 Our next caller is Caroline from Colorado. Hey Caroline, how can we help you? Hi, I recently finished running anabolic and I tried to be in a calorie deficit for the last half of the program. But toward the end my nutrition fell pretty inconsistent. I'm in college so it's kind of hard to stay on track all the time. And right now my goals are more centered on strength and mobility as well as just like figuring out what to do with my nutrition. I have a history of disordered eating so I kind of realized that the whole like cut bulk approach is probably not the best for me. So I guess I just wanted to ask you guys what your advice is for where to go from here in my workouts as well as how to like reign in my nutrition when everything feels all over the place. Very, very, very good question. I'm going to ask you a few more questions Caroline. Just get more information from you. What do you notice when you put a lot of focus on your nutrition? Do you find yourself swinging strongly from end to end? In other words, you focus on it and then you go off but you go off in a big way? Yeah, definitely. Okay, so the advice I'm going to give you may sound counter-intuitive but in my experience with situations like yours, I think this might be the best thing. I think you should not focus on your nutrition. Now that doesn't mean you're not going to try to eat healthy and all that kind of stuff. I mean take the magnifying glass off your nutrition, stop focusing so much on it and instead I want you to train and focus on strength. And when it comes to nutrition, I want you to bring awareness to how the food makes you feel. So try to eat in ways that improve your strength and your health. And that's about all the focus you should place because in a situation like yours, the more you focus on nutrition, the more elusive it's going to get. The more you start to develop this bad relationship with food. Caroline, do you own our intuitive eating guide? I don't. Okay, that's a must. So I'll have Doug ship that over to you. And then my other recommendation because you did say strength and mobility. You could run anabolic again but my recommendation would be to move on to performance which is the natural progression from anabolic which is heavily mobility focused. And there's a lot of unique exercises that a lot of people are not familiar with. So take your mind off of the nutrition stuff, focus more on strength and learning new exercises. And then doing the mobility days on your off strength days and then intuitive eating as the main focus of any sort of nutrition focus at all. I think would serve you really well. Yeah, Caroline, do you think that you're somebody worth taking care of? Absolutely. Okay, that's what I want you to focus on. Okay, so imagine if you had a child or a friend that you were taking care of. When you're taking care of that person, you're not going to be overly strict, but you're also not going to be overly indulgent with them, right? So, you know, like I have kids and sometimes I let them have cookies and but a lot of times I don't because it's not good for them. Sometimes it is good for them to have one. Other times it's not. And that's because I care about them and I take care of them like I care about them. That's the focus I want you to have with your nutrition. I don't want you to focus on calories, macros. Oh my gosh, I ate a cupcake yesterday. Oh, I ate too much today or I didn't eat enough. Putting too much focus on nutrition is probably not a good idea for you right now. Instead, focus on how you feel, taking care of yourself. And then if you need to place your focus on something, focus on your performance in the gym. More often than not, it'll point you in the right direction because it's hard to eat in a way that makes you unhealthy and improve your performance. So if you need to focus on something, focus on performance and that should help. And then of course, taking care of yourself and that should start to direct you in the right way. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys so much. No problem. Yeah, that's the irony of having issues with food is that you think, oh, I have to deal with these food issues. Let me focus on them even more and it makes it way worse. Yeah, I kept thinking because I remember my college experience and I was going to ask her about the dorm life and having to eat at the cafeteria all the time. But then that's going to just reiterate the focus of just trying to scramble and figure this whole nutrition thing out when I think your advice was great in terms of relieving her of that stress. Well, it's so nice that we're getting questions where people are honest enough to admit this. Yes. Because honestly, most of my experience with clients, you don't get that the first encounter. When you first meet clients and they're telling you about their goals, it's very surface. You rarely get somebody to be like, oh, by the way, too, I have a little bit of an eating disorder or a challenge there. They don't even mention that normally. It takes like a year of training someone before they open up. Yes. So it helps us be able to advise better because not knowing any better, I would tell this person, oh, let's start tracking food and let's see where your calories are and start getting them to focus on that. But it's important that for people that are listening, I know we talk a lot about and I talk a lot about how much I think tracking calories and food is so important to learning. But there's always an exception to rule. This is an exception to rule. When you have somebody that has had eating disorders in the past, that could be the worst thing to actually advise them to. Yes. And again, I want to make sure I say this on the podcast very clear. Obviously, none of us are therapists in that field. If you're listening and you're somebody that really has an issue with nutrition in that particular way, the best thing you could do is work with a therapist or counselor who is experienced and qualified in that arena. But again, it is very interesting. It's one of those things. It's like, you know, putting hyper focus on nutrition causes more anxiety and stress around nutrition, which then causes you to do the very things that you're worried about in the first place. And what it looks like is I'm obsessively strict and then I go so far off I hate myself. And it's this in and out terrible relationship that continues to spiral and get worse. And it's either I become, you know, so ridiculously strict and anal about my nutrition that I lose my friendships and I lose myself, or I go in so bad of the opposite direction that I cause myself health problems. So oftentimes just taking your focus off of that, placing it on something else and then just constantly thinking how can I take care of myself. A lot of people are unaware they have this issue too. Oh yeah. And as they've seen success, you know, just because you track your way, you measure, do these things and you have a streak of six months of getting in great shape doesn't mean this potentially isn't a problem for you also. You know, so I think that's what's tough is a lot of clients that you get are unaware that they even have this on or off the wagon type of issue. They think that's just how that how this process goes. Either I'm focused on a goal and I have a wedding or I have Vegas in a couple months and I'm dialed in and then and or I'm off. And that's a lot of times the problem.