Coaching & Cocktails
Don't get weird, use your head, everything will be OK.
Welcome to Coaching & Cocktails, where Team CSFP coaches Tina and Ginny talk about life, health, fitness, natural bodybuilding, and all the beautifully messy stuff in between. With decades of combined experience helping athletes and everyday humans chase their strongest, sanest selves, we dive into training, nutrition, mindset, hormones, stress, and the mental gymnastics required to juggle real life while pursuing big goals.
We’re not here to lecture. We’re here to tell the truth, share our lived experience, and sprinkle in some humor, realism, and science—shaken, not stirred.
If you want a podcast that feels like coaching, therapy, and girl talk had a baby (and that baby lifted weights), pull up a chair. Laugh with us, learn something new, and remember: you’re absolutely not alone on your journey.
Coaching & Cocktails
S5 Ep3: From Stage Lean to Strong again - Reverse, Recover, Rebuild
Post show your hormones want a snack and a nap.... listen in to hear why!
The day after the stage is where the real work begins. We open up about reverse dieting’s unglamorous middle—where hunger howls, hormones recalibrate, and your identity feels like it’s slipping—and map out a clear path from brittle discipline to durable strength. If you’ve ever wondered why coming off a cut feels harder than the cut itself, this conversation puts language, strategy, and compassion to the chaos.
We start with physiology in plain English: very low body fat distorts appetite, sleep, mood, and sex hormones. A short recovery bump in calories helps turn the lights back on; a deliberate reverse rebuilds training, libido, and sanity. For women in their 40s and 50s, we connect the dots between adipose tissue, estrogen, and thyroid function—and explain why “staying stage lean” is a health debt, not a badge of honor. Then we tackle timing traps: fall shows collide with shorter days, seasonal affective symptoms, and the holiday buffet line. We share scripts for setting boundaries, a realistic social plan, and why familiar meals beat hyper-palatable snacks when cravings spike.
From there, we shift the target. Bodybuilding isn’t bodyholding; progress after a show lives in the gym log, not the mirror. We lay out a performance-first mindset—chasing PRs, scheduling a powerlifting cycle or new athletic goal—and a daily checklist that actually works on low-motivation days: sunlight, a simple walk, hygiene, one errand, early sleep. We also cover lab work (thyroid, sex hormones), realistic hormone recovery timelines, and the support network that keeps you steady: coach, clinician, partner, and community.
If you’re navigating post-show blues, midlife hormone shifts, or the holiday headwind after a long prep, this episode is your playbook to reverse, recover, and rebuild—without losing your joy. Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs this, and leave a review telling us your best post-show ritual.
Looking for a coach to help you be YOUR best self in bodybuilding or just in life? Let's get in touch!
Team CSFP
IG: @teamcsfp
FB: https://www.facebook.com/teamcsfp
To reach out to Tina @ Center Stage Athletics
www.centerstagethleticscoaching.com
info@centerstageathleticscoaching.com
To reach out to Ginny @ Thrive NutriFit
IG & FB: @ginnygrivas
Hello, hello, and welcome to Coaching and Cocktails the podcast. And I'm Tina, and you are. I am Jenny. Hello. So now we can actually introduce ourselves. Jenny is officially my new co-host. Um I do want to address something because um Brandy is still alive. I did have some questions. I think even Brandy was like, was there ever any explanation about where I went? Or did people just like think I'm dead? And I was like, I said, no, anytime anybody has asked, right? I'm just like, no, she had, I mean, her kids are like teenagers now, they're super active in soccer and cheerleading and like all of these things. And and really, Brandy just had to take time away from doing all of this stuff so she could go focus on her family stuff, which you know, I absolutely so she's still here. Brandy and I are still besties. Like, I we did not have a falling out. We are we are still we still email each other daily. She was just like, Hey, does anybody know what happened to me? That's great. I was like, Oh no, I don't think we ever explained that. So anyway, we love you, Brandy. We love you. If you're listening or any of Brandy's friends are listening, so we didn't mean to just make it seem like she just went poof and she was gone. Um, so anyway, so Ginny and I are gonna try to pick up the where where we left off a little bit. And I told Jinny she could surprise me with whatever topic she wanted to talk about today because I was just too tired yesterday to read through the email on the topics. I uh I yeah. So um, why do you want to talk about?
SPEAKER_00:So today I really want to talk about reverse dieting and just that unglamorous side of bodybuilding and getting to the stage. It's about what happens after and kind of just you know, the the not so pretty part um to really help ladies, especially those that are in the midlife, you know, in their 40s and 50s. Like I'm 50 and I started this pretty late in my life at 46. There's a lot of ladies out there that compete that are in their 20s or 30s and whatnot, which is awesome. Um, but for those of us that are approaching sort of that end of child end of life, end of life, end of children, we're we're on our way, we're crusty, we're on the downhill spiral, okay, the end of life as we know it. End of life, but you know, it's it's it's that post-show blues, and I don't think it's talked about enough, and I just want to talk about that today, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you know, for people who aren't in bodybuilding or have shitty coaches that don't actually tell them anything about reverse dieting, and really reverse dieting applies to everybody. This isn't just a bodybuilding thing, although it's way less extreme if you're somebody who's in like a training and uh just a typical kind of training cycle. But um, I call it recovery and reverse dieting because I think it's it's both. And so um, really, it's basically the process of coming out of for people who don't know, right? So you diet down, you lose all the body fat, and you spend all these weeks lowering calories and increasing cardio and all the things that you got to do so that you have this really nice lean physique and you get on stage, and then after you get off stage, you have to very slowly bring that back up, right? So you have to slowly put body fat on. Some people do it faster than others, right? Um, but I there there really is this like recovery and reverse phase. And um, I forget what there was another, there was another coach out there that sort of start really started uh coining the the recovery term. And because there is this like couple week period of time where, in my opinion, like you we can't go too slow with re with bringing calories back up because then you're just dragging on all the shitty things that happen to your body when the body fat was really low. So you kind of have this burst of