45- Takeout, Dessert & Strength: Eating for Body Composition Without Guilt

In this episode of MilesFromHerView, Kat debunks the all-or-nothing approach to nutrition and shares how you can achieve your body composition goals without stressing over every meal. Learn how to enjoy takeout and dessert guilt-free, plan meals that work for busy lifestyles, and understand the importance of consistency over perfection. 
Join Kat as she dives into practical strategies for making sustainable changes and reconnecting with food from a place of self-compassion and worthiness.

💡 Enjoy your favorite foods without guilt! 💡

If you’re tired of feeling like every meal has to be “perfect” to see results, grab my FREE Guilt-Free Eating Guide! This simple, no-BS guide will show you:

✅ 3 mindset shifts to ditch all-or-nothing thinking
✅ How to enjoy takeout and dessert without sabotaging progress
✅ A flexible meal-planning framework for busy moms

👉 Download it now!

00:00 The Guilt of Takeout and Overthinking Meals
01:15 Introduction to MilesFromHerView Podcast
02:28 Springtime Energy and Personal Reflections
03:15 Mindset Shifts Around Nutrition
05:34 Debunking Diet Culture Myths
09:04 Personal Journey and Lessons Learned
11:55 Understanding Body Composition
14:42 Practical Tips for Balanced Eating
18:49 Client-Centered Nutrition Strategies
24:28 Key Takeaways and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

Kat: 0:00

You ever have one of those nights where dinner just isn't happening, you're exhausted. The fridge is looking just plain sad, and the easiest thing to do is pick up date takeout on the way home from shuffling your kids to and from practices, or just hit that DoorDash app on your phone and for a second it feels oh, so amazing. You finally sit down, you take that first bite and then the guilt creeps in. Ugh, I should have just cooked something healthy. I should have planned better. This is why I am not making progress. I know this feeling well, and I used to think if I wasn't eating clean a hundred percent of the time, I was doing something wrong like that one meal was going to cancel out all my effort and all my workouts in the gym. And this is what we're gonna dive into today, how you can actually eat for the body composition goals without overthinking every single meal. How you can enjoy takeout, eat dessert, and still see progress without falling into the screw it. I messed up cycle because trust me, you can't screw this up. Welcome to MilesFromHerView, the podcast powered by KatFit Strength, where busy women like you find practical solutions to fuel your fitness journey with authenticity and resilience. I'm Kat, your host, a mom of two active boys, a business owner, and an ultra marathon runner and a strength trainer in her forties with nearly two decades of experience. I'm here to help you cut through the noise of fads, hacks, and quick fixes. This is a space where we celebrate womanhood and motherhood. All while building strength and resilience and reconnecting with you from a place of self-compassion and worthiness. Whether you're lacing up your running shoes to go out for a run, driving your kids to practice or squeezing in a moment for yourself, I'm right here in the trenches with you. Let's dive in.

