From Survive to Thrive Through Metabolic Health with Allie Cass

Join Magic Barclay in an insightful episode of A Magical Life featuring Allie Cass, a former pro bodybuilder turned functional health and fitness coach. Allie shares her transformation journey and offers wisdom on optimizing metabolism, mindset, and holistic health. Discover her top three wealth-building tips—gratitude, investing in health, and giving back. Allie explores her personal battles with weight and stress, revealing coping mechanisms like low-intensity exercise, meditation, and resistance training, which are particularly beneficial for women. Learn how to integrate joy and honesty into your life for ultimate wellbeing. 

Don't miss out on Allie's exclusive complimentary health audit. Find her on Instagram and Facebook at @AllieCassHealth or visit AllieCassHealth.com.

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At Wholistic Natural Health Australia, we often recommend the use of high quality essential oils.

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Transcript

Magic Barclay: 0:43

Welcome back to A Magical Life. I'm your host, Magic Barclay. And today Allie Cass joins us. Allie is a former bodybuilder pro turned functional health and fitness coach who helps stressed out women optimize their metabolism, up level their mindset and shift from surviving to thriving. She's an advocate for self love, becoming your best self through mind body health and living a life fully alive. She's excited to talk to us today, and I'm excited to have her. Allie, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm

Allie Cass: 1:19

excited

Magic Barclay: 1:19

to be

Allie Cass: 1:19

here.

Magic Barclay: 1:21

I love your intro. Being fully alive. How many people do we see go through life, here's an Australian term, half arsing it, like either waiting for death or being the walking dead. Life is so precious. You really need to grab it and run with it.

Allie Cass: 1:39

Really do. And to answer your question, I would say the majority of society, at least in our Western civilizations are just on autopilot. They're just cruising through their days, waiting for the weekend, wishing the day was over. And the sad, unfortunate part about that is our days are limited and we never know how many we're going to get. So I'm a big advocate of living life to the fullest, seizing every opportunity and really making the most out of the time that we have here. I love that.

Magic Barclay: 2:07

Okay. I ask all of my guests the same three questions. Everyone gives me different answers and I've had a look at the show notes you sent me and yours are fantastic. So here we go. What can your expertise do to accelerate health? Not just physical, but also emotional and spiritual health.

Allie Cass: 2:26

So for me, when I am educating, working with clients, having conversations with people, what I aspire to do and bring to the industry and bring to individuals is to bridge that gap between the mind and the body. I have been in this industry for about eight years. And as you mentioned, I started out, as a fitness athlete, a bodybuilding professional. So I really have seen the physical side of things, both from a, physique perspective and just from an overall health perspective. And what I learned through that process myself is that you cannot out train, you cannot out diet, you cannot out supplement or medicate, or beliefs, negative self talk, wounds that are unresolved, traumas that you don't address from the past. All of those things have an impact on our biology and on our physiology and ultimately the way that we show up and live our life. So anytime I'm looking at health with people, I get people all the time that ask me about nutrition, they ask me about training, and it always segues into the bigger picture, which is what is going on in your body, what's going on in your mind, and how are those two things influencing each other and integrating with one another? Because that's really the big picture for the ultimate healing pathway that I think a lot of people desire to be on.

Magic Barclay: 3:48

Very true, indeed. We talk about wealth here as well, Ali, and people think wealth is just financial, but it can also be personal and emotional wealth. And I guess that ties into living every day to its fullest. So what are your top three tips to creating wealth?