calories, you get this recovery, you start to feel a little bit better, and then you start slowly sort of reversing. And I I like to I like to sort of combine the two. Um, but you're right, but that's what it is, right? You gotta you gotta go low to get into a show, and then you gotta bring them back, you gotta bring your calories back up and your cardio back down and all of those things. But it's the worst part of the entire process. It's absolutely the biggest mind fuck you would ever imagine, and nobody knows it until they're in it, and everybody thinks they're gonna be fine. I've had clients that beautifully got to stage, never had a slip-up and never had a binge, and never ate a cookie, and everything was amazing. We thought everything was gonna be great when they came off stage and then they lost their shit, right? And so um you don't know it until you're in it, but it really is truly the hardest part of the entire process, and nobody will understand it unless you're in it. Um, because you don't have a show on the horizon anymore, right? It's real easy in air quotes. I like to use a lot of air quotes. It's really easy to stick to your diet when the show is X number of weeks away and you gotta get your fat ass into this little ity bitty bikini, right? In front of a bunch of people. And so after the show, you're like, well, fuck it. I'm not getting on stage again for two years or whatever. It's hard. It's so much harder, right? And and then obviously um getting um getting into, I just said, I don't want to talk that much about science, but getting into the what happens in your body um getting really lean for stage, right? So everything, everything gets really fucked up, right? Your hormones are fucked up going into the stage, um, your body fat controls like everything using that term loosely, right? And so when you have really low or really too high body fat, like the rest of your body systems get out of whack. And so when you're coming off stage from an evolutionary perspective, our bodies are way smarter than we are. Um and if you ever want to listen to a really good book about this, um shit, I just forgot the name of it. The hungry brain is one. But that one's really good. That gives you a lot of information about what we're talking about here. And there's another one, and I'll figure it out and I'll put it in the podcast notes. But um from an evolutionary perspective, our bodies do not want us to be eight percent body fat. Isn't that what you were, Jenny? Eight, yeah, ten, something. Um, your body is like right now, because you're you're probably kind of out of the actual reverse phase and you're still there, we're working to get you recovered, but um your body's like, fuck this and fuck you. I can't survive this way, right? Like this is this is dumb. I don't know why you did this. And so the only way for me to survive is to like put this body fat on, like, like right now, right now, because we're gonna die if I don't. I mean, that's that's just how our bodies feel. And so it is going to tell you you're hungry no matter how much you've eaten. It's going to crave things that you would probably never in a million years have even eaten in the first place, um, because it just wants, once, wants fuel because it really truly needs to feel like you're not starving it anymore, right? And it really, really wants to survive because that's our body's only our brain and our body, it only cares about survival and reproduction. Like it does not care how we look or feel, for that matter.
SPEAKER_00:That's exactly right. And and on the reproductive aspect, as you get older and your reproductive system begins to change, right? It's your your hormones are changing within your body. You have to understand that endocrine system within you and and how it's responding. Because when you're going into bodybuilding in any kind of an extreme sport where you're having to restrict your calories and really play with food, especially playing with body fat, your brain is adapting to new hormone environments. And I say that with a plural because it's going on its own journey and you have to pay attention to it. And the symptoms of some of that environmental change are your moods, right? And your energy level and your sleep cycle and your menstrual cycle, all of those things, right? So you have to listen to those things because those are really symptom symptoms, right, of that environmental change. And with estrogen, especially as we get older, you know, the fat our fat tissue contains an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen. So fat, we've got to have it. We have to have this fat as women. And then especially when you're going into peri menopause and then full-blown menopause, fat becomes a more important source of that estrogen. So more body fat equals more estrogen, less body fat equals very low estrogen. So, you know, here we are, and like with my journey, here I am at 46 years old. I guess it wasn't much my first competing year. So I went through four total seasons of this, and now it's taking me this fourth season to really understand and see this. I have to, when I go into another bodybuilding competition season, plan not just to the stage date. I have to plan completely after, not a week after, not two weeks after. I got to plan for whatever months after, because our bodies are going to recover in the way that they feel like recovering, you know, at the pace that they're going to recover. And this particular year, I've hurt more. And I'm saying hurt meaning mentally more than I have in previous. And I think it's really important. I want to talk about it. I want to share with people that just what you said earlier, the hardest part of my entire prep this year, which I thought was going to be that long 30-week cut was not. The hardest part has been the last 34 days. The last 34 days since I last stepped off stage. Um, and here's here's some of the things that I I wanted to tell people about because it's not glamours, it's not what you put on IG. I'm not posting these fabulous pictures of me anymore on.
SPEAKER_01:No, because nobody wants to put the everybody's like, oh, look how lean I am as in the last 30 weeks as you got leaner and leaner. Nobody's like, oh, look how chunky I've gotten again. I mean, you're not, but nobody, nobody talks about it because it's just not the fun thing to put out their own social media, right? And obviously, which is part of the problem. Yeah. Um hundred percent. The dog is biting me in the butt. Oh, that's sorry. So sorry, so sorry, everybody. She's literally it's called cobbing. Did you did you know that pit bulls do this thing called cobbing? I know as an aside, I didn't know that it was a thing. I've had pit bulls before, but it's called cobbing and they nibble and they do like they do this, and it seems very cute. It's like a mutual grooming until the this I'm doing this little tiny little nibble becomes like, and then you're like, okay, anyways. Now she's doing bites. Now she's doing zoomies in my office. Okay, sorry. So, what are you going through right now? Why don't you tell tell everybody what's going on in your in your mind and your body right now?
