Sarah: Hello and welcome to the Tough Girl podcast, which is about motivating and inspiring you. I'm your host, Sarah Williams.
I'm absolutely delighted to be here with Gale Bernhardt. I know that you've had over 20 years experience with coaching athletes and helping them to successfully reach their goals.
You're a renowned Olympic coach. You help with triathlons, cycling, mountain biking and running. You do a whole host of amazing things. But I sort of want to take you back to the very beginning, so you sort of understand when you first got involved in sports.
Gale: Well, my first experience in organized sports was as a 10-year old, when I began competitive swimming, and that was the time when I really understood that I enjoyed being physically active. It was fun.
Sarah: Did you carry on the swimming, or did you try other different sports?
Gale: I carried on with the swimming through my high school years, and then really quit swimming when I went to college, but kept up with riding bicycle. My bicycle, even as a very young child, was not only a mode of transportation, but it was a way to explore, and the city I lived in at the time, which is the current city I still live in, was pretty safe, and I was able to explore by using my bicycle, all kinds of interesting places. I carried that sport, if you want to call it that, into college, because I used the bicycle as transport from wherever I was living to get to the college campus, and it was a way for me to get workouts, plus I just enjoyed being outside.
Sarah: Could you just tell our listeners where you're based at the moment, where I'm speaking to you from?
Gale: That's a great question. I'm in a city called Loveland, Colorado, in the USA, which is roughly 60 miles north of the capital of Colorado, Denver.
Sarah: Okay, and I know you've been on a bike camp over the past week or so. How was that?
Gale: It was great. We went into the mountains, a group of us, to train and get ready for the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race.
Sarah: Fantastic. Now, I know that you're a 10-time Leadville 100 Mountain Bike finisher. Are there lots of women in this race?
Gale: There are more and more. I have to admit I don't know what the percentage is today, but 10 years ago when I first began, there really were not very many women and I know the percentage has increased over the years, which is exciting. It's great.
Sarah: Absolutely. I think women, especially in the UK, they're getting more involved in sort of that, and they're running marathons, cycling races, doing obstacle races. I don't know if you have Spartan over in the USA, or Tough Mother, sort of things like that, so it is actually quite exciting to see some more women involved in sports.
Gale: Yes, I totally agree, and we do have those types of races here as well, and I think statistically in endurance sports in general, the percentage of women is increasing, which is fantastic.
Sarah: Well, just from your experience, why do you think that is? What are your thoughts on that?
Gale: I think it's probably a synergistic thing. There's more women see women doing sports, and they start to believe that they're able to do it, and also I have to say I believe that there are more men supporting women in sport, and getting them active and wanting them to be part of sport and business, and perhaps it's they see their daughters and they want their daughters to have opportunities that perhaps their mothers or grandmothers did not have. I think there's a lot of reasons why women are increasing participation in sport, and certainly, just like you, there's more women running businesses that are sport oriented. I think that also helps participation.
Sarah: Absolutely. I think you actually ... One of the first things you said, it's seeing women doing more sports, I think one of the problems that we have at the moment is there's sometimes not enough media exposure, so you never really see the women's football, the women's rugby, sorry, the women's soccer, all these things.
Whereas I think nowadays it's starting to become more easily available on the media, so it's easier to see. I know in the United States, soccer for women is a huge, growing sport, so that's actually fantastic.
Gale: Right, absolutely. You're right. Media is huge, and with the internet, that does make it easier for women to see other women around the world, really, participating in all kinds of interesting sports. Really before the advent of internet, it was much harder to get media coverage for women's sports for all kinds of reasons.
Sarah: Fascinating. You've moved into a coaching role. How did you move across into the coaching? How did that come about?
Gale: Really it began with my swimming. As a young person at age 16, I ... Well, really before that. Let me go back a little bit. When I began competitive swimming at age 10, I had a friend whose sister was involved in being a physical education teacher and she helped with the swim club in the summer, and really I looked at her and idolized the way she had impact on young swimmers, the way she was involved, and I admired her physical fitness. I thought, "Well, gosh, I want to be physically fit, and I want to influence involving others in sport when I get older."
