When to Build and when to Cut Back with Tara Allen Ep#64

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Habits and Humor. I'm  Suzi B. Welcome to the show. This week we have a phenomenal guest here with us who is going to answer some of the questions that I personally struggle with, and I know a lot of you do because these are questions that I get asked often. Questions like, if I'm trying to build muscle and lose weight, do I need to eat more?

Do I need to exercise more? Do I need to eat less? Do I need to exercise less? What is more? What is less? And at what points do I balance those two different. Aspects of improving our health. So that's kind of part of the conversation we're gonna have today, but it's gonna go all sorts of other places. So that, I hope you guys get a ton of value out of today.

I absolutely love this woman. I love her work. I follow her on Instagram. If you don't, you should. She's awesome. She does such phenomenal, simple ways for you to fix huge problems and huge things that a lot of us struggle with. She makes it super simple, quick answers, quick help to help you improve your health.

Without further ado, welcome to the show, Tara Allen. So glad that you're here.

So happy to be here. Thank you. That was such a nice introduction. I appreciate that, Susie.

Yes. I just really admire the work that you do, and I like how you make it so simple. Same here. One of the very, yeah, one of the very first things that drew me to you is that concept of more and less and when to do those two things.

So we're gonna get into that in a moment. But first, let's get to know who Tara Allen is. Tell us a little bit about you, kind of maybe some of your backstory and what got you to where you are.

Sure. Yeah. So I am I'm a wife and a mama. I live in New York, and I was a registered nurse. I still am a registered nurse, but I was working as a registered nurse and I started having all kinds of health issues myself, which I'll get into.

But I feel like I felt like there was more to learn. There was more to understand. I had been a certified personal trainer already. And I went on for more schooling to try to put more of the pieces together. So I became certified as a health coach and a nutrition coach also. And I found that while all those things were putting more pieces together, there was still some things missing, which is really the most up-to-date research that we have on our metabolism.

So I had to really dive into current research in order to find all the rest of the missing pieces. And of course, there's still things that we're always learning, so we'll never have the complete puzzle. Right. But I myself was struggling. I had irregular periods. Actually from the time that I got my period, my period was always irregular, but the way that it was treated, so to speak, was by just putting me on birth control when I was a teenager.

So it just kind of, you know, put a bandaid on the problem. Nobody actually looked. To the root cause and I didn't know enough to ask to do that, right? So I was on birth control seemingly getting a regular period. But really there was all kinds of hormonal issues going on. And I was learning more about menstrual cycles and things.

And when we learned about something called polycystic ovarian syndrome in school, P C O S, I thought, this seems very similar to the symptoms I'm experiencing. I wonder if this is something that I have. So I went. To my gynecologist and he told me, well, you're not trying to conceive. This was before I was married.

He said, so you don't have to worry about something like P C O S. We'll explore that if you're trying to conceive and you have issues, again, red flag. But I didn't know it at the time. I said, okay, sure. That sounds, that sounds great. So guess what? Then I meet my husband. We do get married. We are trying to start a family, and I can't get pregnant.

There's no surprise there. It turns out I wasn't ovulating at all, so I wouldn't have been able to get pregnant ever.

Whoa. Wow. That's crazy. It's

really crazy. Yeah. He sent me to a reproductive endocrinologist, which is, you know, a fertility doctor and I was there for a long time, all kinds of testing, and she disagreed with me.

She didn't think I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, and so at that point I just had tunnel vision. I wanted to become a mom, and that was like the only thing that I started to care about. So all of a sudden me worrying about my health and what was happening under the hood, Kind of got set aside because I said the only thing I wanna do, or the thing that I wanna do most in this life is to become a mom, and I'm gonna do whatever I need to to become a mom.

So we went through some less invasive things and they didn't work. We went through some more invasive things and they didn't work, and we ended up doing in vitro fertilization. And the first round of that didn't work either. And I remember just being at my lowest of low points at that time thinking we did the most invasive thing we could possibly do and it didn't work.

