Ryan Jore interviews Connie Nightingale, a coach with a background in dentistry and functional medicine. Connie shares her journey of transforming her family’s health through diet changes, particularly the GAPS diet, which led to significant personal health improvements and weight loss. She discusses the evolving nature of coaching, the importance of tracking and measuring progress, and the challenges of balancing client expectations with realistic goals. Connie emphasizes the need for personalized approaches, the benefits of meal prep, and the significance of building a supportive network of health professionals. She also addresses the complexities of functional medicine and the importance of addressing underlying health issues before resorting to medication.

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Instagram: @ConnieBegonnie

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Ryan Jore 0:15 Hi guys. Welcome back to the podcast. This week we have on coach, Connie Nightingale. Connie, welcome to the show.

Connie Nightingale 0:20 Thanks for having me, Ryan.

Ryan Jore 0:21 So yeah, last year we met at the true coaches conference and really enjoyed following your content over the last year. So I want to bring you on and kind of talk about your background and how you use a slightly different approach with clients in terms of functional medicine and everything. So just yeah, if you want to give a quick background for the audience.

Connie Nightingale 0:37 Okay, well, first we have to back up a little. You’re like, I enjoy your content, but it’s like chickens and farming. And every once in a while I get on a health rant, and yeah, come out of my shell, and then I retract back into my cave. So yeah.

Ryan Jore 0:52 We would have chickens if I didn’t live in the city, like I aspire to own chickens someday, but it’s like in the city, it’s just too much of a hassle.

Connie Nightingale 1:00 People don’t realize how entertaining they are. So background, it is complicated, and I’ve been through as many of us, many ebbs and flows, but the short end of it was about 12 years ago, I had to make a drastic change in my son’s diet for some health purposes. And what I found out during those drastic changes is that I probably needed them as much as he did. We basically completely rehabbed our nutrition. And I had always thought I was healthy, I was active and all the things, but I kept gaining weight. Couldn’t figure it out, you know? And we went to we changed our our diet. I would say it’s called the GAPS diet. If you’ve ever heard of it, super duper strict. Worked amazing. I’m a believer. Can most people sustain that kind of dieting? I don’t think so. That would be where my my mindset has changed around things over the last decade, but we changed our diet. It changed my life, basically. And we were always, like I said, healthy before active. We have a ranch. We are doing all the things, snowboarding, outdoors. I didn’t work out at the time, but I was so active. Who needed to that was my thought, right? We ended up changing our diet, and it ended up changing not just his life, but my husband and I’s as well. About three weeks in, my husband’s like, man, My back doesn’t hurt anymore. And I was like, Yeah, my wrists don’t hurt anymore, you know, like, all these things started popping up. And next thing you know, I’m, like, losing weight like crazy. I ended up losing about 80 pounds, and, yeah, and it was pretty wild, because I remember the day that I put on a pair of size six jeans, and I was a size 14 when I had started the diet, and I didn’t see myself as overweight until I go back and look at pictures and stuff now, but I remember putting on this pair of like, size six jeans and being like, holy crap. I don’t think I’ve ever been this small and and I was healthy and I felt great, and I had no pain, and I was able to go do things that I hadn’t been able to do in a long time, things that I didn’t even realize were bothering me. So that’s something I always try to tell people, is they’re like, Well, I feel fine, and what I’m doing is working, but it’s like, really? Is it? Because how many people live in a smoker’s house or grandma’s house that smells like cat pee, and they don’t notice these things until they leave and come back, or they go to visit one of those houses and they smell it, but grandma and your smoker friend doesn’t, and that’s kind of how our our body is, right? So it opened up a lot of things for me, and I started to get healthy, then I got into bodybuilding, which is the the opposite of healthy. Then this is where I say there’s a lot of ebbs and flows, right? And we’ve learned lots of lessons along the way. However, during all of this process, I learned there were a lot of holes in the health industry, and especially in bodybuilding. It brought a lot of that to light. And I was watching these women, and their hormones were being totally tanked during contest prep and, and, and then they had no support on the backside, and you were seeing this crazy metabolic chaos, myself included.

Ryan Jore 4:14 The post show rebound is so brutal.

