened in that experience, but is thinking. I think it's forward facing, it's forward thinking. How do I not continue to repeat this pattern in the future, and I think that's, that’s beautiful. 

Katy Saltsman 22:29 

100%. The, the version of me now would never ever accept that, but it was a very unhealed version of me where not that I thought it was normal behavior, but I was accepting the bare minimum and I was doing that because I was dealing with a lot of insecurities and things in my life that I dealt with for years and years and years, and I was trying to cope. In a certain way too. 

Amber B 22:51 

Yeah. So, so interesting. Thank you for sharing that. It's always been my, like balance that I've tried to, like, wrestle with myself. And so I love the light that you showed on, on that, what are some of the specific lessons that you have learned, I know you talked a lot about growth and you've talked about, you know, generic lessons that you've learned, but can you think of any specific lessons that you've learned as you've focused on your own healing. As you've learned more about yourself, is there anything that comes to mind that you're like, this is a lesson that I needed to learn, that I learned through this process. 

Katy Saltsman 23:23 

I think, I think all the lessons, all the things that happen, were lessons that I needed to learn. I think a really strong lesson was realizing how much I was attached to materialistic things and not understanding that like I hadn't. I again, I hadn't built who I was. I built a life based on the people around me and based on the materialistic things and I didn't really know who I was. And when you stripped that all away, you had a really, really empty person and woman. And I didn't realize until I lost it all. So for me, it was understanding that like finding who you are in life, like nobody can take that away from you. People can take things away from me, relationships like I think my biggest fear in life would be to have all of my stuff stolen and and I've like checked it off the list like. 

Amber B 24:10 

And that happened and you're still here. 

Katy Saltsman 24:13 

Yeah. Exactly. So for me now like I've built such an authenticity and a confidence in who I am as a woman that nobody can take that away from me. You can take whatever you want away from me, but I think we're dealing with women that are feeling so empty with who they are. That when you lose things, when you lose relationships, you completely break down and lose who you are. And I understand that because that was me and and now I'm at a point where nobody can take this away from me. So I think that was the most important lesson is like you can't take away truly like when you know who you are and when you're strong in that. And when you're showing up as your most authentic, confident self, nobody can take it away from you. 

Amber B 24:50 

That’s awesome. You mentioned it before of the impact that the unhealed trauma had on you physically and your physical body. What experience did healing have on your physical body? Like, what was that link? I think a lot of people don't recognize that there's such a link between the, the, the how the body perceives and deals with trauma and how that can show up in your physical health. And I'm just curious of that, that shift that you saw from unhealed to healed and how it manifested in your body? 

Katy Saltsman 25:18 

Oh gosh, it was. It was a wild journey and I feel like if I even dive into it, it would sound super woo woo. But I have always been a really in shape, that person loving fitness, high energy. I've never been through a point in my life where I was having trouble getting out of bed. My energy levels weren't there, wasn't getting my cycle, hair was falling out. I had all these things happening and I was being told that I wasn't allowed to do the one thing that I loved, I think for most women that would be that would be a really hard thing. So I had to step back, one and just understand like how important the mental and emotional aspect of it was. But to understand what trauma does to your body and we're dealing with a generation for a lot of women that have years and years of trauma, and this is where the calories and calories out debate, I come off the track with because if we're dealing with years of store trauma in our body, it, it can be stored in a lot of different ways, it can come out in weight gain and autoimmune diseases and thyroid conditions and hormone imbalances. Why? Because this trauma causes this increase of cortisol over an extended period of time. It causes a tense body. It causes a nervous system that's consistently in fight or flight even if you don't feel. Like it it can cause a lot of health issues outside of just like the way your body looks. But I think a lot of us were only focused on the way our body looks. So we're like, oh, my body looks a certain way. Let me use this diet to fix it when what we really need to do is actually regulate our nervous system and release the trauma from our body so we're able to live in a normal state all the time, which looks very different because we've been taught, hey, you, you need to diet. We can fix this with, like macros and exercise. And I think those things are amazing, right? I think having structure in your nutrition and exercising for movement and releasing serotonin and dopamine. These are all great things, but it's like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. If you're not addressing your nervous system, holding on to trauma, the cortisol it's causing in your, the cortisol is like it's causing in your life and and also like just your body's ability to feel good every day. 

