398: Midlife Consistency: Why Everything You Know is Wrong

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:20
Hello, my friend, and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. My name is Courtney Townley, and I am the hostess of the show. I am delighted and oh so grateful that, of all the podcasts you could have put in your ears today, this happened to be the one welcome.

Courtney Townley 0:41
If this is your first time, or if you have not been listening to the show for a while, I do want to tell you from the outset that we are four episodes in to a six part podcast series called The Consistency Code Diaries. I decided to run the six part series leading up to my book launch, which is happening on November 5, I have authored my first book, and the name of the book is The Consistency Code, a midlife Woman’s Guide to deep health and happiness. And the purpose of this podcast series was really to give you kind of a behind the scenes look at why I wrote the book, how I wrote the book, the science that supports the strategies and methodologies that I propose in the book, I wanted to share some client stories in terms of how some of my clients have interacted with the consistency code methodology.

Courtney Townley 1:33
And today, I would love to talk a little bit about the paradoxes that show up when we talk about consistency, because there are a lot of paradoxes to consistency. What is a paradox? Let’s remember what that is a paradox by definition, is a seemingly absurd or self contradictory statement or proposition that, when investigated or explained, may prove to be well founded or true, and I just find in the conversation of consistency, what actually works to help us be consistent at midlife is full of paradoxes. Now I’m not going to go through all of them in this episode, because, of course, I want you to buy the book, but I am going to share with you some of the prominent paradoxes that often show up when we’re talking about consistency. So let’s dive in.

Courtney Townley 2:31
The first paradox I want to explore with you is that constraint creates freedom. Again, constraint creates freedom. Well, what the hell does that mean? It means that if we practice kind of patience and structure and discipline now, it ends up opening up so much possibility for the future. And you know this to be true because you know this is true with finances, right? If you practice constraint with your money and you invest it wisely, you will have more money to spend in the future. We know this to be true with food, right?

Courtney Townley 3:27
If you if you want to lose weight, we know that a calorie deficit, which is a method of constraint, can certainly aid in that ambition. We see this show up in a lot of places, but I find so often we rebel against this. We push against this because we want to do whatever we want to do, whatever we want to do at any time. We don’t want to practice constraint. We don’t like the word discipline. We don’t like structure, because we convince ourselves that it actually robs us of freedom, or that it robs us of spontaneity. And temporarily, that may be true, right temporarily, in this moment, you are going to have to sacrifice a little something in order to experience more freedom down the road.

Courtney Townley 4:26
So it’s freedom now or it’s freedom later. And I find that freedom now like the freedom to eat whatever I want, say whatever I want, spend money on whatever I want. It might feel pleasurable for a brief moment, but there’s no real lasting effect. Now I should let me rephrase that there’s no real positive lasting effect. But when I practice constraint. Want to really do things that align with my long term values and goals. There is lasting, positive freedom on the other side of that. Another way that I like to say this, a lot of my clients who might be listening to this will be familiar with this is no saying no makes way for yes. So saying no today to something, saying no to overfilling your schedule, saying no to, you know, dessert at dinner, saying no to a glass of wine. Saying no to yet another Netflix series allows for some kind of yes tomorrow.

Courtney Townley 5:48
So saying no makes way for a future Yes. Where might that be true for you? What might you need to say no to today in order to have more freedom and be able to say a bigger yes in the future? Maybe it’s something as simple as I’m going to say no to not moving my body today. That’s a big no for me, because I want to say yes to an active future, right? I want to say yes to my independence as I age. I want to yet say yes to aging with with all these adventurous opportunities, which I certainly can’t say yes to if I’m physically challenged, right?

Courtney Townley 6:54
I would also offer that constraint reduces overwhelm, so when I don’t allow myself every option every day, it gives me freedom in my brain, because I’m not telling myself that everything is important I don’t have to give attention to everything and everyone, and there’s a level of freedom to that, because it reserves and preserves resources for my mental bandwidth, for my life, resources that I can dedicate to the things that are most important to me. So when I think of constraint again, I used the word structure and discipline, and I think we rumble with all of those words, like sometimes I see a visceral response in my clients when I’m on a zoom call with them, when I use words like constraint or discipline or structure, but take even structure. Structure is a way of kind of pre deciding, making decisions in advance to help reduce mental load so we can live our days with more freedom. We can be more fully present in the moment, because we’ve already decided what we’re spending our time on. It’s interesting.