SPEAKER_00:No, absolutely, because it it's I really want to talk about depression. I want to talk about these things. They have to be discussed. So here's one thing that I didn't think about this year. This is the first season that I actually competed in the fall, as opposed to competing in the spring. So, what that means to people who aren't familiar with competing is that if I compete in the spring, I'm usually aiming for, let's say, some of my favorite shows that are in May. I got to give a big shout out to the OCB Conquer and Frank Meekins and Aaron Meekins because I think they're phenomenal spring show promoters. But that's a show that I loved doing and happily won in 24. So it was awesome. But I would cut, I would start cutting for that show the very beginning of January, right after New Year, right? Have your big last big hurrah, the whole bit, and then start cutting. Great. When you're done in the spring, you've got that summer, and you've got those beautiful long summer days full of vitamin D with that sun shining. So I felt fantastic coming off of that. And I was able to go and enjoy my party summer with a phenomenal physique at that point, right? Sure, you reverse, sure you thicken up a little bit, sure some of the cuts go away. Fine, but you're still in great swimsuit condition, right? Wonderful. I loved it. This season I decided I really want to hit those powerful fall shows. I want to do the OCB Chesapeake classic. Bobby Cabino is a phenomenal show promoter. I wanted to hit York and Cup. We love Marjorie and Sully, but I needed to start cutting during my hot girl summer, right? So you start cutting. I got off a wonderful spring break cruise with my great kid, my husband, and I started May 1st. Okay. I went through the whole summer. Yeah, that sucked. You miss out on a lot of concerts and birthdays and events and things.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't see you missing out on shit. So I saw you still partying, and you no, I know you weren't partying. I'm again with my air quotes. Nobody sees my air quotes, so I should probably stop using them. I I if you you may or not remember this, but I was like, hey, like to and I know you weren't out drinking or doing anything like that, but you were going out a lot. And I was like, this might be starting to be a time where you don't go out so much. Yes. Not because I thought you were being tempted, but because I'm like, we really need to preserve your energy. And I think I was only, you know, giving you that advice because I think your check-ins were talking about, you know, being tired and all that, you know, all the things that you were doing. And if you were so close to the shows, and I was like, Jenny, we got a really long prep to do here. Like, you really might want to not do so many social events. And I actually say that to a lot of clients. I'm not telling everybody they need to hibernate and never go out anywhere. But my point is, I don't actually think you missed. No, I mean, I think you got a pretty active social life, even in prep. Well, we tried. We did, we didn't try.
SPEAKER_00:Because you're right. I mean, you're right, you're right. Uh normally our summers would have been more packed and more things, you know, like going to my beach and then doing this extended trip over an ocean city and like this and that. We didn't do that. Yeah. We still attended events. I still went to certain concerts. We drank the water, you know, in the back in the courtroom. Like, I don't have a water. Maybe I'll have a Diet Coke. Woo!
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh. Oh my God, did you add a lime? And then it was amazing. Diet Coke lime is so good.
SPEAKER_00:We we I went through that, and you are you are correct. I know that your concern, and definitely my concern as I got more lean is the amount of energy that I'm exhibiting. Um, because you know, when you run your phone battery on such a low percent for too long, maybe your cable's broken or you don't have a charger and you're sick, you're sitting at like 12%, and then you're watching it go to eight percent, and you're like, but I've still got to keep my phone alive because I've got to text this. I need to see what emails are coming in, and literally it's going down to 6% and 4%. That's how you're feeling as you're moving through prep. You're constantly at a low battery level. So great. So then I get to the stage, phenomenal season, wonderful shows. The whole bit's great. I finish on November the 8th. I'm in Vegas, we have a blast, right? It's warm, it's wonderful. Get on that plane on that flight back, and we land, and it is like 32 degrees. And it's dark. Boom, right? I did not think about the fact that I'm finishing this season in a time where most people suffer from seasonal effectiveness disorder. Bingo, I'm that person. I am that person. As soon as we change those damn clocks back and the sun starts setting closer and closer to 4:45 in the afternoon. I'm a mess. I hate it. I just don't like it. I don't thrive in that in the winter season. I am not a snow person. I know a lot of you people out there are. God bless you for it. No, you're all weird.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I'm not. Cold is weird. Nobody that likes the cold is normal. I'm sorry. Goodness. I said what I said. I'll fight you over. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:She will she's pretty scrappy, everybody. She's super scrap.
SPEAKER_01:I said what I said, you're weird. So mostly I'm just jealous that I can't tolerate the cold because I have to be out at it all the time. It's hateful.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I have to have 14 layers on. My husband looks at me when we go out to just try to have a fire outside. He goes, honey, you know it's only 46 degrees. I'm like, Yeah, but you never know. It could change at any moment. I'm dressing if it's negative two.
SPEAKER_01:No, I'm Jenny. I have been known to put my um my bib overalls, my car heart, like to sit out at the fire pit. I have pictures, I shit you not. And Eric's like, what the fuck? I'm like, it's freezing out here. He's like, we're at the fire pit. And I'm like, no, I got like 20 layers on. I got my car heart, my like farm pants on, I got like all the fleece. Yeah, no, don't forget it.
SPEAKER_00:I did this just last night. I just last night. What was it last night? What was it? Like 42 degrees.
SPEAKER_01:No, I don't know. I wouldn't be here.
SPEAKER_00:I put snow pants on top of two other layers of pants, the clava on, I had a scully on, I had my gloves, I had two blankets. No, and prints out in a sweatshirt.
SPEAKER_01:I'm like, just leave me alone. I'll be fine. Nope. I just ordered um a heated vest. Yeah, there you go. Do whatever you gotta do. A battery operated heated vest for myself and for Eric.