Connie Nightingale 4:17 Oh yeah. I went through it. I did about five shows, so I and I was hardcore for a couple of years, and my body never got a break, and it ended up being real bad at the end. So I but I started watching these things. And the funny thing is, I’m terribly competitive, and I’ll admit this about myself. I knew everything I was doing was wrong, but I kind of just got that screw it, I’ll fix it later approach, and I that’s a my to my detriment is I’m highly competitive, and I’m just like, I’ll fix it later, right? So anyway, I learned a lot through that experience, and then I learned that I need to figure this stuff out, because women need support in this. I mean, some males too, but it was mostly the female industry that I was targeting at the time and I absolutely never considered I would be quitting my career. I was in dentistry for 14 years. Never considered I would be making a career change, and started getting in this crazy rabbit hole with things to where I couldn’t stop. I was reading every book. I was diving down every certification. I was taking every mentorship class like it got crazy, right? My whole life was consumed by this for years. And then I started, like, obviously, applying these metrics to people and dabbling in coaching. And next thing you know, I’m changing my mind about things that I learned, you know, five years, and now we’re into this a decade, and I have a whole different outlook on things based on trends. So I got really deep into a lot of rabbit holes, but the lab work one is definitely a large proportion of what I do, and I started seeing things repeatedly happen based on what I would apply to help somebody make changes, it kind of became my own science project, if you will. And so then I started to change my mind about things again. And it was probably about six years in when this started to happen. And I was like, Oh, I see all these trends, and I track everything on spreadsheets, and I’ve had people that work with me, long term, short term, you name it. But we usually, almost always do follow ups. And I could see what moves the needle and what doesn’t. I also started seeing what happens when people go on HRT, and what happens when they change certain nutrition, like keto, carnivore, paleo, counting only macros, eating, just clean. You know, I start seeing all these things, how much exercise you do? What? What does that do? What does our mental health do? Like, it was crazy, right? So I basically have been running this science experiment for the last decade, and it has made me change my mind about everything that we’ve been educated with, and many, much of it aligns with, like, the foundation of things, but how we approach them has completely changed. So that’s kind of the backstory on things.

Ryan Jore 7:08 And I remember seeing one of your posts on that, because that that really is true, coaching, right, is actually evolving. I mean, it’s no one gets this right, like, from day one of coaching. Like, the whole point of coaching is, yeah, you’ll probably have some base tenants that you stick with over your career. But there’s a lot of things we realize, like, Oh, I thought this was the be all, end all, and this doesn’t work anymore. Like, I always use the example, like the FMS. I took the FMS for a while, I was religious with it, and I probably haven’t used it now in like, six years, because, like, there’s, you know, there’s still things I absorb from it, but, you know, I don’t need to, like, fully implement that system to realize, like, just because someone can’t do one random push up doesn’t mean they can’t do a bench press, for example. It’s like figuring out those little things over time and again. That’s why, as coaches, we need to be tracking what we’re doing, because that’s how we spot those trends. It’s you’re not gonna have it figured out unless you’re, like, looking at it on a broad spectrum.

Connie Nightingale 7:53 Absolutely. And it’s just like anything where you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And I think that’s been something that I have repeated for years and years now, like, how do we truly know what’s moving the needle, unless we’re managing and measuring these things right? So that’s been a huge thing is, and everybody’s so different. So like you, you said, If you can’t do a push up, then you shouldn’t be able to bench press. Well, there is anatomy and physiology involved with a lot of this stuff and, and I’m in many spaces now because fitness is like is I’m very passionate about all of it. I’m passionate about movement, I’m passionate about training, I’m passionate about nutrition and mind health and all this stuff, right? But the thing is, is you see people like saying you need to be upright in your squat? Well, they’re not paying attention to biomechanics, right? And that’s just another example. So we are all physiologically and biomechanically different. So what might work for Karen down the street is not going to work for myself or you. So these are all things that we have to learn with our clients as well, and that’s where working with a coach for a period of time can also be exponentially helpful to somebody’s success, because they’re able to see these trends and what works for Karen and what doesn’t work for Karen.

Ryan Jore 9:04 And that’s exactly why I think, like an experienced coach matters, is, you know, in the beginning, you just know what your NASM told you, or whatever, and you know you coaches, everyone’s the exact same. The longer you coach again, as long as you’re an evolving coach, you start to realize, like, Oh, like this cue works for some people, but when I see this, then I need to adjust and do that. It’s the little things you start to pick up over time. You start to realize different patterns, or different, you know, exercise you like. For some people, you don’t like them. For others, it’s all an evolving thing.