2:04

Welcome back. I'm Kat, your host, and I really hope you get some solid takeaways from this. If nonetheless, you start to feel some relief around your food choices to enhance your relationship with the food that you choose for yourself or that you plan for your family. I hope wherever you're at today, you're having an awesome day. We are finally in March. I'm seeing my snowdrop flowers have poked through. They're blooming. The signs of spring are here. I know I'm feeling this absolute renewed sense of energy. The days are getting a little, they're not getting longer, but the sunlight is out longer, and it just feels awesome. I've also enjoyed some very mild. Weather days on the trails, which feels amazing for me because after I've been slogging away at these bitter cold winter months, it is nice not to be cold or force myself to get outside. Knowing the weather is just going to be brutal and just kind of that I gotta get it done mentality. Today's episode is about nutrition, and what I want you to take away from this is the mindset shifts around what nutrition looks like. It can be overwhelming. It can feel like everything you do is wrong. One minute you feel okay, this choice is great, but then the next minute someone else is screaming at you in their little square on Instagram that that's wrong. But here are the facts, we need Whole Foods in our diet. You know what the biggest thing is? It is okay to enjoy takeout and dessert. Trust me, you can do that while seeing results. I'm not going to talk about here today is the calories you need to be consuming. We're not gonna go into macros, and I'm definitely not gonna be talking about, insert any trendy or overhyped diet out there because here's the thing, your caloric intake is unique to you and it will vary on day to day as well as where you're at in this your cycle. You do not need to see body composition changes, meaning losing inches, gaining more muscle and decreasing body fat. You don't need to go on paleo, intermittent fasting you name it. You don't need to do that in order to see results. Today we're focusing on that overarching thing where I see a lot of people struggle with having trust in their food choices. To me, this is step one in decoding why we eat what we eat, and feeling comfortable with the choices that we make without guilting or shaming ourselves because that is not a way to live. We will dive into a little bit of. Ways we can still enjoy the takeout, eat the dessert. Without that, screw it. I messed up cycle because that's not a place to live. All right, so let's go into that diet culture over complication. That we just see everywhere. I mean, I, like I said, I get caught off it in myself, like I have been in this industry for almost two decades. I myself will second guess sometimes if I'm on the right track or if this is, the holy grail to health. Why do we believe that food has to be all or nothing? Either we're on a track or we're falling off the rails. Okay, so let's think about that. Like why is it that if I do this, I'm either on the straight and narrow or I am just totally messed up. We've been conditioned to think that strict diets are the answer. If we want to see the change, we need to be on this super strict diet in which we're measuring. We are. Making ourselves essentially this complex math problem, or we need to be on these powders and pills and potions in order to see results. That's not true. And it also comes about that fitness culture has this belief that if we enjoy our food, we're failing. That if you want to see results, you literally need to take all that kale and be null on it because that is the only way and you need to be miserable through it. You need to boil your chicken and have your plain rice and only eat kale because of that is where you find health. And don't you dare think about having that chocolate chip cookie. Because if you eat that well, you failed. That is absolutely untrue. That can't be farther from the truth. And another those perfect meal plan posts on Instagram it's so strict down to like, eat this, therefore this will happen and it feels impossible. And that's the point. It feels impossible. It has you trapped that you're either on the track or you're falling off the rails the reality is changing. Your body composition does not come down to one meal, one night out, one slice of cake on your kid's birthday or your birthday. It's about what you do most of the time. All right. I am gonna say that again. It's not about the one meal, one night out or that slice of cake you have at a kid's birthday party. Your kid's birthday party. Your birthday party. But it's what you do most of the time that is going to move that needle forward. And the biggest mistake I have seen in the past two decades is individuals. Trying to be perfect. Searching for this mythological. If I find the right diet, if I am enjoying my food, I'm failing. If I use that perfect meal plan on Instagram, therefore I will find success. The secret to success is knowing that it's small, sustainable changes that will work. It's not these big extreme efforts. Those big extreme efforts set you up for failure. The more rules, the more just guidelines that you have to be under in order to find success with your nutrition. It, it's not gonna last, it's not going to be sustainable. I remember when I, oh gosh, I was in my twenties. I had officially retired from competing, I'm in my young adult life. I no longer have the dining hall at the college preparing food for me. And when I was an athlete, I naturally fell into, I gotta eat the proteins, I gotta eat the carbs. I'm getting fruits and vegetables. I. Ate well, I never thought about, my food choices. For me, what happened was I that in my mid twenties, late twenties, when I was just trying to figure out, well, what am I doing now? I'm no longer training for qualifying for the NCAA championships. I'm no longer, on a team to train. So what am I doing? I had to figure that out for myself. So I started falling into the trap of the clean eating ideologies. If I enjoyed that cookie, I was self-sabotaging. Like that was the worst thing I could have done that day. On the weekends. We did take out fast food. That next day, that Monday, it would be a massive reset. It would be looking at, okay, I need to really make sure all I'm eating is that quote unquote kale smoothie and that salad with grilled chicken on for lunch and at dinner. I need to make sure I stop eating after 6:00 PM because I don't want to overconsume calories. I had never felt so guilty about enjoying food, and it truly ruined some of that