Allie Cass: 4:07

Ooh, that is a great question. I actually, I was just at a women's wealth symposium this past weekend, so I feel like this is really fresh on my mind. So I would say the first tip is living in a state of gratitude. Like you mentioned, we oftentimes think of wealth as a financial thing, and we can certainly be financially or materialistically wealthy, but wealth It can apply to anything in life, it can apply to your health, it can apply to your relationships. And I think what's important is that we realize what our values are, and we create wealth around that. If your value is freedom, connection, love, purpose, find ways to be wealthy in those. But at the root of everything, Anything that you want to manifest, anything you want to have wealth in, anything that you want in abundance, it all starts with being grateful for what you already have in this present moment, and being grateful for what is coming to you in the future. So tip number one for living a wealthy life, whatever that means to you, is to practice gratitude in the present moment. Second tip, I would say invest in yourself and that includes in your health. I think, I mean, it's so cliche, but there's the saying that health is wealth. And it really is because if you're not healthy, if you're not feeling your best, showing up as your best, waking up every day ready to go. It does not matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how much money you want to have. If you don't have the ability to experience that to the fullest, like we're talking about a lot of, the conversation is about how do we experience life to the fullest? And in order to do that, you have to be healthy. You have to feel vitality. You have to show up as the best version of yourself. And so I think. Investing in yourself, investing in your health. again, whatever that means to you. However, that's going to help you cultivate wealth. that's where I always like to start. I think that we are our own best investments, and you can never go wrong by investing in yourself, whether it's physically, mentally, emotionally, educationally, anything. And then my third tip is to give back. I know this is so true for me. Every time I give back to someone, whether it's in the form of charity or just offering time or taking some time out of my day to just have a conversation that I know is going to help someone. Um, I have people all the time that are like, can I have a consultation with you? What do you charge? And I'm, I don't charge for consultations. I, my goal is to give back to people. So even if I can just help people, Provide them with a direction or a resource or something that's going to help them on their journey, even if it's not myself, I think that it's so important to give back. And I truly believe that when we give to others, whether it's financially, whether it's with our time, whether it's just lending, you know, someone 10 minutes to hold space for them while they you're. Tell us about how their day has been. I believe that the universe brings us back, whatever it is that we desire in the form of wealth, like, double. Um, so I think giving back in whatever means that you can is a very important part of the journey of life and in creating wealth.

Magic Barclay: 7:15

And our final standard question is around weight loss. Many people struggle with this quite needlessly because stress is such a big factor in it. So have you ever battled your weight? If so, how did you win the war? And what can you offer the listeners who might be on this journey? Specifically on that stress rollercoaster.

Allie Cass: 7:37

Absolutely. I had a really big battle with my weight when I was about 22 years old. I had just graduated college, um, I grew up as an athlete, so physical fitness was always a part of my life. I played collegiate basketball for, A few months, decided that it was no longer for me, and decided to quit and put my focus elsewhere. While I was at university, I actually studied abroad in Australia. And, um, let me tell you, you guys can party over there. Uh, it was a wonderful time, but, um, I did not have the healthiest habits. So, after I graduated, I found myself being the heaviest I'd ever been, exhausted. like brain fog all the time. I just, it, I wasn't happy with the way that I looked, but more than anything, I wasn't happy with the way that I felt. I was like, I'm 22 years old. I'm way too young for this. Um, and then I had another less severe, but still somewhat of a struggle with my weight about four years ago. And this was, again, this was after I was in the fitness industry. This is after I'd already started competing. and I had issues with weight for different reasons. So the first time that, I really struggled with weight. A lot of it was lifestyle induced. I drink a lot of alcohol. I ate very poorly. I didn't really know how to exercise in a way that was suitable for my body and my goals. Um, but there was definitely a level of stress in that process. Um, right after I kind of hit this breaking point with being my heaviest, my mother was diagnosed with stage three brain cancer. I moved across the country and I basically became her primary caregiver. Through that process, I really started to do a lot of research on health, wellness, nutrition, all of these topics. Um, not just for myself, but as a way to cope with what was going on with my mom. I wanted answers, and no one could give me those answers. But in that period, my stress skyrocketed exponentially. Um, fast forward about nine months, and she had lost her battle, unfortunately. And I found myself. In a place physically, mentally, emotionally, where I was at my lowest and stress was a big player in that, um, the second time that I really battled weight as well, um, a lot of it was actually stress induced and not just stress from what we think of. So oftentimes we think of stress as, you know, the financial stress or I'm going through, Some turmoil in my relationship and that's a stressor. I have all these deadlines at work. That's a stressor. What we also don't realize is things that happened in our past that we have not yet worked through or that we haven't let go of that serves as a form of stress. We have internal stress from toxins, parasites, bacterial overgrowth, inflammation, things like that. And what I had found in myself at that point was that a lot of the stress that I was incurring was coming from The fact that I had not really fully faced the grief that I had around my mother's death. another traumatic death that I had prior to that when I was in high school. And so a lot of it was emotional stress that I was carrying. Um, the second time that I was having this battle, I was You know, doing all the right things with my nutrition, my exercise, my supplementation. So I knew it wasn't that. And that was really the first time that I was like, Oh my God, like we talk about how much of a role stress plays, but I'm experiencing it. And this is for real. So the remedy for me to that step number one, always awareness, right? We cannot change what we're not aware of. When I work with clients or even working with myself, my goal is always to bring to the surface what it is that's holding us back or keeping us stuck in that place. Um, for me, some of the biggest, biggest mediators to help me move through stress were things like Low intensity training, um, I moved away from doing high intensity workouts, um, I started doing more restorative movement, like walking, um, yoga, I was still lifting weights, but I was backing off of the intensity quite a bit, um, I started to dabble in meditation, which has become such a crucial role. Practice for me in my day to day life. practicing things like gratitude, like we were just talking about last question. it's really difficult to feel stressed out while you're simultaneously feeling grateful. So even just shifting the focus away from what it is that's stressing you out and, and really, Kind of keeping your mindset on what it is that you have that you're grateful for all of the positive things in life because, you know, I'm a firm believer that we need to feel our emotions and we need to move through them. However, there's always something that we can be grateful for, and there's always something that we can learn from any given situation. So practicing awareness, cultivating practices in my daily life that were more restorative in nature, whether it was through movement, through stillness, and then practicing gratitude were huge for me from a stress management perspective.