I had that seed in the back of my mind, and I decided at age 16 that the first job I wanted was working at the swimming pool and teaching swim lessons to little kids and adults, and being part of the swimming world. That opportunity gave me a little bit of a chance to help with coaching of the younger age groups at swim club, and I quickly recognized that it was exciting for me and very rewarding to help other people do things that they either wanted to do or thought they couldn't do. I helped them harvest the ability out of themselves to be able to do those things, and I'm still very rewarded by that, helping people get a goal or achievement that they really want and they're just not really sure how to go about it. I find it extremely rewarding.
Sarah: I think that's so great that you actually found your passion when you were that age, because I do a lot of motivational speaking. I talk to a lot of young girls age from 16 up to their 30s and a lot of people still don't know what they enjoy or what is it they actually want to do. The fact you found that out when you were 16 is brilliant. How did you then continue down that pathway? Did you think, "Yeah, actually I want to continue doing the coaching?" What was the next step?
Gale: Well, I guess that's where the story is maybe interesting or maybe is similar to some of the women that you speak with, is I recognized that that was in me and I wanted to do that. I considered going to university to get a physiology degree or a sports medicine degree, but I have to say at that time, which was between ... This'll tell you how old I am ... Between 19 ... Really when I was making that decision it was probably 1975.
I had a guidance counselor that spoke with me and said, "Well, you know, there's pretty limited opportunities in the sports field other than being a teacher," and he recognized, he said, "You test extremely high in mathematics and the sciences." He said, "I think you ought to consider an engineering degree." I said, "Well, I don't even know what engineers do." He said, "Let's set you up with interviewing some engineers and touring some industry, and see if that might be something that you'd be interested in." The short story of all that is I went to university and have a degree in mechanical engineering.
Sarah: Oh wow.
Gale: At the time that I was going to school, I still had my finger in sport. I couldn't let that go, so at that time, I got a job instructing downhill skiing, Alpine skiing. I was doing that while I was going to university because I still had that need to help people, to help people be in sport. Meanwhile in university, I took some coursework in biomedical engineering because I was fascinated with how the human body works and I wanted to learn more about that. The short story of all that is there just were not the opportunities to go into a bio-engineering field, at least in a place where I wanted to live at that time.
I graduated university in 1980, and took a job in manufacturing engineering, which I took a job with Eastman Kodak Company, but or and I guess is really the right word, while I was doing a day job as an engineer, always at night I was doing some sort of sport instruction, teaching aerobics. I still taught a couple of seasons of skiing, and then I got involved, a friend invited me to watch a multi-sport, a triathlon. Said, "You've done swimming, you ride your bike to work all the time, you run 10Ks. Why don't you do a triathlon?" I said, "Gee, I don't even know what that is." She said, "Well, come watch it."
I went and watched a triathlon. I thought, "Oh, gosh, that looks just like a ton of fun." At the time I decided, "All right. I would like to do a triathlon, but I want to do a sprint one," and I found a sprint race close to me, and I looked for a training plan that would be easy for me to follow, something that existed for marathons and 10Ks at the time, but really there was nothing for triathlon like that.
The year was 1986. Triathlon was really pretty new as a sport. It was ... People consider it's birth in 1974, so the sport itself was just over 10 years old, and there was really not a developed process for how to train for the sport. There was a couple of magazines at the time, and most of the information came from professional athletes, but there was really not a lot of information for age group athletes, how to train and progress.
What I ended up doing is cobbling together my own training plan based on my experience with other sports. Completed my first sprint distance triathlon, and I was immediately hooked. I just said, "Oh my gosh, this is fun, and it's something I want to keep doing." That first year, people around me knew that I was involved in this endurance sport thing, and they began asking me if I could help train them for doing longer distance bike rides, which at the time, riding 30 miles from one town to the next, or riding 50 miles, was considered endurance sport, and also century rides were pretty common. Almost immediately upon beginning to do endurance sport myself, I started helping other people get in the sport. Maybe i was recruiting training buddies secretly, I don't know.
That's really ... That's a long story, but that's how I kept in a day job, if you'll call it that, and kept an endurance sports in the side, beginning in 1986. But my coaching involvement went clear back to when I first started coaching and teaching swimming. It wasn't until 1996 where I made a decision. I had a gut feeling ... I had been asked to write columns for Triathlete Magazine in 1995. Helping to educate and teach or give tools to age group athletes, how they could easily do a triathlon and it didn't take as much training as they might have viewed from words that were coming out of professional athletes' experience at the time.
