248 – Big Rocks

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Have you ever found yourself Googling the health benefits of like alkaline water? Well. Eating cookies straight from the bag, or maybe you’ve dropped $200 on supplements, like magnesium, collagen, post exercise, electrolytes, and probiotics only to realize that you have eaten a vegetable in three days. Now, if that sounds familiar, be aware that you are so not alone.

In fact, I see it a lot with my followers, and that might be the reason that you’re not making progress that you think you should be despite feeling like you are doing all of the right things. Because while we’re busy obsessing over vibration plates, weighted vests, grounding mats, we’re skipping the stuff that actually moves the dial.

In today’s episode, I am gonna show you exactly why you are doing all of the things and still not seeing the results that you think that you [00:01:00] should, and then how to fix it. So we are talking all about nutrition hacks impossible standards, and the things to do that actually move the dial on your health.

So before you buy another supplement or start another food tracker, listen to today’s episode.

Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don’t have to fight with.

Hey everyone. Thank you for tuning into the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so glad that you’re here. Now, people will often ask me where I get the ideas for my podcast, and after 250 episodes and five years, I have a lot. And so my answer is always the same. I get my ideas from my own life.

Sometimes it’s what I see my clients struggling with. After all, this podcast is mainly for them, but I’ll [00:02:00] also get questions from followers through social media. So if you have a question, connect with me. You might just find me expanding on it in a future episode. But I also get my ideas from my own experiences and the experiences that I have with my friends, my family, and other people out in the world.

So that’s where today’s episode comes from. So let me take you back to a Sunday morning at Costco a few months back, which if you’ve ever been, you know that going to Costco on a Saturday is basically a contact sport. There are carts everywhere, families walking together, four across, taking up the entire aisle.

It is pure chaos. And I was there with a friend who was doing a juice cleanse. Not because she wanted to lose weight, but because she had a medical procedure coming up and her medical team suggested that she could prepare her body before in order to help it recover better [00:03:00] afterwards. So she asked to come along with me on my every other week outing while she stocked up on celery, cucumbers, and whatever else goes into those green drinks that taste like blah.

Now in the store, we split up to divide and conquer. I finished my list and I texted her and I got nothing back. I had seen her in the checkout a few aisles over, and so it was confusing for me. I waited outside the store watching everyone come out for about 15 minutes and still nothing. So I really started to get worried, like what happened?

Where did she go? Did she get abducted? Did she get lost? And finally, a little bit later, she texted me back that she was in the food court eating a hot dog. Now I need to be really clear here. I have zero judgment about her eating a hot dog. Hot dogs aren’t my thing. But they are a dollar 50. And if you’re hungry at Costco, you do what you’ve [00:04:00] gotta do.

And sometimes you are hungry and sometimes you eat the thing that is right in front of you. The purpose of this episode is not throwing shade at your eating habits. That’s not my thing, and that’s not the problem. The problem was what came a little bit later. So we get in the car, we start driving home and we start chatting.

Just normal chatting, catching up stuff. Somehow we land on the topic of ice, as in frozen water, and she pauses and really gets serious and goes, you know, I love ice, but I know ice is so bad for me, and I’m just like staring at her like, what? Ice? And so I ask, I’m, I’m like, what do you mean? She explains that someone told her once, maybe in a yoga training or at an ASAM in India, that ICE can lower your body temperature and mess with your digestion, and [00:05:00] so now she avoids it, but she loves ice.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking back to what happened about a half an hour ago. Hot dog soda cookie, if I remember right. But she’s beating herself up about the ice. And again, this isn’t about making fun of her. I love her. She’s thoughtful, she’s kind, she’s smart. She genuinely cares about her health. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that, disconnect that moment, because this is exactly what I see so many of us doing.

We are focusing on the wrong things when it comes to our health. We’re worried about the temperature of our water while ignoring the fact that we haven’t had a vegetable in three days. We’re debating essential oils, weighted vest, vibration plates, and alkaline diets, but we’re going to bed at 1:00 AM and calling it self care because we [00:06:00] fell asleep to a meditation.

We are focused on the wrong stuff. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not our fault. It’s what we’ve been taught or sold. We’ve been told that health is about optimization and tracking and restriction and rituals. We’ve been sold this idea that there’s always one more thing that we could be doing to finally feel better, and yet.