Connie Nightingale 9:30 Absolutely, and I mean, I’ll take that one step further, you’re able to see how much people are able and willing to apply, because giving somebody a huge plan, and I see this happen. People get driven away from trying to achieve a goal because they get a mount, they they see the whole mountain. They don’t just see the first 10 feet. And so you see this all the time, where people will give these people the perfect plan. Well, yeah, it might be the perfect plan. But is it the perfect plan for Karen? Because she’s got five kids, and she’s running to soccer, and she’s working 80 hours a week, and all the things. What, what can Karen truly sustain? And where can we start so she develops these wins over time and gets better? Is it going to be fast to do it that way? No, but sometimes that’s not the best way to do thing, because, like I said the other day, if you saw my post, I was like, people are so in a hurry that they forget, you know, I use the analogy, if you were given $1 a day, you’d be given $365 a year. And you’d be like, sweet, but if you only looked at the first three days, you’re like, I only got three bucks. This is stupid. And then you quit. You’re not ever giving yourself that opportunity to make the $365. So many people, even slow progress is still progress. So many people, they go into it too much. And coaches do this as well. Then you have people that are not successful because they quit.

Ryan Jore 10:52 And it is such a tricky balance, because I found some clients like they need a certain amount at the beginning to like for them to get their buy in, even though you know that ultimately what that person needs is exactly like you said, like, starting super small and like, maybe we add a habit to that each week. But for some people, for some reason, people can’t start at all unless they feel like it’s enough. I think that’s where, again, coaching comes in. Of explaining to them, like, I know this doesn’t seem like enough now, but like you said, if we just add to this, like, Dan John had this great story about some guy who lost like, 100 pounds in a year, and literally, for the first, I think, three months, the only habit change he made is he’d have one glass of water every single day, because, like, that was something he knew he could do no matter what, even if sometimes it was like 11:50 at night he’s slamming that. But from building that, it built instilled in him the idea that, like, he could keep building upon this, like just small, sustainable habits. It’s again, everyone wants to do the quit smoking, start working out six times a week, eat clean, vegan, or whatever. It’s like, you’re not going to sustain that for more than, like, three weeks of just night or just holding on to it, like it’s not, it’s not a sustainable thing.

Connie Nightingale 11:51 That’s like, the carnivore, the person that’s like, I’ve been doing carnivore for a year, and then, like, oh, I went out for beers with my girlfriend. It’s like, okay. So yeah, that’s, that’s how that works. I suppose.

Ryan Jore 12:05 No, exactly. It’s just learning that the slow and steady approach is almost always the better approach. I think is so helpful for people.

Connie Nightingale 12:17 Absolutely.

Ryan Jore 12:17 And actually, it kind of goes back to one of the questions I would had, is, you did a post recently too, on, like, the difference between foundations and hacks. And again, I think a lot of people do that’s exactly it’s like they want to start doing to start doing keto or some little thing like that, because I think you can cheat the system. And again, whether you’re doing ozempic or doing any other little thing, it’s like we still need a foundation of habits. Like, nothing overrides that. I wanted to have you speak on that a little more.

Connie Nightingale 12:34 Absolutely. And I think that’s a good one. And I think you used a good thing there, like, ozempic, GLP ones, like, that’s a huge talk right now. You have this crazy, diverse thought process on this, where people are like, No way. You’re cheaters, you know? Yada yada. And then you’ve got other people that are like, yes, absolutely, because this person’s unhealthy. Anyways, so, and I’m a little on that train, but the train that I’m not on, so this is the prime example. Is, yes, we are being able to change their weight and we are being able to help them be successful. However, they’re not learning any of the things that it takes to continue that journey further down the road. So if you have a show for your whole life, yes, you’re going to get from point A to point B, but are you ever going to learn how to drive the car? Like, if the zombie apocalypse happens, you’re in deep trouble, right? You can’t save yourself. So, you know, I think. And the other thing is, is, yes, you can feel you can it can be a catalyst for success, for sure, like once somebody is able to start making progress, especially in these cases of morbid obesity, they’re going to feel better. They’re going to be more willing to do more things. And I think it’s there are fantastic. There are things that are fantastic about it, but at one point they need to have something implemented to where they can learn to take it further in their journey. And it’s that way with so many things.

