 Next question is from Leonza Peroni. I've been tracking and working with an online trainer for a while, but the constant tracking, measuring, and weighing has started to become an issue for my mental health. What are your suggested steps for someone who wants to continue to stay healthy, but also wants to transition into a more intuitive, less calculated lifestyle? Okay, so Adam always talks about something called what's your intended result or what's the intent? Desired outcome. Desired outcome, right? What is it that ultimately you'd like to achieve with your nutrition? And ultimately, I think I can confidently say that for most people or for everybody, the goal is to have a comfortable, stress-free, healthy relationship with food, where you eat healthy and you eat in a balanced way, where you can enjoy the occasional dinner out and pizza or drinks, but for the most part you eat in a way that's very healthy and you don't sit there and stress about it all the time. It's just a natural part of how you live. That's the goal, okay? That's where we all want to end up. Now, what you're stuck at is you are stuck at right before that, okay? So, I'm going to go through, I've talked about this before, but there's really four stages of awareness or learning around anything that you're trying to accomplish. And I'll go through them real quick, but the first stage is unconscious incompetence. You don't know what you don't know. This is where most, this is most people, by the way. Most people are here. They don't even know what they don't know about nutrition. They've heard a few things on the TV or on the internet, but they really don't know what they don't know. Then they pick up their first book or they listen to a Mind Pump episode and then they start to realize what they don't know. Like, wow, I really don't know a lot of stuff. That's the next stage, which is conscious incompetence. You're consciously incompetent, okay? The third stage is where you're stuck. The third stage is conscious competence. You have to, like, consciously think about what to do in order to eat healthy, okay? That's a great stage to get to. Terrible place to stay at. So, let's use something else. Let's forget diet for a second, okay? If you're listening to this podcast right now, you are breathing in a way that is unconsciously competent, okay? You naturally breathe. You don't have to think about every single breath, although maybe you are now because I mentioned it. Imagine if every time you walked or every time you breath, you had to consciously think about every step I took or every breath that I take. It would feel very much like you feel right now with your diet where you have to weigh and track and measure everything. Great place to transition from. Terrible place to be stuck in. This can become a stress in and of itself. It can also create a bad relationship with food itself. So, how do we move out of it? Very slowly. Here's what I recommend. Give yourself, right now, one day a week and call it your intuitive day. And your goal in that day is to ask yourself, how do I feel? What foods are going to best serve me? Am I really hungry? Am I bored? What feelings am I having around food? While I'm eating, I'm sitting down. I'm not distracted. I'm being very aware of the food. How does it taste? How do I feel afterwards? How do I feel before? And don't judge any decisions you make on that intuitive day. 100%, I guarantee it's going to resemble more of a cheat day at first. But as you continue to get used to this intuitive day, it'll become a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more healthy. Once you've mastered one intuitive day, don't track, right? Don't judge it. Once you feel comfortable with it and it starts to feel healthy, then you add another day and so on. And then eventually you have seven days a week intuitive. This doesn't mean you'll never go back to tracking. It just means now you're starting to figure out how to do this without having to track all the time. Now, that was a very sensitive approach and I think probably a good and we'll stick with that being the best answer. But I can't help but want to challenge a little bit of this because I want to know what a while means and I also want to know what is it doing to your mental health. Sometimes people get frustrated, clients would get frustrated when I'd asked them to track and I know we talk about that, you know, tracking also and weighing your food all the time can also be an eating disorder, right? But when I see that, I don't see the person who's trying to learn how to eat properly or learn what macros are. That's normally the competitor who has like been tracking and weighing for five years consistently and they don't know how to operate without doing that. They've attached themselves to that so much that they don't know how to move away from that. I don't see that as often in a client who just hired me and I'm trying to get them to learn what they're consuming on a regular basis. So when I hear something like, I've been training with an online trainer for a while. Well, what's a while? Two months, five months? Or we've done about three years he's had you tracking like that. If you've only been tracking for a month or two and you think it's affecting your mental health and you're ready to give up on it and you wanna go to intuitive eating you may not be ready for that yet. So I would caution you of thinking that it's creating some sort of mental issue with you because you're having to track right now and maybe you just need to continue on with tracking for a little bit until you learn, until here's what I would do with a client. If I can't put a plate of food down and you give me some idea of how much protein, carbs, fat and calories that plate is and you're completely clueless to it you still got some tracking to do in my eyes. You do, but I'll say this if you're already identifying that it's causing you undue stress and in issues you said mental health and you're identifying I don't like this relationship and developing with food. Yes, you probably and if it's only been a short time at some point you need to revisit it and see if you can get through it without feeling unhealthy but it's okay to take a break because here's the thing if you push through and you already have even if it's only a week and you're like oh my gosh I'm having this real unhealthy relationship with food that's developing and you're identifying that it's okay to take a break, gather yourself and then revisit it. Here's a couple tips. One, stop weighing yourself and stop focusing on aesthetic goals. Start there because sometimes they go hand in hand typically somebody who's constantly weighing themselves constantly looking in the mirror testing their body fat goes hand in hand with this stress over weighing and measuring food. Instead, maybe focus on performance a little bit. How strong am I in the gym? How good do I feel? How's my mobility? That might help. You might need to take a break for a couple of weeks. Go back to it with that attitude but Adam's 100% right. The only way you can get to intuitive eating is if you have knowledge of an awareness around food and some of the most basic knowledge around food includes calories, proteins, fats. I can't help but think of like the kid who's wanting to skip doing all the long form and learn how to do division. They just want to get right to the calculator. Give me the calculator. This is stressing me out too much to have to figure this out. I feel like too maybe this trainer kind of jumped them right into tracking versus like focusing on something that wasn't too foreign for them in terms of their lifestyle currently. So that may be a bit of a resistance that they're feeling now to where this is like so different than what I would normally do to where I could just introduce whole foods. I could just introduce like slowly ways to incorporate healthier habits versus all of a sudden now have to be so dialed, so measured with the way that I'm approaching this. That's a great point. That's an excellent point. And so I hammered this person first. Now I'm going to come back and defend you with the point that Justin's making that I would never start any client with if you're in your first month or two with me. We've talked about this on the show. I'm not making you weigh and measure and track and do all those things. We all were doing and we've talked about this on the show many times is I'm looking to introduce foods to you and I keep it simple. I'm going to be the one who like looks I might have you track for one week so I can get an idea of what you're doing. And then from that, I have a snapshot of your habits and behaviors and the foods that you're probably lacking. And then I'm going to tell you I want you to add something. So I might say eat just like you're eating but now what I want you to do is add you know a bowl of Brussels sprouts every single day or this and give you three or four different options and keep it very simple. That's all and then I'm going to add something else down you know three, four weeks down the road. So you know like this could also be the lack of experience coming from the trainer knowing how to work with you. So part of our job is to be able to work with all different types of people and if you're somebody who has a really hard time tracking you may not be ready for that yet. And so I would have a different approach in your defense without knowing you. So I'm going to I'm going to guess here but I think what might be a good approach for you if you want to try something different to start with if this kind of tracking isn't working for you. Try doing this. Try just hitting protein targets and avoiding heavily processed foods. That's it. Don't worry about calories, carbs, fats anything else. Just worry about I'm going to hit my protein target and I'm going to really try to avoid eating heavily processed foods start there. Usually what happens when people do that is their body self-regulates and they start to eat right amounts of calories heavily processed foods really encourage us to overeat and nine out of ten times when I have clients kind of cut those out their calories tend to fall right where they need to be.