In my most recent Women Emerging Fearlessly podcast episode, I spoke with special guest, Nicole Simonin.
Nicole’s specialty is helping women over forty lose weight for the last time, and in this episode we discuss the importance of your mindset when it comes to becoming fit and healthy, how weight training is “the fountain of youth,” how losing weight when you’re over forty is achievable, and so much more.
Nicole said that over the years of helping women lose weight for the last time, that she found that there was this missing piece - working on your mindset.
Enjoy the highlights of our conversation here:
Nicole said: Things change when we’re forty, and I’ve heard that things change, too, when you’re fifty, so I’m excited for that chapter. I had switched gears a little bit in my business awhile back because I had turned forty, and I was really struggling with why I can’t do certain things that I really want to do. And in particular, it was why can I not resist this type of food? So, I really dived into the mindset part.
When I was seventeen, I was really sick, and the doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to walk and I possibly would be blind. And I think young bliss stepped in, and – I was a professional ballet dancer, and I was very determined, at seventeen, to become a professional ballet dancer, and I did achieve that. Obviously, the doctors were wrong. I am not blind, and I can walk very well, I can even run on occasion.
But I think there was also another pivot point in my career, about ten years ago. I had owned a studio, and we were doing really well, but I was struggling with the balance between running a successful fitness studio and balancing my family. My kids were really little, I was driving back and forth six times a day to the studio that I’d owned, and it was a good twenty-minute drive. I was never seeing my husband.
And I went through this really big funk.
When I closed the business, I was like, “What am I going to do now? Should I continue with fitness?” I was just really not in a good place. So I really dived into self-help. This definitely shifted something for me. And I think, going along your podcast’s lines, I just became fearless. And it’s just added incrementally throughout the years.
I feel that I am more fearless now than I was in my twenties, and that’s saying a lot because in my twenties, as a ballet dancer, I was very determined. I was very competitive, and if I saw a dance role that I wanted I was like, “I’m going for that, and no one is going to stop me.” So, to be able to say that now, in my forties, when I think that’s, most of the time, when people are thinking, “Oh, let’s start winding down,” I feel like I’m just ramping up and ready to get started.
Then you hit 50!
I totally relate to what Nicole was saying. It is true that when you hit fifty, more things happen. I feel like fifties is a very transitional period, even more than forties, and I think maybe part of that is your kids are by then probably leaving the nest. And there’s a lot of, “Who am I?”
Women, if they haven’t been taking care of their health, and they haven’t been exercising or eating healthy, that’s when it really starts to show up – that post-menopause extra twenty pounds, which I dealt with for sure. It’s harder to get it off. If they haven’t been doing anything, then by then it’s really hard to start, and you get this feeling like, “Well, it’s too late.” But it’s not.
If you do start to wake up to your life, a lot of the things we dealt with when we were younger as women, kind of go away. You get to this place where you know yourself really well and you feel a lot more comfortable with who you are, and you have more freedom to do what you want. You’ve learned a lot in life and have a lot more wisdom and self-assurance and self-awareness, and that tends to make you feel a lot more fearless as well.
It’s really all perspective. It’s how you’re looking at it, really, that makes the difference. I recently celebrated my sixty-seventh birthday. You can’t get caught up in numbers, I’ll tell you that right now. Just live your life and live to the fullest and be present right now. Be healthy and strong.
Nicole said: If you are taking care of yourself – you know, sixty-seven might seem very old, but at the same time it could be very young, depending on how what you’re doing with your body, physically, whether you’re active and things like that, I think that really plays a big part in how you approach each year.
That’s a big shift for people, too, especially for our generation. We grew up in the ‘70’s, the ‘80’s, and it was: starve yourself, do tons of cardio, resist and white knuckle through everything, and then, when you explode, do it all over again. Which makes perfect sense, right? Yeah…it doesn’t work.
When clients come to me, a lot of them don’t believe that they can lose weight, especially when they’re over forty. And a lot of them blame it on genetics, they blame it on their age, you know, “it’s all downhill from here.” Even friends of mine that I talk to who are either creeping up to forty or just past forty, they’re like, “Oh. It’s over.” I’m like, “Are you kidding? Not even close.”
Do You Believe You Can Lose Weight?
A lot of people don’t believe that they can lose weight over forty, let alone fifty, sixty. But what I find is that we all know that we’re supposed to move more and eat less.
But why don’t we do it?