Most of us are completely burnt out and still not getting the results that we want. So today I wanna talk about the difference between what sounds healthy and what actually is. I wanna talk about the big rocks, the things that truly move the dial when it comes to your health, your energy, and your ability to live your life feeling good in your body.

Because if you’re tired of trying so hard and still not feeling great, that might be why. So [00:07:00] let’s talk about this idea of what we’re focusing on with our health,

because I don’t think most of us wake up and one day decide, you know what I wanna do? I wanna waste all of my time and money on stuff that doesn’t actually work. What happens is this. We get tired, we gain a little weight. We notice that we’re not bouncing back the way that we used to, and we start looking for answers.

Now, maybe your friends in the group text start talking about the latest health hack that are making the rounds, or you go looking for answers. But when you do that. You know what you find? You find people on Instagram talking about ice baths and red light therapy and grounding mats, and you find a podcast episode on how to optimize your hormones.

And another one on gut parasites. You find a supplement for every hormone and a product for every single symptom, and each one promises that this is the [00:08:00] thing that you need. It is the missing link. And so you start chasing, and maybe you try a greens powder that tastes like grass and it completely ruins your smoothie.

Or you try to switch your eating and workouts to match your menstrual cycle, or you spend $70 on drops that are supposed to activate your brown fat. Again, none of this stuff is necessarily wrong. Some of it might even help if you’ve already got the basics down, but what I see all the time in my work is that women are spending so much time, energy, and money trying to fine tune the icing when the cake is still raw in the middle.

It’s like trying to hang curtains on a house without walls or buying custom floor mats for a car that’s completely rusted out. And here’s the part that breaks my heart. When none of these things work, we [00:09:00] blame ourselves. We think I must be the problem. I must not be disciplined enough. I didn’t do it right.

Maybe I need a different product or more of them. Maybe I’m just too old or too far gone. But there’s nothing wrong with you. You are just trying to take a shortcut to build on a foundation of habits that don’t exist yet. And again, it’s not your fault because the wellness world, it rewards the sexy stuff.

It doesn’t reward consistency. It doesn’t celebrate you drinking water or going to bed on time. No one claps for you for getting up at 5 45 on a rainy morning to exercise before you go to work. No. When people ask my clients how they did it, they wanna know the secrets because the health and wellness industry sells you complexity.

It tells you that real health, quote unquote. [00:10:00] Is fancy, expensive, precise, and just out of reach. And if you’ve been doing all the things and still not getting the results, this might be why. So before we talk about what to add, we first need to talk about what’s missing. Because it’s not your desire, your motivation, or your willpower.

It’s not your metabolism. It’s not your supplements. It’s that you’ve been skipping out on the big rocks, and so let’s fix that. This is something that I know firsthand, not just as a coach, but as a woman who fell for all of that stuff too. Years ago when I first started trying to take control of my health, I didn’t start with just water, sleep, and vegetables.

No, of course not. I started with supplements. I took ephedra. I had carb blockers, metabolism burners. I bought gym gear and VHS tapes that promised to torch my fat. [00:11:00] The only thing that got lighter was my wallet. I bought expensive protein powders. I made macro tracking spreadsheets. I hired the bodybuilding coach that gave us all the same exact plan, the cleanse kit that made me physically nauseous for three entire days, and I thought I was doing everything right.

I thought I was being proactive, that I was being the good, healthy woman. But I was only spending a boatload of money, and I was exhausted, not just physically, but mentally as well. I was constantly researching second guessing, wondering if I was doing it right. Should I be working out longer? Should I switch to a different metabolism booster?

Maybe my birth control pill was getting in the way. Should I cut more carbs? What if I just needed a detox? It felt like trying to solve a gigantic puzzle [00:12:00] while being blindfolded. I wasn’t sleeping well. I didn’t have great energy. My weight wasn’t moving, and worst of all, I was constantly judging myself.

Like if I could just try harder, I could finally figure it out. But here’s the thing. I was trying hard, but all of that effort, it was the wrong thing. I hadn’t built the foundation of health first. I was addicted to sugar and coffee. I wasn’t drinking enough water. I wasn’t consistently eating vegetables.

I wasn’t getting good sleep. I wasn’t eating enough protein to support my body, and I was skimping on meals and wondering why I couldn’t stop thinking about food. I was throwing supplements at whatever symptoms that I had without asking why I was experiencing the symptoms in the first place.