What happens if this doesn't work? Thankfully we just kind of regrouped and tried again, and our second attempt was successful. And that's our daughter Magnolia, who is now nine years old and

congratulations. That's crazy. Wild experience. It was very

wild. And I was breastfeeding her for a long time.

So my period never came back. But I didn't know if it was from the breastfeeding or because of whatever was going on with me. And when we were ready to try for a sibling for Magnolia I pretty quickly moved to in vitro because, you know, I was being told that I'm infertile and that there's kind of no point in trying or doing anything on my own.

So we pre pretty quickly moved to in vitro fertilization. Again, the first round wasn't successful and the second round was successful. And it's our son Jagger and he's seven. But when I was newly pregnant to go in to see the fertility specialist and she was gonna graduate me out of her care so I could go and be seen by my ob gyn for regular care, she wasn't in my regular doctor.

So, This other doctor came in and she looks at my chart. She says, hi, Tara. She said, I see here that you have P C O S. And that's how I found out that that was my diagnosis. My doctor, I had been telling her for a long time that I thought that that's what I had. I know, I know. And she at some point had decided that I did in fact have it, even though that was something that we disagreed on.

And she diagnosed me with it and she wrote it on my chart, but she never told

me. Never told you. Oh my gosh. This is like. Crime thriller. I know, I know.

So now I, I was like, well wait a minute. This changes a lot of things cuz I knew along with polycystic ovarian syndrome, I knew that that meant that I might have some issues with my blood sugar.

You know, I had studied this in school so I wanted to find out some more. So she graduated me out of her care. Sent me to my ob gyn for the rest of my pregnancy. And when I went back to him, I said I think we need to check my blood sugar. I've just been diagnosed with P C O S, and sure enough, he tested me and I was already pre-diabetic, which I knew to be something that takes years, if not decades, to develop.

And it would've been nice to just have more of a heads up. This is probably something that was going on with me since I was a teenager, but instead of looking for the root cause of it, And I was just given, you know, the birth control pill is a bandaid. We never had the opportunity to dive in deep and figure out what's going on.

I don't fall to the doctors or anything. I really do think that the doctors are doing that their absolute best. But they themselves are not being trained on the most up-to-date information about what our bodies can do. Well, they're, they're mostly given information on what our bodies can do wrong and how to go about treating that rather than, you know, Here are the nutrition and fitness and lifestyle choices that you can make to actually optimize, right?

Not just thrive, but to actually optimize. Yeah, so. Luckily, I said to my doctor, so now I had P C O S pre-diabetes. I ended up also having hypothyroidism in all that blood work. We figured that out. And he wanted me on medications for the rest of my life. And I said, no, I'm gonna do this on my own. And he said, Tara, you're already healthy.

You're already healthy. There's nothing more you can do. And I said, hold my beer.

Hold my beer. Cause hold my beer. I am gonna put wrong.

Yes, I know. I know that if our bodies, if our.

Now it's a little bit more understood that we can reverse certain conditions. At that time, it was like, you know, you were saying something wrong if you said you could possibly reverse a condition that is not possible. You can't reverse a chronic condition yourself. But I went ahead and I said, let me just see what I can do.

I'm not against. Pharmaceuticals when they are necessary. But I wanna see what I can do first on my own with my lifestyle before resorting to that. I'm so grateful that I was able to make some tweaks to my fitness, make some tweaks to my nutrition, to my lifestyle, and complete a, you know, another healthy pregnancy and then go on to reverse those conditions.

So, within a couple of years of delivering my son, I was no longer able to be diagnosed with P C O S or pre-diabetes. Or hypothyroidism.

Oh, smokes. And how many, like what is the timeframe on that? How many years do you think it took for you to go from switching to being healed? I

think it took probably a good couple of years.

I wasn't getting regularly tested, so I'm not exactly sure what point. But I think it really took time. You know, I think I was kind of just sliding it over a little bit, a little bit each as it went along. But I think it probably took a good couple of years before I was able to not have those diagnoses anymore by the time I went back to check.

Those diagnoses were gone. Basically, all the criteria that it takes for those things to be diagnosed were no longer happening after a couple more years of that.