Nicole’s Secret Sauce: Mindset Shifting
I have found that the mindset is the missing piece to all this. Because, exactly like what you were saying, when you focused your goal on being independent in your older age – that’s a very strong driving force for you to want to eat healthier, want to move your body. So, I really find that mindset is the missing piece.
When I was forty, I was like, “Why do I keep repeating the same things, and getting the same results?” I felt like I was going a little crazy because I kept striving for whatever goal I was after, but I kept getting knocked back down. And now that I understand how our minds work and how they’re set up to – and I don’t know how much you delve into the primitive brain vs. the prefrontal cortex – and how we just navigate from that primitive brain all the time, who’s like a toddler running around with scissors in the house, going crazy.
I actually work with several clients who are trying to lose weight and get healthy, and that’s one of the conversations we have all the time. You’ve really got to deal with your mindset. You need to understand how your mind works in all of this; otherwise, if you’re just following a diet and you’re just eating what you’re supposed to eat and not eating what you’re not supposed to eat, then when you lose the weight and you get to your goal weight, you’re going to get right back to it.
Because you haven’t dealt with the passages that your thoughts have created in your brain, that way of thinking, the pattern of thinking that you have established for all these years. If you don’t go in there and that do that work, you’re going to keep on the cycle, you’re going to be on that diet roller coaster.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t like generic workouts or diets, because there are a multitude of diets out there, there are a multitude of goal weight programs out there that anybody can sign up for, but if you aren’t taking that diet and making it a lifestyle, it’s not going to work.
Weight Training - It’s the Fountain of Youth
If you want to be toned, you want to look healthy, you want to feel healthy and be healthy, then you definitely need to incorporate weight training, some sort of cardio, yoga, stretching – all the facets of the fitness realm.
We’re like onions, we all have different layers. Because we all grew up very differently. And that, again, is why generic workouts and diets don’t work, either. Because everybody has their own personal preference. Everybody likes to do certain exercises or doesn’t. You don’t like to eat that certain food, you don’t like to eat three times a day, you only want to eat once. There are so many factors.
Honestly, weight training, I think, is the fountain of youth. A lot of women don’t want to lift. And I’m not talking – you don’t have to go flipping tires. You don’t have to go lifting cars. Nothing crazy. You don’t have to do Olympic lifts, but I do think you have to get away from those five and three pound dumbbells, or two pounds. Even myself, I range from fives, if it’s a light thing, to twenty, twenty-five pounds, somewhere in there if I’m doing dumbbells, depending on the exercise.
But weight training is so beneficial. One, because you are building muscle mass, or at least preserving the muscle mass that you have. It also strengthens your bones, so if you have osteopenia or osteoporosis, you are helping to combat that. And if you don’t have those, definitely start picking up some weights because there’s this think called Wolff’s Law. Basically, your bones, when they have resistance on them, the bones get stronger. So, that’s why weight training is so essential for everything. I think weight training is the fountain of youth. You have to do it correctly, though.
And here’s a big bonus for building muscle: the more muscle you have, the more you burn, calorie-wise, just sitting around doing nothing. Because muscles are very metabolic, and you need food – obviously, Ho-Hos and Twinkies are not going to fuel your muscles, but you do need protein, and you need to stress those muscles to keep them. But that is a huge driving force, especially when I’m sitting at my computer doing things for my business or talking to my clients. You can still be burning calories, rather than just sitting.
Many women feel very self-conscious when they walk into a gym. Especially if you’re overweight, you’re not really sure what you’re doing, that kind of thing. Which is interesting because this is a common thing that women come to me with and I’m like, honestly, most people are not even concerned. The people who are being nasty, they’re people you don’t want to worry about anyway. But the people that are looking at you, they’re probably thinking, “You go, girl. You go in there and you do your thing.” They’re probably cheering you on, or they’re feeling self-conscious about themselves. So, always go into the gym.
Make sure you know what you’re doing, though. When I work with my clients I have an app so they actually know the exercises that they’re doing when they go to the gym and things like that. But soreness, for sure, and one of the things, with my physical therapy background…I try not to get my clients really sore in that initial one to two weeks. If you’re super sore and you can’t move, you do not want to go back. You do not want to do it. And the thoughts of, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to put my body through this torture again.” Who wants that? So, starting off really slow and progressing, I think, is key.
If you really want this, don’t let anything stand in your way.
