Intro:
Welcome to The Healthy Catholic moms podcast where we make moving and nourishing our bodies the priority, so that we not only fulfill our vocations, but excel in our callings. I’m Brittany Pearson, a Catholic wife, mom, personal trainer, and I’m here to help you build healthy habits that actually fit your life. I am here to teach you how to get the results that you want and maintain the results that you want. Without spending hours at the gym, or meal prepping all weekend long. I understand I am right here with you getting my workouts done in the nooks and crannies of time, looking up recipes, while nursing babies and trying to prioritize my own health amidst everything else going on. But I have really good news for you, you can get the results you want. In less time without doing hours of cardio and restrictive dieting, I’m going to teach you how to use strength training and eating in a macro balanced way to get you feeling so good and your skin full of energy, and strong to carry out your life. Okay, on this podcast, we’ll delve into how to lose fat in a simple, sustainable way. What your workouts and nutrition should look like during different seasons of life, like during pregnancy and postpartum times. We’ll also discuss healthy quick meals, and how to get them on the table make foods that kids will actually want to eat, mom hacks for making your day run more smoothly, and so much more. All the while with continuous encouragement to stay the course and live with discipline. This is a place where we’re striving to steward our bodies. Well, in order to joyfully serve. I am so happy you’re here. Let’s dive in.
Hello, my friends, how are you? I hope you’re having a wonderful day. And I’m so happy that you’re here today, you might be a little bit hesitant apparently you already clicked play. So that’s. But the topic of today’s episode is a tricky one, I was drinking a title because I knew what I wanted to talk about. And I have this conversation so often with clients. But I wanted to kind of blow it up, have it on the larger scale here, open it up to all of you into this healthy Catholic moms community. Because I think if you’re not working with somebody, or we haven’t had this conversation personally, you might think it’s just you or you might not see a way out or like an alternative is a better way to put that. So not trying to be ambiguous, we’re gonna get into the meat of it here in a second. But please know, as always, when I share things like this, it’s because this is something I’ve struggled with. This is like me on any given day, it’s not something I’ve ever really gone through and then overcome. And I’m at the other side telling you how to do it. You know, we dip in and out of different seasons of life. And there are times where I forget that a lot of things are actually within my control. And then a lot of the issues I’m having your problems I’m having, I actually need to like zoom out and can back up and realize that I had a hand in and that I could make better the next time. So something I like about like I read a lot of military books or listen to military podcasts, I have no affiliation at all with the military have never served, my husband has never served like I just think a lot of especially like the special ops and navy seals and things are very interesting, like watching movies like that documentaries, that kind of thing. And, you know, they talk a lot about the debrief, right you debrief after a mission, you talk about what went well, what I think there’s there’s three exact questions that I’m gonna butcher.
But it’s something like what went well, what could go better next time. I don’t know what the third thing is, maybe it’s like overall mission success. But it’s important afterward to talk about, you know, what could go better. And I like to do this in my own life where there’s places it took me a really long time, there were certain places I would continually bash my head against a wall. And then realize, like, Oh, I could fix this, like this. It seemed like unsolvable at the time, like I always run into the same problem, or this always pops up like this.
One example I’ve talked about on the podcast that comes to mind is birthday gifts. Okay, this was something I probably struggled with even back when I was single, and just trying to take care of myself and work my own jobs and things and I wasn’t married yet. Didn’t have kids yet. And I just remember what it was like my nieces and nephews. And as that started to grow and expand, I just felt like I was always or even friends. Always running to the store last minute, like the night before an event or a party or whatever. And I was always like wrapping things on the way red lights like could not get it together. When it took I know at least I was married and had kids. I want to say I was like married kids, two kids deep that I realized like this system is not working because you know what? It got a heck of a lot harder to pull off. I wasn’t just inconveniencing myself. I was now inconveniencing a bunch of other people, even if it was like my husband I were supposed to hang out after we put the kids to bed. And you know there’s plenty Some nights where I have to work or he has to work or whatever it it’s like, okay, I want to get an O I have to run out at nine o’clock to to buy a gift because I dropped the ball on that or I’m asking him to go pick one up like it’s just inconveniencing people.