Courtney Townley 8:29
I was thinking about examples that I could share with you about clients I’ve worked with who I think really exemplify constraint creating freedom. And one of my clients that came to mind is a woman I’ve been working with for years, and when she first started with me, she had a very full career. She She, to this day, still runs her own business, and she was working 6080, hour work weeks. But on top of it, she was also doing a lot of volunteer work. She was on the chair of a lot of different boards, and she those on their own seemed like full time jobs. And the mission, of course, is important, like volunteer work was important to her, but she found when I was poking questions at her, that spending time with her family and giving her best to her actual job was most important to her. So ultimately, she decided to let go of a couple of these volunteer positions. And it was, it was a rumble for her. It was hard because she didn’t want to be seen as someone who didn’t care. But ultimately, letting go of those two things, those two volunteer positions, hope gave her so. Much more freedom in other areas of her life that were even more important to her.

Courtney Townley 10:05
And I recently had a conversation with her kind of reminiscing about when she first came in and how much she was carrying, and her comment was like, I just can’t even imagine living that way anymore. That just feels so foreign to me and almost makes me want to hyperventilate just thinking about going back into that space.

Courtney Townley 10:30
So I would ask you as the listener, where might it be true that in your own process, in your own health journey in your own wellness journey, where might you need to practice constraint in order to have more freedom on the other side.

Courtney Townley 10:57
Paradox number two, when it comes to this conversation of consistency is doing less yields more. Again, doing less yields more. I do not work with a woman who needs more to do. Okay, I work with really busy women. And what’s so interesting, of course, is when they come in to work with me, they’re often working with me to take better care of themselves more consistently. That’s the reason they hire me, and they want to focus all their attention on stacking more in more exercise, more rules and regulations around food, right? It’s more more, more give me more to do. And as a coach, I can see so clearly after I’ve talked to them about their life, that the reason they’re not showing up for themselves is because their plates are so full, they’re so overloaded.

Courtney Townley 12:15
Yes, we we need to give them some some areas of focus to improve their health and well being, but it’s way less than they expect. And they argue with me a lot, right? They’ll argue with me that no give me more, I can handle more, and I believe they can handle handle more right? If they had more time and energy, but they don’t have more time and energy. It’s not that they’re weak, it’s not that they’re not smart, it’s not that they’re lazy, it’s not that they’re not serious about their success. I’m giving them a very small step to focus on, because I know given all the other responsibilities in their life, they are going to find it way easier to be consistent with a small step than they will be by taking on all things, by taking on too much, too fast.

Courtney Townley 13:14
So I just want to offer you that sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking that doing less means that we must not be serious about success, but I want to offer that doing less, in my opinion, as a coach, means that you probably are pretty serious about your success, and doing less means you just start with a smaller commitment. You don’t try to take on so much out of the gate. Simplification is truly the secret to sustainable progress, and yet our human brains love to delude us into thinking that we need complex we need a lot of things to do, or we’re not going to be successful. And that is just simply not true. Doing less yields more, especially at midlife. Ladies, when we’re our plates are just so incredibly full, we will never be consistent with our own self-care if we don’t give ourselves permission to start with less less commitment, not saying no commitment, just less commitment. Paradox, three, planned inconsistency strengthens consistency.

Courtney Townley 14:54
Again, planned inconsistency. It strengthens consistency. We love to think that we can apply the same effort at all times regardless of what’s happening in our life. But that is not true, right? Different stress loads demand a different level of self-care, so we have to be willing to adjust. And if you are going at the same intensity all the time without a break, that is the path to burnout. So even in well built strength programs, well built strength training programs, you’ll often be prescribed or programmed a deload period after you’ve pushed for a few weeks. A good trainer will often program in a week of deloading. It doesn’t mean that you don’t work out at all. It just means that you work out lighter. Sometimes it does mean you don’t set foot in the gym. And I think that we need to have that approach to everything with self-care, that we need to give our our self periods of planned deloading in order to stay the course. De loading in your strength training allows you to come back with more focus and healthier muscle tissue and just renewed energy in the process. And that is what planned periods of inconsistency can do for any part of your well being.

Courtney Townley 16:48
Giving yourself full permission to go on vacation and not have to work out every day at 6am like you do at home, or giving yourself full permission to take the week of Christmas off of planning your food because you have family in town. Like it sounds reasonable, but when I coach women, I find that they’re they’re they’re so resistant to giving themselves planned periods of inconsistency, because again, a lot of the beliefs surface that I’m never going to come back to it or I’m going to get so derailed, but I often find the opposite is true. It actually reinvigorates our commitment to our process, to have periods of deloading on our commitments, and that’s what I mean by planned periods of inconsistency.

