Detoxifying Your Body from the Damage of Diets in Menopause

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. The damage of diets. And often it's in midlife that a lifetime of diets can be the limiting factor in your weight loss, your fitness, and your longevity. Girls begin dieting as young as 13, if sooner, and 6-year-olds, 6-year-olds claim they're fat. One year we're showing off how fast we are, saying watch me, and the next we're hiding, taking a backseat, feeling self-conscious. With a lifetime of diet experience and exposure, menopause may be the first brutal reality that this model is is not gonna work anymore. So enter 30-something male to talk about how 50-something women should get in shape. Intrigued about why a young male trainer would choose such a career path? Me too. So I asked, and here he is. You'll be glad you stayed for this one, and stay till the end because if this resonates with you, Joe's giving away 3 months of coaching to one lucky listener, and I'll tell you how to be eligible at the end of the show. My guest today is Joe Hoy. His journey in health and fitness began at 13, inspired by his mother's strength and guidance. Despite a detour in college that led to weight gain, Joe reclaimed his health through disciplined fitness and nutrition. This personal transformation drew others to to seek his advice, sparking his passion for helping others. With a background as a surgery technologist focusing on OB-GYNs, Joe gained a deep understanding of women's health. This, combined with his admiration for his mother, motivated him to establish Hoy Fit, a wellness platform dedicated to empowering women over 40. Joe's approach is holistic recognizing that true fitness involves more than just diet and exercise. He leads a diverse team at Hoyt Fitness, including a registered dietitian, mindset specialist, movement specialist, and behavior change specialist, all committed to providing comprehensive support. Through Hoyt Fit, Joe's helped thousands of women achieve balanced transformation in their lives. His story is one of resilience, compassion, and a commitment to uplifting others, making him a trusted ally in the journey to health and well-being. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Joe Hoy, thanks so much for being here.

It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

All right, so first of all, the elephant in the room— we don't step over things here. We talked about this in the green room, and you're good with this, but what is a young, good-looking guy like you doing in a place like this? So how'd you get here?