And I had to zoom out and be like, there’s actually a solution Britt, which is called back it up and get more organized. And I had to look at like, okay, how am I going like, this is not working. So what I started doing, personally in this area was trying to get like a month ahead of gifts, I started out by just say it was March, I would think, Okay, I’m gonna look at all the April birthdays, as far as I know, you know, and order all their gifts, go shop for all their gifts, whatever, due April. And this also I should point out, never happens to me as Christmas like, again, Christmas I planned for I know, it’s a month to month I could not manage. So I was doing this just a month ahead. Like Kay, it’s March, I’ll order all April or buy all of April, that’ll be done. I’ll wrap them and be great. That was good until I met one of my nephew’s has a December 1 birthday. And I went to flip the calendar was like, oh, shoot back in the same boat. So it was a work in progress. And you know, it’s still not 100%, there’s still times, actually, it just happened to me last month, for the first time and honestly, at least a year and a half. And I was like, Oh man, see, I thought I had this system. And somebody’s birthday snuck up on me. And I was doing the last minute run around.
But now I try to go two months out to avoid that whole December 1 situation. If it’s March, I am looking at May and June. And so trying to always be two months out. This all takes a little bit of backing up a little reverse engineering and a little like forward thinking and back end planning. But then it’s so much smoother in the execution. Now you might think like Brittany, what the heck are you talking about? Because I thought this was gonna be about health and fitness. And you’re just talking about like your gift system and whatnot. But think about this in your own life. Okay?
There’s plenty of times where all these other circumstances are what gets in the way of you making healthy choices for yourself. But what do we do? A lot of us were so good at this, we’re so good at masking it and making ourselves martyrs. And like, well, I just, it’s because I had to do the laundry, then I had to run kids around to this event. And I’m just so much of a giver, that it’s why I couldn’t you know, cook a healthy meal or whatever XYZ. And I know I’m kind of saying it in a jovial tone, make it it sounds like making fun of it. I’m not making fun I’m making light hopefully is my goal of this. Because it’s a familiar tune. It’s a familiar song and dance, and we’re really good at selling ourselves things. So if we want to believe that we could really make ourselves believe that the thing is that gets us nowhere. That gets us like great.
You make yourself believe that and what did you get any healthier? Did you get your workout in? Did you get a healthy meal? You know, in you today? Do you feel any better? Are you feeling energized? Or are you feeling sluggish and exhausted? And you know, whatever it is, like think about that in terms of sleep, a lot of times my clients will say like, well, we have a five year old and we have a newborn and we have this and that like so my sleep is just really not great. Okay, that might be true, totally not gonna refute that, if that’s your current situation. But sometimes, we have the just, oh, I just I can’t get that much sleep because I’m busy. Like I just, we just have a busy life, I get like, five, six hours every night. peel back the layers of that. And it’s actually a lot of frenzy and craziness that is making you get the five, six hours of sleep, like things like having to run out and buy a gift at 9pm. You know, see what I’m saying? Where if you peel back some of these layers we just can sometimes look at and it’s very hard to look broadly at our overall schedule, our overall setup, this was actually something good to do with a spouse or a sibling or a friend or someone you trust that like you can really bring this problem to and be like, I cannot find a way out of this. Can you help me kind of like work this out? A lot of us as women are external processors and even just saying it out loud, can help us find the solution. There have been times like I blamed it on our schedule or blamed it on our day where you know, there was always a day I dropped the ball on having dinner ready. And I just realized like okay, this is a recurring problem, but here’s why it’s because we always run out of food on Wednesday like midweek so do I need to do a midweek grocery shop. Do I need to order a grocery pickup that day on the way home from something so that we have groceries ready to go? Do I need to have some bailout foods in the freezer, ready to go for days like this but always seem to catch me on the same day like what is the problem? How can we fix it?