trust I had in with my food choices that I had in college. So once I started figuring that out and trying to decode and put that trust back in for myself, it felt better. I needed to stop feeling guilty for what I decided and own up to the fact that, hey, if I wanted to sit down and I wanted to have a fast food meal, because that's just what I wanted. I needed to own that. I needed to not hold myself in guilt or shame for eating, that I started making decisions from a place of confidence instead of fear. I. My results started to get better because I wasn't constantly in a cycle of restriction or burnout. So I had to look at it and be like, what did I do? Why was this so easy for me to eat and enjoy? When I was in college and how can I bring that into now my adult life where I'm not training for the NCAA championships. I am an everyday individual looking to maintain my health, to continue building strength and enjoying food. Let's dive into how. We can e for body composition while enjoying life. And now why I'm saying body composition is health is derived of what your body is composed of. Your body is composed of bones to help hold your skeletal structure in place to give you a form. It is composed of soft tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments, organs inside. Then we have fluids. All the fluids, the blood, the water, the bile, all of that,. We also have fat. You need fat to survive, so we never want to get to 0% body fat. What we want is to have a healthy balance of fat in our body as well as muscle. Muscle. In the last episode, I talked about the metabolic response of muscle and why it is important to have muscle to help with our metabolism. And this is why I am focusing on body composition. If our body composition is a healthy muscle mass, we have solid muscle in our body and our fat mass non Leann tissues. So lean tissues is muscle non leann. I'm just trying to use a little bit more vocabulary around it. So when you are hearing these things, you don't get confused of what's lean and what's non lean. Basically, that's another way to say fat and muscle is that we have a good ratio. We want muscle. We don't need to be a bodybuilder. We want good, solid muscles in our body, and that is how our. Our systems are going to be functioning well when our bodies have more non leann, more fat, peripheral fat in our body, or the subcutaneous fat, the fat around our organs. That is where we're going to see more metabolic syndrome issues, trying to tweak those changes in our body composition, meaning maintain and build muscle and decrease non-line fat, whether it be peripheral in our arms and legs or subcutaneous fat around our organs. We need to make sure that our eating backs that up along with the strength training, the mobility and the cardio. So for, in this podcast, we're focused on the nutrition. I'm gonna say it again so many times because I feel like I can never say this enough. You can enjoy dessert, you can enjoy takeout while doing this. Perfection is not the answer at all. What do we need to do? When I work with clients about nutrition, I talk about the big rocks and what we need to focus on because if those big rocks are in place, and if we put our time and energy in those big rocks with nutrition. The little rocks, the little insignificant things, the those things to be blunt, are those flashy things that you see the wellness influencers screaming on social media? Buy my protein, buy this Green magic potion because this is the Elixir two health. Those are small rocks, because if you don't have these big rocks in place, those small little rocks are not going to move the needle where you want to. We're focused on what do most of our meals look like? There's 21 meals in a seven day cycle. So I want my clients to think about 21 meals. Out of those 21 meals, we want to around 80% of the time, you know, 70 to 90% of the time it's all gonna fall. Within that, maybe some weeks, 60% that we are nailing nutrition. So it's looking at your whole life. If you know I'm gonna use myself as an example, I'm in that era of mom taxi, getting my kids to and from sports. There are some nights we don't get home until nine, and I need to get quick dinners on the go. It's kind of like that meme that floats around where either we're eating dinner at four or 9:00 PM because there's a lot of activities in the evening, it is so easy to just be like, we're going through the drive-thru, we're going through the, but let's be honest, that isn't always the best answer. Now you're probably like, well, I don't have time to cook a home cooked meal I respect that. Even though my life situation is, I do work from home. My partner, my husband also works from home. I don't always have time to cook. What I do is I plan and. it's not obsessing over every macro for every individual. I look at the balance. So let me give you a more tangible example and I'm gonna use the takeout one for this. I love Thai food. If I'm ordering a Thai food and you can apply this to any type of food, I make sure that there is a protein source, animal or plant. And at least a vegetable. Ideally you like to try and get two or three vegetables into that dish. So I focus on the big rocks. Am I getting a protein source? Are there vegetables included in it? So now let's take pizza. If you're ordering a pizza and you need to, entertain multiple people's palate choices for a pizza'cause not everyone agrees, is there a protein you can put on it? And I don't want you to sit here and be like, well, pepperoni's not a really good protein source. Well, if it's your only protein source option, that's fine. It's a one time thing. Again, we're looking at the macro choices, the big rock, the overarching, I'm thinking, let's get a side salad and maybe not have the protein on pizza, but that's where the grilled chicken goes. So I'll do a side salad and some pizza. That's it. There's no guilt, no weird food rules that is how to make some smart choices without stressing. If you're at home and you're like, I just need to throw together something, think about a protein source, a veggie and a grain. Steam some broccoli, bake some chicken and do brown rice, rice, white rice, whatever you have on hand. A dinner. Keep it simple. Let's talk about dessert, I love dessert. I am not skipping the birthday cake at all. Take a little bit of it. Because the difference is when people allow themselves to enjoy a little, they're gonna succeed in the long term without yo yo-yoing. So let's dive a little bit deeper to how you apply this in your everyday life. Well, how this works, and I'm gonna take