Wow. That's such an incredibly inspiring story to go from no information to crazy amounts of information, to small shifts, to healed and healthy.

Oh my heck, that's incredible. So when you say you made small tweaks and small shifts to your nutrition and your exercise, what did some of that look like and what do you feel are the most important steps? I'm sure you took a million steps in that, you know, five year period or whatever, but what are some of the most important things?

If the people who are listening here have P S C O S or any of these symptoms, what are some of the very important things that are those simple tweaks, tweaks and shifts that they could make?

Sure I'll let you know. And also, even if people watching don't have P C O S, what I have found then when I went on to do more of my own research here, is that even though my Achilles heal were things like P C O S, pre-diabetes, hypothyroidism, our bodies are actually so much more similar than they are different.

And so when we are working on the root causes of something like that, they're very similar to the root causes of anything else that someone's going on, you know, has going on. If they have trouble putting on muscle or losing excess body fat if they have issues with brain fog, like all kinds of other things.

Basically when, when our bodies are inflamed, it will show up in a different way for different people. And so my achilles heels just happens to be this blood sugar you know, kind of issue. And I have no doubt that I'm, if I'm not super careful, those things are gonna come back. It's certainly not that they went away forever.

I have to be really on my toes about these things. And who knows? Time will tell. Maybe they'll come back even when I am super careful. But for the time being, I'm taking, you know, this time that I have right now being healed and I appreciate, you know, all the time that I have there. The biggest tweaks I would say I made were, I was already exercising, but I was doing so much more cardio than strength training and so I kind of flipped that in reverse.

And so cardio is still important. It's really great for health, but I needed to make sure that I put on more muscle and the reason being, Muscle is like our, our largest disposal of glucose, of sugar. And in order to become more metabolically flexible, in order to help to prevent things like diabetes or if you have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, in order to help improve that, you need to put some more muscle on your body, even if it's just a little bit, you don't have to look like bodybuilders, but just a little bit of muscle will.

Mean that we have places for the sugar, the carbs, the glucose to go, because they like to be stored there. And so if you don't have very much muscle or you're not using your muscle a lot, then when your body goes to store it there, there's no storage space there. And so it ends up, you know, staying in your, in your blood for longer, spiking your blood sugar for longer, and then it ends up just getting stored as excess body fat more often.

So definitely focusing on strength training was probably one of the biggest things I did.

In terms of, so let's hold on right there. Yeah. So some of us, I mean, most of us women have a harder time putting on muscle as a general populace. Mm-hmm. Unless we are doing super intense,, consistent, you know, frequent things.

This is what is being taught out there in the world. So how do we go from, you know, doing these things that, that are activities of daily living? How do we increase muscle mass? Like what, what kind of strength training would you recommend and how often that kind of a thing.

Yeah, so I, you're absolutely right and it also gets harder as we get older.

We need actually more of a stimulus in order to have the same effect of putting on muscle as we get older. So some of the workouts, like, when we're younger and we're bopping around and just doing this random Instagram workout and this random YouTube workout, I. That might be enough to put on some muscle when we're younger, but once we're like 35 and above, we really need a more consistent plan.

So that would include progressively overloading strength training, which just means strength training on a regular basis. That gets harder over time, more challenging. So, It could be two days a week, I would say at a mini at, at a minimum. Five days a week would be a lot. So most people do really great with three to four days a week of strength training.

And you can split it up where you're doing like upper body some days and lower body some days. Or you could do three full body days a week, as long as you have a rest day in between. So you can do, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, full body days where you're working all the major muscle groups. And the key here when you have any kind of fat loss, muscle building or toning up goals and toning up, is just a combination of fat loss and muscle building.

When you have those goals, you really wanna make sure you're progressively overloading, so you're doing the same workouts over and over again for a period of time. So, Let's say you have let's say we're gonna do three days a week and you're gonna have an upper body day, a lower body day, and a full body day.

You have those workouts. Make sure that they're nice and complete. You might need to ask somebody for help. Susie could probably help you with that and make sure that you're working all the major muscle groups in the ways that they need to be worked, from the different planes of motion and all of that.

