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Fitness Trackers and Listening to Your Body

Recently I decided to welcome back a wearable fitness tracker into my life after a decade-long break from one. This topic brought up a lot of questions for me. While the decision to stop or start wearing a tracker is very personal, I want to bring to light a few of the questions that have surfaced for me in the hopes that they can help you out when making this call for yourself. 

Listen To Your Body podcast 342 Fitness Trackers and Listening to Your Body

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Key Takeaways

If You Are Considering Stopping, Or Starting, Using a Fitness Tracker:

  1. Examine the pros and cons of fitness trackers and how they play into your personal relationship with your body
  2. Find a tracker that suits your lifestyle and provides you with the data you are curious about
  3. Keep listening to the signals of your body as your guide to what your body needs

Getting Curious About Your Body Patterns

It took me over ten years to get to the place where I am confident enough to listen to my body signals to be curious about the patterns and trends that a wearable fitness tracker can provide.

How my recovery is correlating with my heart rate variability, menstrual cycle, and fatigue are incredibly interesting to me. The key is to not be so reliant on these numbers that you stop listening to your body and only listen to the numbers on an app.

It’s All About Balance

Wearing a fitness tracker is an incredibly personal decision and depends on your ability to combine the data from a tracker with the signals your body is sending you. While most of us don’t have the same relationship to data, such as heart rate variability, as we do to the numbers on the scale, it is still something to be sensitive to.

An app can never tell you everything that is going on in your body. The question is, does the data from a fitness tracker help you reinforce the way your body feels, or distract you from it?

How do you feel about your relationship with fitness trackers? Do you believe they are diet culture? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.

In This Episode

  • Why I decided to start using a wearable fitness tracker again (4:48)
  • The pros and cons I see when using a fitness tracker (9:10)
  • How to deal with fitness trackers if you have an all-or-nothing personality (20:38)
  • Which tracker I am using currently and why I personally like it (23:42)
  • Explore if fitness trackers are in fact a part of diet culture (29:04)

Quotes

“I am not in an all-or-nothing situation with training anymore, I am able to really listen to my body, but I am curious about bringing some sort of fitness tracker back into my life.” (8:37)

“I am not here to present my argument necessarily for or against, but if it is something that you have kind of been thinking about, maybe these will be some interesting points.” (14:34)

“There is a tendency to become too reliant sometimes on external trackers at the expense of also developing a sense of what your training and recovery feel like overall so that you get to know your body a lot more intimately.” (19:27)

“If you have started looking at data, do you sort of tune out what your body is telling you? Or are you looking where they overlap and using both to make decisions? Or can one help you make decisions about the other? Can having data help you connect to how your body is feeling? In some cases, potentially yes, but it is really about you individually.” (23:20)

“I don’t think fitness trackers are in the same league as the scale and tracking body weight. However, could they potentially become an issue for some people? Potentially. So this is where it is really important to know yourself.” (32:18)

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Fitness Trackers and Listening to Your Body FULL TRANSCRIPT

Steph Gaudreau

Recently, after a decade’s long break from any kind of wearable tracker, I’ve welcomed one back into my life. And it’s really gotten me thinking, what are the pros and cons of wearable trackers? First of all? And second of all? Are they diet culture?

On this episode, I’ll be exploring those questions covering some of the pros and cons, sharing the wearable tracker that I have right now and why I really like it, and hopefully giving you some food for thought so you can answer this question for yourself.

The next evolution of harder to kill radio is here. Welcome to the Listen To Your Body podcast. On this show, we’ll explore the intersection of body, mind, and soul health, and help you reclaim your abilities to eat and move more intuitively, hear your body’s signals, and trust yourself more deeply.

I’m Steph Gaudreau, a certified intuitive eating counselor, nutritional therapy practitioner, and strength coach. On this podcast, you can expect to hear expert guest interviews and solo chats that will help you deepen your trust with food movement, and your body. Remember to hit the subscribe button and share this podcast with your friends and loved ones. Now on to the show.