SPEAKER_00:It's just such a tough time of year. Point being, it's a really hard time of year. Yes. It is. So I did not consider that. I did not consider that. And I should because I could have planned for it mentally a little bit better. So then on top of that, right, you start to eat and you start to reverse a little bit. And holy moly, that hunger hormone comes back with this vengeance. It literally claws into you where you are craving everything and anything at all hours, and you really then have to moderate yourself at that point. That's that mental discipline that we learned through the reduction phase comes into play on that build part because you can't eat too much. We can't gain too fast, you know. But because again, now here we are with that hormonal environment changing. So it is changing. And at 50, I'm still getting my cycles as normally as I was before. Somehow, I have no idea. But I'm dealing with that roller coaster that I'm feeling more so than I did before with that estrogen low, estrogen high, and this and that, and progesterone here and this and that. And all of a sudden, I'm looking outside and I'm going, is it a full moon? What happened?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and it was a full moon last week, and everything was really, I don't really get into that much, but everything was really fucking weird last week. It was, it was that super moon thing last week, and I was like, What is happening? The dog was nuts, and I felt like I was losing my shit. And I was like, What? I was like, Oh, it's a full moon. That must be what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, but and I don't really follow that either. But last week I certainly did because I never I had never felt so low in my life. And I mean, I used to during prep because you're feeling great and because you're eating so well, I was able to jump out of bed in the morning and I can do this and this and that, knowing that I needed to manage my energy level though, because in the morning it's at its highest, right? So I've got to make sure that my 7 a.m. genny, or sometimes you know, my 5 a.m. or 4:30 a.m. genie needs to still be there at 3 p.m. So you're managing it. But last week, especially last week, um, I couldn't get out of bed. I did no motivation to do anything. I mean, it was so low. I was like, I have got to go and brush my teeth. And I just the thought of doing that was exhausting. Like, why who am I gonna see today? Do I really have to go? I had returns I needed to go do, right? Like Amazon returns. Like the normal things that you do, you gotta go to the UPS store and drop this off, or you gotta go to the grocery store, or you just gotta run an error and drop off dry cleaning. I'm like, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I became the world's worst procrastinator and just so sad. And then all of a sudden, you're listening to something in the car, maybe it's a song, or you're at home and you're doing the dishes and the song comes on, and I'm just I start crying, just bawling your eyes out. And I'm a mess. And then your brain starts to play tricks on you. I really started feeling a little bit of a hopelessness or worthlessness, is kind of where the only way that I can describe it. And I started recognizing signs that I knew were dangerous. Truly, because your brain can so quickly and easily convince you that you are less than, that your value is not what others perceive it as or whatnot. Like you just go down a dark spiral hole. And I thought, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. This is where, and this is really something important that I want to tell people, you have got to seek great medical guidance. And I'm saying that in the sense that don't do it when you're feeling this way. You need to put this in your freaking plan. Yeah. Put this in your plan. If you're looking to compete this coming up year, right now, write this down. Put in your plan that in that reverse diet, you've got somebody ready waiting in the wings. Also, you got to make an appointment with your GP or with your OB. Go in and tell them specifically, I just finished a bodybuilding show. You know that I've been doing this. I've told you about it before. I want you to check my hormone levels. I want you to check my thyroid.
SPEAKER_02:Take a look at this.
SPEAKER_00:Because you've got to have that support system to catch you when you fall. Because it's it's not just about looking in the mirror and going, oh, I don't have that show body anymore or whatever. That's a piece, but that's a symptom. You have to look at what's going on in your endocrine system. What is happening to you? Because we're not 30 anymore. We're not these bikini beautiful girls in their 20s who are competing who can bounce back so fast.
SPEAKER_01:And I'll say too, in all fairness, this is hard regardless of your age. I mean, even my clients in their 20s and 30s struggle. And yes, I think the older we get, it it just complicates things more, right? Um, but we're just complicated human beings because women are just really super fortunate that way. Ha ha. Um, and so everything you're saying is true, which is also why it's so important to have the support of your coach. So whether it's your coach or uh your therapist or your doctor, your spouse, your whatever, um understanding. I think the first step is really an understanding that like this is just because your brain is saying it doesn't mean it's true, right? Our brains like to speak really loudly when they're lying. And so that doesn't mean we have to believe everything it says. I have suffered from depression uh off and on over the years myself, many times. I am very, very thankful that I have the tools to understand it when it's there. It doesn't mean it doesn't suck. It really sucks to not be motivated. I mean, and I don't even like to use the term motivation. I it's it's not even motivation. I simply do not want to get out of fucking bed because I don't see a point, right? I'm just like, I feel like shit, the world sucks, every it's cold, it's gray, and there's just there's you know, and and life sucks, and and so what's the point? And so yeah, there is a hopelessness to to to depression, but having the the tools, first of all, understanding that this is not actually who you are, it's just some feelings, that's just your brain screaming at you really loudly, and understanding that there is a physiological response for it a good part of the time, right? So whether it's you know, a chemical imbalance, a hormonal imbalance, a you know, just whatever the case is, and understanding that doesn't mean that you're like fucked up and broken, and you know, because I think the majority of women go through this at some point anyway. Um, and then having having the tools, right? So being prepared for that and understanding it first and foremost, having support system, and then understanding, you know, and I think some of the tools that we uh use in in prep. So one of the benefits to um really cultivating this discipline, which is really what the beauty of this sport does, right? Which is why I think this is beneficial for anybody to listen to, right? So when you have that discipline, you cultivate that discipline over the course of your let me get to the stage, your cutting phase, or even just somebody who's regularly going to the gym now and eating healthy, you can use that discipline to get up out of bed and go brush your teeth and go return your shit to Amazon, right? Like it's no, I don't fucking want to. When it's cold outside, I'm not competing. I haven't competed since 2012. I don't want to get up and go work out in my garage. I have a little space, I have a heater in there, warms it up sometimes, but it sucks and it's dark and it's cold and I don't want to. But I have done this for 30 years now, and so I just go and I do it. And guess what? I don't always like it. I fucking think it sucks most of the time. I don't want to be out there. I'm bored, I hate my garage gym, I hate the winter, I hate all the things, but I'm gonna do it anyway because that's a discipline, right? So, and so my point being, and I'm not talking about you know, if if you need to seek professional help, seek professional help. But one of the beautiful things about this sport, cultivating discipline in your life and whatever it is that you're doing, is that you just get up and go, right? You still do it, you still put one foot in front of the other. Whatever your best is today is okay. I don't care what your best was yesterday, I don't care what you think your best might be tomorrow. You give it your best shot for today. And if that best is unrecognizable to you, that's okay. Because you at least got up and you did something. There have been days I've walked out into my garage gym and I just feel so low and so shitty that I'm just like, uh I'm gonna walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes. That's it. That's all I got. And I turn around and I walk back out of my garage gym. But it did something, right? Like, was it what I planned to do when I walked out there? No. Sometimes my