Now you've got your workouts. When you do your sets and your reps, write down what weight you're using, it could be, maybe you're starting with body weight, that's totally fine. Maybe you're using bands or maybe you're using some dumbbells or something. Whatever you're using, write down what it is that you are using and make sure it's a resistance that feels challenging to complete, at least the last couple of reps.

So let's say you're doing a set of 10 bicep curls once you get to number eight. Nine, 10, it shouldn't feel like a breeze. It should feel pretty challenging. And if it does, then you know that you're in a sweet spot. Write down that number, that resistance, because the following week, if you can. Maybe add a couple more reps to it, or maybe you can even increase the resistance and go up a couple of pounds.

It won't happen every single week, but maybe in three weeks time, you'll be able to go from 10 pound dumbbells to 12 pound dumbbells, doing the same you know, reps and sets there. So the whole idea of progressive overloading is that you're taking the same suite of workouts and repeating them over and over, but just dialing something up so that you know for sure that you're making progress.

And that should go on for. 8, 10, 12, maybe even 16 weeks that you're repeating the same workouts and then you can switch it up and have a new set of workouts that you're repeating over and over again. And that's the best way to put on muscle in conjunction with some of the other things that we're gonna be talking about.

Hmm. Awesome. Okay, so let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. Yeah. A lot of functional trainers out there are saying you need the variety of movements. Where, how, how do we progressively overload if we're supposed to get all these different varieties of you know, different things to make sure that.

We're training all of the different joints and mobility and stability and all of that, plus these overload trainings where we're doing the same workouts. How do we get the variety and the overload?

That's a great question. Yeah, so I would say, number one, make sure that the workouts that you are going with are very complete.

So this, if you're not familiar with how to program this for yourself with, which most people are not, I would say reach out to somebody and get some help, even in just the program design so that your workouts are. Pretty functional where you're really are getting multiple joints and compound movements and things like that in your actual workouts.

And then you switch them up. So if it's every eight, 10 weeks, something like that, you're switching up to a new set. So, you know, when you zoom out and think about a course of a couple of months, or even a whole year, you have done a wide variety of movements just in those progressively overloading sessions.

But besides that, You could add in some mobility plenty of stretching either on the days that you're working out or on off days. You could have some active hobbies that keep you going in different ways. You know, I'm thinking, um, tennis or golf or there, there's always other activities that will bring additional movement in that you can just do for the sake of enjoyment and for adding a little bit more movement into your day too.

Beautiful. One of the things that we kind of hear about is Tai Chi as we age. Tai Chi is one of those exercises that makes your body move in ways that you don't normally move. And so that is one of those things that a lot of people add in as they age. Same thing with like yoga or breathing, breath work, that kind of a thing.

People think, okay, I'm gonna do that as I age. But really that kind of training is very valuable at any age. And so if you're like Tara's saying here, if you're getting both the combination of. You know, the functional movements where your body is able to move side to side and lift different ways and move in different motions.

I like to call it expecting the unexpected. Most injuries happen because you've reached back in the backseat and, oh, now you tweaked your back because you've never done a rotational movement. Or, you know, you do a ton of hiking, so your, your quads and your hamstrings are super strong because of that forward backward motion.

But you haven't done a lot of lateral motion. And so just think about you guys as you're thinking about this kind of stuff. Think about the normal patterns that you do. If you're doing a lot of squats and deadlifts, maybe consider some, some side to side motion. If you're doing a lot of crunches and leg raises, consider adding some Russian twists.

You know, make sure that you're, like, she's saying the completeness, the wholeness of your workouts is so incredibly important. And I like how you phrase it that way, just like, Stick with the same workouts, but also AF after the course of a year, you can look back and see, oh, I've done all these different movements.

They don't have to be done at the same time. You guys, I think so many of us get overwhelmed with that. Do you agree with that? That we feel like we have to do it all at once?

Yes, it's, yes. People feel like that a lot too. And then when it comes to the workouts, sometimes people will say, well, how do I fight the boredom if I'm repeating the same workouts for eight weeks in a row?