What is shaking my gumdrop? Thanks for being here on the podcast this week and hanging out with me as I explore this question about wearable fitness trackers. It is a question that has not only come up in my mind, as I shared in the intro because I’ve started using a wearable fitness tracker again after a long, long break. And I’ll explain why that is. It’s also a question that comes up from my clients and my private coaching clients are often working on their relationship with exercise, and wearable trackers for some of them or something they’ve decided to move away from because they feel it does not suit their current relationship with exercise to continue. I can’t promise that in this episode, I have an exact, clear-cut answer for you. Because much like many of the things I talked about on this podcast, it depends. It’s very personal. And at the same time, it makes me think and ask this question. How do wearable trackers potentially play into diet culture? How can they be more of an objective tool? And how do you determine for yourself if and when it’s time to stop using one or potentially try one out. So I hope by the end of this podcast, you have some things to think about. The first thing before we do anything else is to remind you that if you want to get on the waitlist for my new group nutrition coaching program if you can’t work with me one on one, this is your opportunity and the last podcast, I gave the wrong link which I realized too late and I had already submitted the audio so there’s a fairly good chance if you went to the link that I mentioned in the last episode, it didn’t work. And so if you want to get on the waitlist, this waitlist is just to hear more information. I’ve already started dripping out some emails writing some emails to talk about some of the backstories some of why this stuff matters who it’s for. There’s no official launch date yet, but you can get on that waitlist by going to bit.ly, that’s ly, so bit.ly/GroupWaitlist, G is capital in the group, W is capital in the waitlist. So bit.ly/GroupWaitlist, group capitalized, waitlist capitalized but if you want to make it super easy for yourself, head over to my Instagram, LinkedIn profile, just tap on that and you’ll see the link to the waitlist there. My apologies for getting that wrong. I went to the URL later on that I had said and I was like, Oh, this shit, this is not mine. So there you go. But you know what I said? I’m not going to stress about it. We’re not going to make the producer change it at the last second. So here we are. Okay.

So recently and I will say in the last three months. I’ve started using a wearable fitness tracker again, after a decade-plus long break and so we need to go back 10 years plus. So I used to be into endurance distance mountain biking. I used to race Xterra triathlons, I was doing all sorts of cardiovascular training, I was out riding my bike all the time. And I have used regular heart rate monitors for a long time while I was doing that and running. And then when I really started to get serious about racing bikes, and when I guess I knew that they existed, I ended up with a Garmin, which is for biking, it’s sort of a small display, and it attaches to essentially your handlebars. So when you look down, you can see all the stats, how far you’ve written, and your pace, and your heart rate and all of that stuff. So I did that for a really long time.

And of course, my relationship with exercise, as I talked about quite often on this podcast was not the healthiest, what is healthy, we can debate that all day, but it definitely wasn’t serving me, I was over-exercising, I was definitely under-eating, and really focused on getting as small and as lean as possible at all costs. And, you know, recently I wrote about this in an email, I consider myself pretty lucky that I didn’t have more serious health implications from this period of really low energy availability, riding and training so hard and all the time and not recovering well and not eating enough.

Suffice to say, when I left the endurance sports world behind, I really, walked away from a lot of the things that I was doing that were feeding this unhealthy relationship with exercise. And one of the things that I decided to stop doing was using any kind of heart rate, monitor, or tracker. And of course, I moved to strength training and the necessity to track like distance and pace. And over time, you would when you’re running or riding a bike really fell away. Of course, I would write things down in my training journal and the weights that I was lifting and things like that. But I moved away from any kind of tracker in that way. So no more heart rate. HRV wasn’t really a thing that people were able to see on their trackers back then I think a lot has changed in a decade.

So suffice to say, I went through this period of over 10 years, where I continued to exercise and train, even at the competitive level, and really had to get to know my body a lot better. And that has served me really, really well for the last 10 years, it was more of a curiosity thing that brought me to wearing a fitness tracker again, now I’ve never had a step counter, I’ve never had anything like that. But for my clients, I often hear that even their Fitbit or their step tracker has become a bit of an all-or-nothing situation.

And through the last 10 years and finding a different and more kind relationship with food and exercise has really brought me to a place where I felt you know what, I’m not in an all or nothing situation with training anymore. I’m able to really listen to my body. But I’m curious. I’m curious about bringing some kind of a fitness tracker back into my life. And so that’s ultimately why I did specifically I really wanted to look at patterns and trends as they related to things like heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and an overlap with my menstrual cycle. Now there are trackers that all kinds of integrating with different apps. And I’m not going to necessarily go into that today.