That’s a productive conversation not just like well it is the way it is and this is how things are back to that five hours of sleep. Maybe it’s because you’re running around super frenzied and you know doing things last minute. Maybe it’s also because that’s what you’re prioritizing. Like you have some kid less time and instead of watching a half hour of TV and calling a night and going to bed, you keep clicking the urge It’s not clicking anything you let it go to next episode, let it go next episode. That might be why you’re getting five to six hours of sleep. Okay? Things like that, like, what are you? And again, I bring this up not as a nagging friend, not as a person you want to hopefully, you know, not smack right now. But in a way that’s like what’s actually going to bring about what you want most. I think the bigger conversations here is that we need to give up what we want in the moment for what we want most because I’m there, there’s so many times and like, we’re not watching anything right now. So I’m not into a show. But if we’re into a show, or I’m like, Ben, you want another episode. We gotta do to like, look at each other thing of like, Oh, if the other person says yes, I’m totally doing it. So we need one of us to be like, no, no, we shouldn’t actually this weekend, we were watching what we’ve just been doing lately is occasionally it’s usually like once a week we’ll watch stand up comedy. And I might have shared this already. It’s hard. I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself. But some people we think are really funny. Nate Bargatze recently we were watching some Jim Gaffigan. And it was a Jim Gaffigan we watched this weekend. I think we’re just watching like a You Tube things. It was like a 30 minute compilation or something. And it was one of those on the cusp. It was a weekend night, we could have stayed up later. We also knew like, you know, kids still get up when they get up. We still have a range of when we usually like to be in bed by on the weekend. Again, I looked at each other, like, Should we do another one? And we’re like, no, no, let’s let’s go to bed.
And the next day, like we have gotten seven or eight hours of sleep. We’re both feeling really good. And we’re like, wow, like we got great sleep this weekend. And that tends to be a struggle because it is like, well, we’ll do great during the week, knowing we need to get to bed weekend’s you just want to hang out. But, you know, nothing, we didn’t get any further quality time, we wouldn’t have gotten any further quality time from watching another half hour show or another hour show. But you’re gonna get a lot better, like your mother asleep just goes, that’s, you know, we could go down that rabbit hole sleep is so essential for overall health, that that was a much better, you know, decision in that moment, we don’t always make it that’s the point is like, I do struggle with that. So paint a picture of what you really want your days to look like what a smooth, I did this recently, with her homeschool year, and Olivia spears. This lovely human is the creator of into the deep catechesis. And I had her on the podcast before. So you go back and listen to that. And she put out it should still probably be accessible through her Instagram into the deep co I believe is the handle. And you can find her through mine too, cuz I’m following her but she put out like a free homeschool planning resource. And I sat down with it. So really beautiful is everything she puts out is helped you plan out your year, like design, what your ideal day look like your ideal schedule, it really jives with me because I do that kind of thing. I had done that kind of thing previously where I journaled about, like, what made our days run smoothly and what didn’t to try to find common themes. And that worksheet just kind of organized it for me. Everybody’s different. But to kind of go, you know, down that hole, I was realizing like the days that we have really good peaceful smoothies we’ve always had outside time, we’ve always had morning time together, where we really start with prayer than usually a subject altogether, like these kind of pillars, I realized, like, Oh, this is really informative to see, this is what I need in my day. So that’s what I’m trying to do here is look at, okay, where do I feel like I’m out of control? Or this is like a not helpful or sticky point in my life? And like, how can we go about making it enjoyable? Like what does it look like to have a really great day? And then how can we kind of reverse engineer that? So I was saying about, like, what my ideal homeschool day looks like, okay, then how do I plan for that? Think about what your ideal healthy day looks like? Are you getting up before your kids? Are you getting some spare time and getting a quick workout in? Do you already have foods that are really easy to throw together ready to go so that you can make those healthy choices? And then like how do we back those steps up and be able to get ahead of ourselves? Now. Some of those things, if you’re thinking like Bernie, I’m gonna have to do so much work to make that kind of like ideal day happen. These things can become habits. If you’re really far from that right now. Start slowly and I’m sure you will be able to make these habits, you know, one at a time. I share this.