Ryan Jore 13:59 No, exactly, I think an issue when that, when the trend started, I was fully against it at the start, and then as I’ve came around, like, realizing, again, there’s certain people where it totally makes sense for I just don’t like the idea of necessarily mass marketing. It like is, I don’t think it’s a solution for everyone, but I think it’s a solution for a lot of people. It’s, again, it’s, I’m going to take a middle to take road, because that’s what I take a lot of the times.

Connie Nightingale 14:20 Well, and you have a fine point there, and it’s a point that is not just happening in the GLP-1 space. It is actually happening with functional medicine and Western medicine and bio identical hormone replacement therapy, and, you know, cleanses and social media has really made the health industry a profitable industry, so now we have people using things like buzzword root cause. Well, let’s fix your root cause by putting you on hormone replacement therapy. Well, that makes no freaking sense, because if you put hormones into an environment that caused them to be a problem in the first place, likely they’re not going to work the way that they should. So we see a lot of this space that has become profitable, and it has made it really difficult for somebody that is trying to get healthy to embark on their journey, because they have so much noise coming from everywhere and like, how do you pick the right doctor? How do you pick the right coach? How do you how do you pick a care team around you that can help you be successful? Because nowadays it’s real hard to figure out. Like, somebody might sound good on in social media, but every one of their posts may be chat GPT, or maybe they’re just somebody that goes in and they just prescribe the hell out of stuff and get paid for it, you know. And so the health and fitness industry has become lucrative if you can make something be wrong with somebody. So that’s a space that I’ve I’ve found myself falling into, is what can we do, like the people that are truly passionate about helping people get better, they’re not going to care about all the fancy bells and whistles, yeah, they’re going to help somebody just be better. Sometimes that might look like hormone replacement therapy or ozempic or gut protocols or whatever it may be like, it depends on how much of a negative your bank account is in, right? Like, there is a there is a point where people end up in a really poor health outcome, and now we have to do this like, sorry, it is the strict diet. It is this. And unfortunately, there are places where moderation doesn’t work anymore, because our debt is so big, you can’t get a giant debt and then still spend $100 a week on your credit card and expect to pay it off. So there is some nuance there, and you have to be realistic with who you’re working with as well. But yeah, so that’s kind of the take on that, is that the people that are really interested in helping people will help them, regardless of if it’s even working with myself or certain people, right? So if somebody needs help from me and I can’t give it to them, I have a network that’s honestly that’s something that needs to be talked about. Is like you and I, we go to real coaches Summit, and we go to these continuing education events and things like that. We are not seeing coaches and personal trainers do that. But the thing is, is you have an availability to build a network around you when you go to these events of people that can help you, where I could reach out and be like, Hey, Ryan, I know you’re good at this. I have a client dealing with this. Maybe I could refer them to you that refer them to you, or maybe you can give me some information on them, and we build this network so we can best help our clients. Because in the end, the people that are helping people, and it’s not just about making $1 are going to be the people that get the most clients, so they have to keep that in mind.

Ryan Jore 17:46 Well, I think that was one of the biggest things I did for my starting is, like, I have a trainer over in Bozeman who was honestly one of the biggest mentors I’ve ever had, and then having, like, chiropractors and PTs and people like that, you can reach out to with questions, because, again, there’s so much the time. All it takes from is like a simple text over to that person to, like, maybe avoid a whole appointment, or to know whether the client needs an appointment, and things like that. It’s because you know you’ve you’ve had clients where you tell them, Go see a Chiro, go see a PT. A lot of times they’re not going to do it, unless you like, really force them to do it. So sometimes you just need to message someone to find like, hey, is this worth them seeing you for? And I mean, we’re not going to have all the answers. Like you said. It’s like we’ve got to have that network that helps us to address the questions that aren’t for us, basically.

Connie Nightingale 18:23 Absolutely and that can be really great. Ryan, just an example of that is, I had a client recently, not so recently, she was on birth control for a very long time. They were using it to control her PCOS anyway, long and the short of it is, she had a lot of other things that needed to be taken care of. We were able to take care of them. However, her thyroid still didn’t bounce back the way I wanted. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. And so I reached out to a functional medicine doctor in her area, and we talked about it, and they asked me 8 million questions. And she was like, honestly, you have done everything that I would do, so I don’t think referring her out at this point is going to be helpful to either of you guys. She’s like, I think you need to stay the course, because sometimes post birth control therapy can take up to three years to normalize. And I was like, oh, okay, you know. I mean, sometimes we as coaches are unrealistic about things too. So it was good to have somebody back that up and be like, No, you’re doing great. Continue on that path. So, yeah.