But I’m going to kind of share some of the pros and cons that I see from fitness trackers, and then some of the bigger picture questions that I’m thinking of. So the first thing that I like is that a tracker fitness tracker is some is objective data. And you can argue that the scale gives you objective data too. However, most of us don’t have the same kind of relationship with our heart rate variability or our resting heart rate. As we do with the scale. There’s a whole fuckload of judgment, a whole crap ton of diet culture II stuff that comes along with the scale right our worth our value, our weight, all that stuff. And from everyone I’ve ever talked to about this and myself included. They don’t have that same kind of relationship with like, oh my gosh, my HRV is low today. Oh, this means, something really bad about me as a person. Now, theoretically, that could happen. But from what I’ve seen, and I’ve used tracking devices in the past, but the one I’m using currently, I really like that I have some, just some data that I can look for the bigger patterns, I can look for the bigger patterns in my recovery, like, Oh, I pushed it a little bit harder at jujitsu today, like, Huh, I mean, the second half of my cycle where hormones are higher, I’m not recovering as well, I’m feeling pretty crispy here on the edges, that sort of thing.

So if anything, I’m using it currently to reinforce how my body feels, not the opposite way around. So to say, Oh, I’m feeling pretty. I’m feeling pretty rundown or pretty tired or pretty crispy around the edges today? And then I’ll see the data and I’ll think Yeah, okay, well, that can partially explain why. So it is numbered, it is numerical data. And generally, you’re going to see some kind of patterns over time emerging. As I mentioned already, HRV, or heart rate variability is something I didn’t have access to before. With Garmin, maybe that’s changed. But at the time, 10 years ago, when I was using that, or my polar heart rate strap, you know, that you would like you would lick and put it on, you know, under your boobs or around your chest.

Everybody who’s ever used a heart rate strap can probably relate to that where you’d like to lick your fingers, or like you had to get it wet first. Anyway, I feel like that’s just a rite of passage. But heart rate variability is something I’ve really never seen for myself. So I was really curious about how what mine’s like, you know, how does it correlate to how recovered I am. And so if you’re not aware, heart rate variability is essentially a measurement in milliseconds of the time between your heartbeats. It’s a whole thing. But here’s it in a nutshell, for, you know, just the general crowd to understand, when you are stressed, your heart rate variability tends to go down. So this could be psych psychological stress, physical stress, it’s when your sympathetic nervous system, that’s your fight or flight system is really activated, or there’s a lot more demand on it, essentially, your heart rate variability tends to decrease. So in general, overall, when you’re more stressed, or you’re less recovered, your heart rate variability goes down. When you’re more recovered, your heart rate variability goes up. So I was really curious to see for myself, what is this like, and I don’t have any, unlike the scale, I don’t have any preconceived notions, I’m not attaching my worth, to this metric. So that was one of the pros for me, was being able to really get in there.

And with the last, you know, five-plus years of data that I have, from my cycle to start looking for, how do these things potentially overlap? Where are there trends or patterns in my cycle, that I can see in the other data that this is collecting? Now, I don’t think it’s necessary to collect this kind of data to get in really interesting insights about your cycle. If you currently have a cycle, menstrual cycle. That is, there are lots of other ways that you can track things like your basal body temperature, you know, it will track your ovulation, sort of like Femtech is what it’s called overall. But there are tons of ways that you can track your cycle without having to use a fitness tracker. So just to say that you know, I was really interesting, really interested to see over time in the big picture. What are the trends that I can see with my training?

So I’m lifting a few times a week and doing jujitsu with my recovery, and any correlation to my menstrual cycle. So those are sort of the pros for me. And I’ll get into some specific pros of the tracker that I’m using in just a minute. Okay, so the cons to this, if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, Oh shit, should I be using one of these things? First of all, I don’t, I’m not here to present my argument either necessarily, for, or against. But if it’s something that you’ve been kind of thinking about, maybe these will be some interesting points. First of all, no tracker can be completely accurate. So you could consider that a con, or downside, right? There’s always going to be some measure of the error in this, and it’s not 100%. So, you know, you can think about laboratory-based studies that are highly, highly controlled. I mean, we can talk about all sorts of things like VO 2 Max and like all sorts of stuff, and it can be really, really scientific and really controlled. Obviously, most of these trackers are being used in the general population, and they’re not going to come with a higher degree of accuracy.

Right. So it’s not something that can be 100% accurate. So we have to kind of go into it with that knowledge. The other con to me is that we can sometimes become reliant on metrics, too reliant on numbers, and not developing a sense over time of what our body feels like, no, obviously, for some people, there are some barriers to that for different reasons, which we have covered tons and tons on this podcast in the past.

But the way I’m thinking about it is it really took me 10 years, well, I don’t want to say it’s gonna take you 10 years, but I took a 10-year break from relying on any external data or metrics like resting heart rate, heart rate, HRV, that sort of thing. And in that time, I was really able to develop and become more aware of my body. And so here’s the, they can inform each other. I think that’s really important. Like one can inform the other. However, I’ll give you an example.