I began to assemble training plans and put them in Triathlete Magazine to help people see how they could easily do the sport. That was really my first breakthrough into mass media and helping people understand how to train for triathlon.
About a year later, I had a gut feeling that the sport was going to grow, as would coaching opportunities around the sport, and so my husband and I made some lifestyle changes and said, "Okay, you have 2 years to try to make this happen. If you can't make it happen as a professional coach, then you'll have to go back to a job as an engineer." I was fine with that. It was like, "Okay, let's give it a shot." That's how it all began.
Sarah: That's so fascinating. I know you talked about the triathlon. You said you did your first one and it got you absolutely hooked. Can you try and explain what it was about the triathlon that sort of got you hooked?
Gale: I think it was ... Part of it was changing from sport to sport. I liked doing the swim and then changing to the bike and changing to the run. I found that more interesting for me than a running race only, and more interesting than a swimming race only. At that point, I had never participated in a bicycle race of any kind, but I found that changing from those sports and really being able to push myself differently was part of the attraction. Then I'll have to admit the people that were doing the sport were so friendly and inviting and helpful, and they wanted you to be there, and they were excited to talk to you at the finish line.
I have to admit, I did not find a similar comradery certainly in running races, and swimming was just different. Competitive swimming is a different sort of feeling. Gosh, the events take all day long, and they're short and there is some social aspect, but it was just very different from triathlon. I think all of those things attracted me. Additionally, because of my lifestyle, I found I could train for triathlon on my own pretty easily. I didn't have to show up for an organized swim practice. I could if I wanted to with the masters group, but really I could organize sport around my lifestyle, which at the time suited me really well, trying to figure out how to stay active while still working a day job.
Sarah: Yeah, and I think a lot of women these days ... One of the questions I get asked quite a lot is how do you fit it all in? How do you fit it around your life and having a day job and if you've got a family and children? That's really, really interesting. You mentioned when you were writing for your column that you used to give out tools and pieces of advice. Do you have any ... Just a few little pieces of advice for anybody who's thinking, "I'd love to get involved with a sprint triathlon?"
Gale: Well, I can tell you that people imagine that it takes a tremendous amount of training each week, and they'll have to ... Most people imagine it will take 10 or 12 hours a week to train for a triathlon, a sprint triathlon, and it's just not true. I've written training plans that help people begin from really not ... I call it dormant fitness, because I think there's really an athlete in all of us. We were all intended to move as human beings. I don't think we were intended to be stationary in front of a computer or sit all day long.
I think taking a currently dormant athlete to being able to do a sprint distance triathlon, it only takes a maximum of about 4 1/2, 5 hours per week, and that's the biggest week of training. People can say, "Oh, my gosh, well, I can certainly fit 5 hours a week into my busy schedule with kids and other activities, doing maybe 30 minutes a day during the week and not even every day," and then making longer workouts on the weekends when they're off work. I think it's pretty achievable for most folks.
Sarah: Definitely. I'd say I certainly agree with you, because when you think about a triathlon, you would think, because it's 3 different disciplines, it's going to involve hours and hours of training. But hearing you say that you can actually do it on 5 hours a week, from just a dormant start, is actually really fascinating.
You decided to make it a go as a professional coach. You gave yourself 2 years to do it, and you've obviously by this point, you've got a vast amount of experience with training from downhill skiing to the swimming to the triathlon, obviously, getting out into the media to talk about your opinion and write your pieces of information. What was the next step for you?
Gale: The next real big step was working with a road racer, a female road racer, her name is Nicole Freedman. She came to my doorstep really because another coach was too busy, couldn't take the time for her and he said, "Do you want to work with this woman? She's a fairly high level road racer, but I just don't have the time to work with her," so I said, "Yeah. I think she would be interesting to work with." I began working with Nicole and she was really an interesting woman in that she had lived at our Olympic training center as a resident athlete, and she felt like she was both over-trained and under-trained at the same time. The physiologist that she was working with there had her doing VO2 max intervals frequently, and she just felt really burned out.
Her goal at the time was to try to make the 2000 Olympic team for the USA, and she was really very much a long shot. What I mean by that is at the time the selection process was primarily national coach selection, and what I mean by that is the national coach had a very large hand in deciding who was going to be on the team and who was not. Nicole didn't have the best relationship with that person, and there were other conflicts going on at the time, and so there was literally 1 spot available on the Olympic team that could be gained by direct performance, like an Olympic trials process. She needed to win the USA National Championship in order to secure that spot on the Olympic team, and honestly no one gave her a chance in a long shot to be able to do that.