Let's just say like, that gets very boring. And I say couple things there. Number one, try to focus on your, you're making progress, you're getting stronger. You're gonna notice that you can pick up, you know, heavier weights as time goes on, or do more reps or something. And that's exciting. Blast, whatever your favorite music is, make it a concert.

When you're in there, you know, whether you're in the gym, you've got your headphones, or you're at home and you've got your Alexa going or whatever, you know, you can make it whatever it is that you want. I thought mine was gonna start talking to me. And and then I also like to think about everything else that you're doing can be switched up.

So like when it comes to cardiovascular exercise, we don't need to be repeating that over and over again to in order to get the cardiovascular benefits. So if you want some more variety, you can bring it in there, do some tai chi sometimes in some yoga. Get your mobility and your stretching there. Do some hiking some days, or some biking or swimming other days to get the cardiovascular work so you can be really mixing it up and getting some more variety, even if those actual workouts are repeating for eight weeks in a row or

something like that.

Beautiful. So you can alternate, you got a variety day and you've got a set overload day. Yes. I find that the rep range that is most useful for most people is six to 12 repetitions. If you can't complete at least six, then you're probably lifting too heavy. If you can complete more than 12, you're probably lifting too light.

So adjust your resistance. And a lot of people are like, oh, well I don't have heavier weights. Talk to me later. We can, we can come up with a whole bunch of different ways that you can Oh yeah. Adjust the resistance level without having to increase the weights. Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. So let's get into the next piece of this puzzle then nutrition.

So how do we, you know, what tweaks did you make to nutrition? And just to remind you guys, like she's talking about, this is not for specifically just those issues that she mentioned at the beginning, maybe P C O S, maybe diabetes, but this is for everybody. This is how we heal chronic illness.

This is how we heal chronic. Disease, all of these different things that all of us are experiencing. So tell us nutritionally, what small changes can we make, Tara? Yes. Okay. So

one was I had to be more mindful of my carb and protein intake, so my carb intake was too high and my protein intake was too low.

I'm a vegetarian. I'm a vegetarian. I joke that I don't promote vegetarianism because I think it's so much harder to balance our plates. Actually, when we're vegetarian, I just, meat has always grossed me out since I'm a little kid, and so I have to, you know, Supplement more and all of that. So if you are an omnivore, that is great cuz it's easier to balance your plate.

But for me personally, I as a vegetarian, it, I tend to lean towards more carbohydrates and less protein if I'm not really careful. So prior I wasn't being very careful, I had to actually really step it up. So I like to think about how many carbohydrates, if we weren't going to eat any carbohydrates, how many would our body.

Make cuz we, we will make our own carbohydrates. Nobody actually goes without carbs. It's a different form of carbs. But I'm just gonna say carbs for this discussion. Right? Um, if you weren't gonna eat any carbohydrates, your body would make a certain amount. It would take some of your fuel and turn it into carbohydrates, because we do use that up as energy.

So I like to think about what it is that we need in terms of that and try to more closely match it. Now, it does vary from person to person, especially based on how much muscle you have on you, how active you are. Those types of things. So it's going to be different for different people. But in general, I am not a fan of super low carb diets for most people, most of the time, and I'm not a fan of super high carb diets for most people.

Most of the time I really try to get a moderate carbohydrate approach. So for me, what that looked like is I had to make sure that my carbohydrate portions were about 25 to 35 grams ish of net carbohydrates. So when I take total carbohydrates, I subtract out the fiber. What I get at the end there is net carbohydrates.

And so somewhere in the range of 25 to 35 grams. So this could be like a half a cup to three quarters of a cup of something like oats or rice or, you know, a medium sized piece of fruit. You know, a serving of crackers, something like that. And I had to make sure that I didn't go over that by too much in one sitting.

Now I'm not a fan of. Tracking macro or calorie tracking for most people most of the time either. I just think that's not so healthy for our mindset. So I like to think more about in terms of balancing each individual meal without tracking, without calculators or apps or anything. And then when I sit down to the next meal, trying to make that one nice and balanced.