you in from a coaching perspective, and this is the same application I apply in my own life, is I don't hand out restrictive meal plans or tell my clients they need to cut out favorite foods. Because to be quite honest, you are the authority on your body and your choices. You are a grown. Woman, you don't need someone else telling you that you can't have. We need to learn how to trust our food choices and how to develop the strategy that actually fits your life. When I work with a client, I look at their whole life. I look at, in this seven day cycle, the 21 meals. What is our capacity? How can we make small tweaks? What can we add, what can we enhance of what you're already doing to focus on these big rocks more? So oftentimes my clients have one or two meals a week, primarily dinner in which they do takeout. Fantastic. I am here to support that. Those are part of your meal plan. Some of my clients enjoy a piece of chocolate, a couple pieces of chocolate every night, or that chocolate chip cookie. Fantastic. Let's keep that in and look at that because taking away that one dessert on a daily is not gonna move the needle forward. One client of mine a couple mornings a week, she'll enjoy a nice cup of coffee and walk talking with her mom. I am not going to take that away from her. That's part of your meal plan. That's part of your routine. That is something that we don't need to change up and like, you must drink black coffee if you enjoy drinking black coffee. I personally am a black coffee drinker. I also really enjoy a fancy coffee treat. But that's part of her routine. That's part of her moment where she is speaking with her mom, walking and enjoying a cup of coffee that does more for stress mitigation than being like, well, I want you to only drink water during that time because there's so much more that we can tweak to see. Bigger and better changes to support her efforts in the gym and outside of the gym than taking away that coffee. I want her to maintain that because the reality is, there is gonna come a time where she may not be able to phone her mom, but drinking that cup of coffee, that special coffee treat is going to bring back those memories. And the last thing I want is to be like, sorry, you can't have that there because that is not what is going make it or break it for that client. So we look at, what are we doing for the three big meals? I wanna see a protein source. I wanna see a fruit. Or a vegetable primarily. Let's boost those vegetables even for breakfast, and I wanna see a good carb source. Okay? Something that is going to what I call in my own terms, like stick on those ribs. I want your body to feel fuller longer. So that's where we're gonna focus on nutrient dense foods. I want. My clients to feel excited, excited about when they sit down for a meal. The last thing I want anyone to do, whether they're a client or not, is to sit down and be like, awesome. This is all I get. And this is, this isn't fun eating. Is fun. It should be an experience. You should be fired up about what you're eating. You should be excited to take that time, whether in the car or around a table chatting with your family or whoever you cohabitate with or on the phone, wherever you're at and enjoying. Every single bite of that food. There are so many vegetables out there that there isn't one vegetable that is the holy grail compared to all of'em. So if you don't like kale, who cares? My favorite thing I tell the clients is kale and burpees are not the holy grail to fitness. There are so many different ways to get nutrient-dense foods into your body without white knuckling or feeling like you have to find these obscure ingredients or these vegetables or proteins that you just don't like. If you have young kids, I don't want you to be a short order cook to them or yourself. So I look at what does the whole family eat? What are times that you are only focused on yourself and you really enjoy? I am gonna use one for myself. I love eggplant. My family isn't the keenest on eggplant, so I might have eggplant during lunch because lunch is a little bit more individualized for me That's where you can incorporate the foods that you really enjoy. And then when you're with the family, thinking about how can I get the nutrient dense foods on the table with without being that short order cook to me. Think about. Your life in this situation. Think about the overarching, there's 21 meals in a week now meals, if you snacks, absolutely snacks go in there too. But focus on the big rocks here. The meals. And looking at that, is there a protein source, lean or non lean? Is there a vegetable or a fruit or both Or two vegetables. And are we getting that good whole grain there? Set your plate up for success focused on this. Let's bring this home to the biggest takeaways from today. You don't have to be perfect to make progress. It's about consistency, not perfection. This goes with everything I'm saying. It's showing up and focusing on those big, big rocks. Takeout and dessert are not the enemy. They're just part of life. So let's learn how to incorporate them in because that is gonna be the long term success plan here. Strength training, movement, and protein. It matters so much more than stressing over the single meal. If this resonated with you, please share it with a friend. Reach out to me, and if you're stuck in that cycle of guilt and starting over every Monday, I wanna hear from you. Send me a dm. You can message a podcast or send me a DM on Instagram at KatFit Strength, and tell me what part hit home the most. If you're ready to. See that change in your approach to fitness and nutrition? Check out KatFit Strength, and I'll show you how this can work for yourself with you and not against you. So thank you for taking time to just spend a few moments with me and go out and enjoy your takeout and your dessert, and I'll catch you next week. Thank you for tuning in to MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFIt Strength. If this podcast inspires you, don't keep it for yourself. Hit follow or subscribe to stay updated on the new episodes, and leave us a review to help more women and moms discover this space. Your feedback fuels this podcast and I'd love to hear what's working for you or what topics you want to dive into Next. You can connect with me on Instagram at KatFit or share this episode. With a friend who is ready to embrace her strength. Remember, fitness isn't about perfection. It's about showing up for yourself and finding strength in every step of your journey. Until next time, keep moving forward one mile at a time.