This is me talking now: When I worked with my trainer – and I invested money in him because I knew I wanted to know how to exercise correctly, and I also knew I needed somebody to push me because I wasn’t going to push myself to that point that I needed to go. And I couldn’t even tell you what that point was, because when he would push me, I’d be doing an exercise and he would say, “Keep going, do another set and push harder.” I learned through that where my point was that I could go, and I went further than I thought I ever could do, and on my own I would not have done.
So, that helped me to learn not only the correct form and how to do the exercises and how to use all the machines, but then how to push myself, how to create a routine. It taught me a lot. Don’t go in there and just do some crazy huge workout without knowing what you’re doing, and doing too much at once. I think that happens a lot. People are like, “I’m going to do this!” and they go to the gym and kill themselves and they can’t maintain that.
Nicole said: Yeah, and they bring their generic workout with them. Just as a side note, there are some fabulous trainers out there, there are some fabulous health and fitness people. Be careful who you’re following, though, because, I don’t know if you know -- I’m a personal trainer through American Council on Exercise, but there are a lot of certifications out there where you just go online, you read a couple things, you pay them their money, you say you’re CPR certified and in less than thirty minutes, you’re a personal trainer. And they can maybe look fabulous, but that doesn’t mean that they know how to teach and instruct or modify, which, I know from my physical therapy background, that is a big thing.
Especially when you’re over forty. And I’m sure there’s some fabulous ones, but the young trainers, some of them are all about looking good in front of the people that they’re training or the people that are watching, and I don’t think a lot of times that their priority is, “What’s the safest way that I can get this person the results that they want?”
What’s one thing that women over 40 could do today to start losing weight?
My best suggestion is to always eat when you are hungry, meaning true hunger, when your stomach is actually growling and talking to you, making noises. Because if you’re eating when your stomach is not growling, you are eating for emotional reasons. The other end of that is to stop when you’re comfortably full, because if you just start eating and you don’t stop, you’re going to overeat. Be mindful of when you’re eating, what you’re eating, how does it taste?
Try this: sit down with your food and (you have to be very mindful as you’re eating) as you’re eating, notice if the taste of the food changes. Interestingly enough, when it changes, that’s usually when you’re comfortably full.
Be Present with Your Food
This is something that helped me (Janelle) so much: Think about what you’re eating, and be mindful about how it feels and how it tastes, instead of just shoving food in your mouth while you’re watching TV. I found that I ate less and I was aware when I was full, and satisfied, and I could stop. And then, I wasn’t hungry an hour later. What used to happen was that I wouldn’t be physically hungry, but I wanted to eat even though I just ate, because my mind wasn’t involved when I ate. So, my mind thought, “you didn’t eat.”
Nicole said: I was joking that with COVID we need to socially distance from our refrigerator. Because we’re bored, we need a mood change, our kids are driving us crazy, we don’t want to do homeschooling, whatever you’re in – food is huge, in America especially.
If you work in a corporate environment, there’s at least one birthday every day, so you’ve got cake. You go to Starbucks for a cup of coffee – the coffee itself is probably 500 calories depending on what you get – then, of course, you can’t leave without a muffin. Food is just so entrenched in our society and what we do, that we haven’t separated it from the fact that food is for fuel.
And that’s not to say that you can’t enjoy a piece of cake or anything like that, but you need to be hungry to eat that cake. Definitely mindset – that’s the bottom line. You’ve got to start there, and then build up, for sure. I think that’s why, a lot of times, people get stuck in that dieting cycle and never get out of it. It’s so important.
Nicole has an offer for you called Crush Your Cravings: It’s a 7-day challenge, and basically, I give you the skill sets – remember, I said when I was forty I went through all my mindset stuff and figuring out why I did what I did – one of the things with me is that I had huge cravings. Donuts were my thing, and Cinnabon cinnamon buns, and I could not not eat them. I felt like they were calling to me from the kitchen.
So, I developed these skills and now I can sit in front of my favorite cinnamon bun or whatever, and I can choose whether or not I want to eat it. And it’s so calm and peaceful, knowing that you’re in control and not feeling like food is controlling you. So, that is what the challenge is about.
It is seven days. I give you complete tools, 5-step tools to crush your cravings. You can grab that free offer here: www.shapeitupfitness.com/stopcravings
Nicole’s website: https://shapeitupfitness.com/
Janelle’s website: https://www.emerginglifecoaching.com/