body says, fuck off. I don't sometimes I go out there super motivated. My body still says fuck off. My body's like, nah, we're not, you know, I know your brain says you're motivated, but we're not motivated. And so, you know, it's it's understanding that these are the things going on. And so I glad I'm glad that you're sharing that about your own journey because a lot of coaches aren't out there sharing it. Uh, you know, when I think I talked about this in our last podcast, but when I was competing um a million years ago, there was no post-show advice other than you go to the show with a bag full of junk, you come home to cabinets full of junk. The actual advice was, oh, just take a week off the gym, eat whatever you want for a week. Okay. Literally the dumbest advice on the planet, right? And because then you really fuck yourself up because talk about fucking up your hormones, right? Like eating too much too fast, putting on too much body fat fat too fast. Eric almost ended up in the hospital once with stomach ulcers because he ate so much post-show and it was fall shows. The other, so the other thing you didn't mention about the problem with fall shows, and I'm not, you know, some people are perfectly fine with it, but I know every single client I've ever worked with that competed in fall shows struggles with the same thing. I'm glad you brought up the seasonal depression, the cold and dark. The fucking holidays. When you come off of a show and your last show was the Conquer, wrong one, your last show was the Chesapeake Classic. What you got? Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. And you're trying to maintain some semblance of discipline and self-control, and your hormones are fucked up, and it's cold and dark, and it's all the holidays, and everybody wants to bring you treats because oh, well, you haven't had anything for 30 weeks. Let's go to lunch. Everybody wants to schedule lunch, everybody wants to celebrate with you. Oh, you missed your birthday too. Everybody wants to celebrate your birthday with you now, and so you got to schedule all these things, and you want to see all the people you didn't see, and you know, all of those things. And so it's you have to have a plan, right? To to manage that because you cannot go out to lunch with every person that invites you in your first week post-show. You cannot go on vacation. I am so sorry to tell people this. Do not go on your hot girl Jamaica vacation in the day that you come off the stage in October because you will go to this all-inclusive resort and you will have absolutely no ability to control yourself, not because you're non- not disciplined, but because your brain is gonna scream at you so loudly that you know you you need to get your body fat up really high and you need to do all these things. You just put yourself in a little you can eat buffet, and you're not gonna be able to do it. And I've seen it, I've seen it time and time again. So I always recommend my clients when they come off the stage, give yourself, I think the danger zone is two to four weeks. Give yourself at least two, preferably four before you schedule a vacation. Yep. Sorry, but do it right. Um, schedule a photo shoot in there. That's great. Helps you kind of stay on track a little bit, gives you a little something, something without needing to be stage lean. You got a little something in between, and that just kind of help you do that. Um let your friends and family know that you appreciate that they are all there to they want to celebrate with you and they want to bring you all the treats and they want to take you out, but you've got to have some boundaries, and you have to tell them, you have to let them understand what this is going to look like for you. It is not a I just dieted for 30 weeks and now I can eat all the things because you can't. And the temptation is so fucking hard. Nobody is broken, nobody is weak, nobody just can't do it. Your body is is going to fight you tooth and nail to put body fat on. This is what people need to understand is physiology, biology, neurology. It's all the ologies, right? So don't put yourself in a position to fail, right? So have that plan. Talk to your friends and family, talk to your loved ones, schedule one a week. You don't need to go out every day. Um, you know, the vacation thing. So all of those things, and and really just having a conversation, not only with yourself, but with the people around you who love you and what and want to celebrate with you, that you just can't do that yet, right? And so you you might have to have some uncomfortable conversations because people don't understand this world, yeah. Um, and then understanding that this is what's happening with yourself, right? So, how do you so let me ask you, Jenny, since you're going through it right now, and instead of from my perspective and coaching people, what are you doing to get yourself out of bed to go return your Amazon packages? What are you doing to get out of bed and go brush your teeth, right? Like what is helping you through this period now that you realize, whoops, I'm in it. What are you doing now?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, it's um it's interesting. Uh on the last podcast, I kind of used the analogy, the analogy of parenting a toddler when we were talking about how you negotiate through that cut phase. Um, now I'm parenting myself the way I would parent my teenager when she was, well, now she's still a teenager, she's a freshman in college. But when you're parenting a teenager that is 15 or 16 years old, that is stuck on their phone, that's stuck in their room, and maybe it's a Saturday, and you want to get them out and about, and they're, you know, kind of like I am that teenager right now. Right now. So I've going back to my parenting analogy, and I have been having to literally say out loud to myself, you are going to get up, you lazy moron. You know, whatever it is that you've got to do to motivate yourself to do. So it's small goals, right? Little teeny tiny little baby steps, baby goals. And it's you get up and you're gonna go to the bathroom and you're gonna brush your teeth. And you know what? You're gonna take a freaking shower. Yeah, you might have taken one last night, take another one, just get in, and then you're gonna put actual clothes on, not your freaking pajamas that you're gonna be in until your husband gets home at six o'clock and you're wearing exactly what you wore when you left, right? It's it's right. Oops, oops. I'm not saying that those things are all bad things, but I'm saying that these are the ways to kind of pull yourself out. So parent yourself through the process. And in this process, I have realized for me, my future self that wants to do this again in 27, and for my own clients is helping to build this compassionate framework. You've got to build this post-show compassionate framework. And I've kind of boiled it down to like for the four pillars in the sense. Number one, really being that support that we've been talking about support and connection. Talk to your family, talk to your spouse, um, talk to your children, anyone that's in your environment. Your coach. Yeah, of course. Of course, your coach. But you want those people that are in your environment to understand and know that, hey, listen, I'm going through this. I'm about to really go through this. This is gonna be kind of tough. Just be aware if I'm really emotional or if I spout off or whatever it is, this is what's happening. But you've got to understand, too, that there's this biological repair. And that's kind of that second pillar that's there. And that's where that mind screw hits us, right? Because here we've been stage lean for a blank period of time. People have commented nonstop about how phenomenal we're looking or how phenomenal we looked on stage. You almost get to a certain point, too, where you feel a little freakish. At least that was me. You're so lean, you're so ripped, you're so vascular, right? Like every muscle's popping out. And you almost feel a bit freakish and you almost want to gain a few pounds to get back. So all those things. But you do need to go through this biological repair. So you've got to focus on those proteins. We're talking about those whole foods, right? Being smart, not just trash dieting our way back up, not to hurt ourselves, like what you're saying that Eric had done. Um, and then working with the doctor, right? Talking to your coach and all those things. But then you also have to understand that that that third pillar is that nervous system reset. So you're eating for the right reasons. You're biologically repairing, you're also repairing that nervous system. And here's something I'm I made a big mistake on this year. I didn't listen to you. I didn't listen to my coach in this one aspect. You kept telling me after my last show, all right, you gotta rest. You gotta rest. Like, you need to do nothing, or you need to go out and do some walks, the mind-body experience, right? The breath work, sleeping. And I was like, No, are you kidding me? I feel like a rock star.