The short story is she won. She won that National Championship, which got her a spot on the 2000 Olympic team.
I was able to travel to Sydney, Australia, with my first Olympic athlete, and learn about the process of the Olympics, and learn about it from an individual coach perspective, and was absolutely enthralled with the Olympics. My love of the Olympics really began as a child watching Alpine skiing, because that was my sport at the time. To be able to go to the Olympics with an athlete that I coached in 2000, was literally a dream come true. It was something that I dreamed of doing, but couldn't, even in 1986, I couldn't imagine ever going to the Olympics, because at the time I really didn't know any elite athletes whatsoever. I think part of the point there is I wrote that dream down in a journal without having really any idea of how it would ever happen to come true.
I encourage the women out there to take a chance of writing down your ridiculous dreams, and keeping them in a notebook somewhere, because they have a way of keeping us focused and keeping those goals and dreams in the back of our mind and maybe in front of our face. Even though you don't know how you're going to get to that dream or that goal, I think we begin to make conscious decisions about opportunities that will eventually lead us to that goal. I wrote down that goal probably in 1990, somewhere between 1990 and 1993, so it was before I quit corporate, and it took a full 10 years for me to realize that goal to go to the Olympics to coach an Olympic athlete. But the point is, it happened, and I think no matter what dreams or goals women have that are listening to this podcast, they're possible. Don't hesitate to go after those and write them down, and make them come true.
Sarah: Absolutely. One of the things that I was thinking about what you've just said is that actually this opportunity came along to you when Nicole Freedman, when the other road coach couldn't take her on, and you had to ...
You know, she was a long shot, but then she went out to win the National Championship, and it took her to the Olympics.
I'm actually a massive believer in getting people to write down their goals, whether it's on a piece of paper that they stick on a Post-It note on the back of a door, whether it's they create their own vision board.
But if you do write it down, it gives you the opportunity to plan, have a thing to aim towards. As you said, it may not happen in a year or 2 years. It may take 10 years for your dream to come about, but it can still happen, no matter how crazy the dream is.
The Sydney Olympics, I watched that on the TV, and it was just absolutely phenomenal. How would you sort of explain what was the atmosphere like? What was it like to actually be there with your athlete?
Gale: It's really hard to explain an Olympic experience, because literally it is like no other experience you have in your life. Even attending a world championship event is not quite like an Olympic Games, because there's so much security, there's all the other countries there, there's complicating factors of sponsors, nationally and internationally. Because the United Stated, I believe is, if not the only country, one of the few countries, where the Olympic movement is not government funded. There's all kinds of complicating issues with sponsors and expectations of family and it's just a crazy, crazy environment. But at the same time, it's such a privilege to be at a place where the world sets aside its differences, just even for a short time, and does sport. It's fantastic.
Sarah: I always think with the Olympics is there's always two sides to it. You've got your physical preparation, but equally, which I don't know if you would say it's more important or just as important, is the mental preparation. How do you get your athletes mentally prepared for races? Whether it's the Olympics or a sprint triathlon, or a road race?
Gale: What I kind of do in training, is as much as possible, mimic the physical demands of the event, so that when they get to the event, all the dress rehearsal has been done in one way or another a number of times, and people know what ... They have established a routine that works for them, what to eat for breakfast, what to eat during the event, what clothes to wear for the event, so that there's some amount of central anchoring that is comfortable. Then there's things outside of their control zone, really, that is always going to be changeable and a wild card. You can't control the weather, you can't control what other people are going to do around you. All you can control is your reaction to those stimuli.
We talk about those things during training, like what are you worried about? What worries you? I have athletes write down what things worry them, and then we talk about, "Well, what if that does happen? What can you do?" Part of the process is brainstorming potential solutions to things that could go wrong during the athletic events so that when the athlete is presented with that problem during the event, they aren't caught completely off-guard. They have some choices to make that they can go back to their either experience or, "Oh, yeah, we talked about this, and I could do this action and that will at least help get me around the problem." As much as possible we practice in practice, not only physical things, but mental things, like, "What if this goes wrong? What will you do?"
Sarah: So it's all about having a plan in place of how to deal with the different situations that could come up during that time.