Okay, so I really like the way we kind of made our way over to this. No, number one, this is way too big of an elephant to step over. Number two, this was not the 5-year-old or 13-year-old's dream. And I didn't, to be honest with you, Debra, I didn't choose this. I really don't think I chose this. I think it was chosen for me by other people. And so it's kind of a 3-part story and growing up just a second ago, I said the number 13 for a reason. Growing up at 13 years old, I had 2 stepbrothers. Sometimes they were in my house. Sometimes they're at their other parents. And when they were gone, it was just myself and my mom. And growing up, she was really my only strong and consistent role model. And at 13, she kind of saw that I was going down a bad path. Number one, I was making poor choices. Number two, I was starting to get picked on in school and really just not having a super high quality of life. And so one day I get home from school, I do my homework, I do all the things I should have been doing. We eat dinner and she checks on me. She's like, Joe, did you get everything done? Are you free for the night? I was like, yep, I'm good to go. She's like, awesome. Well, I'm going to the gym. I think it'd be fun if you came with me. I'd love to show you around. Do you want to come? And like I said, I was starting to get picked on. I was pretty tall, really skinny, super unathletic and goofy and awkward, not confident in myself and really not make like a lot of eye contact with people. And it made sense in my head that all of the people at the gym, all the guys at the gym, they were strong, they were more confident, they had the things that I wanted to have. And so I said, yeah, Yeah, I'd love to go. The second that she opened up that gym door, I fell in love with it and I never looked back. So she started to redirect me on this path at 13 years old, and from 13 to 18, I went religiously, but I never really changed my body. I worked out as hard as I could. I did as much as I knew how to do, but nothing changed. So I graduated high school 5 to 10 pounds heavier than I was at 13. Still awkward, still skinny and lanky and still getting picked on for a lot of things. And that really put a chip on my shoulder of like, I want to change, I just don't know how. But when I graduated high school, I started pursuing a career in surgery. And with that, I had to take courses that were relative. So I was taking courses like anatomy, physiology, nutrition, kinesiology, and really just getting a good understanding of what the body needs and requires in order for change to happen. But at that same time, I was in college, I was a young man, and I also discovered alcohol and partying. So while I was still going to the gym, I was also starting to drink and treat my body poorly. And I eventually started to gain the weight that I thought I wanted. In my head, I wanted to be 190 because I saw pictures of men on magazines at 190. And it's like, I like that body. That's how I want to look. I eventually make it all the way to 190. But I didn't stop there. I kept partying, and I made it up to 225. And so then I had a new problem. I was still uncomfortable with myself, still not athletic, none of the things I wanted, but now I was overweight instead of skinny. I had a new problem to fix. So I eventually ditched all the partying, I stopped drinking. And I really dialed in everything I had learned.. And that's when I went from too skinny to overweight to right down to where I am today at about 190, 195 pounds. And people noticed because not only did my body change, but the way I carried myself changed and the way I presented changed. And everybody asked, because I grew up in a small town, like, Joe, how did you do that? And enough people asked to where I figured I had something here. Number one, I could help people. And number two, I could make a few bucks doing it. So transparently, this is why I don't think I chose this career path. Transparently, I thought I wanted to help people like me, young men that were either skinny or overweight, get to a body they were happy with so they could be confident. And so I started running these 6-week challenges for weight loss, just talking the way I normally do, putting this out on the internet, Facebook and Instagram, and having people sign up. And I got a lot of people to sign up to my surprise, but I never looked at the names. And so Sunday morning, my first Zoom call for this first weight loss challenge, I open up my laptop and I look at all the faces looking at me and none of them looked like me. There was just a whole bunch of Debras staring back at me. And I was like, well, what happened? What the hell did I do? And I think what happened is I just grew up around my mom. I just learned to communicate like her and resonate with people like her. And I attracted that crowd. And so on day one, I was panicked. I was like, well, I've only ever helped myself. I don't know if I can help this population. But by the end of week 6, two things happened. I created a lot of results and I had so much fun doing it. And that's kind of where this was born. And I just rolled with it. But at the time, I wasn't making enough money to just do the whole fitness thing. So I was still working in surgery at this time. I graduated college. I got my job in surgery. And I was working on a team of 7 people that had my specific role. I was never, I'm not a surgeon. I was a surgical technologist. And so in the tiny hospital I was in, my job was to help the doctor do just about everything he or she couldn't do with their own two hands. And again, why I didn't choose this path, they thought it was a great idea to stick the one male on the team. Everybody else was a woman. Stick the one male on the team inside of the OB and GYN-based groups. And so there I am for the next 3.5 years working 40 hours a week plus on-call emergency surgery on the female body, working next to these surgeons that spent their entire career learning about how the body operated. And then here I am on the side after work helping these women transform their body in a healthy way to hopefully avoid surgery. And so I'm taking everything I can from these doctors and saying, hey, I have this problem outside of work with this client. What do I do? What do I do here? What do I do there? And so combine all of this and like, now I want to give back to my mom because she rerouted me. Now I have a blast with these people and now I create massive results for them and I haven't looked back since.

So good. I find that every male who is in this space and who ends up coaching midlife and older women has a very similar story. You know, kind of a foundational story. And many women who are listening here know that it actually doesn't matter, you know, who it is, if it's a male or if it's a female, if it's someone younger or someone older, if they build your trust and gain it and you're getting results and feel understood. And that's all it takes. You know, it doesn't have to come in a certain size, gender, shape, and look necessarily a certain way. I think a lot of people will say, you know, I didn't expect that, but we didn't have an expectation necessarily in the first place. It just is like, oh, this is kind of a surprise. So good surprise. So thanks for sharing that story. I love it. I also love the title of this, and we talked a little bit about that before we even turned on record to get started. But damage from past diets— I mean, these words are, you know, they're painful. I think for any woman who's probably over 40, she's experienced it, and she probably started— and I hope at the very least she was a teenager before it started. But we know 6-year-olds think they're fat and want to cut their thighs off, you know. So dieting starts at a very young age. Let's talk about quote unquote, the diet detox and how you propose that a woman detox her body and her mind from the damage of past diets.

Really well said on the mind part. Before I get into that, I just want to agree with you on how early I've seen a lot of our community members or clients start their diets. And we just brought on a new client. She's been dieting since she was 13.

And it's terrible.

Yeah. Because generally when people diet, and I guess we'll just get into this naturally, but generally when people diet, they're malnourishing their body because that's what weight loss is. It's giving your body less calories than it needs. And if you do that for too long, you're gonna, you're gonna move from a weight loss phase into true malnourishment. And if you've been doing that at 13, when you should be growing and producing these hormones and allowing yourself to evolve, you are shooting yourself in the foot so badly. And it's terrible because there's a much better way to do it. And that's kind of why the diet detox was born. And I chose those two words carefully. They're two words that I absolutely hate, but I've learned to love them. I'm not a big fan of diets. I'm an even smaller fan of detoxes because those are generally just more extreme. But if we look at those two words as more of like a compound word, we are detoxifying somebody's body from the damage that past diets have done. And like you said, both physically and mentally. Man, that leaves some scars in our brain for sure.