SPEAKER_01:You were like fired up. I was like, Jenny, you're gonna like this is all gonna come crashing down on you at any moment. I was like, because you were just on this like adrenaline high. Yes, right. And you you were your body was running on pure adrenaline because you had you had zero body fat. There was no way that you actually had that kind of energy, and you were like a 24 hour what wait, wait, five-hour energy drink and a bottle.
SPEAKER_00:I was I I was manic. Let's just put it out there. You become manic because as soon as you step off stage and you do start to add in some of those extra calories, those extra calories go straight to your energy level, which boosts that adrenaline even further, and you feel like a freaking rock star. And I didn't listen though, I should have future parented myself, right? With that plan and gone, expect to feel fantastic, but know that you've got to slow it down, calm down. And I didn't, and because I didn't, I crashed so bloody hard, so hard. And it was so sad for me. Um and it was sad for my partner. I mean, Britt was looking at me like, what is wrong with you? You know, and even though he competes too and he understands it, men don't go through the same hormonal changes that we do in the adaptations, they don't, right? So they're wonderful listeners, our husbands, but they don't understand it. And I keep trying to explain it to him, like it feels like and you can't, your partner can't understand it still. So that was the biggest thing for me was the nervous system reset. It's biology, yeah, but your brain has to reset. So future parent yourself. And then that last pillar for me now I'm understanding is understanding the identity and kind of doing that body image work. And this is something I think somebody may have mentioned is like, please talk about this. How do you deal with the fact that your body's changing so much? There's a wonderful competitor that we both saw win the she was a physique champion, Yorton, OCB Chesapeake classic, Kristen Frey. I'm a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge fan of hers. And she was the one who, in one comment that I had made on a post, said, I'm focusing on my PRs, baby. I'm getting back in that gym and I'm eating to fuel up so I can regain some of that muscle that you know gets catabolized during the point of cut, but also like build, build, build. So she showed me just in her simple, sweet comment, oh my gosh, I need to focus now on going, listen, your job is done, stage is done. Now let's get some of that beautiful weight on because we need it. We need those fat, we need that carb, we need it to push further so we can really continue recomposing and building. And that changed my mindset because it was who am I beyond my stage photos?
SPEAKER_01:Who am I? Well, that's okay. So we have to come back to the basics that this is called bodybuilding for a reason. This is not a dieting competition. Yes, it is about aesthetics on stage, but you don't get aesthetics without building muscle. It is what it is, right? And so we don't get to build muscle without body fat, we don't get to build muscle while we stay stage lean all year long. This is not about being lean, except on the day of the show. This is a sport, and I I have said this in so many podcasts before. This is something that um I know Brandy and I have talked about ad nauseum. A lot of people go into this with the wrong mindset and it is and it's all about looks. If you're an a true athlete and you're in the sport for the right reasons, you're not just doing it for the aesthetics, right? And so, in order to make yourself a better athlete, if I was running a marathon and I just came off my marathon season and I just decided to stop running, right? Or I didn't fuel myself, or I didn't try to improve my run, then what's the fucking point? What is the point, right? Like it it's it's no different in terms of the sport. This sport requires you to have body fat. It requires you to put on muscle. And so if you want to be an athlete in the sport, you must do those things. As a natural athlete, I am talking about natural athletes. If you're taking performance-enhancing drugs, you can throw all everything I just said out the window, stay lean all year long. I don't fucking care. Right? You're killing yourself anyway. That's a whole nother topic. Um, but if you you have to have that mindset, and so you have to get out of the the mindset that my visual is constantly get leaner, get leaner, get leaner, get leaner. And now we have just have to change the narrative to my mindset is I gotta put some body fat back on, I gotta fuel my training, I gotta get stronger, right? So you have to start chasing PRs. I even have, I even recommend a lot of my clients come up with some other athletic goal post show so that they are no longer looking at themselves in the mirror constantly, like, what does my body look like? Let's chase some other athletic goal. You want to go do a CrossFit competition, go to a CrossFit competition. I love my clients coming off of bodybuilding shows and going into powerlifting. It is one of the most amazing things that you can do, right? Because suddenly it is about the PR, right? It is about how strong you are, and you've got to fucking feed yourself if you want to do powerlifting, right? And so I have several clients who have gone and you know, and I'm not saying you got to do that forever, but it is a great way to give yourself a new athlete. You want to go run a 5k? Yeah, running's not really my thing, and it's not super conducive to bodybuilding, but you gotta have some other goal that takes your mind off of what do I look like and puts it back into performance as an athlete, right? So chase the PRs, get stronger, go do some powerlifting, do some crossfit, do do whatever, right? But you gotta have something. Um, you also have to think about like you really just you gotta give your brain time to reset. So to your point, but on on another note, in terms of like the neurology that comes into it, right? The psyche. And so I have you just looked at yourself for 30 weeks straight in the mirror with a the visual of new new veins, get leaner, new ab, new what right? Like I'm leaner, lean, lean, lean, lean, lean, lean. It's gonna take your brain a while to understand that looking at your body now is different, right? So your brain wants to keep looking for leaner, leaner, leaner. And so your brain is focused on that. So it's just gonna take it's like adjusting your eyes to the dark, right? You get into a dark room, you can't see shit, but if you're standing there for long enough, you're gonna be able to see a little bit of what's going on. So you just have to give your brain some time to go, oh, okay. Like I to get used to what you look like again, right? And so it's it's okay to have the feeling of like watching your body get softer. It's okay to feel a little shitty about that. Like, I mean, it sucks, right? Like sometimes it just sucks. But you have to change the narrative, and this takes as much practice and repetition as it does going to the gym, right? So these aren't the this is when because neuroscience is like really where I geek out and love things. But if you really understand how our how our brains work, we just spent all this time making this neuroscircuit in our brains. It's like lean, lean, lean, look at how lean I am. Well, you gotta we gotta give it some time to like create a new circuit, right? And so you have to give yourself some grace and you have to tell yourself, no, putting on this