69- Real Life Fitness: Juggling Kids, Dogs, and Goals

In this episode of MilesFromHerView, powered by KatFit Strength, host Kat shares insights and practical solutions for busy women to fuel their fitness journeys. Kat, a mom, business owner, ultra marathon runner, and strength trainer with nearly two decades of experience, addresses common fitness and nutrition challenges. She recounts her recent family trip to Nova Scotia, highlighting the importance of adaptability and planning. Kat answers listener questions about fitting strength training into busy schedules, the importance of varied cardio activities, incorporating mobility exercises, and maintaining balanced nutrition amidst daily chaos. Tune in for actionable advice on how to stay consistent with your fitness routines while navigating life's unpredictability.

00:00 Welcome to MilesFromHerView

00:48 Catching Up After a Family Trip

01:29 Travel Adventures and Planning

08:33 Fitness and Life Lessons from the Trip

10:41 Maintaining Fitness Routines

17:42 Cardio Training Insights

22:15 Addressing Mobility and Recovery

26:55 Nutrition Tips for Busy Lives

40:34 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

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Transcript

Kat: 0:00

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. Welcome to MilesFromHerView. I'm Kat your host and I'm excited to be here with you. If you're new here, welcome. If you're a longtime listener, welcome. The last couple weeks have been featuring best of episodes. Well, there's a reason behind that. I've been traveling for the last two weeks with my family. I was grateful I was able to take the time off, step away from my business. I am back and I am feeling energized and excited to dive back into all things client related, podcast related, all the things with my business and life. I wanna share a little bit about my trip. It was a bit of an undertaking. Our life is very busy. My children are my eldest, starting high school. I cannot believe it. And my youngest is in middle school. So they are embracing all things sports and music, and socially just super busy. So our everyday life between two working parents and two very active kids, plus we have two very active dogs. It's jam packed. So when we travel, we build in time to relax and we love getting out and seeing the sites and exploring the world around us in which we are visiting. So this trip has been on. My list and my husband's list for 15 years. 15 years ago, we went up to Bar Harbor and Acadia, and then we went over into Nova Scotia and we fell in love with Nova Scotia During that time, we said we hope to get back here and bring our kid kids in the future here and enjoy the trails. And what we fell in love with in the Nova Scotia When I plan trips, I love a good spreadsheet. This is something that. I've always done, even when my husband and I were just us, we both enjoy a nice welled out plan. That does not mean every moment is scheduled it's really just to organize what we wanna see, and we research beforehand as to what is in the area. And then we also pivot when we speak to those who live in that area, or, if we're visiting a national park or a state park. Reviews are great. Bloggers are great. I think they're all great resources. However, sometimes people who have quote unquote boots on the ground also offer very valuable advice that you can't find online before visiting somewhere. Or you get there and you see something that. You didn't know what was happening at the time and it deviates. So all that said, I had a very lengthy, well multi-tabbed spreadsheet. We did five locations, five different Airbnbs, both of our kids and two dogs on the trip. Yes, we traveled with our dogs. I have two German short hair pointers and if you know anything about these dogs, they are high energy, lovable, incredible dogs who love nothing more, but to be with their people, their family, be outdoors, see the world around them, so we decided to bring them. We have traveled with them in the past. Nothing on this grantor, so, okay. That was one layer of stress. So it also needed a good plan to make sure that we. Knew we could take the dogs on different hikes, restaurants, beaches, you know, et cetera, that we could enjoy the activities and the sites around us that we wanted to see, and that our dogs were also welcome there too. Our first stop was in Bar Harbor, Acadia area. We enjoyed some lovely hikes there. We hiked some hikes that my husband and I went on that we fell in love with. We shared it with the kids. We then moved our way up into Canada and we went to Prince Edward Island. This island had been on our list for a very long time. We had never been there. We enjoyed so much about that island. Then we moved over to Cape Breton Island, which is in the Nova Scotia province, and fell in love with that island. We're already stated, all four of us, maybe the dog stated this too. But we wanna go back. We wanna explore more, and this time we want to camp versus stay in an Airbnb. Then from there we did a day trip stopping at different points, Halifax and a couple points further south on the eastern side of Nova Scotia, and then moved over, drove over to the western side of Nova