Hi everyone!!! Happy Monday!! I'm going to start this off with the Winner of the February Skool Community giveaway: @Maria Greiner (message me to get your creatine + preworkout sent to you) This month, our Skool giveaway will be a pair of Versa Gripps (if you have these we will pick something else). Same rules apply- contribute & join meetings (meetings are 10 bonus points). Now, a couple of BIG extras!!! 🌈From now until March 19th at 12pm you can enter the 6-weeks of free nutrition & fitness coaching giveaway. I will draw the winner at 12pm March 19th. Attached is the pdf of everything you receive with that coaching. 👀Since March is also National Nutrition month, I will be running a special on my coaching: Invest in 3-months of coaching, get 1 month free. I will be 31 on March 20th 🎂(hence the 3+1 deal haha) Lastly, Thursday at 10:30am Central we will have our community progress check-in meeting. All are welcome! Please come and ask questions/get support on your journey. Let's have a kick ass month! Let me know if you have any questions! Coach Em

Happy Monday everyone! See below for the next two virtual meeting times: 1. Thursday Feb 26th at 6:30pm-7:30pm Central Topic: Resistance Training. Here we will cover the principles needed to gain muscle and not waste time in the gym. 2.Thursday March 5th at 10:30am-11:30am Central Topic: Premium Members Goal & Progress Check This is our monthly community goal check. Here you can ask me questions and get help with any part of your plans you might be stuck/struggling with. More to come for the month of March (it being my Birthday month too 🎂)

I love this question for a few reasons: 1. We generally expect to have results if we are putting in the effort. 2. We are impatient hahahaha. BUT. This is an important question to ask as it leads to either knowing we are doing something right and can continue doing it or we can correct ourselves if we are doing something wrong with our plans. Since my coaching is primarily fat loss or weight gain, I can tell you this- You SHOULD see differences within 2-4 weeks. This is either scale weight or visuals/progress pics OR BOTH. Rules to this- you have to be consistent. I require my clients to be 90%-100% consistency. The 80/20 rule really has no place in my coaching simply because it is abused and I have NEVER seen someone make great progress saying they do that. But also, that is just me and I've only been doing this for 6 years 👀. When you are consistent to that degree and TRACK (daily food and body weights) then you can take the average weight difference between your weeks and know if you are gaining/losing/maintaining weight. Weekly weights will not give you enough information because as we know, body weight fluctuations are normal. If we have inconsistent food tracking (yes even UNDEREATING your calories) will impact this too. There is a reason you have set macros for your deficit. Eat those and stop thinking you are "making progress go faster" by undereating those. I promise you it isn't that helpful and leads to more muscle loss and shitty gym performance because you have less energy. A spicy one for a Monday. Let's get after it y'all. Coach Em

Hi everyone! Since this is the very beginning of our community, I'd like to have a post for all members to write up an introduction so we can all get to know each other better. This is optional and please only share what you are comfortable with! If you want to do this, please comment below and include: - Name & Pronouns - Where you’re joining from (city/state or time zone) - What brought you here - Primary goal (nutrition, fitness, consistency, energy, WL, etc.) - Current movement style (gym, home, none, returning after a break) - One thing you’re excited about Alright, I am Coach Em (she/her) and I run this from Kansas City. I wanted there to be an inclusive community for queers to learn the CORRECT information about nutrition & fitness. Many of you have joined from TikTok, which is sick!. TikTok is great, but time after time I see viral posts with mediocre and/or just blatantly incorrect information that people try to implement. If you follow me, you know my content is more educational based & long. This place will be for even more dense material so you actually learn the "whys" behind things instead of someone saying "do this bicep exercise for blah blah." Lmao, we will learn the why and the how. My primary goal for fitness is steady strength increase & endurance increase. I am healing my calf from a running injury as well. I'd like to cycle a century when the weather is a bit nicer. With that, my current movements are: weight lifting, cycling, & running! One thing I am excited about is just building this community and getting to know each of you!!! Happy Monday!!!

It's peak flu/cold/Covid season and a lot of my friends/family/clients are getting hit with it. I came down with Covid on November 18th and am still feeling the lung effects from it- pretty disappointing since I had planned to cycle 100miles straight for the first time on December 13th, but that goal has been put on pause! I thought for one of the first posts we would tackle this topic in hopes to get some of you back in action or you can pass along the information as necessary! The things I want to discuss in will be ways to reduce that inflammatory state via nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle intervention (aka sleep here). When we are sick, we are in an inflamed state. Dr. Lisa Goehler (neuroscientist) speaks on "sickness syndrome: just not feeling well (i.e. fatigue, low mood or depression, cognitive fuzziness, anhedonia, sleep issues, etc.). While inflammation is the body's first line of defense, we also need to support its fight to fend off the infection and heal. Not to get too deep into it, but this can apply to many conditions we have. 1. How nutrition drives recovery from illness Food has a direct influence on inflammation. The last thing we typically want to do when sick is cook or even eat something that isn't super tasty. But, if we want to get better SOONER, we need to give our bodies whole, nutrient-dense foods which provides the micronutrients necessary to achieve this. Some of the main culprits that drive this inflammation, simply put, are: high sugar foods and other refined carbs and foods containing oxidized fats (oxidized fats/lipids are linked to a cascade of events leading to inflammation, that's a big topic though) aka fried foods or foods that have also been stored for a long time (think it's been in a box/package). Someday I'll put the figures and mechanisms to explain this in detail for you. So, ways to make sure we aren't fueling the inflammation fire are going to be: eating all the good foods that actually combat that. All the vegetables, fruits, lean meats/meats with the good omegas etc. Cooking with quality olive oil primarily as well (damn I should probably cover this too?!). The more PLANTS you can get, the better. This is one of the pinnacles to combating inflammation. Generally, if you are tracking food, aim for 300g-500g of fruit AND vegetables per day. The range is there because we are all different and have different calorie goals. That should take care of base micronutrient needs. Oh, and drink water I stg.