body fat is good. Putting on this body fat is good. Look how strong I'm getting. Yes, I'm getting softer, but man, look, I I I'm PR ing and you have to keep telling yourself those things because you just spent 30 weeks telling yourself how lean you were and how amazing you were. Now you got to tell yourself something else, and so you got to build a different story, and you got and it's just gonna take some time. And it's I we talked about this in the last podcast. I said it's like my Grand Canyon reference, right? Like you've just got to, it's gonna feel stupid, right? Because you're looking in the mirror and you're like, no, I don't like this extra belly fat. This fucking sucks. No, I don't like the cellulite that's coming back in my ass. Nobody wants that, nobody likes it, but you gotta look at yourself and tell yourself a different story because it's not bad, right? It's like it just is so you just have to say, This is what it is, this is who I am, and now I'm chasing these PRs. And who fucking cares if you have cellulite on your ass, right? Like nobody cares if you're strong as fuck, right? Yeah, nobody cares. Do I care if you have cellulite on your ass on stage? Yeah, as a judge, you probably shouldn't, right? But that's not what we're doing here. So that doesn't matter right now. It does not matter that you have some cellulite on your ass. It does not matter that your tricep gets a little jiggly. No, it doesn't matter. You gotta get strong, you gotta fuel yourself, you gotta be give yourself some grace. Um, that's my but you have to change, right? You can't just give yourself grace, you have to change the narrative. Because otherwise, if you if nothing changes, nothing changes, and then you're just gonna keep spiraling in this right, and then then all you can do is give yourself grace because all you're doing is in this, like, I suck, okay. Well, I'll give myself grace. Okay, I suck, okay. Well, I'll give myself grace. Well, that's not helpful, right? So giving yourself grace is changing that narrative, right? It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, let's go over here. You're not beating yourself up over it, but you're able to kind of go in and and and start to change so that it doesn't feel so painful to look in the mirror all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you have to give, you know, you got to be respectful of yourself. You need to have respectful self-talk. I mean, think about how hard we are on ourselves as human beings. We would never say the things to other people that we say to ourselves.
SPEAKER_01:Do you remember the um thing we did in the retreat? Do you remember the the dove self self-talk um video that we show in the retreat? And I don't know if you were at the retreat where we did this particular exercise, but we had we did this for our first couple of retreats. We had everybody write down all their negative thoughts in a week, right? And so we had them on little pieces of paper. And you know, I always like to say, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm bad mom, like nobody loves me, whatever. Those are the the recurring narratives that women like to tell themselves. And so we put them all in a little jar and we put teamed people up, and you would pick one out of a jar and you would tell the person in front of them that they were fat, and you would tell the person in front of them that that you were ugly, whatever you pulled out of the jar, and then you would go, and then we would talk about like what does that I don't I get chills even like saying that. Like, if I could ever look at somebody in the face and say, Man, you really got fat post-show. And you know, some assholes out there, I'm probably gonna say it, but you have to be your own best friend, that's the point, right? So you cannot talk to yourself any differently than you would talk to your friend, right? So if you wouldn't say it to your best friend, you have to get in the habit of, I can't say it to myself because we are our own worst enemy. And so you have to be your own best friend. So that is the giving yourself grace, that is the you know, compassion, radical acceptance, all the little terms I could throw on top of it, right? You have to to get there, but it doesn't come without practice. And so if your normal narrative is I'm fat, I'm not good enough, I suck, that's always going to be your narrative. And your body will believe it, and your brain will believe it, and your brain will scream it at you because it's really used to saying that, it's really comfortable for it to say, and so until you actually just so start change it to something else, like no, like you just have to say, No, I don't believe you. This is not what we're doing until and until you do believe it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that that's why I go back for me as the analogy of parenting myself, because you know, you you want to say when you look in the mirror, I'm disgusting, I'm disgusting, and you have to change that. And so no, your body's recovering from something really extreme. Yeah, and so I think about that again. Like I've got a beautiful teenage daughter, and of course, she suffers from body image issues like every other teenage girl does, and even teenage boys do. Of course, it's totally natural. But my goodness, if you think about what you would want to say to your kid, right, your daughter, that and you're looking at your own self and your own body, think about that. Think about your body as something separate and apart from you, um, as this wonderful, God-created, organic figure, and think about treating it the same way that you would the greatest gift you've ever had in your life, which is your kid.
SPEAKER_01:Unless you're a shitty parent, like mine were and said really shitty things to your parent. Don't do that. Sure. Well, yeah, and listen, I'm with you on that. Okay, and say do that. I'm still on the kind of parent you are. Be the kind of parent you're supposed to be, be the kind of parent you had. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Be the parent you wish you had, be the parent wish you had. Don't go out and pick your own tree limb that you can whip yourself with because nobody needs that.
SPEAKER_00:Don't be that parent. Right or grow up with a lot of issues with insecurity and self-confidence, like like me, right? I I was absolutely 100% that. So I do pay close attention with my own daughter. Like, you know, I really want to treat her with all the love and respect and help her treat herself with all that love and respect. And that goes right back to us and our own bodies. Exactly. So I I almost, and this is kind of sound a little weird, sort of disassociate. I treat my body as something a little bit separate. Yes, it's me, but I'm trying to treat it and look at it and give it that the care and concern and love that it needs, which is giving my brain the care and concern and love that it needs. So you you you have to look at it that way. You've got to give yourself some positive self-talk and go through it. Think about it this way: when you became pregnant, okay, you had this little being growing in you, and your body starts to change, and you're hungry, and you're so excited. And whatever that craving was that you had, like mine was chicken salad sandwiches on croissant. That was my my thing.
SPEAKER_01:Mine was mashed potatoes and marshmallows, which is why I looked like mashed potatoes and marshmallows by the time I gave birth. 50 pounds, 50 pounds of mashed potatoes and marshmallows, Jenny.