Scotia, where my husband and I,, camped there 15 years ago. We stayed in a lovely little cottage that was right on the ocean and it's on the Bay of Fundy side of Nova Scotia. Now the unique thing about Bay of Fundy, but if you've never been to Nova Scotia or heard about the Bay of Fundy, is the Bay of Fundy has, um, I forget the per precise amount of gallons, but it is several, million gallons. I should have looked that up. But it is some exorbitant amount of water that goes in and out of that Bay Area. It's the highest tidal region I believe, in the world. So it is so cool to see how far out the water, goes out, and you can see these incredible tidal poles. When the water is at low tide and when it comes back in it, high tide, typically high tide, the water comes in slowly. The first day we came, the water was coming in pretty fast. So it's some pretty vigorous waves as it comes in. It is the coolest thing ever. My kids loved it where we were staying, they could walk out on the rocks and they could see the tidal pools. We even had to plan one of our days around being back at the cottage so that they could be there for high tide to see how high the water came up to the cottage. Now the cottage was set further back, but there was, you know, green space and then the rocky area, and they wanted to see how far the water came up and if it reached basically the green space. All that said, there were so many moving parts on this trip. Two kids, two docs, two adults, multiple locations and activities every day. Plus the question of what do we eat? What if the weather doesn't hold out? What if an attraction or a hike is just not what we think it would be? Well, we can't control everything, and we had to adjust a lot on this trip and find ways, not just to make it work, but find ways to pivot in knowing we were only in locations. For a short amount of time to enjoy the timeline doesn't stop. And you also are investing hard earned dollars into a trip. So you don't wanna feel like you traveled all these places and not taken advantage of it. So this trip really reminded me, general life. Like there are so many things that we hope to control, but we can't control everything. So what we learned on that trip was that not everything is gonna go as planned. Delays are gonna happen. There's gonna be the chaos of packing, figuring out meals, figuring out what to do when your original plan doesn't work out, and how this relates to fitness. And while I was gone, I will say this, I automate things in my business. Because I am one person and I do all of my podcast planning, editing, producing social media, email marketing newsletters. All of my client plans, all the coaching, one-on-one coaching time with my clients. When I go away, I don't want those things to stop, so I automate things. Thankfully, technology allows me to do this, so it's not a two week ghost time or even during the school year that we're coming up. I will work ahead, I plan out my business just like I plan out my clients programming. So while I was away, I shifted my newsletters in a way that I was like, ask me any question. I have a little unstructured time where I could just answer individuals. Who replied to the newsletter as questions I knew being on this trip, both my husband and I knew there were gonna be times we were gonna check in on our respective careers, my business, his career, his job, his responsibilities that he has, and we carved out time for that. We knew our kids were gonna want downtime, the dogs were gonna need downtime, et cetera. So all this to say is I got some really great questions during that time, the thing that came up a lot was how much can you control with your fitness routine? We are at the dawn of a new school year. A lot of kids are heading off to college, starting their grade school years. Parents are feeling this pool. In another transition season, the routine that they just got used to with summer is now changing again. And before we know what the holidays are gonna be upon us, and there's gonna be a little bit of an unsettled this then. And then the winter season is just feels long and drab. And then we're back into the spring season. So there tends to be a lot of transition in that time. And how do we keep that focus on our strength, cardio, mobility, and nutrition habits. So one of the top questions that came in was how do I fit strength training into my schedule, the subscriber to the newsletter? A routine gets established and then something upends it. So what do you do? This is common. Because the fact is life is unpredictable. It's always gonna be unpredictable. There are always gonna be things you can't control. Those are the facts. So we have to look at what can we control and my best advice for this individual. And when I do an ask me anything type thing, it's not a prescriptive. Offering. I'm not gonna hand out plans, not because I wanna gate keep, but because when I work with clients, I do get to know like, what is their schedule? When are they working out? I understand the stressors in their life, I understand when, and they communicate, Hey, vacation is coming, work trip is happening for either one of the working parent. So I get to know more intricate details and I can help