Allie's Fitness Journey and Psychological Barriers

so how about we talk about like this photo shoot thing I did yeah that yeah we we planned um so we originally planned it like because you got me so shredded for my wedding and then we're like let's do a shoot and then just like the wedding we moved that three times and it became like this never-ending prep but it was enjoyable and you did it the right way so for context kind of talk about what you know it's been like taking me through this whole journey for the past i mean i've been with you guys four years now yeah so um my crazy and everything i gave luke full you know disclosure rights to everything about me so you guys know that i'm fully transparent so yeah easy well yeah i mean how do we start this how do we start so we'll start with your old nickname i can't call you that anymore which was crazy alley uh that's what we called you first because like when you when you first came on and and and I just want to be clear this is this this story that we're about to tell is the most common story I see training people especially women um and I used to think it was going to get better it's going to get but it's not it's not like women are still crazy when it comes to this stuff and it's if we go way way back even before I started training you uh when I got in the industry, it wasn't, it was like super taboo for women to actually be in the jump. Like you, it was all dudes. It was a bros club. You might have one or two women that, that the weird freaky bodybuilders that would come in, you know, but it wasn't like it is now where, you know, you've gotten mass amounts of women that actually want to get strong. Like women want to lift heavy. They want to lift hard. They want to grow muscle. It's now become accepted. Thank God for women to actually put on muscle and pursue strength and hypertrophy. But it wasn't always that way. And I mean, you got to think this is only only 20 years ago, when I started a little over 20 years ago that I started personal training. And then even before that, you know, I've been in gym since I was eight years old, and you never saw any women in there. So it's changed a lot. But then you've gone through this, this whole thing of, you know, there's still the stigma for women. And there's this still kind of psychological issue too, because they want to put on muscle, but they don't want to put on weight to do that. It's like, okay, if you eat and lift to grow, you're going to have to accept the scale going up. And that was the first battle for you is I think you were eating something like 1100 calories when we first started and your output was really high. And so it's like, okay, you want to look like Dana Lynn Bailey. you're going to have to put on a significant amount of muscle mass. And this is going to take a long time and you're going to have to be okay with the scale going up. So I still remember, I, I don't do a lot of reverse dieting. I only do reverse dieting. If someone has that kind of psychological thing where they see the skill jump up, you know, a pound and they freak out. Right. I would rather just take them straight up the maintenance and just rip the bandaid off and get it over with. But with some people, you can't do that because they've been eating so low for so long that the minute they, let's say, I think the first thing I did was take up to like 2,100 calories or something. 2,400, I think. You start freaking out. I can't remember. Yeah. And then I was like, okay, we'll do it slowly. So let's just go to 1,800. So we went to 1,800. You put on like one and a half kilos. You freaked out. Let's go back to 1,100. and then we went back up to 1800 you freaked out went back to 11 so this process went on for a long time until you finally got okay with now bringing that up a bit when you start putting on muscle but that's kind of the that's the the the mind fuck that this can be because women have such a psychological attachment to the scale and it's the scale doesn't matter it it does in certain situations but it's only one metric to look at there's a lot of other metrics you have to look at in order to um to put on muscle and put on strength But a lot of women are really hesitant to do that