I could look at my data in the morning when I wake up, and it will say you’re in the green, you’re recovered, or whatever percentage of recovery it gives, or whatever unique algorithm or set of calculations the app uses to determine how recovered you are. There have been times even when that has been favorable, it’s been a favorable number indicates that I’m relatively or highly recovered. But in my body, I do not feel particularly recovered. And or there are certain aspects of, for example, fatigue, that I feel that the app can’t tell me, no app can tell you that. And here’s an example.

If I were if I do a really heavy session of, for example, deadlifts, I tend to have a kind of fatigue, that’s either more central nervous system fatigue, where it feels like my whole body is tired. Or if I’m not going super duper heavy, which I don’t often these days, and it’s more, moderately heavy, and I’m doing kind of a moderate number of reps, I will oftentimes feel localized fatigue and those muscles. So there are times where my whole body might feel fatigued.

And then sometimes there, it’s more localized to whatever lift I was doing. So sometimes it might be my upper body, sometimes it might be my lower body, there’s no way that an app is going to tell me that sometimes when I’m not super recovered, or like in the second half of my cycle, especially, I’ll pick up the barbell, and gosh, it just feels so much heavier than it should. That to me is a huge telltale sign that today is probably not the day to push it and go heavy.

Another example could be if you’re trying to do something that’s a highly-skilled, highly skilled lift, for example, maybe you’re trying to do some Olympic lifting, you’re trying to snatch or you’re trying to do some, I don’t know some other kind of gymnastics work or something like that. You might be more uncoordinated. And that’s an indication of where you are in your cycle if you have one or a different kind of fatigue that you might be experiencing. And that’s not going to show up on an app.

And so you decide to do something less technical. Without it really, you can still get a good training session, but it’s not necessarily it’s like today is not a good highest skill day, if that makes sense. So I think that there is a tendency to become either too reliant sometimes on external trackers at the expense of also developing a sense of what your training and recovery feel like overall so you get to know your body a lot more intimately. And then of course, for people that have more of an all or nothing personality, which is I would say 90% of my private clients and a lot of you out there listening to this podcast and in my Instagram community and in my on my newsletter I hear from so many people who are like I just am so all or nothing that you know, it’s hard for me to use something like a tracker fitness tracker to be objective because I look at that, and I just think I’m not doing good enough. And so then I give up. Whatever training I’m doing, I stopped lifting or I just say like, today is not a perfect day, I didn’t get 10,000 steps. So I’m or there’s no way I can get 10,000 steps. So I’m not doing anything.

And I’ve had those conversations with clients where we, most mostly, I helped them to kind of say, like, is this something you want to continue doing? And they’re like, you know what, I want to take a break. And so we kind of pull them back from that a little bit to explore where is the flexibility in this. So if you have a tendency for an all-or-nothing personality or an all-or-nothing relationship with food and exercise, this kind of wearable fitness trackers may not be something that’s serving you. And that’s really up to you to decide and ask those questions. So some pros again, you do get more objective data, you can look for trends over time. For me, specifically, I was really interested in seeing things like heart rate variability, and cons, right, you can become reliant on them, they’re not completely accurate to you know, 100% of a degree. And they also can feed into an all-or-nothing mentality. And here’s the catch 22. And why it’s really personal. If you’re still in the earlier stages of learning what listening to your body is about, and it is not just like, oh my god, like one day, you just like wake up and like, listen to your body.

It’s not that there’s why we’ve been talking about this for years on this podcast, it’s not. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy. But if you’re someone who is still developing this sense of what it is to, like, pay attention to your body signals that interoceptive awareness, you’re getting more familiar with those things, it may help you to have some more objective data to help you learn about your body and make decisions. On the other hand, having data or looking at patterns, or having individual numbers like this could mean that it makes it easier for you to stop listening to your body. You’re like, well, there’s the app set, I’m recovered the app set, I’m not recovered. And so I gave that example earlier of sometimes I will get like, Hey, you know, your, your, your this percentage recovered, or like 80%, recovered or 90% recovered. In theory, that would mean hey, to some people, I should just go all out. But when I check in with my body, I’m like, Oh, you know what, my legs are really fatigued today. Maybe I’ll stick to my upper body or maybe today is not a good day for me to train, I should take an active recovery day, that would probably serve my body better. So this is the sort of conundrum right? And so I think you have to kind of ask yourself that question.