This is another personal example. But I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing here in the online space for a couple of years now. And the previous years like I’ve had, I’ve always had challenges going on. Yes, I used to run more of them. I used to do advanced challenges and now we just have our eight week beginner challenge and then we have our monthly group so I can really pour into those two areas. I do take one on one clients but it’s more sporadic. I do more coaching calls less like packages, all that kind of stuff. But there’s essentially I would say the workloads the same I’m still I’m when I started the podcast, I was only doing one a week and I’ve been doing two a week for a long time. I do record workout videos for you too. goofing around there if you want to go check them out that kind of stuff. I have weekly emails, I didn’t always have weekly, weekly emails and they’ve been totally consistent this year, like haven’t missed a Thursday since the start of the year, not patting myself on the back on these things just outlining this for you.
Couple years ago, this was so hard for me like I always felt like I was very behind. I was always doing the thing that needed my attention the next day, I really got weekly emails all because it was always the last thing on my to do list. So it often got dropped off. I felt like I could never get ahead, essentially. Now it took a while. But it took me You know, I don’t know a couple months to kind of put things in place to get ahead to the point where I’m sharing this with you where I am recording this over a month out before this podcast is due. In June, I was filming the October workouts like this is not Oh, look at how I had Brittany is it took a while to get there. But this has been such a peaceful year for me. In my business of okay Britt. Like this has been like the hardest my parenting has been I’ve got three really active kids are involved in a lot more now. You know, my son’s doing Taekwondo two days a week, like we have a lot more going on. The two year old is like a whole new thing than having a baby. Honestly, I feel like it’s just you know, we have more kids than we did a couple years ago, I have a baby on the way like we’re, I’ve been doing this year pregnant. Like, all that stuff. Nothing on paper got easier or went off my plate necessarily. But by working to get a little bit ahead has just done so much. Like I had to reverse engineer so much, though to get there like okay, Brittany, well, what is it going to take for you to be ahead in your podcast, you need to set aside like, tonight’s, you know, a week, I don’t record two nights a week, but you know, whatever that looks like. So kind of go through the scenario. And I’m just speaking from example, to tell you like this stuff is important because it makes it so much more doable. So much more peaceful, you will feel like you’re not always running around chasing your tail.
And it all starts with being honest with ourselves that there is a lot we can control. There’s plenty we can’t that we need to give to God and all of that and then be okay with and be flexible when plans change. But there’s so much we’re in control of so what are we in control of number one, the organization and cleanliness of your household. This is a really big one that I talk about a lot of my clients, a lot of times they’re faced with this should I work out should I cleaned like the baby’s nappy and my kids are down or, you know, maybe you’re working full time and you’re out of the house and you have such precious little hours that you don’t know what to do, you’ve got to have some kind of cleaning system in place organization system so that you know what you’re doing when I know what days I’m cleaning the living room, I know what days I’m washing the sheets, so I don’t have to think about it. There’s no decision fatigue. So if I go to workout on Tuesday morning, I know I’m not supposed to be doing anything else there or if I you know need to do something else later in the day, it’s gonna get done. So it’s again that not playing catch up, like it’s knowing something is getting done soon or you just didn’t get it done.
This is a really, really big one. Okay, so I am not the person to delve into. I do have some podcast episodes about my own daily, weekly quarterly kind of cleaning checklist. But there’s a lot of other resources you can go to for this to find something that works for you, but you need a system if you don’t have one here.