Gale: Right. Right.
Sarah: In terms of ... We talked briefly before about setting goals and it's something that you would encourage everybody to do. What advice would you give to the women listening about how they should go about to set their goals?
Gale: Well, I think a good place to start is to sit down and in writing, and I prefer handwriting, I know computers are big, but I think there is some connection between the physical process of putting pen to paper that makes a difference. I have no proof of that, but I just believe it does. I think the first thing for women would be to describe their perfect day. What would your day look like if you could have it any way you choose? Do that first, and then set that aside. Then the next thing I think is incredibly hard for adults to do, and that is to brainstorm all the things you think would be really cool to do, or to accomplish, or to have. As adults ... Children are extremely good at doing this. They will write down things like, "I want a giraffe in my backyard."
Adults, before they even write that down, they're already going through a process in their mind of why it would be totally impossible to have a giraffe in the backyard, and that's not going to work. The only rule I tell people when I walk them through this process is there are no rules and you must not put any limits on yourself. If you want a giraffe in your backyard, you write it down. If you want to coach an Olympian and you have no idea how you're going to do that, you write it down. You don't start putting up roadblocks before you write those things down. I think it sounds strange, but I think that step is the hardest thing for adults to do, because they start putting roadblocks up before they've even began.
Sarah: Absolutely. I really like that. No rules, no limits. I've written down a number of goals that I want to do, and one of my sort of my, I think, most outlandish ones is really random. I'd love to go and have dinner at the White House. I've written it down. I don't know how it's going to happen, but who knows? In 5 or 10 years time I could be sat with the President having dinner.
Gale: Why not? Why not? Why would you ... I mean, other people do it. Why not you?
Sarah: Absolutely. Absolutely. You've had this amazing career of doing a lot of coaching, both in person and online, and in 2014, you were actually selected by Men's Fitness Magazine as one of the top online trainers for giving advice on workouts and on how they can do their workouts and what they need to do. You've also written a book as well, a number of different books. Could you tell us a bit more about the books that you've written and how they can help people?
Gale: Sure. The books I've written to date, I really wanted a way to be able to touch more people, and working with people like I worked with Nicole, and the other athletes that I work with very personally, I'm time limited in that I can only work with a certain number of people at any one time. I just, I was eager to help more people. I wanted to be able to help a bigger percentage of my nation, and honestly the world. That was one of my goals is I wanted to help more people in the world become healthy and be active, and improve their long-term quality of life. That was one of the things I wrote down, and it sounds ridiculous, maybe to some people, to say I want to influence the health and fitness of the world.
Maybe that dream is still coming, so what I began with, the books I began with are books to help people get involved in cycling and triathlon, and training plans in those books to make it easy. It doesn't matter whether you pick up a book or use an online training plan, I want you to be able to look at the plan from beginning to end and say, "Oh, gosh, I can do that and I can see how if I take this one step each day, I can come closer to achieving a sprint triathlon, or a mountain bike race, or a century ride, or a marathon, whatever it might be.
Those are the books that I've written in the past, and my most recent book, and the title of it is How to Become a Fat Burning Machine, and I give people, not necessarily in triathlon, but a broader spectrum of people, guidelines for diet and exercise that I've learned from my years of working with endurance athletes to help them become healthier and share with them secrets that endurance athletes know that they can use to help their body burn more fat as fuel, and become more efficient, and hopefully improve health markers as well. I do, I want to influence a bigger number of people because the obesity problem, certainly in my nation and I believe in the world as well, is an enormous problem that, it's a terrible load on our health care systems and it's also terrible for the people as they age.
They end up with just a below optimal quality of life, and it doesn't have to be like that. Again, it's not that hard. You don't have to train 20 hours a week, and you don't have to give up everything you love, but certainly you do have to give up being addicted to junk food and some bad lifestyle choices that have people on all kinds of medications and in hospitals as they age. I don't think anybody, as they look forward, really wants to do that.
Sarah: No. I completely agree. I've been trying recently to give up processed sugar, and it's been possibly one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I'm struggling with it daily. Just because processed foods are just everywhere and sugar is in absolutely everything, unless you're going full-on paleo and you're getting all your fresh fruits and vegetables. Otherwise, you know, you can't pretty much eat anything from the supermarket. It does get very challenging. But you mentioned providing a few little secrets. Could you share maybe one or two secrets that you mentioned in the book?