Of this. And really, this is a great place to unpack this right now. I think so many people are talking about you've got to have a caloric deficit, like we want to get your protein in, but while you have a caloric deficit. And it's so easy and nobody is saying, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop. You've been living in a caloric deficit for years, potentially decades. You have no business doing less, you know, that's a problem. And yet you don't hear an influencer talk about that. And I think partially because of that word influencer, not expert, there's a big difference, but it kind of unpack that with your own thoughts and feelings about caloric deficit and how much we're hearing about that. Like it's making a research.

Yeah, absolutely. You said it best. Influencer, not educator, or whatever it is you just said. A lot of the people that I see in my circles, they don't have the tens of thousands of followers. They're small like me, but they're, they're spreading the right message. And so thankfully, there's a lot of us that are pushing the right thing out of like, hey, just give your body the nutrients and the nourishment that it needs, and it's going to pay you back in tenfold. But yeah, I mean, when we diet, we are stressing our body out. And when we enter a weight loss phase, we are stressing our body out. And there's a limit to everything, including stress. And when we reach that limit, our body starts to fight back. And it doesn't fight back because it wants to be mean. It fights back because it wants to protect us. And so the entire purpose of the diet detox is really just to fight back against that, to say, hey, body, you're safe. I'm going to give you the food you need so that you can stop taking the calories I give you and storing them for later. And you can start taking the calories I give you and start burning them as energy to get through the day and function and focus and sleep good and grow and recover. And that's just the path that we like to take.

So talk a little bit about some steps. I'm guessing that you might slowly start increasing somebody's caloric intake, obviously with healthy whole foods. But talk about the moment of panic that flashes before a woman's eyes when you ask her to eat more.

The The first thing that pops into my mind is one of our clients, and I think she would appreciate the shout out. Her name's Eleanor, and she started our program. She was, she's roughly 65, and she joined the program eating about 1,200 calories. She came and she's like, Joe, I want to lose 35 pounds, but I don't get it. I'm eating 1,200 calories. I already know how to track, so you don't need to teach me that. I know I'm eating this much. What gives? So I ran the, the TDEE numbers. So for anyone listening that doesn't know what that is, basically how many body, how many calories your body needs to just maintain its weight. And it turns out she needed nearly double that. She needed 2,150 calories a day to not gain weight and to not lose weight. And so she needs 2,150 calories to not lose and to not gain, but she's eating 1,200 and not losing and not gaining. That's a problem. So like you said, Debra Atkinson, we started increasing our calories. And we didn't go from 1,200 on Monday up to 2,150 on Tuesday.

Right.

We got her there slowly. Yeah. And she was terrified, like you had guessed, because that's a lot of food. Like, I don't know the last time she had ate that much food in a day, yet alone every day for 2 to 3 months. But what we found, interestingly enough, is when we crossed— and I don't remember the exact number, I'm making this up— But when we crossed roughly the 1,700 calorie number, the number on the scale started going down.

Decrease stress, stop the cortisol. Yep. Open the door for what's possible. Love that. Yep. And what about her energy level?

So she just jumped on a plane yesterday because she's retired and living the life. She just jumped on a plane yesterday with her brother and her family. To South Africa to go on a hiking and kayaking trip. So I'll just let that speak for itself.