Ryan Jore 19:29 So, so if someone was looking for, like, say, a functional medical person, what were some things you would have them make sure to look for if they’re trying to determine whether or not the person they’re considering is qualified or not.

Connie Nightingale 19:40 So this has become the tricky thing in the space. And when I first started getting into this, and I was working with functional medicine providers, they were amazing. It was just incredible. But the way you have to figure is they are also being preyed upon with marketing as well. So we have these, not to dog on companies, but I’m going to dog on a company right now. We have these companies, for example, a big one is like Cell Core. Cell Core is a supplement company. They make fantastic products, but they also put on these conferences where they allow coaches and educate, you know, doctors, nurses, all these people come and then they tell them why they need to use their supplement in the treatment of all of these things, mold, Lyme disease, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, hormonal dysfunction. And the providers come back, and they’re so excited about it. And next thing you know, they’re giving people $2,000 treatment plans, supplement treatment plans, right? Because they believe in it. Somebody told them it’s just like us. We go to a conference, we learn some things. We’re like, Yeah, we want to apply it, right? Same thing happens in medicine. It’s still propaganda. So, so I would say, if you are a coach, getting out and talking to your local functional medicine practitioners is huge. Get a feel for their personality. Get a feel for if there’s somebody that likes to prescribe, get a feel for if there’s somebody that has reasonable expectations with somebody’s health outcomes. Like, if we have John who has worked 80 hours a week, stressful job, you know, low testosterone, and we send him over to a functional medicine provider, and they’re like, here’s some TRT. Well, John eats McDonald’s every day, and he had, he never gets away from his computer. And likely, there could have been some things that we could have done to improve John’s life before adding hormones and stuff. I’m not saying don’t add hormones, because also we have to talk to John and be like, Hey, John, you may be a candidate for bioidentical hormone replacement. I think we could work with this naturally. Could we run 10 to 12 weeks of doing X, Y, Z, and see how much we’re able to improve this and then we just saved you a lifetime of being on a hormone? Or do we send him into a functional medicine office that almost certainly is gonna be like John, your testosterone is 200 here’s some testosterone replacement. See you later, you’re on it for life.

Ryan Jore 22:07 When I met with a functional medical person a couple years ago that’s so impressed with, I mean, I think it was 90 minutes of questions before we addressed anything. And, you know, again, having came from, like, a conventional model where you’re just so used to, like, you’re trying to get in your questions in your questions in like, five minutes, because, you know, eventually they’re going to cut you off. It’s like it was just so refreshing to see make sure someone was, like, checking every single base before they just, you know, hand you this prescription and walk away. It’s a huge and it’s, I think it gives a lot more confidence to the client as well, because you feel like you were actually listened to, versus, like, did I even get to the right thing.

Connie Nightingale 22:39 Correct. And so that’s where you literally, as a coach, even you can reach out to all your local functional medicine professionals, or even some online ones and be like, Hey, I would like to do lunch, or I would like to do coffee, or I would like to do a zoom meeting. I would just want to understand what your foundations are in your practice, what’s your way of thinking. You know? What do you do to help people be successful outside of prescribing things too, because that’s huge. Everybody has a different business model. There are a lot out there that want to just put people on medication, even in the functional medicine space and and maybe John, our friend, who has 200 testosterone, maybe he doesn’t want to fix anything. Maybe he’s happy with the life he has. He’s happy with McDonald’s, and he’s like Connie, there’s the chances of me making a change are zero. Then I’m going to say, Okay, here’s this, this functional medicine clinic. Get down there. They’ll have a talk with you. Go on PRT, yeah, whatever, you know. And there’s plenty of that in the space, and it’s, it’s not wrong, like, but at one point, you know, it kind of goes back to our original where we have to learn to walk or drive or learn how to get there, right? Maybe John’s just not arrived at the place where he needs to learn how to get there yet. So anyway, that’s enough picking on John and Karen, but that’s the foundation of it all.

Ryan Jore 23:52 No, but I do, and kind of what you’re saying is I love how most I feel like reputable people are willing to do like a five or 10 minute consult call before meeting with you. It’s because, again, like, once you’re there and you’re committed, you’re going to follow the plan, regardless of what they say. It’s kind of nice to just, you know, even give five or 10 minutes free to someone and be like, Okay, here’s kind of an idea of how I work before we commit to 1000s of dollars, potentially, especially.