Gale: Let's see. What can I help share? Certainly giving up ... Becoming a sugar detective is one thing, and studies on laboratory mice have proven that sugar is actually more addicting than cocaine. If you, as a consumer, very much like you've done, start to look at labels and try as much as you can to begin taking sugar out of your diet, is certainly a huge step in the right direction. I think another tip that I would offer is trying, particularly with your evening meal, if you can pull out sugar as much as possible, and also high glycemic carbohydrates.
When you do that, what it really does is it's one step in forcing your body to utilizing fat as a fuel, because if you eat a big bowl of ice cream before you go to bed, or a big sugary piece of cake, then your body is going to try to access that sugar for fuel, rather than trying to burn fat or excess fat as a fuel, because it's easy. It's right there. Unfortunately, for a huge population, I think in the United States right now, the number of people that are insulin resistant is around 35%, and it's growing. It's huge. Insulin resistance means that people don't ... Their muscles don't actively use sugar and bring it in, because the insulin door, if you want to call it that, is broken. What it does is it shuts and that sugar, then, is immediately stored as fat because there's nowhere else for it to go.
If you're insulin resistant, your body's insulin door isn't opening and allowing your muscles to utilize carbohydrates, really, and you're storing them as fat. That is a terrible, vicious cycle. People can start to, number one, eliminate sugar from their diet, and as you found, it is everywhere and it's not an easy thing to do. Certainly in the evening, try to peel back the sugars, for sure the sugars, and try to restrict the high glycemic carbohydrates. I think those 2 steps will go a long way in starting the process for sure.
Sarah: By high glycemic, you mean things like bread and pasta and white potatoes?
Gale: Right. Right.
Sarah: Perfect.
Gale: People can go online and they can look for charts of 2 things. One is foods that have a high glycemic index, and those are foods that tend to raise insulin almost immediately, and then there's also foods that have high glycemic loads, and that's given a serving size, it gets a little bit more complicated, but your listeners can go online and begin to look at foods that have high glycemic index and high glycemic loads. If they can begin to reduce those foods in their diet, then that's going to help them start the process of becoming better fat burning machines.
Sarah: That sounds fantastic. I love the thought of burning off fat while I sleep.
Gale: Right. Right.
Sarah: That sounds like a win-win. Yeah.
You do have a website where you offer coaching. Do you just want to share your website and your social media contacts?
Gale: Sure. My website is gale, G-A-L-E, at galebernhardt.com, and that's G-A-L-E-B-E-R-N-H-A-R-D-T dot com, and then I have a Twitter account, which is just the same, galebernhardt, all one word, and then I actually have 2 Facebook accounts. One is primarily coaching related, which is Gale Bernhardt Consulting, and the 2nd one is if people want to know what I'm doing for my training and the activities that I do with the athletes pretty much around here, fun activities I do on my own, and how I keep myself fit. Then that Facebook site is Gale Bernhardt, Gale.Bernhardt on Facebook.
Sarah: Gale, thank you so much for sharing those. Obviously I'll include all of the links and books that we've discussed today in the show notes as well. I just want to say a massive thank you for your time and sharing so much useful advice and information from how you started getting into coaching, how to set goals, how to do the brainstorming. My favorite is still have no rules and have no limits on that.
Also talking through the mental preparation, how you can get yourself ready, not only just for the physical demands of the event, but mentally prepare yourself for that. I think it's been hugely educational and I've really enjoyed talking with you today.
If you've also enjoyed listening to Gale, please do get in contact with her on her Facebook account, on her Twitter account, and also through her website as well. Gale, just want to say a massive thank you again for being on the Tough Girl podcast.
Gale: My pleasure, Sarah. Thank you very much for the invitation.
Sarah: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Tough Girl podcast with Gale Bernhardt. We'd love to hear from you, so please send us a tweet for Gale. She can be reached at her Twitter handle, @galebernhardt. For myself, Sarah Williams, I'm @_TOUGH_GIRL, all in capitals.
Don't forget though, to write down your goals and be as outlandish and creative as possible. If you are wanting to cut out processed sugar, you can read about my experience on the Tough Girl blog, www.toughgirlchallenges.com.
Thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on iTunes and share with your friends and family. I'll be back with you next Tuesday for another Tough Girl podcast. Have a fantastic week.