Magic Barclay: 12:18

I really love how you just mentioned all the different types of stress, you know, it's not just what you're experiencing mentally, it's everything around you, it's the people, it's the food, it's the chemicals, and I often say this to my clients, you know, any stressor Is going to change your cortisol patterns, your adrenaline patterns and either make you feel up for a little while and then crash or just make you crash completely. And we often just look at stress as, you know, work, time, money, that kind of thing. There's so much more to it.

Allie Cass: 12:57

A hundred percent. And I often find with people too, sometimes we don't even realize that we're actually contributing. You know, are we, experiencing those stressors at work in our relationships and with finances? And then are we. using unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol, drugs, are we using food in an unhealthy way as well? Because all of those things contribute to our, the stress load of our body, whether it is through toxins, um, whether it is through just creating inflammation or not having healthy patterns. So sometimes, you know, I hate to say it, but sometimes we're our own worst enemy as when it comes to, creating more stress for ourselves while we Consciously think that we're dealing with our stress. We're actually contributing to it even more.

Magic Barclay: 13:37

Very true. Now we've already covered a fair bit. What else haven't we touched on that you feel the listeners need to hear today? I really want to hear about. What you do every day, what you offer to your clients and how the listeners can maybe learn more about how their body works physically, you know, in this podcast, we've explored a lot of the emotional stuff, coaching, but I think many people just think, first of all, that weight is calories in calories out, which we know it's not, there's so much more to it, but also how the body experiences things. And I know here in Australia, definitely. You know, there's still a large percentage of women that feel that working out with weights makes them big and bulky and masculine looking, you know, those old myths are still kicking around. So can you explain to us a little bit about why resistance training and weight training is so good for women's health and how they can do it without the fear of looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Allie Cass: 14:46

A hundred percent. So I resistance training is definitely a love of mine. And it is part of what I do in my coaching practice with women, a very small part, but a very important part. I think that that's very common. That's very much still the mindset here in America as well. I think we're shifting away from that, but, um, Weight training for a long time has kind of been, you know, we've been told to go do aerobics or to, you know, do cardio machines or, you know, if we are going to lift weights, pick up five pounds and do it a hundred times. And, and a lot of that advice is there's certainly a time and place for cardio, but weight training in general will not make you look bulky. I can tell you from personal experience in bodybuilding, the people, the women that, um, look like they're a female version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, nine times out of ten are taking performance enhancing drugs. I did not realize this when I went into bodybuilding. I was very naive. but there are federations who they're not, um, all natural. And so just from the perspective of like a, an everyday consumer or somebody who wants to just get in shape, who wants to feel more fit that I promise you, even if you lifted consistently for 10 years, it's going to be really difficult for you to get to that point, without taking some kind of enhancement, drug. And even the people who are natural who get very big and muscular, there's a lot of science and a lot of, What's the word I'm thinking of? It's very specific stimulus to create that kind of outcome. So those people have very strict training regimens, they have very strict nutrition regimens, supplements, and it takes time. So if you are convinced that you're just going to go into the gym and start lifting weights and you're going to look like that in six months, I'm here to tell you that's absolutely not the case. Um, the reason why weight training though is so important particularly for women. obviously there's many different reasons, but one of the biggest ones being that muscle, they call it the longevity organ. So muscle is also the most metabolically active tissue. So oftentimes we hear, you know, eat less, move more. That's kind of your calories in versus calories out. But what happens when we're constantly eating less is that we're Reducing our energy intake and our metabolism, our hormones, our thyroid starts to down regulate over time. If we're living in that state on a chronic basis. what I like to focus on with clients is building more muscle as muscle takes more calories to maintain at rest. So when you're focusing on building muscle, you're actually focusing on becoming more metabolically healthy in turn, raising your metabolic rate. So you're not having to live in a chronic calorie deficit. I mean, Even people who chronically diet, nobody wants to diet, right? Everybody wants to enjoy food. We want to be able to have flexibility to live our lives, to nourish our bodies, rightfully so. And building muscle is one tool that can help you get there without having to constantly be in a state of dieting. having muscle tissue is also super important for regulating blood sugar. So, our muscle stores glycogen, which is glucose. in the storage form. It's also stored in our liver. So when you have more muscle, you can consume more carbohydrates. and a lot of women don't want to give up, you know, their, their fun foods every now and then. And so having more muscle is also a way to, again, stay more metabolically healthy and have more flexibility with your diet. Um, another thing more from a health and longevity perspective is that resistance training has been shown particularly in women to help maintain and increase bone density. Many of us that have been, I'm not currently not on birth control anymore, but I was for many years in my teens and in my twenties. and that can actually lead to decreased bone density, obviously, as we age, bone density is a very important topic. And so having resistance training, doing, Exercises where we're loading our body with a particular amount of weight can be really, really beneficial, um, in making sure that we have healthy bones so that we don't fall when we're older. Um, you know, we have less of a risk of fracture, breaking a hip, things like that. You know, you can look at resistance training as being beneficial, not just from a physique perspective, but also for longevity and maintaining proper health and function throughout our life. So I'm a big proponent of it. There's so many more benefits, but those are just kind of the main ones that I think. Are really attractive for most people