Connie Nightingale 24:16 Right? And then the other thing is, is, if somebody is willing, so if John is willing to do that 10 to 12 weeks of seeing if he can make some lifestyle changes and improve his health naturally. What do you have to lose, really? I mean, even eight weeks, if somebody’s like, really impatient, you’re like, well, just give me eight weeks. Let’s can we do this for eight weeks? It’s amazing what you can see. And this is where it goes back to you can’t manage what you don’t measure, right? But in most cases, especially in the new keyword functional medicine space, in most cases, if you do make some changes for somebody in 10 to 12 weeks, you can see if you were able to move the needle from multiple perspectives, not just labs, either, like from sustainability, mental health, all the things, like, if that person did all these things for 10 to 12 weeks, is it something that they could apply indefinitely? Like we would learn all of these things, not just the lab numbers and so in a lot of these functional medicine quote, he quotes cases, we can learn, like a they’re not something that’s going to have somebody’s going to die from, right? So a lot of these key terms that people are using now, like low estrogen, low progesterone, low testosterone, HPA, axis dysfunction, gut, I’m trying to come up with all of them, right. Gut things, liver detox, many of these things are, are not going to kill someone, right? So we’re able to make lifestyle choices and see what happens. Now, there are cases where you might look at their labs and go, you know, I think we can make some changes here, but I do want you to see a doctor in the meantime, this is what I would recommend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, get them pointed at the right direction, so that you’re not doing them a disservice either. So fortunately for me, I had, a couple years ago. I had a client that was 10 weeks into working with me, and she had a heart attack, and yeah, and it had me going, Oh my gosh. What? What did I miss here? Because, yeah, there were signs. There were definitely signs, she was working with a doctor already, so I didn’t send her to somebody. I just said, Hey, your inflammation is through the roof. You’re at risk of a cardiac event. You know, she was already working with a doctor. They had not run a lipids panel on her, as I had requested, and at the time, I couldn’t order my own stuff. This is probably five years ago now, and I remember going, Okay, this lady’s liver enzymes are through the roof. Her C reactive protein was through the roof. She had severe insulin resistance. And I was like, you are like, a prime candidate for having major heart issues or stroke or something. So anyway, we, I ended up doing like, this pretty significant health rehab, and 10 weeks later, she has this, this heart attack, and actually we had significantly improved her numbers so much, they said probably she would have died if they would have been the numbers they were, yeah, prior So, and it was interesting, because she they wanted to bring all the supplements she was on and stuff into the office, and when she did, they were like, oh, none of this would would cause any health problems. It’s just a bunch of chalk and water, is what they told her. And then they looked at her labs, and they’re like, Wow, how did you make changes like this? And in 10 weeks, it was like, the chalk and water, you know? So, so, yeah, like, in cases of things though, where you have, like, some down regulated thyroid, I’m not saying bottomed out, but rarely do you see somebody’s thyroid bottomed out, you know, but in cases of down regulated thyroid and progesterone and testosterone and estrogen and all these key words these days, many of those things are things where you can make a significant lifestyle change, maybe incorporate some supplementation in the forms of like things that people are deficient in, zinc, magnesium, stuff like that, selenium, and then see if you were able to move the needle, if you were cool, maybe we can avoid going to functional medicine in entirety.

Ryan Jore 28:05 To finish up, I just wanted to ask you a couple of quick hitter questions on some of the stuff that I’ve seen with your social media. So one was just, how would you determine for someone who thinks that they’re in a calorie deficit, but they’re not losing weight. What would you say to that?

Connie Nightingale 28:22 So I told you I wouldn’t dive down any rabbit holes. The tricky part is, so you have this, this clash of people right now that are like a calorie deficit, of calorie deficit. Then you have people saying, Well, the reason you can’t lose weight is your thyroid or your hormones or whatever. The thing is, is the thyroid or hormones may be causing you to need more of a calorie deficit, because your metabolism is down regulated so that it that’s something that people don’t understand. Now, should you press people into crazy caloric deficits? Because they’re not being successful with what they have tried, and it’s starting to get down there, you know, in the in the calorie range, that’s where you need to maybe start seeing, okay, what’s going on with this person. Because in somebody that that is hormonally down regulated, or dealing with the adrenal stuff, or whatever the keywords are out there, right? You may need to address some of that stuff before you ask for a true fat loss stage. Now that doesn’t mean that we can’t be in a reasonable caloric amount, and maintain where we’re at, but we may need some other things that need to be addressed first, prior to asking for fat loss, and that’s just fine. Sometimes you go through a rehab phase. It’s not a reverse dieting phase. That’s a new another thing, right? It is a phase where we work on our health. We eat a healthy diet, we are okay with maintaining where we’re at, even if it’s pounds that needs to be lost, because maybe we need to work on some of the other health outcomes. Oftentimes, those health outcomes also come with nutrition as well. So when you get to that, that place that’s not a deficit, maybe it’s maintenance, maybe it’s slightly out of right, you are going to change nutrition in a healthy way. Anyways, nine times out of 10. So you’re going to see changes in the health outcome further on down the road with that. So I think the biggest thing with that is going to be patience and understanding from the client as well.