fine tune the plant so that they are staying focused. So it's not a gatekeeping thing, it's, there are more aspects that I don't know about the person asking me the question. However, the advice. Is the same, not to each person, but what I'm gonna share here, you can apply and to your own life and adapt it. Okay? The big thing with staying consistent with your fitness routine is the ability to adapt. Now, adapt does not mean that you can miss workouts constantly. What I mean when you adapt. So you start out, doing two to three full body sessions a week of strength training. Their workouts are on compound movements, and they are short workouts between 30 to 40 minutes. Now, that is the baseline, more so of my clients. They start out with one to two workouts to integrate into there. Those workouts, maybe one might wind up being 30 minutes. The second one might be 10 minutes, and then they move into being able to incorporate that third full body strength session. The cardio, it's, we're just trying to increase overall movement. Some clients come to me in a stage where they already have a fantastic walking, routine. We build on that based on how their whole life can handle that. So my response to this individual was. We want to try to maintain two to three full body strength sessions per week in a time and a duration between 30 to 40 minutes. Now, 30 to 40 minutes is not the magic number. We want to be able to see compound movements, so push, pull, hinge, rotational movements in there. So I gave them a couple ideas of like squats, deadlifts wood chops, you know, to kind of help framework it out. And the thing that I stressed with the individual is it's showing up. It's not holding yourself to the parameter. If I don't have 30 minutes, if I don't have 40 minutes, therefore I cannot do the workout. It's okay. I'm going to show up. You're going to see that consistency more. Focusing on getting the reps in with showing up to the sessions of, I'm gonna show up one time every single week, and not worrying that you don't have the 40 minutes, but showing up and doing 10 minutes of the workout. That is a win that is showing up. It's adapting so that it is working with your life. Because what research shows us when you are creating that behavioral change, when you are maintaining discipline in that it's basically applying that discipline. It's not working on motivation. Motivation is crap. Like don't wait for motivation. It's holding yourself to being disciplined. It's saying, I'm going to show up here one time or two times. If you are someone who can work in ranges, work in a range. If you were someone who is an all or nothing person, don't work in a range.'cause you're never going to feel like you showed up. Start with one time when you get consistent with that one time showing up. Add on a second time. I argue. Don't mess around with the duration. You know, 30 to four, 40 minutes isn't the magic number. Research shows us, yes, two to three full body strength sessions per week does tend to be the sweet spot for most. Again, generalizations. There's always exceptions to the rule, but that tends to be the sweet spot for building strength, maintaining strength. And please if you have questions on any of this, you can write the podcast, hit reply in the notes, and or on the podcast. I think it's right in there. It's just this message podcast. I will receive them, I will respond to them. If you want to jump on my newsletter, there is a link in the podcast notes. Jump on that. That is another way you can just hit reply to my newsletter. And I do respond. Like I said, I do automate, but I am the person who's responding and I do respond to every person's email. The next one, cardio. The question came in, do I need to run five days a week to stay fit? My answer here is, no, absolutely not., Now with the caveat, if you are training for a race of some sort, depending on the distance, yeah, you may need to run five days a week, however. If you're a long time listener to the podcast, you know, I run ultra marathons. Ultra marathons is a distance. Uber, 26.2 miles. 26.2 miles is a marathon. Ultra marathoners. We need to do a lot of mileage because we are running 30, 40, 50, 60, 80, a hundred miles plus that is a lot of time on feet. And even myself now looking at this two week vacation, I didn't run five days a week. I didn't run six days a week. I. I ran, I'm trying to think here. Four times, maybe five times. The entire two weeks does not mean it was like, oh, I can slack off, you know, whatever. The schedule just didn't allow it. When there was a high travel day, there wasn't much moving. So when, when we think cardio, cardio can be walking, running, spinning, family activities, it is moving the body, swimming, dancing, et cetera. I'm sure you pop on any sort of social media app and. Check out a fitness influencer or another trainer, and they might be like, zone two training. That's all you should do. Zone two training's bad. You should only be doing sprint intervals. You shouldn't be doing sprint intervals. Study state is where it's at. Okay? It gets all confusing. You need it all. And as an avid runner who spends a lot of time running, and I do strength training and mobility and recovery