Number two, you’re in control of what you put in your body. This drives me nuts. To be perfectly honest. When clients will say like well my kid has had a soccer tournament so I had to eat like crap this weekend and you’re like whoa whoa whoa, pause so did someone force feed you a McDonald’s Big Mac like every couple hours are like how did this transpire? And again, trying to be funny here but it’s true like you can be busy and you can still make healthy choices you can have not meal prep at all you can still make healthy choices you can have be going through a drive thru you can still make healthy choices so you are in control of what you put in your body and again we got to back a lot of these things up because sometimes we’ll say well Bernie I was out running errands and I there was nowhere I could stop food. Okay, well could you put some healthy snacks in your car? So next time that doesn’t happen? Can you go put some nuts in your car those aren’t gonna go bad in the summer. And some bars that are like not gonna melt in your car, some dried vegetables, dried fruits, so that you have things ready for you again there’s the off times like yes where we all get caught off guard and that happens to me too. But is it the norm like is that where we’re functioning in? You are in control of what you put in your body. So have things in your house again, we have so many Oh my goodness. If like our ancestors could see how easy it is for us to get food right now. All the grocery pickups available all the grocery and Instacart deliveries it’s never been easier to get food you so there’s really no excuse and there’s so much that can be readily available. That is healthy that you need to do absolutely no prep for grab rotisserie chicken, grab some whole grain wraps or so I feel like it’s you’re in control of this stop acting like people are forcing pizza logs down your throat. That’s not happening. Okay? Number three, I know real talk, I don’t care.
Number three, what you give priority to over your workouts, you’re totally in control of this is big and you need to be honest with yourself and assess this one. This is something I struggled with a lot as a mom of like, what I just talked about the cleaning thing where I have a sink full of dishes, but I really want to get a workout in today. Okay, well, what is more important in the long run? Like, no, your house cannot be in a state of filth. But can your dishes be delayed? 20 minutes? Is it the end all be all, if you get in a workout at night, which would not be my ideal time to work out but say you need to at night. And then you wake up to dishes in the morning? Like no, that’s not great to set yourself up for that. But your body like is very your physical health is extremely important as well.
So what are you prioritizing over your health? That’s a very big broad question. This is where I think we can really take the martyrdom thing and be like, well, we put like way too many things that are just inconsequential of our health. Like we’ll say it in a blanket thing like, oh, I put my kids over my health. Okay, your kids, but is it like you had to go run in front of a car to protect your child from being hit? Or was it like, your kid wanted you to put sequins on their shoes so that they had them for school tomorrow, like and you just bend to their every whim or something? I don’t know, I’m trying to make up really terrible stupid things. But you know, like,
we’re really good at putting it in the emergency category. When things are not emergencies. There have been times like, for example, here’s here’s an actual one, I’m betting. For example, the last one was kind of meat. So strike that one from the record. But like we do this st class where my mom teaches on my sister’s kids and my kids every couple of Fridays a month about a saint and it’s very cute, they all enjoy it, and whatnot. And we all take turns to bring snack. So there have been times where like, I will prioritize making a homemade snack above a lot of other things. And I’ll get panicked about it. Sometimes if I haven’t planned well. And I’ll there’s been plenty times I’ve had to do it that morning that I’m scrambling around. And there was a time couple weeks ago and it was a really busy week, I was out and about I was grocery shopping, I remembered I had snack coming up, it’s like this is gonna be really tight to make these muffins or make a big stamp. Like, we’ve a lot of kids as well, as we need a lot. It’s not like you’re making 10 Muffins. If we, you know, I just knew it was gonna be tight and take a lot out of me to try to do that. So rather than be a murderer about it and make it infringe on my whole life, I was like, well, we’re buying snack this week, like I’m gonna be the fun out and who has some fun snacks. And it is what it is, like the kids are gonna live, they have some veggie straws and watermelon one week or something like that, like it was still healthy. But think about that, there’s some things that really I get it need to take precedence over you getting in a workout or you meal properly or something. But there’s a lot of things that don’t need to that aren’t