She was doing everything right. That was the problem.
Three real women. Three very different problems. One thing they all had in common.
I want to tell you about three women I’ve coached.
Details changed, but the arc is real.
The first came to me convinced she needed to eat less. She was already under-eating by about 400 calories, training five days a week, and exhausted.
Her body had adapted beautifully to the stress she was putting it under — meaning it had slowed everything down to match her intake.
We spent the first month just getting her fed. She was furious with me. She thought I was sabotaging her.
Six weeks later she emails me a picture of her strong, defined back muscles in the mirror and said, “I don’t understand what’s happening but keep doing what you’re doing.”
What was happening was simple:
She finally had enough fuel to build something.
Her body had been so busy protecting itself from scarcity that it couldn’t do the work of a physique recomposition.
Once we fixed that — generous portions, the right foods, timed to support her workouts — everything changed.
Not because we found some secret.
Because we stopped doing the thing that was actively in the way.
The second woman had been training for two years with no meaningful strength progress.
She was following a well-regarded program to the letter and eating what she described as ‘pretty clean.’
When I looked at her logs, two problems were immediately obvious:
She was never actually in a progressive overload zone — working hard at weights her body had long since adapted to.
She was chronically under-eating protein, which meant even when she did create the right training stimulus, her body didn’t have the raw materials to respond to it.
We fixed both. Within eight weeks she blasted pass all her personal bests in the weight room while dropping several percentages of body fat.
The third had a stress fracture history and was terrified of loading her skeleton.
She’d been doing exclusively ‘low impact’ training and had inadvertently let her nutrition drift —
— not dramatically, but enough that she wasn’t supporting bone density or muscle retention.
We rebuilt her relationship with load gradually, and we rebuilt her nutrition to match.
A year later her bone density scan came back significantly improved with her doctor asking what she’d done differently.
None of these women needed more information.
They needed someone to look at their specific situation — weight training and nutrition together, as a system — and say: here’s what I see, here’s what I’d change, here’s why.
I have something to tell you on Friday. I just wanted you to understand what I mean by ‘coaching’ first.
The cage you’re in isn’t locked.
Michelle