and nutrition, but as someone who who trained for long endurance races, my cardio training is a culmination of walking, hiking, running, spinning, and family activities. It is backed primarily with a run training program because I am training for a sports specific event that only includes running now ultra marathoning. Full confession. Yes, there are times you are hard hiking, you are, you know, walking extremely purposeful because I'm not someone, I'm not elite who is going to be running a full on hundred miler. So that is also part of training your body to do that. For this individual, they were told running five days a week is how you stay fit. That is untrue. For most of my clients. Walking is what they do now, and some do spinning, so they have a Peloton or another type of spin bike, or they go to a spin class and we incorporate that into their training. With walking, there are going to be some walks that are going to be relaxed, a stress producing walk, connect with others around you, whether you're walking with a friend, a partner, or chatting on the phone. And then there are some walks that are going to be more intentional. There is going to be a bit more of like a workout framework there. So it might be powering up hills, it might be picking up the pace for a certain amount of time so that we are getting. That, variation in intensity with that walk. It's the same thing that we would be doing if we were on a Peloton or a spin bike where you are picking up the pace and doing an interval workout. It's the same thing if we were doing an interval workout with running or in swimming where you are working on that variability so that we are creating cardio efficiency there. So all movement does count, yes, but we do want to make sure we have specified areas where it is focused on, whether it be speed intervals, hill intervals, and speed does not mean all out sprinting or an all out like super, super fast like walk. But we want to make sure that we are getting that heart rate spike up at least one to two times per week. Now the next question that I got pertains to mobility and recovery. This is something that I feel a lot of people can relate to and it says, I sit all day and at the end of the day I feel really stiff or halfway through the day I get up and I feel stiff moving around. How can I feel better? How can I reduce the stiffness? This is common when the body's at rest. Yes. Our body does stiffen at stiffen up. As we progress with the decades of life, our ligaments and tendons become stiffer, more rigid. They lose that pliability in them. And this is where mobility comes in. Where with mobility we can, with mobility, we can. Help the joints stay more lubricated. We prime those tendons and ligaments we allow for, the movement to be in there. This helps produce that achiness, that stiffness that we tend to feel either getting up in the morning or if. After a long period of sitting, think about like a long car ride. I did plenty of that on my vacation where there was just, oh, it might've been like a two and a half, three hour bout in the car, and you get up and you feel a bit stiff. When you're on a road trip, there's some standing mobility you can do. But in this case, if you are someone who has a job in which you are sitting. A lot during the day. There's a couple things to mitigate it just within the constraints of your day. So the first thing is, if you have a sit to stand desk to be able to stand at some points when you're working and then sit at some points when you're working, this changes up how the body is positioned throughout the day. This kind of goes back to cardio, if you have a walking, the ability to put a walking pad underneath your desk if you have a sit to stand desk, so when you're standing, maybe get some easy walking into it. I would really encourage with that head that if we can prop up the. A laptop or the desktop screen so we're not bearing our chest down and our head is looking down at the screen and that it's more er, er ergonomic, so that we are looking a little bit more straight on while we are doing our work. I do understand that may not be practical, but if you do have a stand desk and a walking pad that you wanna incorporate in for some more movement, be mindful that. Our head creamed down in that position can create some tension in the neck and we just need to add some mobility there so that we don't have a cranky neck with that positioning. Mobility is really great in the morning. If your morning can accommodate that, it's not the end all be all. Mobility is also great in the evening if you have the ability to do it one or the other or some days on both when you know you have more stiffness in the body. Fantastic. Do that in all my YouTube channel, there's a link in the show notes. There are some mobility routines on there that you can use. So I do recommend two to three mobility sessions per week. It doesn't have to be a long session. It can be 10 minutes, it could be five minutes, and you can do it around your kids. In fact, one of the things as we head into the school year, I tend to do mobility, not all the time, but one of the pockets of time in busy evening schedule that I find helps me not only address what I need after