#57: Episode 57 – Health From The Inside Out with Steph Gaudreau

VeronicaValli

Steph Gaudreau’s mission is to help women create bigger, bolder, fiercer lives by building health from the inside out. In this episode, we discuss body image, health, and nutrition. Steph advises us on how we can get started with exercise, how to deal with cravings in early sobriety and shares her own reason for ditching the booze.

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What This Episode Is About

Today I’m excited to share my interview with nutritionist-strength coach, Steph Gaudreau. I love that she’s got such a solid base in science and that her practice combines that background with her personal experience.

Steph Gaudreau is a nutritionist-strength coach whose mission is to help women create bigger, bolder, fiercer lives by building health from the inside out. After 12 years as a high school science teacher, Steph realized she wasn’t in the right career and left the classroom to become a teacher in a different way.

“Starting out small with manageable changes is the way to go.” – Steph Gaudreau

Taking care of our bodies is such an important part of recovery, especially since we’ve been abusing them for so long. That’s why movement is one of the five pillars of sustainable sobriety.

In this episode, Steph and I talk about her best strategies for improving your health from the inside out using movement, diet, and nutrition, how alcohol impacts our health and how our mainstream culture and media negatively influence our relationship with our bodies.

Getting Started

When we’re frustrated with ourselves, there’s a tendency to want to leap all in and jump into doing everything. This happens a lot in early sobriety when we really want to start taking care of our bodies. But inevitably, after a while life gets in the way and we get overwhelmed and then flip in the opposite direction and quit altogether.

So what can you do to avoid ending up in this loop? Making consistent, small, gradual changes that you can maintain is the path to long-term success.

“Focus on consistency.” – Steph Gaudreau

Ask yourself, what am I willing to change?

What works for a lot of people might not work for you. Instead of thinking about what you “should” be doing, consider your time, resources, and energy, and break down your health goals piece by piece. For example, if joining a gym doesn’t work for you because of cost, your schedule, or the mental hurdle of getting into an environment like that, think about how you can make it simpler. Maybe starting with walking down the block and then going from there will be a more sustainable commitment.

 

Diet & Nutrition

With two young kids, I resigned myself to constantly being tired and fell into lots of bad eating habits, telling myself it was the best I could do. But after finding Steph’s content I started to mentally connect diet with energy, rather than losing weight. That made changing things up worth a try.

“I have since changed my diet, and I feel like I’m like Superwoman. It’s incredible.” – Veronica Valli

Steph says, the reason why so many people feel such a shift in their energy when they start making positive changes to their diet is usually down to the fact that they’re having less processed food, there’s more overall food intake, more protein, and fiber intake, and probably better hydration.

On top of that, taking a lower carbohydrate approach for the short term can help to even out the energy rollercoaster that tends to come with a high intake of ultra-processed, ultra-palatable, high carbohydrate foods.

Your diet has such a big effect on how you feel in your body and in your mind and being able to be clear and sharp and have the energy to get through the day is an amazing feeling.

 

Exercise

Just the word – exercise – brings up negative feelings for a lot of people. For many of us, exercise was always like a punishment or something you had to do to make up for what you ate. But in reality, movement has so many benefits from increased strength, coordination, and bone density to improved mental health and there’s no one way to approach it.

“The best exercise is the one you’ll actually do.” – Steph Gaudreau

Exercise doesn’t have to be something you hate doing. Think about what movement can look like for YOU. If you’re a walker, there’s nothing wrong with that. Want to play a sport? Go for it. The most important thing once again is choosing something you will be able to do consistently.

 

About Steph Gaudreau

Steph Gaudreau is a nutritionist-strength coach who uses evidence-based nutrition and strength training best practices along with ways to improve your relationship with food to help women get stronger, increase their energy, and perform better…both in the gym and in life. Focusing on getting stronger and what her body could do – instead of how it looked – changed everything for her. Now, she helps women do the same.

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