Courtney Townley 17:53
And it’s such a tragedy when a woman has a special holiday planned with family coming into town, or she does plan a really spectacular vacation, or she is going to a conference she’s been saving up for for months, and then she doesn’t really even enjoy herself, because she’s so stressed out about abiding by her health protocol. She’s not really all in it, and she’s not really all out of it, so she’s just feeling massively unsuccessful. And I’m saying pre decide to give yourself full permission to back off a little bit for a period of time and watch how that re energizes you, because it does, it does re energize you. Okay, paradox four, and this is the last one I’m going to speak to today around consistency is being gentle makes you stronger. And what I mean by stronger in this context is it makes you more consistent. Being gentle makes you stronger. We don’t, we don’t believe that. We believe that if we extend ourselves compassion and grace, we’re going to become more complacent.

Courtney Townley 19:20
But really think about that for a second, when you’re an ass to yourself, when you’re constantly berating yourself, when you’re always talking negative, especially when you’re already knocked down. Does that make you want to show up the next day. No, it makes you want to crawl back in bed under the covers with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s self compassion in the moments where we’re really struggling. It’s kind of like that coach or the friend or. Teacher or the parent, whoever those people have been in your lifetime that have helped you stand up when you were really broken down. They didn’t scream at you in order to inspire you to stand back up. They didn’t threaten you if you didn’t stand back up, if you did have those experiences, I am so sorry you had those experiences.

Courtney Townley 20:28
But even if you did have those experiences, I bet it didn’t inspire you in a way that made you want to do it from a genuine place. You did it out of fear, and that’s not what I’m talking about. When you are knocked down and a good friend comes to your aid. They remind you how powerful you are. They remind you how deserving you are, how much they believe in you, why it’s crazy talk to think that you can’t get back up. And that’s the way you need to be talking to yourself, being nice to yourself along your journey makes it easier to realign when you get misaligned and you’re going to get misaligned all the time, but when you’re misaligned and you’re a jerk to yourself, it’s going to take you that much more time and energy to get yourself back on track. But I also feel like it’s necessary to say that there’s a big difference between self compassion and self indulgence.

Courtney Townley 21:33
We can disguise self indulgence as self compassion, self indulgence. Being me, you just don’t want to do the work, and so you just tell yourself, it’s self compassion, that I’m not going to do the thing today, I’m not going to walk today, because I’m just being kind to myself. You’re the only person who knows if that’s true. If you didn’t sleep the night before, you feel like you’re on the edge of getting sick and you just have a lot packed into your day. Maybe it makes a lot of sense to extend yourself the compassion to say, hey, you know what. You’re not going to do that 30 minute walk at lunch today. But if you slept great, your day is a normal day, and you are just rationalizing why you don’t want to do the walk. That’s something entirely different. So I’m talking about being gentle with yourself, when you screw up, when you make mistakes, when things don’t go the way you planned.

Courtney Townley 22:42
Be gentle with yourself so you can start again, so you can take another step forward, but not being gentle with yourself to stay just where you are because you don’t want to do the work that’s self indulgence. I have had lots of clients over the years who it was so clear to me from very early on in our relationship that the reason they struggled to be consistent with their self-care was for this very reason, they were just the self narrative was so bad, it was so cruel, that all they want they were making themselves feel terrible. And when we feel terrible, we don’t want to show up. We want to hide. So we hide behind food, we hide behind social media, we hide behind alcohol, we reach for all the things that actually cost us our well being, rather than doing the things that will actually help us improve our well being. I am sure you have had that experience.

Courtney Townley 24:04
To wrap the session up, today, I would love to read just a short passage from the book, which I’ve been doing every week for the past four weeks, just to give you a little taste of what’s inside The Consistency Code. Make the most of the consistency code framework, you will be able to use the four practices I am about to teach you in the consistency code framework throughout the rest of your life to build and sustain mastery of yourself in the health arena and well beyond. It is my high hope that this framework will do for you what it has done for so many of my clients, give you a very sturdy foundation on which to build your practice of taking care of yourself. Sell to soul, of course, with more consistency and ease and a pathway that you can come back to time and time again. The goal is to keep. Deepening your health and happiness, no matter how far you may have distanced yourself from those things. The consistency code is not a one and done program, which is why I illustrate it as a circle. There is no finish line to your wellness journey. It is a wheel that continues to turn as long as you have the privilege of being alive, and these four practices will help you to keep making forward momentum for the rest of your life.

Courtney Townley 25:31
All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful. I hope it gave you something to think about, and I hope you will come back for the final two installments of this series. Thank you so much for joining me today. Remember the launch of The Consistency Code is happening on November 5, 2025 and if you want to stay abreast of all the goodness happening around the launch, you can head on over to theconsistencycode.com, again theconsistencycode.com Have a great day.

Courtney Townley 26:11
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self-care, you are worth the effort, and With a little grace and grit, anything is possible.