a long day training clients, or there are days where I am desk bound and. I feel the aches and the stiffness in my body is when my kids are doing homework and when they have questions, they're sitting at the kitchen table, I'm in the family room, and I'm able to do some mobility stretches. This is where it does play a piece in the whole string training, cardio picture as well. It all compliments each other. Now, I didn't get so many questions about recovery, and recovery is a big thing and I've talked, several. Podcast on how to get rest and recovery. But the one thing I'll just say here in mobility plays into this is doing a mobility routine at night can really help set your body up for rest. It can help, clear the mind. You can incorporate some breathing, some box breathing with it. It can help just decompress at the end of the day and allow for you to get in a better. State of mind to prepare yourself for sleep nutrition. One of the questions I got in here, and I really do feel it is fantastic for this time of year is how do I eat well with kids' schedules and life chaos? That question comes up time and time again. So there's a lot of tips out there. And the way I view nutrition, and we're gonna kind of start as broad range and bring it into answering this question is, let's start with this. There are no bad foods out there. However. The foods that we want to, and if you've heard the 80 20 rule, the foods that we wanna consume 80% of the time and is the more nutrient dense foods. Those foods are fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grain. They're not listed in any hierarchy order. Those are the 80% area. The 20% are the less nutrient dense, the ones that, tend to be, lower on the nutrient scale, so I'm gonna throw this out. They tend to be more, quote unquote old term, but a perfectly normal term junk food. Okay? Is junk food bad? No. There are no bad foods out there. There are no foods that you need to restrict. Completely with the exception, and these are my rules here and a lot of my good friends who are registered dieticians do agree with this as well, is the food you really wanna avoid are the ones that are expired, spoiled, moldy. Those are the ones we don't want in our diet. Number two, you want to avoid foods you just don't like for me. And this is a whole food. It doesn't matter if it's a whole food. I don't like chickpeas. However, the exception there for me is I do enjoy hummus. I will eat hummus, but I don't like roasted chickpeas. And then number three, foods that you have an allergy or a sensitivity to. You don't need to eat them, like especially please don't eat foods you're allergic to. Then the fourth one is religious reasons you are abstaining from certain food groups,. Those are the only foods you need to avoid. The other foods, they all serve the purpose. If we're focusing on that, and I do recommend focus that bulk of your food is at 80% whole food or whole nutrient dense foods, and the 20% is filled in with the less nutrient dense kind of junk foods does not mean you have to have that 20% every single day. But if we look in a seven day period that. 80% of your foods that you are eating and your family is eating should be in that whole food, nutrient dense category. And then 20% in that, the term we grew up, junk food category. We wanna focus on simple meal prep. When we think, or when I mentioned meal prep to clients, oftentimes it's met with the thought process of I need to cook every single meal, have it measured out and put into Tupperware containers or a mason jar. These were ideologies that are probably still out there and maybe some people practice. And if that works for you and you have the time to do that, fantastic. Stick with it. Find the system that works for you. So I'm not here to bash that system, but that is a system that was mainstream when a lot of my clients were going through their teens and their twenties, and maybe even early thirties. So it became the gold standard of meal prep. However, that is not the only way to meal prep when you have a chaotic life. When you're in the thick of the kids' activities and a two parent working household we wanna simplify. We wanna create a simple system that is repeatable, that we are getting the 80% whole food. And yes, I'm gonna keep saying the 20% of non nutrient dense foods can be in there. They don't have to be. But I do find allowing some of it does help and it teaches trust and responsibility with those. Less nutrient dense foods tend to be more hyper palatable, meaning you, crave them more. You consume more in one setting. So with simple meal prep things I focus on with that is create. Themed days, so in my household, Sundays, I tend to batch cook, cook, double the dinner because Mondays tend to be our crazier day all around from just the start of the week. To the activities, et cetera. Mondays tend to be our day where there's not a lot of time in the evening to cook meals. So I and my family is okay with eating the same thing that they ate the night before. So I batch cook that meal. If your family's not okay with eating the same thing that they ate before, the same, like having the same dinners two nights in a row. But batch cooking works for you. Save it for a