Amber B 27:21 

Interesting. I have to imagine that coming out of an abusive relationship, learning to trust yourself and your judgment in in the future like that had to be a process that you went through of, like learning to rebuild that trust with yourself. So can you speak to a little bit about that experience? 

Katy Saltsman 27:39 

Yes, this was a really, really hard one. I had wrapped my head around the fact that I was going to be by myself forever and I was OK with that. I again in myself discovery, work through the self discovery Coach I, she had me do these like funny challenges. I had never gone on a date by myself, and if you've like never gone to a restaurant by yourself, it is an awkward thing, and I wasn't allowed to like scroll on my phone. I had to, like, actually sit there by myself and go on a date, which was a bizarre experience. But I had really committed to like a year of being single and I didn't want to get on dating apps because for me, that felt really inauthentic. I'm very big on like genuine connection and in person, but I've gotten to a point where I felt so safe with myself that I had kind of boxed out everybody around me and I told myself I was going to take a really special person to get me to feel safe and like, let my guard down and anybody listening, I I know there's a lot of nightmare dating stories and I chose not to do dating apps. I had said over and over again I'm going to meet someone drinking coffee like this is the one thing that helped me believe in manifestation because I actually did meet somebody drinking coffee and he's like the most wonderful man. And but, the thing is, is I was at a point, what's really cool is we were both at a point where we were too healed, individuals coming together in a relationship. And I think a lot of times we have two broken individuals coming together in a relationship, trying to heal and fix each other, and that will never work. You will only repeat patterns in different ways. I think the most important step is do you know who you are? Are you fully healed? Have you taken that time? And if not, if you're not having any luck like finding somebody or finding that happiness, like that's number one, and then number two becomes a lot easier. 

Amber B 29:20 

It’s awesome, it’s so good. OK, one of the questions I like to ask my guests is what are some of your current fitness goals, health and fitness goals? 

Katy Saltsman 29:29 

And this is a great question. So I'm actually at a point where I have, like I told you, I had like put on weight taking this big break and my goal this last year was just to gain strength again, not working out for three to four months and then starting a slow build when you were used to. Like higher strength, it, it's, it's taken a lot for my body to get there. Because I couldn't start with my 5 workouts a day, I had to start with like 2 workouts a week and build up from there, but I'm just at a point where my hormones are finally, like at their prime again. I’ve completely healed my body. My hair is coming back. All these exciting things, so I'm going to point where my fitness goal actually is to see a little bit of strength and to like I would say, composition change. I'm OK with saying that like composition change is part of my goal now, because I've done the work, the pre work, my body to get where it wants to be, do I want to be where I was at before? No, because I think I was doing too much at an unhealthy amount, but I just want to be at a point where I'm consistently getting stronger and feeling better. 

Amber B 30:28 

So fabulous. All right, well, if people are wanting to find you, where can they find you? 

Katy Saltsman 30:32 

Yes. So I have a podcast called the, the Crying Burns Calories Podcast. And then I also have an Instagram, I am @katysaltsman on Instagram. You can connect with me there, send me a DM, say hi, whatever you want. 

Amber B 30:46 

Awesome. And we will link all that up in the show notes. Katy, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. This has been such an excellent conversation and one that I think a lot of women need to hear. 

Katy Saltsman 30:57 

Yes, thank you so much for having me. 

Amber B 30:59 

Wow, what an awesome episode and I really am grateful to Katie for coming on and talking so openly about her experience about the things that she's learned through that process. We never want to go through hard things, but I think she would even admit that what has come out of this hard experience has been beautiful and sometimes those hard challenges really shape and mold us in a way that we can look back, not, maybe not when we're going through. It we can look back and say, yeah, that made me who I am today. And part of me is at least grateful for going through that experience. So I'm, I'm so grateful for the conversation that we were able to have today. If you love the podcast, quick request to just take 3 to 5 minutes. Rate and review the podcast on whatever that platform you're listening on and leave a review of how you like the podcast, what you think about it, what you want to hear more of. I read those reviews and I am really grateful for those of you who take the time to do that. That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber, now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.

Outro

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