Magic Barclay: 19:11

and going back to your introduction and we were talking about living life fully rather than just waiting for the day to end, waiting for the week to end, hanging out for your weekend and then spending it. slave to your home or whatever it is, the tasks that you have to get done before you rush back to work. How can people stop that cycle and really start taking each day as a blessing?

Allie Cass: 19:40

That's such a great question. I think going back to the awareness piece, being honest with yourself about what it is in life that you're unsatisfied with. Is it a job? Is it a relationship? Is it your health, your weight, the way you feel? Is how you're feeling in your health, is that holding you back from being able to do the things that you want to do? I think a lot of us turn a blind eye. We know, we know the things in life that are pain points for us that we don't enjoy, but we don't necessarily want to face them all the time because it's painful and it requires us to change. And once, it's kind of like that ignorance is bliss, right? So once we know the issue, we know that. It's our responsibility and we're the only one to blame if we don't change it. So by not recognizing something, we can kind of live in this state of blissful ignorance, but meanwhile, we're, you know, not, not happy, not feeling healthy, just not feeling satisfied with life. So I think taking inventory and really trying to be brutally honest with yourself about what in your life Is not working and can we change it? Certainly, there are times where we may not be able to, you know, if you're a single mom and you don't really love your job, but it's really what you need to do right now to make ends meet for your kid. It may not be feasible to quit at this moment or to make a career change. So how can we either Bye. Bye. express more gratitude for the situation that we're in, or how can we infuse your life with other things that you enjoy? One of the questions that I ask on my intake form is what is something that you used to do like as a kid or basically before you were an adult that you no longer do? And oftentimes homework items for my clients include reincorporating those things that they used to do that they thought were so much fun, they could just indulge in and get lost in before they had to have these quote unquote adult responsibilities. And so what is that for you? What brings you joy and what can you include more of in your life? So I think being honest with where you're at, what's not working, what you can change, and taking the steps to change that and seeking support if you need to. And then if it's something that you can't change, change. Looking at how that situation is making you better or better equipped for what the future holds and how can we also infuse more fun and joy into your life with the circumstances that we're given right now.

Magic Barclay: 22:00

Some great advice there. Okay, Ali, before I let you go, we love freebies. What can you offer the listeners and where can they find it?

Allie Cass: 22:09

Absolutely. So I offer a complimentary no obligations health audit. It is a free consultation where we sit down, we talk about your goals. We talk about where you're at now and where you'd like to be. And I help you dig into some of those root causes, some of the things that we've been talking about here on the podcast and help you design a roadmap to get you from point a Over to point B. Um, you can find me on Instagram. My handle is at AllieCassHealth or you can visit my website, www. AllieCassHealth. com. You can read more about me, my program, and schedule your free health audit.

Magic Barclay: 22:43

Fantastic freebie there. So you can find Allie, as she said, on Instagram at AllieCassHealth, also on Facebook at AllieCassHealth. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Allie Cass: 22:56

Thank you so much for having me.

Magic Barclay: 22:59

And listeners. Thank you for your time. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast, leave us a like a review and share it with your loved ones for now, go forth and create your magical life.