Tuesday or whatnot. Or, a non-consecutive day to have that meal. Tuesdays are always, taco Tuesday does not mean we have the same style tacos. There's many variations in tacos. There's many different ways to get. A lot of nutrient dense foods in tacos. Wednesday tends to be more of a traditional dinner where there's a lean protein, two vegetables and a whole grain. Thursdays, my husband cooks, he cooks the same thing every single week. That's his deal. And then Fridays are pizza. Friday and then Saturdays I tend to have a little bit more fun cooking'cause we tend to have more time. On those days. And then like I said, we're right back into Sunday. So with those meals, I know what my family likes. We buy pretty much the same things every week. Sometimes I spice it up with a little bit different, and that takes the guesswork out of what's for dinner. Now when you are dealing with, and I'm in the same. Struggle too, where you have practices that go till, five and then another child who might have practice starting at five. And then, it's that meme that tends to float around that. It's like we're either eating at 4:00 PM or 10:00 PM So what do you do there? There's a couple ways you can split this and. So when we have these days where divide and conquer, just eating in the car. What I focus on then is I look at what the meal would be, either I do have the flexibility. I work from home, I do control my schedule where I will either cook the dinner earlier and. Package it up so that whatever kid is splitting a meal, and maybe it's all of us, we all have that there. And then the kid, child and adults or whoever is in that weird area where maybe their practice is during the traditional dinner time hours, five to 7:00 PM ish. They can eat a little bit before. And then they can eat after practice. So it's right there with them. Another way you can do that is having, nutrient dense snacks so that they're getting that, good fuel food in their body to help push them through the practice so they're not running on empty How I do that in some of our staples with. The, snacks are, and these are the shortcuts, like I love the Kodiak brand and I get their Kodiak mix,, from co Costco. I think it's their, I forget what the actual title is, but it's, I think, their, um, pancake mix. And I use the recipe on the back for their protein muffins. It's fantastic. It takes like 15 minutes or less. I've gotten a down pat. I pretty much have the recipe memorized. I throw it all in one bowl on Sunday night., And then I will throw in frozen fruits in it. You don't even have to thaw out the fruits. That's how crazy it is. It's like just throw in cherries or throw in blueberries, or I throw in a mix of blueberries and cherries. I will make,, two dozen of them. I use the silicone, cupcake. Wrappers or muffin wrappers, whatever you wanna call'em. I put them right in easy cleanup. And I just drop them in and I cook them alongside of the dinner that we are having on Sunday night they're right there. Kids can grab them it is. It's got protein, it's got some fruit in it. And then I'll also have them pair it with, you know, a vegetable or another fruit, snack idea is I made like, power balls and I use my food processor and I'm throwing in cashews and dates a little cocoa powder to, for like giving it that rich, chocolatey taste. But there's essentially the sugar, the sweetener is from the dates and a little mint in it, and it is so yummy. The kids love it. There's a couple other ingredients that go in there, but I, roll them all up and they absolutely love'em. So they're getting a little bit more nutrient dense snack in there. Meal prep, look at your whole week plan for your busiest day. Understand that maybe a batch cooking will have to happen and. When you are incorporating these recipes in, I strongly encourage, don't try any new recipes during the week. Reserve that for and for me, it typically is a Saturday where there's more time, and I will try and see if this is a crowd pleaser. It does take a little bit of trial and error to put together a themed meal system, especially around dinner. But really look at like what are the things your family likes to eat? What are things you can cook quickly?, And then build around that. Now in the event that you need to go out to eat, it is not the worst thing in the world. Okay. There may be a time, and maybe you're sitting there being like, well, Tuesdays and Thursdays. There is absolutely no way that I can batch cook meal prep for those days. It's just not humanly possible. Fantastic. Here's what we can do those Tuesdays and Thursdays, those takeout meals, that is part of your meal prep, your meal plan. What this then will look like, whatever restaurant you are going to, or maybe in Southeast Pennsylvania where I'm located, Wawas are big. If you're going to a Wawa or we also have Wegman's here where they have a lot of grab and go options for meals. If you are going through a store, a mini mart, a drive through, this is where we do the 80 20 rule. And I feel like, well, McDonald's is only 20. Okay. Well that's where we look at the whole week. We want 80% of your food to be nutrient dense food throughout that seven day period, 21 meal week. And then 20% of that can