Nice. Yeah, gotta, gotta love that. Yeah. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily. I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago, but when I realized all the junk, the sugar, and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want, hiding in most protein powders, that's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never ever ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich. Sometimes the protein— and don't forget the fiber— they kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at flipping50.com today. Very similarly, I have a 71-year-old client who may be listening right now, and it took years to increase that caloric intake. And simultaneously cut exercise in half in order to decrease the amount of stress placed on the body. So shout out to all of you who are huge believers and into intermittent fasting. It has its place, I think, but many of us who are drawn to it probably were already flirting with dieting in our past. And it's a little bit like 1970s is calling you back. We're not going back there. It's not going to work as well, you know, as you got away with, whether it worked or not. You know, that's such a challenge. Your client here who was 65, post-menopause, you know, at that point, but, you know, looking at fitness during menopause and fit, healthy body, and I think we have to qualify this a little. So we have a number of listeners and some of them are maybe on one end of the continuum where they're very athletic. They love being active. We really need to probably pull them back a little bit and/or sit them down and learn how to eat again and fuel that activity. But then there's the part of the continuum who've never bonded with exercise. I know you out there. I see you out there. And they're just really trying to get by with the minimum that they can for longevity at this point, because we've seen mortality before our eyes in our aging parents and what happens and don't want to go there, you know? So we've got a wide continuum here. So healthy and a fit body in menopause means slightly different things to any one woman listening right now. What do you think the biggest change that if you could give it to a woman who was 40, as she's entering perimenopause, whether or not she's symptomatic— she may not be the obvious, I've got hot flashes or belly fat, I know I'm there— but we know it's happening under the hood. We just know through evolution that's what will happen. What would you like to give her or tell her? What's— what set of things do you wish you could send her through her 40s with?

3 things. I would love to have this person invest in a coach with proven results. Because that— because, I mean, I have a coach. I don't know about you, but I obviously believe in coaching. I have 2 of my own coaches, and I have never grown faster in either of these directions than when I had somebody guiding me. So number 1, find someone you can trust and stay close to them. Number 2, look at the big picture, right? If you aren't where you want to be now and you haven't been there for 10 years, please don't expect to be there in 6 to 12 months. Please expect to be there in 2 to 3 years, but for the rest of your life. So take your time and be patient. And then number 3, figure out how much food you need to eat to be healthy and nourish your body and prioritize strength training. 2 to 4 times a week. Somebody can do that, they're going to be so successful.

Yeah, yeah. So talk to me about your strength training guidelines. 2 to 4 times a week. So we differ a little bit here just because of the endocrine system and the stress and the cortisol, you know. And probably 80% of women who come into our membership have some level of adrenal insufficiency. And they will kill it in those workouts, but then they're saying, I had to lay on the couch for almost 3 days before I feel like I can even do it again. I think I'm ready. And I'm like, whoa, timeout. Let's just reassess. So talk a little bit about what you like to see them do on those 2 to 4 days.

Yeah. So this, gosh, that's such a loose range for me. And really, I like to start by seeing where somebody is. So if they've never strength trained, We're not going to 4 days. We're starting slow. We're starting at body weight or maybe resistance bands. I always like to see people prioritizing compound movements, right? So, multi-joint movements including maybe the elbow and the shoulder or the knees and the hips because you're going to get more bang for your buck. You're going to be way more efficient. And then, what we like to do is we built out this system called our Simple Success Recovery System. And, our community, it's a free thing. Our community members score theirself on it. So how much rest are you getting? Where are your calories at? What are your calorie needs? XYZ. And from there, it really tells them how much they should be exercising based on how much they're recovering. Because fundamentally, exercise doesn't make you better. Exercise actually makes you worse, right? It's the recovery that makes you better. And if you're making yourself worse more than you're making yourself better, you're just going to dig yourself a hole. So recovery always needs to be understood. I hope that answers that.

You know, that was so good, and I should probably have you repeat that like 8 times and write it on the chalkboard 100, because, because listeners, this is a really hard lesson. We've all grown up in the more is better. And so I, I remember, you know, 10 years ago starting to talk about the importance of strength training versus cardio, because we've all grown up in— back in the day, we did monster classes, you know, like we're gonna go to 2-hour aerobics class, and then we're gonna get on the StairMaster after class because that wasn't enough. We just thought, look at me, I'm fitter because I'm doing all this stuff. And really, you know, those of us who were doing that, if we're honest, we're probably consuming a lot of sugar or craved it, and consuming a lot of Diet Coke or craved it. And I can't tell you how I know that or I'll have to kill you, but right. So the truth is You know, we, we struggle. And when I said strength training is actually far more beneficial, the question, the obvious question that I didn't see coming was, well, if strength training is so great, why don't we do more of it? Why don't we do it more often? We forget recovery is a big part. And let's talk a little bit about the need for recovery. You know, when you're 20 versus when you're 40 versus when you're 60.

Yeah. Absolutely. So really, you're just becoming more and more stressed as you get older. And it maybe, maybe somebody doesn't feel that way, because I'm sure that there's this, this bell chart, bell graph, whatever you want to call it, that maybe you reach this point of feeling stressed, and then it goes down because your life changes. But internally, cortisol levels are generally higher. And with that being the case, you need to take it into account whether you feel it or not. And so That's age is something that's on our recovery system because it plays a massive role.