And so I was doing all of this high maintenance health work on a very shaky [00:13:00] foundation, and when I finally got honest with myself, when I finally stripped away all of the extras and just focused on the basics, the core unsexy basics, everything shifted. It wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t overnight, but for the first time I started to gain traction, I felt better.

I had energy. My brain wasn’t foggy, my body felt more responsive, and the constant second guessing started to fade away. And I realized this isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being intentional with the right things. We don’t need more health hacks. We need to come home to the habits that actually work and then build from there.

So let’s talk about these ideas of big rocks. You may have heard the analogy before, it gets used a lot in productivity circles, but it works [00:14:00] beautifully for what we’re talking about today. Health. So imagine you’ve got a big empty jar and sitting in front of you are three things. I have large rocks, I have marbles or pebbles, and then I have sand.

Now your job is to fit all of them into the jar. Now, if you start by pouring in the sand, then add the marbles. Guess what happens? There’s no room for the big rocks. They sit on top, or worse, there’s no room for them at all. But if you start with the big rocks, put those in first, then you can pour in the marbles and.

They’ll move around them. And then finally you add the sand and it slips into the little crevices and fills in the gaps. It’s the same jar, it’s the same materials, and you get a totally different result. Now, here’s how that applies to your health. The big rocks are the eight [00:15:00] basic habits that when practiced consistently create a massive shift in how you feel.

They are simple. They’re not flashy or sexy, but they do work and they are drink enough water, eat vegetables, prioritize protein with every meal. Move your body, get enough sleep, manage your stress. eat, just enough, not too much. And finally, limit your treats. Now, these are the behaviors that support your hormones, regulate your appetite, stabilize your mood, and help you to feel more grounded and capable.

They are the things that you can do forever, and they build the foundation for every other goal that you might have, whether it’s weight loss, better digestion, more energy, or aging well, and then we have the marbles. Now these are the things that can help. Only [00:16:00] after your big rocks are in place. Now these are things like supplements, a multivitamin, fish oil, maybe magnesium, meal timing, organic versus conventional produce, tracking your macros, switching to clean beauty or non-toxic cleaning products, mindful exercise selection, like strength training splits, or high intensity interval training.

Now Marbles can support you. They can refine your results, but they are not the core. They are not. What’s going to move you from, I feel like garbage to, I’m finally thriving. Then there’s the sand. Now that’s the stuff that gets all the attention on social media, and I see the sand as being things like alkaline water, essential oils, grounding mats, vibration plates, biohacking protocols, [00:17:00] detox drinks, demonizing ice, drinking celery juice within five minutes of juicing it.

A hundred other hacks that sound super cool, but don’t actually help if you’re not sleeping, eating, or hydrating. Now, here’s the important part. You are 100% allowed to want your marbles and your sand, or you might get your big rocks in place and decide, you know what? I feel good here. This is enough. Or maybe you like experimenting with sand.

Maybe you like your rituals, the products, the playfulness of it, the essential oils. You might love that stuff. That’s totally okay. There’s no morality here. You don’t get extra credit for being minimalist. This is about strategy, not superiority. Because if you are not feeling great, if you’re [00:18:00] tired and frustrated and stuck, this is the place to look.

So start by asking are my big rocks in place? Because the truth is, I have worked with so many women who were doing incredibly advanced protocols, fasting windows, carb cycling, liver detoxes, peptide stacks, but they weren’t. Eating enough protein, they were taking six different supplements and sleeping four hours a night.

They were researching stress hormones while emotionally spiraling because they hadn’t had a vegetable in a few days. Again, it’s not about shame. It’s not about blame. It’s about understanding the order of operations. If you want your health efforts to work, if you want results that actually stick, you need a solid foundation first.

And the truth is that foundation is incredibly boring. Water, [00:19:00] protein, sleep movement, vegetables. You’ll never see these go viral on Instagram. No one is selling you a $97 masterclass on the things that you already know that you should be doing, but they work. And when you consistently build your days around the big rocks, it becomes a whole lot easier to make space for refinement later if you want it and need it.