SPEAKER_00:The weird thing, the weird thing, like I also eventually had a craving of the Wendy's frosties and dipping my French fries in it or my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the point is, you're growing this little human being, and your body is growing along with it, and you're eating and you're eating, but you're not shamed by it because you're growing this incredible human being. And then nine months later, funny how that's pretty close to what a prep cut could be, right? Right, nine months later, you end up having this gorgeous being, and you're left with a body that's very, very, very different. And you can work on it, and it's never necessarily going to come back to exactly what it was pre. And you're gonna have some additions, you're gonna have those stretch marks and things of that sort. And you may look at them in a certain way, but a lot of us would look at it as a sense of pride. For me, I did. I'm like, I love every stretch mark that I have because I love my kid. And there's so you treat your body and your brain differently because of having a child. So as you get older and as you're going through some of these changes, as you get, you know, into bodybuilding and you're you're going through another extreme. Your body's going through another extreme. You're not having a baby, but what are you birthing at the end? And what you end up with is a really resilient mindset. You get with this a surety within your confidence, not just based on how you look, but because of building that muscle and building that strength and building that mental resilience, you've all of a sudden come out with an incredible sense of confidence you never thought that you could ever have before. So you've birthed a new version of yourself.
SPEAKER_01:I'm loving all your child references. I base it on experience. I love, I think, well, I think it's a great way, it's a it's a great new way for people to look at things, you know.
SPEAKER_00:I that's my goal. That's what I want. Think about all the women that you meet that you now currently coach, whether it's a livestock client or a competition client, and all the freaking baggage that everybody, all of us come with. Oh, yeah, and how we have to work through that. So this is a transformation, even if it's not a transformation show, let's say per se, but we are going through that transformation. So we are reversing out of entering into and reversing out of. You need to look at this as an entire full-fledged journey, and that what you're doing is developing a better you. It's not gonna always be a better physical complete completely. Yeah, like you don't look at that as your value, it's the package. What's the package?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I I know that we said we were gonna keep this to 30 minutes, which we have already not done. Um, so sorry everybody. Um, so I the last couple things I'll add to because I think we covered everything, but really, you know, in the reverse diet, your body's gonna crave junk and you're gonna think you can have the junk, and it's not it's okay to have the occasional junk. I think we even talked about this in the last podcast a little bit, but the more you continue to just eat the same foods that you ate pre-prep in larger quantities, the less the cravings will be, right? So the more you eat junk, you know, the food, uh highly palatable foods are actually engineered to make us want more, right? That's why I can't eat one Oreo or one Dorito. Like it's not a thing, right? So um, the less you eat those things, the less you will crave those things. And so that you want to kind of just eat more of what you've always been eating. Add a little variety, but don't go mixing it all up, trying to eat all the things. That's just gonna way overcomplicate your life and make you feel uh it's gonna be a whole lot harder. Um, and then the whole entire, you know, the the reverse process in terms of, you know, there's a really good study out there. I'll see if I can put it in the show notes. Um, and I loved it. Granted, it was done on men because just about all of these things are done on men. Women are really hard to study because of our hormones and getting anything. Um, so it is what it is. But um, it was a really great study. So this natural bodybuilder, I think it was actually Andrew Pardue. This was years ago. And so he did all of his uh hormonal markers before he started prep. He did them at his absolute leanest, and then um he did them again when he was at the the same weight and body fat that he was when he first had his uh hormones tested. Expecting the hypothesis was when he reached the same body fat, his hormones would be recovered. And that is not what happened. And so while he had was at the level of body fat he had been when he first tested his his hormonal markers, it was not the case. So just getting back to that body fat level does not mean you're hormonally recovered. It can actually take a whole lot longer than what you think it might take. And I think in his case, it ended up, I'm I'm throwing these numbers out there. I think he had them like retested around like six months, but I think it ended up being something like nine to 12 months later that his hormones were actually back at the same levels as testosterone and things like that that they had been pre-prep. So it doesn't always equate. And so it's not a quick process. Um, just getting your cycle back doesn't necessarily mean that, I mean, it's a good indicator, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everything's fully recovered. And so the whole point of like reverse dieting, recovery dieting, whatever you want to call it, is to not just get your hormones back, you know, on track, but it is also to recover mentally, physically, financially, um, socially, um, all those things, right? Which is why a three-month off season is not a thing. And we can talk about that on another podcast. Goodness. Um, and it's also not an off season. It's a growth season, it's improvement season. We don't call it bulking. I don't call it off because we're not taking off. We're also not bulking. We're not like fucking um, I don't know, what's we're not trash. It's bulk. Um, those are just like quick little things, and we can certainly get into those, like the technical things in more detail. But I think we kind of covered the the gist of really what um what a post-show looks like, how hard it is, um all the different things you might go through, and really how to um manage it, right? I mean, in in in whatever way you can find to do so without look completely losing your shit. Um so yeah, so is there anything else you want to add before we hop off since we went longer than 30 minutes? Sorry to your sorry to tell your friend I said I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, no. Sorry, friend, you said that our podcast was too long.
SPEAKER_00:It's all good. No, it's all good. I think we just close it out just by saying to everybody that you know your value is not measured in your body fat percentage, right? You are allowed to change your goals, you've got to protect your mental health, yeah, and your midlife can be strong and it can be beautiful without having to be completely extreme. So just even with cellulite on your ass, and even with it. So just love yourself, love yourself, and just reach out to us if you're struggling because that just means you need a better coach.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, friends, yes. Well, thank you, Jenny, for sharing your struggles. I think it helps other people to um to understand, right? Like, really, the biggest thing is community and and knowing you're not crazy, you're not alone, you're not broken, you're not weak, you're not undisciplined, you're not like your body is literally like telling you to fuck off. And evolution says we need to eat and we need to do it right now, right? Like we didn't get this far in life without that happening. Um, so understanding those things helps a little bit. Um, but yeah, I mean, the most important thing is to do you remember that don't get weird. Use your head, it'll all be okay. It will all be okay, and then we'll say, bye.
unknown:Bye.