22: Getting Fit Without Fad Diets: A Conversation with Michele Riechman
Michele Riechman is a personal trainer, yoga teacher, and health coach with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy. She helps women who have put themself on the back burner finally get in shape, fit back into their clothes, & optimize their metabolism without dieting.
You'll learn the foundational steps to achieving your health and fitness goals from a certified personal trainer, yoga teacher, and health coach Michele Riechman. From understanding the importance of starting small to discovering the power of self-talk, learn how to begin your health journey and finally make changes that last.
Plus, you'll receive exclusive access to discounted offerings of her online personal training program for a limited time. Get ready to transform your health with tips and advice from Michele Riechman.
In this episode we cover:
What does it mean to be all in or all out with your health?
How you will start your health journey today
How to get in shape, fit back into your clothes, and optimize your metabolism without dieting
Summary:
Michele Riechman is a personal trainer, yoga teacher, and health coach with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy. She helps women who have put themselves on the back burner finally get in shape, fit back into their clothes, and optimize their metabolism without dieting. In the recent episode of the HobbyScool podcast, she discussed how the all-in or all-out mentality on health is preventing people from achieving their goals.
Michele believes that people think they have to do a lot of things in order to stay healthy, like follow a diet or exercise for an hour a day.
However, she suggests that it's possible to start small and make progress over time. The first step can be as simple as having half the rice you normally eat or committing to five or ten minutes of exercise.
It's also important to keep in mind that it usually takes more than 21 days to form a habit. She advises people to be aware of their thoughts and talk to themselves like they would talk to a friend. If people are overwhelmed, her free metabolism webinar on her website can provide guidance.
For those who are looking for a more in-depth approach, Michele is offering a special deal. HobbyScool podcast listeners can get 30% off her online personal training for three months.
It's clear that with the right guidance, making changes to your health doesn't have to be overwhelming. The all-in or all-out mentality isn't the only way and starting small is the key to success. With the help of Michele, anyone can take the first step and start their health journey today.
Mentioned In This Episode
Where you can find Michele: Website
Michele's gift: Use the code hspodcast to save 30% of her online personal training for 3 months
Don't forget to join our wait list for the next HobbyScool online learning summit. Our summits are free to attend and you can be the first to know when the next summit launches by getting on the wait list here.
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Transcript:
[0:00:02] Dr. Destini Copp: And my special guest today is Michele Riechman. Michele is a personal trainer, yoga teacher, and health coach. With her doctorate in physical therapy, she helps women who have put themselves on the back burner finally get in shape, fit back into their clothes and optimize their metabolism without dieting. Miche22: Getting Fit Without Fad Diets: A Conversation with Michele Riechmanle, l I am so excited to jump into this topic with you today. It's one of my I'm very passionate about it. Also, can you tell the audience a little bit more about you and how you help people before we get into all the good questions that I have for you?
[0:00:41] Michele Riechman: Yeah, so I'm also a mom of four, so keeping my health and fitness really simple is important and that's what I'm passionate about. Sharing with other women, and especially with moms or busy entrepreneurs, is that you can get healthy and keep it simple. We tend to overcomplicate it. So I love helping moms do that and using all my pieces of my background to bring that together for them.
[0:01:07] Dr. Destini Copp: So today we're going to be talking about some tips to break the all in or all out mindset on your health. And I really want to ask you first, what does it mean to be all in or all out with your health?
[0:01:25] Michele Riechman: Yeah, so I think a lot of people, especially when it comes to our health, we think that we have to do a lot of things. We think we have to maybe follow a diet or we have to exercise for an hour a day or we have to be super restrictive and we either do all these things, prep all of our meals, or we give up. And then people give up and they get stuck. They set themselves up for failure and they don't even know what to do that they can sustain to get healthy. So really helping people to break that and that there can be lots of flexibility. You can work out for five or ten minutes. You can focus on just eating one meal healthy a day to get started and really breaking that mindset that you have to do everything and you have to do it perfectly.
[0:02:08] Dr. Destini Copp: And I love that. So the flexibility and just focusing on one thing, kind of like baby steps, if you would. Yeah, and just build upon that. So that is so very powerful. So let me ask you this. What is the first step someone should take when they want to start making changes to their health? Where would you suggest they get started?
[0:02:32] Michele Riechman: Yeah, perfect. So thinking of one to two habits and starting really small. So for example, we're thinking someone normally eats 2000 calories a day and they think that magic number 1200 calories a day is going to help them lose weight. That's a really drastic drop in calories and our metabolism actually doesn't like it. So we want to start small. So you could think of your nutrition. Is there one meal that maybe you could eat less of. So maybe you have a really big plate of rice with different things in it. So maybe you could have half the rice, add some veggies in. Or maybe you could just try to add three to five veggies in a day if you're not getting any. And the same thing with exercise. Could you just start with five or ten minutes? Could you commit to that? Most people when I say there are like, I could do five or ten minutes. And just imagine if you're consistent with that five or ten minutes, most days of the week, you're going to start to get stronger, you're going to breathe easier, you're going to feel better, you're going to gain muscle and you're going to start making progress.
[0:03:37] Michele Riechman: And when we start making progress, we're telling ourselves that we can do it. So even if it's just five minutes a day and you start making that progress, you believe you can do it, and then maybe you'll bump it up to ten or a little bit more. But starting with something small and narrowing in on just one or two things to do is what's going to create success and is going to be more sustainable and you could eventually add more things on, but it's sort of starting right where you are, keeping it small, keeping it easy. And I also want people to keep in mind that a habit usually takes more than 21 days. It's typically closer to a few months. So to really when we're trying to change something, we really need that longer time of a few months for it to become a habit so you don't have to think about this. So recently I was talking to one of my clients who's in my fitness membership and she said she has recently lost £5. And she's like, it was really just making these small changes. She's like, I wasn't even perfect. I would still have sugar or treats and these other things. But making these small changes and thinking about what she was doing and getting the support she needed made all the difference and it just became easy without doing anything drastic.