If you’ve started looking at data, do you sort of tune out what your body’s telling you? Or are you looking to kind of where they overlap and using both to help you make decisions? Or can one help you make decisions about the other? So can having data helped you to connect to how your body’s feeling? In some cases? Potentially, yes, but it’s really going to depend on you individually.

Alright, so I’m going to finish this out by talking about the tracker that I have currently. And also this question of are these things diet culture? Because I think you being here listening to this podcast for as long as you have, you’re probably thinking, well, how is this different from weighing yourself, for example. So the tracker that I have is called whoop, w h. o p. And I’ll tell you a couple of the reasons why I personally like it. Now, what I’m not asking for is to get lots of messages about why this isn’t good, and yours is better or things like that. Obviously, I can’t try out every tracker on the market, but I’m just telling you what I’m using and why I like it, you might have one that you love, and that’s totally fine. I’m not here to say that. Those other words are complete shit and you should just change what you’re doing. This is just me sharing my experience. So what I like about this one is a couple of things. Compared to Garmin, which I used to have on the top two, not the top tube, the handlebars of my bike. I when you look at this strap, it’s a strap about the size of a wristwatch.

But there’s no display on it. None. There’s no display. So when I look at it, it’s just a plain strap. And you could draw the analogy that would be almost like a heartrate monitor where there’s no display. There’s no numbers that you can see. This is different from something like an Apple Watch. where an apple watch you have a face where it’s telling you numbers or sending you text messages, or whatever. So I personally like this because there’s no distraction. I can’t see while I’m doing exercise what the numbers are doing, which is important to me, because when I had a Garmin before, and I was racing bikes and training for all of that, I would oftentimes feel like, Oh, you know what, I’m tired, and I’m not feeling the best. But I need to push it because I need to get to this heart rate zone, or I need to get that calorie number higher, or whatever it was. So for me being able to see it in real-time, wasn’t the best. And that’s what I like about this. And there are others on the market like it the aura ring is another one that I’ve you know, I’ve seen before where it doesn’t actually have a display, but it feeds information into your app.

And, yes, you could look at the app in real-time. But to be quite honest, if I’m sitting there in between sets of squats, or I’m doing jujitsu, I’m not looking at my phone. So I’ll turn it on at the beginning, but then I can’t see what it’s doing. While it’s recording data. So I really, really like that, because it doesn’t cause me to feel like I should go harder to try to meet some kind of a metric if that makes sense. For jujitsu when I wear it because it is kind of it looks almost like a wristwatch situation, when you’re kind of going about your daily day, your daily days that you’re going about your day, they also have an arm strap or when I do it for jujitsu, obviously, we’re kind of you to know, doing all sorts of cuddle pajamas with each other, and my husband calls it. So there’s an arm sleeve that has a kind of foam around it so that it’s soft, and I don’t get hurt, and neither does my training partner. Because the actual piece that records that sort of like senses, the sensor on it is hard plastic on the outside.

So that’s what I really like about it, it’s sort of giving me after the fact what happened in and yes, you could sit there and look at the app in real-time, I just don’t do that. So I really like that, because it gives me sort of a log of what occurred without me having to stare at the screen or see it on my wrist or, or see it on a display in front of me.

And decide I’m going to like override how I’m feeling and just go balls to the wall pedal to the metal and go way harder than I’m feeling. So sometimes I’m at jujitsu, I’m rolling, I’m, you know, we’re sparring or whatever you want to call it. And I’m just like, you know what, I’m just gonna sit out, I’m feeling tired, not feeling as recovered, I’m gonna go light today, or whatever the case might be.

I’m not seeing the data staring at me and going like, Oh, my gosh, I have to get this higher. So I really like that. The other thing is to a lot of you have told me you like the ones that were you were on your finger. I don’t have that option with jujitsu. So that’s one of the reasons why I opted for the one that I did. But from what I understand they’re, they’re fairly similar. So that’s why I chose this specific one, sort of for the functionality of it. And this concept of, I’m not seeing the data like thrown in my face every second, if I choose to put my phone away, or put it over to the side, I’m not looking at it all the time.

So that’s what I really like about it. I also if you want to check it out, and you want to get a free month, you can check it out with my link join.whoop.com. Slash Steph G and if you can get a free month. So I do have that link. It’s an affiliate link, full transparency, but you can check it out and get a free month and see what it’s like. So the last question is our fitness trackers part of diet culture? and holy fuck, we could have a whole long conversation about this.