be, or has the option of being a little less non nutrient dense food. And so that would be two meals, and with that really tune into your hunger. How hungry are you? Maybe not supersize it, maybe you know. Swap out. With a salad and have a burger and salad or look at it and be like, I'm gonna eat the burgers and fries. Because I mean, when I go to a McDonald's I tend to just get cheeseburger and I guess now the smallest size they have is medium. I never finished my fries'cause I'm like, the cheeseburger fills me up and like I'll have some fries. Look at it as that is part of your meal plan. Maybe it's in our area. There is a fantastic business, women owned business who does meal prep and has, meals that you can pop in the freezer. Maybe it's looking into something like that. Again, I do understand budgetary constraints. I respect that, but there are ways to get that nutrient dense foods in there that are grab and go. Some may require a little bit of prep, but. The other alternative is being frustrated that all you're doing is spending time in a drive-through window and feeling miserable because you don't have the food that sets you up for success. That's what I would say there. I encourage you if you have questions about any of this. If you're like, Hey, wait, can you explain this more message, the podcast? The other thing is get on my email newsletter. I don't have time to spam. I have told you I have one woman show. I've got a lot going on. That does not mean I will not reply and that you should not message me. You can absolutely message me, but in regards to my email. I'm not going to spam your inbox personally. I can't stand spam, so don't worry. I will not spam you. So hop on that newsletter. The link is in the show notes. It is inevitable. Life is going to throw you curve balls. It, it just is what it is that's part of life. In order to prioritize your health, it's becoming, adaptable and flexible with keeping the principles, the basics, the make sure we are strength training, removing our body. We're having that mobility there. And then we are eating for the most of the time, nutrient dense foods. I didn't get into water. There are some more aspects to it, the sleep and that. But not to overcomplicate it. You don't need crazy intense systems You can do workouts in a short amount of time. We can find ways to move our body in and around our day, as well as getting that mobility in there to ease some of that stiffness, the achiness that builds up in our body and clear our mind to reduce that stress. While you're going through this, self-compassion is huge. It's understanding that just because you can doesn't mean you, you should. It's when those, the should is the could, the would've if I only am putting yourself, where you're comparing yourself to the ultimate goal or to somebody else's reality or a. Social media influencer out there whose only job is to, put up these complex things because they're trying to sell you something or some highly complex routine. Know that's not your life. You have to find out the system that works for you. You have to find out the processes that work for you, and this is something that I focus on with my clients. I really try to focus on finding a plan, a workout routine, as well as we talk about the nutrition, we talk about the mobility, the cardio training. All of these things go into their plan and their coaching so that it works for them so that they start putting in the skills. To be flexible, to be adaptable, but they stay disciplined without the guilt and shame or the all are nothing approach because they understand what they can control, what they can't control, and they are in control of their health and I'm helping their them guide them in helping them troubleshoot. So planning does matter. Planning helps you keep what is a priority for you to help you thrive at the forefront. And it's backed with adaptability, and that is where success is. I'm gonna mention it again. If you want more tips, strategies, and just realistic approaches for building strength, staying active and eating well, especially as life gets busy, sign up for my newsletter. I share advice that you can use immediately. Things that I help, train my clients on. And you'll also get to hear more. Honestly, I love social media. I'm on it, but if you follow me on social media, I genuinely appreciate that follow. But as we know, it's a loud area email. I pop up in your inbox Tuesday at 11:00 AM every week, and you get it delivered right to you. Also, follow this podcast. This is another way that I can get directly to you, and if you've loved anything on this podcast or you found this episode or another episode, very helpful. Forward it to a friend because chances are they might find something that is beneficial for them. Alright, so. Before I depart, I hope you are having a wonderful rest of your summer, and if your kids are already back to school, I do hope this transition back to School is going smoothly. Like I said, message the podcast if you have any questions about this episode, and I look forward to see having you back here next Friday at 6:00 AM. 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. Road 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.