emergencies that aren’t earth shattering, that are also going to be there, if we decided to get in our workout first or something like that. Okay, number four, the last item on my list here of what you are more in control of than you think you are, is what you spend your free time doing. And this, again, is just kind of something for you to ponder. When we say we don’t have time to do our workouts, to make healthy food, to whatever it is to get our household in order so that we have the space to do that. Or to learn about macros, and the right balance for our body. What are you spending your free time doing? Because I think this is another big one in modern culture where we’re so hit with the message of like, just crash. Like if you just need to watch Netflix, if you just need to take a bubble bath, you just need to sewn out on your phone. Like that’s what you need to do and don’t feel bad about it. Okay, but none of those things that we’re usually particularly filling, like, yes, taking a bath could be good for you. But I’ve never walked away after watching lots of Netflix or scrolling on my phone for a half hour. Feeling like yes, I am filled up like that really helped me replace that energy that I was feeling depleted of. It’s just not usually what happens. So what are you spending your free time doing? Is it life giving? Like, you’ve got to have some free time and if not, then, you know, you try to find a small pocket work for that pocket too. I’ll say that in the busiest periods of my life where I’ve been working three jobs while raising kids. Like that’s all happened. I’ve done a lot of that kind of thing. Been out of the house at there’s a very, you know, I can go back to a time I had one child, one on the way so I was pregnant and I would get up at like 345 because my first client at the gym was 445 in the morning so I could train for my husband went to work. My first client was 445. So for me to get my workout in, I would get there at 415. So therefore I would get up a little bit early and that I had a full day a full morning of training clients. he’d go to work, I worked at a kind of like a homeschool Co Op that had a little kid room and I was in the little kid room with my own son. So then we’d go there from like eight to 330. And then we’d go home and I make or at least put dinner on the table. And then I would go back to the gym and train a couple clients and come home at like nine o’clock. And that was a really difficult time period, you can do anything when you need to. And it wasn’t even that long ago, this on I was pregnant with this three. So that’s all very fresh. And guess what, like you figure it out and you do what needs to be done. So in any kind of free time that I didn’t have free time to make something happen. I needed to make it happen if I want to get my workout in, that’s what it looked like was getting up at 345. Again, I don’t necessarily recommend sacrificing sleep like that to get a workout in but you get the gist like we probably have slivers of free time and especially we don’t realize how much we are draining on our phones a lot of the time like what felt like five minutes of an Instagram flip could turn into a half hour rabbit hole where you could have been you know doing something to truly better yourself in some way. And not just for the sake of bettering yourself but for like feeling the benefits of that feeling the growth feeling filled up like I feel a different kind of, we could get into this and I’m not going to that would be really good to do an episode about honoring the Sabbath day and like recreation and what that looks like but you know that comes from the word to recreate like to, there is a difference in if you’re doing something creative or inspiring or that like stimulates you in some way versus zoning out and doing something passive doesn’t have the same effect. So even though it feels like a break and might feel like we need it. We benefit more from do something that’s going to help us grow. All right. Okay. I took a breath that I love is out just like we did it I did it. I hope this was helpful. I hope it wasn’t a little too harsh. I tried to ride that line. Sometimes I missed the mark It’s alright. If you did like it and you have not read it and review the podcast previously. I would love if you do that. That would be so wonderful. Also we’re closing out the month here. So as we head into August if you are looking at we don’t have that eight week program I mentioned my eight week beginner program is not coming till September so hang tight for that you can get on the waitlist if you email me Brittany and healthy Catholic moms.com But our monthly group the chasing greatness group is getting ready to kick off for August. totally brand new workouts, workout videos new focuses we do live workouts together great community of women. I do usually recommend doing the eight week program as a prerequisite to that but there’s sometimes special exception so you can message me if you want to know about that or just want to try the free trial and check that out. All right, bye ladies. I will talk to you next time. Have a great rest your day.