Because now you are no longer grasping at fixes. You’re no longer trying to earn your health with products and protocols. You’re just living your life day by day in a way that feels like yours. So if you’ve been stuck or spiraling, overwhelmed by all the things that you should be doing, I wanna invite you to pause and ask, am I skipping [00:20:00] the big rocks?

Now if the answer is yes, I promise you it’s okay, and it’s never too late to start. But we are at an age where we can no longer beat the house by taking shortcuts, also known as diets. It’s not in our body’s best interest to rely on health hacks for our vibrancy and longevity. Our bodies know and it doesn’t serve us.

Sorry, not sorry. But maybe I struck a nerve. So if you’re nodding along, if you’re thinking, yeah, I have a cabinet full of supplements and no idea what I ate for lunch today, I want you to know that you’re not alone and you are who I recorded this episode for. And more importantly, getting your health back on track doesn’t have to be complicated.

You don’t need a perfect routine. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You don’t need another cleanse. What you need [00:21:00] is a foundation, something solid, something simple, and that’s where the eight basic habits comes in. Again, these are the exact habits I work on with every single client no matter where she is starting, because they are the things that actually move the needle and not just for a few weeks, but for life.

Again, they are drink water. Eat vegetables daily, not just when you remember them. Prioritize your protein. Move your body intentionally every day. Get enough sleep. Manage your stress in ways that actually help, not just distract. Stop eating when you’re satisfied, instead of full and limiting treats, not banning them all together.

Do be aware of them. That’s it. That’s the work. Lean into the habits. You don’t have to change all of them overnight. Start with one more [00:22:00] glass of water or an extra serving of vegetables, a 10 minute walk at lunchtime. If you can build consistency with these eight things, you will feel better than you have in years.

And I say that with zero exaggeration. I know because I have watched it happen with dozens of women who have tried everything else. Once the big rocks are in place, the chaos just calms down and your body starts to respond. The scale might even move, but more importantly, you move through your day with more ease, more focus, more trust in yourself, and a lot less drama.

And the best part is. These habits don’t require a lot of time or money. You don’t have to overhaul your life. You just have to stop skipping the stuff that works. Now, if you are thinking, okay, this all sounds [00:23:00] good, but where do I start? I’ve got you. I’ve put everything I teach into a super simple document called The Eight Basic Habits That Healthy People Do Guide and Checklist.

Now it’s free. It’s printable and it’s not another thing that’ll collect digital dust in your inbox. It’s a checklist that you can actually use to get real about where your energy is going and what’s missing. There’s no more guessing, no more spinning, just a clear starting point that’ll help you to rebuild your health from the ground up without guilt, without overwhelm, or the $300 supplement bill.

You can download the guide@elizabethsherman.com slash habits, or use the link in the show notes. It’s my favorite kind of resource. It’s honest, simple, and doable, and it’s yours because you don’t need more advice. You just need a framework. You need a filter, and you [00:24:00] need permission to stop trying to fix everything all at once.

So here it is, permission granted. Start with the big rocks. So even if you’ve been feeling like you’re doing everything and nothing is working, I want you to hear me on this again. You are not failing. You are just focused on the wrong things. And again, that’s not your fault. You’ve been handed a thousand different strategies, all promising quick results and perfect health, but no one ever handed you a framework.

No one ever said, Hey, let’s get the foundation in place first. So that’s what we’re doing now. Download the eight basic habits guide. Print it out, stick it on your fridge or bathroom mirror and just start one habit at a time. Because when you do these things consistently, drink your water, get your sleep, eat your vegetables.

It’s like flipping on the lights in a room that you’ve been stumbling around in for years. Things start to make [00:25:00] sense. You start to feel more like yourself again. So head to Elizabeth sherman.com/habits or tap the link in the show notes and grab your free copy of the eight basic habits that healthy people do.

Let’s make your health simple again. That’s all I have for you today. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you next time. Byebye.

Thank you for joining us on today’s episode. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the health advice out there and looking for something that’s straightforward, my eight basic habits that healthy people do, guide and checklist is just what you need. It breaks down essential habits into simple, actionable steps that you already know how to do.

By following these habits, you’ll set yourself on a path to better health, surpassing most people that you know. To get your free copy, just click the link in the show notes or go to elizabeth sherman.com/habits. It’s an easy start, but it could make all the difference in your health journey. Grab your guide today and [00:26:00] take the first step towards a healthier you.