Ryan Jore 30:11 Last one I had, because I know this has been a couple of your rants as well, is what would you say to people who feel like they’re too busy for meal prep?

Connie Nightingale 30:18 Oh boy, you don’t even want to get me on that one. So meal prep changed my life. But I’ll just tell people that right now, I worked as a coach and a full time dentistry job for many years, and I have kids and I’m I have, like, my own athletic endeavors going on and crazy. My house is a three ring circus. I’m literally the busiest person I know. It’s so good for so many reasons. One prime example of this is I literally had a client the other day. She was like, I can’t believe how much money I am saving now. I am not eating out. She’s like, it is incredible. And there’s nothing left in her fridge at the end of the week, nothing has gone to waste because it’s all been planned out. So meal prep will change your life. I can’t say anything bad about it? Honestly, maybe you’re just not a person that’s a cook. But honestly, you can meal prep and not be a cook. It’s now, we got air fryers, we got all the things, right, instant pots, but, yeah, it’s what, again, what you don’t measure, you can’t manage. So we’ve got that. We’ve also got who has time to not meal prep? I mean, like, I don’t cook during the week. I can’t, I can hardly take care of myself during the week. I’m not cooking for my family. I literally meal prep for my husband, my children. They know what containers are theirs. They’re color coded. They go and they grab them and, like, just put a significant amount of time and effort into getting good at it. I was not good at it when I started, and it will change your life.

Ryan Jore 31:41 Yeah, I literally, I did a post on this the other day. I said, I’m the same way, like, I actually don’t like the act of meal prepping, but it’s like I don’t have time to cook four meals a day, like I’m not going to do that. It’s like, if I can spend one hour on Sunday and then eliminates, you know, 20 meals of the week, it’s like I can’t afford not to do it.

Connie Nightingale 31:58 And it takes so much like from a logging aspect, like logging your food, log it on on Sunday and repeat the day for the week, and if you have to make a little tweak somewhere so easy, right? And people, please don’t over complicate this. I know it might sound crazy, but you know, I’m so dang busy sometimes I literally have to get some gluten free Annie’s mac and cheese at the freaking store, each container is two and a half servings. I usually get two containers because that’s five days. That’s my work week, right? I get broccoli, I get chicken or ground beef, I cook that up, and I cook the mac and cheese, and I portion it out, and I’m done. It literally took me 30 minutes, like, done.

Ryan Jore 32:39 Again. I think that’s where people make the mistake. Is like, they think every single week has to be, you know, four new meals, and it’s just like, you’re going to burn yourself out so fast. Like, even if you were like, a, you know, stay at home person, that’s going to be tricky. It’s like, you again, start with simple. It’s like, you can always make small adjustments. It’s like, start small and just, you know, grow as you need to basically.

Connie Nightingale 32:59 Absolutely.

Ryan Jore 33:01 So Connie, where can people find you on social media?

Connie Nightingale 33:03 They can just head on over to Connie.Begonnie, so C-O-N-N-I-E.B-E-G-O-N-N-I-E. I was given that when I was 11, and that’s just been my thing. I don’t have any like Connie fit fitness or anything special like that, but you can type, go on type, Connie Begonnie. You’ll find me. You’ll see pictures of chickens and probably pictures of me power lifting, because that’s what I do. And, yeah, that’s, I mean, you can pop on over to my website, connienightingale.com, I can order labs now directly, which saves people a ton of money. So that’s kind of fun and exciting. But yeah, that’s how you find me.

Ryan Jore 33:43 Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on.

Connie Nightingale 33:44 I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Ryan Jore 33:47 Thank you. Thanks. We’ll see you guys next episode.