When Your Boyfriend Got to 5% Body Fat, and You Couldn't Lose a Pound.

Hi Green Door Fam!

I want to tell you a little origin story about how we all arrived here inside the Green Door Life…

About 12 years ago, one of my personal-training clients asked if I would coach her for a bikini competition.

There was one small problem:

I had absolutely no idea how to coach someone for a bikini competition.

So I did what any responsible coach would do and told her I'd help her find someone who did.

I called a friend who had coached competitors for years.

His response surprised me.

"I'll coach you. Then you can coach her."

Well...

That sounded like a pretty incredible education.

So I said yes.

At the time, I was 30. I had a successful personal-training practice in Pacific Heights in San Francisco and was helping certify personal trainers through NPTI and NAMS.

I had studied nutrition.

I understood exercise physiology.

I knew a lot about the human body.

And apparently, I knew just enough about nutrition to be dangerous to myself.

During the week, I was VERY "good."

Then came the weekend.

Dinner. Drinks. Social life. Start again Monday.

I didn't see anything particularly problematic about the cycle.

Until I started tracking my food.

And down the rabbit hole I went.

Six workouts a week.

5 AM training.

Almost no alcohol.

Very few carbohydrates.

Vegetables, avocado, olive oil, protein, coffee...

...and Coffee-mate creamer, because apparently 30-year-old Shannon had decided liquids consumed in small quantities existed outside the laws of nutrition science.

We all have a past.

And here's where things got interesting.

My boyfriend at the time decided to follow the approach with me.

About two and a half months later:

He was around 5% body fat.

And I couldn't seem to lose weight at all.

Same general strategy.

Two completely different experiences.

Worse, I didn't feel good.

My energy was struggling. My training felt different. And eventually we both got sick at the same time.

That day, my body wanted one thing:

A bowl of oatmeal.

I ate it.

And I remember how noticeably different I felt afterward.

That moment made me curious.

Not:

"Why can't I be more disciplined?"

But:

What am I missing?

That question ended up changing the trajectory of my career.

The Plan Wasn't the Whole Story

Not long afterward, we heard that a nutrition coach named Dr. Joe Klemczewski was giving a lecture a few hours away.

So we drove to Sacramento and sat in that room on a Saturday.

And for the first time, I heard someone explain concepts around glucose, carbohydrate availability, energy balance, metabolism and individualized nutrition in a way that connected the science to what I had actually been experiencing.

I remember thinking:

Ohhhhh.

This wasn't just what was happening.

I finally had language for why.

And that changed everything.

I'd taken nutrition courses before.

My mom had even taught nutrition when I was growing up.

But most of what I'd learned was oriented toward general health.

This was a different question:

How does an individual body respond to different nutritional inputs?

That question fascinated me.

I started learning.

Testing. tracking. adjusting, and watching.

Over the following months, my body composition changed significantly.

But something even more important happened.

I started eating foods I had previously believed I'd have to eliminate.

Pizza, wine, travel, restaurants, celebrations, and life could exist.

And somehow, having more understanding created more freedom.

That was the part that blew my mind.

It wasn't harder, it was actually easier than I could have ever imagined. 

So I Tried It With Four People

I asked four of my personal-training clients if they'd let me experiment with this approach.

Different ages, genders, bodies, goals and lifestyles. 

We looked at nutrition, energy needs, macronutrients, activity and, most importantly, how each person's body responded.

Their plans weren't identical.

That was the point.

The framework gave us a starting place.

Their response told us what to do next.

And that's when something clicked for me:

The plan is the input. Your body provides the feedback.

Nutrition didn't have to mean blindly following rules.

It could be a process of learning.

That small experiment eventually became an office in San Francisco.

One office became two.

Then three.

Clients became coaches.

And over the years, more than 1,000 people have moved through what eventually became Awaken Your Nutrition.

The program has evolved tremendously since those early days.

And so has my understanding of what we're actually doing.

We're Not Really Teaching People How to Diet

Yes, we support clients who want to change their body composition.

We teach nutrition science.

We teach exercise science.

We teach energy balance, macronutrients, food quality and practical application.

But underneath all of it is something much more interesting.

We're teaching you how to understand the body you're living in.

Hunger, energy, sleep, recovery, digestion, strength, cravings and body-composition changes all become information.

Instead of constantly asking:

"Is this food good or bad?"

you learn to ask:

"How does my body respond?"

Instead of:

"What diet should I follow?"

the question becomes:

"What does my body need in this season of my life?"

And that brings me back to something printed on one of my very first business cards back when The Green Door Life was The Diet Doc in San Francisco.

On the back of one of the business cards it read

 -> "A Smooth Sea Never Made for a Skillful Sailor"

Awaken Your Nutrition isn't designed for the imaginary month where you're perfectly rested, working predictable hours, eating every meal at home and nobody invites you anywhere.

Because that's not your life.

Your life includes:

Travel, restaurants, birthdays, stressful Tuesdays, bad sleep, job changes, holidays, children, hormonal changes and unexpected seasons. 

And those aren't interruptions to the work.

Those are where you learn the work.

That's why we use education, coaching and biofeedback together.

You experience something.

You observe how your body responds.

Your coach helps you interpret it.

You make an adjustment.

And slowly, something changes.

You don't just get better at following our instructions.

You get better at understanding yourself.

And Then We Go Deeper

There's another sentence from that old business card that has stayed with me:

"The body manifests what the mind believes."

I don't mean that every physical outcome can be reduced to mindset.

I mean that the beliefs we carry influence the behaviors available to us.

"I'm not someone who exercises."

"My body just doesn't change."

"I'm terrible around food."

"I've always been this way."

When a belief becomes part of our identity, we can unconsciously keep making choices that reinforce it.

Which is why Awaken Your Nutrition isn't twelve weeks of food math.

The first half establishes the foundation:

Nutrition. Physiology. Biofeedback. Experimentation. Learning your body.

Then we begin looking underneath the behaviors themselves:

What beliefs, identities and patterns are influencing the choices you're making?

Because we can give someone all the nutrition science in the world.

We can personalize their targets.

We can teach them how to interpret biofeedback.

But if an unconscious pattern keeps pulling them toward the same behavior...

eventually we have to become curious about that, too.

Twelve Weeks to Learn. A Lifetime to Apply It.

Our next Awaken Your Nutrition cohort begins September 21.

You'll move through the experience alongside our team of seven nutrition, lifestyle and holistic architects, with:

12 weeks of guided exploration

Lifetime access to our evolving education curriculum

Weekly group coaching with our NAMS-certified nutrition coaches

Personalized biofeedback and adjustment

Nutrition science, exercise science and behavior-change education

A community learning alongside you

Access to our virtual training studio and NASM-certified personal-training team

But I want to be very clear about something:

This is not a done-for-you program.

And it isn't a quick fix.

We don't want you to finish twelve weeks thinking:

"I hope someone tells me what to do next."

We want you thinking:

"I know how to navigate my own body now, for life!"

Because twelve years after that first bowl of oatmeal, that's still the part of this work that fascinates me most.

Your body is always giving you information.

Sometimes you just need someone to teach you how to read it.

If you're ready to begin learning your own language, we'd love to meet you.

Awaken Your Nutrition begins September 21.

Click here to apply for Awaken Your Nutrition

 

All love,

Shannon Morse

Founder of The Green Door Life