Either all three meals will have some kind of a carbohydrate source. If I'm super active that day, or sometimes if I'm not, maybe one of my meals won't have a specific, I call it intentional carbs, but it won't have an intentional carb source. So for example, a breakfast sometimes that I'll have will be like one full egg.

A cup of egg whites. I will scramble that in some coconut oil. I'll top it with a bunch of veggies. I'll add like some real sauerkraut on top for some fermented food, which is great for our gut. I'll add some salsa and some sriracha just cause I like it spicy. And that'll be my meal. It's very, Filling.

It's got lots of protein, like 40 grams of protein. It has fat coming from the coconut oil that I scrambled the eggs in, and from that one egg yolk that I use, and it's got lots of fiber also in all the vegetables. So I like to think of P f F, protein, fat, and fiber in every meal. And then when it comes to intentional carbohydrates, I include them in at least two of my meals.

Again, if I'm super active. I'll include them in more in like all three meals then on top of that. But I'm having the carbohydrates in conjunction with the protein, fat, and fiber, and that really helps to keep my blood sugar nice and

stable. Hmm, okay. So you're saying kind of curb cycling is a big talk about out there in the world.

So you're saying you could carb cycle just based on each individual day. You could carve cycle by not having carbs with one meal, but you could have them, but the next meal and that way you're sort of getting that balance without having to track and without having to do the craziness.

Yes. Yes, exactly.

It's similar to carb cycling, or you can think of it as just in that term, you're balancing out your day. So with protein, fat, and fiber, I like to keep that balanced with each meal. And when it comes to the carbs, I like to think of that more in terms of for the whole day. So if I'm going out to dinner, I know that there's gonna be more carbohydrates than usual in my meals that I'm gonna get out.

So I might only have. A meal that has one carbohydrate at home prior, you know, maybe I make a smoothie for lunch and it's got some fruit in it, and that's my carbohydrate then. But I know when I'm going out to dinner, maybe I'm getting pizza, and so that'll be some more carbohydrates there. So for the carbs, I like to think of kind of what do I need for the day?

And then for each individual meal, I think about getting enough protein, fat, and fiber in each meal, and as well as our strength training needing to get more and more challenging as we get older. In order to put on or maintain our muscle, we also need to increase protein as we get older. It really requires more of that stimulus as we get older in order to do the thing that we want it to do, which is muscle protein synthesis, which just means.

Your body feels like it's got plenty of resources on hand that it is willing to sacrifice some of the protein you're bringing on board. In order to build muscle, it's gotta feel very secure. You've gotta be eating enough and certainly enough protein too. So for putting on muscle, you really need to be eating at least 30 grams of protein per meal.

That seems like a really high number for most of us. So how are we getting that in, especially where you're a vegetarian? I would love to know what your protein sources are. Yeah,

so I, I'm lucky that I eat eggs because that really saves me. So like I said, I'll do like one full egg and a whole cup of egg whites, and that'll be, you know, one of my meals with the protein.

About a third of my protein needs I get from plant sources, you know, beans, lentils, that kind of thing. I do tofu sometimes, not a ton. But I'll do it sometimes. Nuts, seeds, that kind of thing. Well, that gives me about a third of my needs. And then the other third, I do have to supplement as a vegetarian.

But this would be where I would have some kind of meat fish if I wasn't a vegetarian. But for me, I'll do a lot of like smoothies that have protein powder and that kind of thing. One scoop might be 20 grams. I'll do a scoop and a half or two scoops, so I'm getting more like 30 or 40 grams in that meal, especially if I know another meal might be a little bit lighter if I'm having.

A bean burrito for dinner, and I know that meal might only be 10 or or 15 grams of protein. I'll try to make sure that my breakfast is nice and heavy in protein, and my lunch is nice and heavy in protein too.

That to me is a breath of fresh air that it can balance out throughout the day. And it doesn't have to be every single time you eat.

You have to be perfectly balanced and you know, you have all the resources and all the things, but you can do it throughout the day. Y'all, you can do it throughout the day, y'all. Yes,

no. Yes. Not perfection at all. Like I, I feel we should have room for fun foods. We should have room for indulgences and we shouldn't be tracking everything like it's supposed to feel good and it's supposed to feel a little bit natural.