I’ve been noodling on this question. And I don’t have a specific quick answer of like, Oh my gosh, yes, obviously. Or like hell no, it’s just objective. Right? Right. It’s just like a scale. A scale is objective. It’s only your, your thoughts and your beliefs about the scale that make it a problem. My current thoughts on this are that yes.

So for some people, they probably don’t want to wear a fitness tracker for a variety of reasons, if they’re trying to improve their relationship with exercise, or trying to learn more about their body maybe. But, and I don’t think that fitness trackers, in general, are the same level of problematic as the scale or other things like oh, I just need to like burn more calories, like, you know, this sort of like, we pin everything on calorie counts. So the reason for that is that, to my knowledge, I’ve never heard anybody saying things like, you know what, I’m such a shitty person because my HRV is too low today.

On the flip side, the scale is something that a lot of us have a negative relationship with. And it ties into how our culture values humans based on their bodies, and the assumptions that we make about people’s health and well-being. And the fact that this scale cannot measure our entire health and well-being. So I think because of the intensity with which bodyweight becomes tied to worth and value and the disordered things that can happen around it.

I don’t see the scale and fitness trackers as being in the same league. When it comes to that now, can individual people certainly have a challenging and complicated relationship with fitness trackers? Sure. Much like I was sharing with you one of my clients who was like, Well, at this kind of at the start of my day, or by the middle of my day, if I know, I can’t get down to 10,000 steps, I just don’t try.

You know, I sort of like I’ve already ruined it. You know, you could argue all day, where did 10,000 come from? And like, is that the exact number and all sorts of stuff, but suffice to say the general gist of it was, if I can’t get all the steps I think I should be getting, then I feel like I’ve ruined it all. And I’m just not going to do any, that line of thinking is very common. And it is one where I help people, you know, in group programs and private clients, Sessions is like, can we work on making that more flexible? So I don’t think that fitness trackers are in the same league as things like the scale and tracking bodyweight.

However, could they potentially become an issue for some people, potentially? And so this is where it’s really important to know yourself, but overall, is collecting information like heart rate variability, resting heart rate? And, you know, potentially overlaying that with things like trends in your menstrual cycle? Is that inherently diet culture? I don’t think so. And that’s my current answer on it. But I’m open to hearing what you have to say. And I think this is a conversation that we can continue. And I’ll probably be posting a little bit more about it on Instagram, or at least bringing up the discussion in some other places because I think it’s important to consider different perspectives, and that there isn’t a clear-cut answer, at least from my perspective about that. So the long and short of that answer is, I don’t think so. But it’s definitely something to be taken on an individual basis, on an individual one-on-one basis for you, and thinking about your relationship with food and your relationship with exercise.

Alright, with that being said, we’re going to wrap up this show today. Thank you so much for being here. And joining me, it has been an interesting topic that I’ve wanted to cover for quite some time. And one more, I think there is still room to explore and continue the conversation. So make sure you send me a direct message on Instagram, you can share our thoughts there. You can also share it out on your Instagram stories, share this episode, tag me so I can see it. Definitely subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, you can get the show notes for this episode, including the link to join the waitlist for my upcoming group strength nutrition program. If you cannot work with me one on one on one because of time constraints or budgetary reasons like this is going to be your best shot to work with me in small groups. So if that’s something interesting to you, you want to learn how to feel your lifting, how to have more energy, how to perform better in and out of the gym, without obsessing about every single thing you put in your mouth. This is the program for you, we’re going to go through it all. It’s going to be amazing, and I cannot wait to send more details out to you. So go ahead and get on the waitlist. And if you do want to check out more about whoop, then you can do that with the link, join.whoop.com/StephG. Again, full disclosure, it is an affiliate link. But if you want to check it out for a month, and get that first month for free, then that link will do it for you. But if you’re not sure about wearable trackers and you don’t think it fits for you in your life, that’s totally fine too. I completely understand. Like I said it was a 10-year break for me and I’m enjoying at this point looking at some of the data and how it correlates to how my body feels and the messages that I’m getting from my body, my interoceptive awareness, other things like my menstrual cycle, and how all this is kind of painting the bigger picture. Thanks for joining me this week. I will be back next week with a guest episode. Can’t wait for that, so make sure you tune in then, and until then have an amazing week.

 

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Hi, I'm Steph Gaudreau, bs, ma, cissn!

Nutrition and fitness coach for women, Lord of the Rings nerd, and depending on who you ask, crazy cat lady. My mission is to help you fuel for more, not less: bigger muscles, strength, energy, and possibilities. We’ll do it with my signature blend of science, strategy…and a little bit of sarcasm.

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