[0:04:54] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that, moving forward with the small changes and I didn't realize I always thought it took 21 days to change a habit, but you're saying it actually takes more than that, so that's something new. I just learned that, yeah.
[0:05:09] Michele Riechman: I mean, sort of think about different habits or things you've done in your life. If you do it for three weeks, do you always stay consistent with those? Do those stick as a habit? Usually not. We really need that a longer time period to make it a habit and make it more consistent.
[0:05:25] Dr. Destini Copp: So once someone starts with the small habits, making the small changes here and there, is there anything else that tends to come up that we need to be aware of?
[0:05:36] Michele Riechman: Yes, our thoughts. They tend to get in the way a lot. And when I'm talking to clients privately, they'll tell me their thoughts and how they're feeling. And we tend to feel a lot of shame around how things go. We're really negative. We're really hard on ourselves. So first, noticing what thoughts you have going on and what you're saying to yourself, because if you can recognize those thoughts and start to change those, when we're more positive and positive about ourselves, our hormones in our body actually change and our body functions a little bit better. So if someone is thinking, I can't do this, I'm not going to be successful, or they have a carton of ice cream and then they feel shame, they're not going to move forward. All those feelings and all those thoughts keep us stuck where we are. So allowing yourself grace, allowing yourself to start small, allowing yourself if you have a bag of cookies to be like, okay, I'm not going to feel bad about this, what can I do to move forward? So really capturing those thoughts, noticing what you're saying to yourself and giving yourself grace and also taking that time to figure out a plan going forward. Maybe notice what keeps coming up that you get stuck on journaling about it, talking about a friend, talking to someone and figuring out what you can do to move forward and talking to yourself like you would talk to a friend. A lot of stuff we say to ourselves we don't even recognize, and we definitely wouldn't talk to our friends like that. So just recognizing those thoughts going on.
[0:07:11] Dr. Destini Copp: I think inevitably we're all going to have setbacks. We're all going to eat that carton of ice cream maybe that you talked about or eat more than our fair share of cookies or overeat at dinner or whatever. How do we deal with setbacks like that? What would you recommend?
[0:07:29] Michele Riechman: Yeah, so first is know they're going to come because I think a lot of people start something, they get a setback, and then they give up. So knowing that struggles and setbacks are going to come in our health because seasons change, maybe we have kids, maybe we have jobs, maybe we get sick, there's going to be something that's going to come up and have a plan for that and be able to work through it. So recently I was talking with a client, and she was just really struggling with eating junk food. So for one week, we just had her notice what was going on. She didn't have to change her eating. She just sort of wrote down how she was feeling before and after without trying to change anything. And she pieced together that it was her main thing was physical and emotional exhaustion. So what we're working on is she's creating a pause for herself, a five minute pause, and she's just implementing some things that will be helpful to her in that five minute pause. So then she can choose something better. So we're creating a plan, she's creating support for herself and she's really getting to the problem of what's wrong. So she's not necessarily trying to fix the end result of not eating the junk food. She's working through the harder stuff first so that it becomes more successful.
[0:08:49] Dr. Destini Copp: And I like that kind of digging underneath to figure out what's causing her to do the behavior that she doesn't want to do. So I love that. Yeah, we've talked about a lot today and I believe you also have a free gift for us to help us put some of these pieces in place. Can you kind of walk us through that?
[0:09:11] Michele Riechman: Yeah. So if you head to my website on my freebies page, you will find my freebies there. And one great resource to walk you through these different pieces is I have a metabolism webinar, and it talks about it from the nutrition aspect and the fitness aspect, but in a way that keeps it back to these. Ideas of keeping our habits small, starting small, noticing what's going on so that your body can work better, that the hormones can work better, that you can feel better and you can do it in a way that feels good for you.
[0:09:43] Dr. Destini Copp: I love that. We'll make sure that that link is in the show notes so they can get that training for you. Any last minute tips before we wrap it up here?
[0:09:55] Michele Riechman: Yeah, just another tip would be don't sabotage yourself when you're working on your health. It's going to be a long process. And personally, I've been working on my health for 15 years and you just do things differently at different times and you are right where you are, but you have to make a change to get a different result. So you have to be willing to come in and try something. It doesn't have to be hard, it can be something small. But if you want a different result, you have to do that. And our health is so important because it affects our whole life. It affects the way we show up in our family, our business, just being able to go out places and enjoy family or friends.
[0:10:34] Dr. Destini Copp: Now, Michele, I'm going to make sure that the link is in the show notes so people can find you. And I also believe you have a special deal to share with the audience.
[0:10:44] Michele Riechman: Yes. So for any of the listeners, they can use the Code HS podcast and you will get to save 30% on my online personal training for three months. So not only will you get started, you're going to have that three months there so you can actually start to stay consistent and make some changes. And all this is done online and it's done at your own time, too. So I'm able to customize workouts and habits and everything for people to make it affordable and to make it easy for busy people to do.
[0:11:15] Dr. Destini Copp: So thank you. Michele, we so much enjoyed chatting with you today. And so thank you for sharing all that wonderful information for us in the audience. I will make sure that all of those links from the show notes in that coupon code so you can reach Michele.
[0:11:32] Michele Riechman: Perfect. Thanks so much for having me.
[0:11:34] Dr. Destini Copp: Thank you.