I just think with a little bit more knowledge about our. Body and our metabolism and how it works, we're able to just go out and make these decisions on purpose and without like second guessing ourselves all the time, you know?

Awesome. I love that. Without second guessing ourselves. To me, second guessing is the thief of joy.

I know they say comparison is for me, it's second guessing. Yeah. Yeah. I tell this story all the time that I have the best. My husband and I planned this trip to Hawaii and it was like the greatest trip ever, and I felt like we had done everything primo, like perfect trip. And then I got home and our next door neighbors went and they did all these different things that we did, and I instantly was like, oh, get trips home.

And the week before it was like the greatest thing ever. Oh yeah. And then, cause I second guessed if I had, oh, well maybe there were things we should have done, it instantly changed the, and I just was like, whoa. Like I just robbed myself of the best trip in the world. Yeah. So don't do that to yourselves.

People don't do that to yourselves. Yes, agreed. Awesome. All right, so we're gonna open this room up to the live q and a now. So those of you that are here, go ahead and type in the comments, your questions. You can feel free to come on camera and unmute yourselves and things like that in just a moment.

For those of you that are watching this or hearing this as a podcast replay later, feel free to join us when we do these episodes every Tuesday at 1:00 PM Mountain Time. Which is noon Pacific or three Eastern every single Tuesday. We do these episodes with these amazing, incredible guests like Tara, and you get to ask them your questions.

If you have specific needs, specific questions, get in here and ask 'em. Get your questions answered you guys. So every single Tuesday we do these calls live. If you are interested in getting reminders for this, you can go to show show.suzibhabits.com suzy b habits.com and sign it for weekly reminders. Or just come on here right at Tuesdays at the right time, 1:00 PM Mountain Time, and go to live .suzib habits.com and that will bring you here to the show.

Alright, Tara, so before we let the, recording go, I want people to be able to reach out to you if they want more information, if they're interested in your awesome programs. I know you have a phenomenal program that helps people with a lot of different things. Tell us where people find you and what your programs are A little bit about.

Sure. So probably the best place is Instagram if you have it. And that's Tara Allen Health with Underscores. So it's Tara underscore Allen Underscore Health is Instagram. My website is tara allen health.com. And so what I do is I work one-on-one with people and then I also have a group. Course it's a metabolism boosting course, and I run that four times a year.

The next one will be in September. There's a wait list you can hop on so that you make sure you get notified of any you know, fun news. I'm gonna have some fun news coming up in a couple weeks about it actually, but it also reserves your spot and it gets you a discount code for the next round. So hop on the wait list if you're interested.

But what I do is I help people with nutrition. Fitness and all kinds of lifestyle habits that will help with boosting metabolism. I don't believe in people dieting down to rabbit portions in order to get their fat loss goals. And so what I do instead is I help them work on boosting their metabolism so that they're bringing in an enviable amount of food, but still achieving both their body composition goals and their health goals.

At the same time, I always do everything from a health optimization standpoint, and when we optimize our health and we demand excellence from all of our body's systems. Guess what? That requires a lot more fuel from our bodies. So all of a sudden our bodies are burning up more of the fuel that we have.

So it gets the body composition goals at the same time. So we go through, like I said, a deep dive in nutrition, a deep dive in fitness. There's a complete workout program there too. And then we get into some nerdy longevity stuff, which is like heat and cold exposure. Does the way that you breathe affect whether you're burning fat or not?

And it does. And so we get into all kinds of fun and nerdy things like that too.

Excellent. I love the nerdy one. That's my favorite. I love those kinda things, and Tara does a phenomenal job, you guys. If you're interested in that, certainly go check her out and absolutely follow her on Instagram. She's just a wealth of knowledge.

Thank you so much, Tara. Those of you that are here live, stay with us. We'll answer your questions in just a moment. Those of you that are catching this later, please feel free to join us on these live calls and we'll catch you next week on habits and Humor.