Yeah, that's such a great point. And women, I mean, I can say this because I'm one of us, we suck at being judges of whether we're under stress because we've ignored it for so long. Like, we're running around and we drove the minivan and we did the juggling of the career and we worried about the macaroni dish sitting on the counter if somebody forgot to wash it out. You know, we juggle all that and we ignore our own urge to go to the bathroom and we ignore our own hunger. And then all of a sudden here we are, you know, and realize we've got this cumulative stress and we only realize it because maybe we've got weight loss resistance or we have inability to gain lean muscle, you know, and we're doing all the things. And so that's how it shows up. It doesn't show up in, oh, I feel stressed. What about labs, Joe? Are you using lab testing with your clients to see what's going on, or is that something you, you even discuss?

Yeah, so we have the ability to, to be completely transparent. That is not what I do.

Yeah.

So our head coach Kate, she's a registered dietitian, she is extremely good at that. And so when we have someone that enters the program, we'll kind of assess them before choosing what direction to go in. And if we figure that right off the bat, none of our normal protocols are going to work, we'll just get labs proactively. If we generally think that someone can be successful from our foundational protocols, we'll send them through that. And then if at a certain point in the program nothing's happening, then we'll order labs and see what's going on. But I generally like to start assuming that there's no, like, red flags. I generally like to start with the things that make the biggest bang for the buck.

So yeah, yeah, sleep, nutrition, exercise, the easiest things. I want to ask you a question about, I mean, kind of circling back to diet detox. There's so many out there right now, right? The labels, you know, the vegan and plant-based diet, you know, almost virtuous. And that's a religious cult all in its own. No offense to any of you out there who are listening, but we get very defensive and we get very emotional if somebody talks about the food beliefs that we have in a derogatory way or doesn't agree with us. So, I mean, it's really a miracle that we can sit down, if you're a carnivore, with a plant-based eater and have a peaceful meal. It's really a good thing, and you're a well-developed person if you're doing that. But there's paleo, there's keto, there's veganism, there's vegetarianism, there's of course intermittent fasting and that's got such a wide continuum. And some people are taking that to 18 and 20 hour or 24 or 36 hours of fasting versus just, what if we just went 3 meals, no snacks, and overnight for 12 hours? How about if we did that? You know, so what are your thoughts about, you know, any of these, and where do you begin with people with their own preferences beliefs, because we come with this set of beliefs.

That's tough, because there is this fine line where some of these beliefs turn into disordered eating. And so when we see that, that needs to be addressed. But aside from that, aside from that, I'm in the camp that the best diet is the one that works for you, assuming there's no disordered eating. And this person, this imaginary person we're talking about, is getting all of their calories and nutrients that are needed. And if that, if all that checks out, go ahead and be a vegan or be a carnivore or do intermittent fasting. Like if you can get to your goal and live that way enjoyably for you for the rest of your life, I'm happy for you and I'm not going to take it away. But as soon as you start playing these terrible mental games or like malnourishing your body because you can't get enough complete proteins, we are going to have a conversation.

Very cool. I'm going to ask you something that's a little off the beaten path. How do you think being a male, not being a midlife woman, is an advantage for you in working with midlife and older women?

That's a good question. And I don't think I've ever shared this with anyone. Every, every single thing is your mindset. Every single thing comes down to the lens that you look at life through. And nothing has changed for me in the past 6 years of running Hoyfa except the lens I look through. And in the beginning, when I was struggling with my business, I was still creating incredible results, but I had so much pushback from people that were like, well, I don't know this guy. I don't trust him because he's a man. I'm not going to work with him. And so, I had this disadvantage that I created in my head saying I can't get enough clients to pay the bills because I'm a man. However, I'll bet you if you made this title, 30-year-old man tells 50-year-old woman how to lose weight, we would get clicks. Because number one, there's a few ladies that are just curious of how to lose weight. That's amazing. And then there's ladies that say, I hate this guy, I'm gonna listen to him and get mad. But I'll bet you I can turn around some of their beliefs while listening to me, and then I can help her, which means I can help more people. And that's all I want to do. So it helps because it kind of gets me attention in a way.

Yeah. And, and all attention is good attention when it comes to social media. This is true.

As long as you have a thick skin.

So we have a number of lurkers here. I know you're out there, health coaches, fitness pros, and we do have a special podcast just for you, by the way. It's She Means Fitness Business. But because you're here, You know, I think struggling in health and fitness is also another elephant in the room. You know, it's not as easy as, oh, get my certification and put my business card out there and they will come, right? I'm from Iowa. That's not the way baseball worked either. So Field of Dreams as it is, there's a little more to it than that. And, you know, there's never been— since the pandemic, there's never been more health coaches or trainers But the statistics about fitness and exercise and obesity haven't changed in the last 40 years. They're no different than when I was an undergraduate, you know, and that's a challenge. What do you think was the big breakthrough that you experienced that got you there? You could come back and say mindset, because it's all mindset, but There was something that, that made you turn the corner.

Yeah. Number one, I hired a coach. So for anyone listening that is stuck in their business, yeah, Debra, it seems like you have a pretty sound coaching business for your health clients. You clearly know what you're doing. For anyone listening, I would love to see you consider talking with a coach that can help you grow because she has a proven blueprint. Number two, this is very similar to my clients or your health clients or anyone's health clients where, or not clients, I'm going to say leads, leads where we talk to them and we're like, hey, how you doing? It's been 2 months since we checked in. How are things going? And then Linda says, oh, well, I'm just getting all this education. I think I'm going to be good to go soon. And you said during this question, it's not as easy as getting your certification. And so certification is another word for education. And there's a massive gap between education and application. And it doesn't matter what you're talking about. My clients are extremely smart in terms of what they need, but if they can't apply it to their life, they're not going to succeed. And I know a lot of fitness coaches because I'll help them not for money, but just on the side because I want to see people help people. I know a lot of fitness coaches that realistically, they might be better coaches than me, but they cannot apply to their clients and they cannot get results and they cannot apply the business tactics to get clients. And so if you can't apply things, you're not going to have success in anything.

So no matter who you are listening, you're listening about your own fitness and the changes that you want to make, or you're listening and you're a health and fitness pro who wants to potentially make changes for yourself, because let's face it, ladies, we're not immune to changes in hormones simply because we're a health and fitness pro. Trust me, I know this one too. But, you know, so very true. And I have to say, first of all, 30 minutes has flown with you. It's been a pleasure. But it's so very obvious. And I think sometimes we are doing video, you may be listening and going for a walk, which I love, or lifting weights while you're listening. But I think you can also hear it in tone of voice, rate of speech. The energy that comes behind this is just you know, confidence is easy to detect. You know when somebody is not so confident, you know when someone is, and you get a gut feeling about it. And we want, you know, more heart-centered and educated people like Joe who can apply the both of them to what it is they're doing. And so it's a pleasure to be here in the industry with you. Joe, where could everybody stalk you, find you, follow you, get more?

Yeah. Before that, I just want to say thank you because I really enjoyed this. Like, the conversation flowed well. I think we touched on a lot of topics that have the possibility to impact a lot of lives. And at this point, both in health and business. So number one, thanks for that. But number two, you guys can just Google my name. I'm sure it's going to be in the show notes or in the episode. It's just Joe Hoy. You will find me on Instagram and Facebook. And that's probably the easiest place and best place to spend some time with me.

So good. It's been an absolute pleasure. So listeners, there you have it. So that's the end of the line for this, but I'm going to direct you to the show notes right here before I forget. It's at flipping50.com/damageofdiets. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit Flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So go and listen right now. So there you have it. Big takeaways from today. Number 1, attempting a caloric deficit. It's not from what you usually consume, but it's from what it is you actually need. So if you are way down here and need is way up here, you're not ready for a caloric deficit. Knowing what to do and the application of what to do can leave a huge gap. Know where you are. Trust your gut when you have a coach. Confidence and confident application often shows up as stable energy. It doesn't have to be over the top. Okay. If today's episode resonated with you as much as it did with me, Joe promised that you can apply and as many of you as apply as possible, but it will be the one of you who provides the most compelling message as to why you need and deserve coaching. And I would mention that you are coachable in your application. There's a link for 3 months of free coaching in the giveaway. You can do that at giveaway.hoytfit.com.flipping50. That link is in the show notes. Just a reminder, your show notes will be at flipping50.com/damageofdiets. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups? The answers. My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions, or tell your story, would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year, join the Flip Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 5-0 Insiders on Facebook.