Ep 252 – Can Body Positivity and Weight Loss Coexist?

In this episode of Muscles by Brussels Radio, Dani sits down with Randall and Robin to explore the nuanced relationship between body positivity and weight loss. They share their personal journeys through long-term struggles with body image, food, and fitness, including major weight loss transformations.

The conversation dives into food noise, the reality of yo-yo dieting, and how building routines (not relying on motivation) became the key to sustainable change. They also unpack the benefits and limitations of the body positivity movement, challenging the idea that health and self-acceptance are mutually exclusive.

This episode offers an honest, balanced look at how you can pursue better health while still respecting and valuing your body.

Randall: @knishofdeath
Robin: @tofunestfitness🌱 Coaching Application

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TRANSCRIPT

Dani Taylor (00:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Dani and today we have two very special guests that I’m excited to introduce you guys to. My good friends Randall and Robin here. Hopefully if you’re on YouTube you’ll be able to see them. So Randall and I met at the same time like me and Giacomo and Robert met. We all met on the same week 18 years ago, which is crazy.

And then of course we met lovely Robin when you guys got married a decade ago, right? A decade ago? Yeah, crazy. So, you know, we met in the vegan bodybuilding space a bajillion years ago, but you guys have been on quite the crazy fitness journey for the last couple of years and just watching it from afar has been very, very cool. And I think you both have a very interesting perspective.

Randall And Robin (00:30)
Literally a ago. Yep, a decade ago. That’s right.

Dani Taylor (00:52)
on health and fitness and transformation. And I really thought it would be cool to have a conversation about it for our audience. We did a body positivity conversation, I don’t know, a year ago or something. And I feel like this is kind of just an extension of that with much better perspective than I had. ⁓ But before we dive into it, why don’t you guys just tell the audience a little bit about yourselves?

Randall And Robin (01:09)
you

Sure. So, we live in Seattle. We’ve moved all over the place. We lived in Philly. We live in Seattle now. We lived in Orange County, California before that. I’ve been vegan in the animal rights scene for almost 30 years. I think this year will be my 30th year. Started when I was pretty young, when I was in middle school and just kind of stuck with it.

I’ve orbited the fitness and like vegan bodybuilding space since I was about probably, I don’t know, 18, 19, started working out, started getting online, finding like resources for other people like me who are also working out. But I will say that I always had like a bit of a complicated relationship with the fitness industry. And that that made it difficult to kind of persist.

and be consistent and feel comfortable in those kinds of spaces. So, you know, it’s been an off and on again thing. I would say the last two, almost two years now has been definitely the most consistent both of us have been, but by far the most consistent I’ve been in my entire life.

Dani Taylor (02:22)
I’m I want to dive more into this Robin. want to hear a little bit more about I actually don’t know how long you’ve been vegan or when you got interested in the fitness sea side of things so

Randall And Robin (02:30)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, I’m coming up on 13 years here in a couple of months, vegan. And I have a really have always had a really complicated relationship with fitness. I’ve been or had been, guess, ⁓ fat basically my entire life. And, know, I’ve kind of orbited his orbit as far as his relationship to like the fitness community goes and the vegan community goes and

Yeah, these last couple of years have been really, really different for both of us just as far as like our relationship to fitness goes. And I think that’s been a huge change for us. Yeah.

Dani Taylor (03:03)
So Robin, said like you had been like up until recently, been fat your whole life. ⁓ Randall, think you, please correct me if I’m wrong, it was more of like an up and down thing for you.

Randall And Robin (03:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean I basically yo-yoed since I was a teenager and I’ve always had like weird complexes about my body and about food and You know, there’s been a lot of I feel like I had to go We can talk talk about it in more depth. I’m sure you’ll have some questions about it But I feel like I had to repair my relationship with myself

and my body and fitness before I could repair my relationship with food. Because there were some really unhealthy things there that I didn’t realize at the time. And part of the reason I didn’t realize it is because I had this really problematic relationship with my body as well. And so working through that meant ignoring the food aspect of it for a very long time and then having to kind of like circle back and figure it all out.

It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I knew we had this this conversation coming up and I feel like The body positive movement repaired my relationship with my body And then that’s what allowed me to actually I don’t think I would be here I don’t think I would have accomplished what I have For the listeners that don’t know we actually haven’t said it yet. So in 2020, what was it 2023?

I was 350 pounds. I’m currently 215 pounds. So that’s what 135 pounds lost. And I don’t think that would have been possible without the body positivity movement, which is very interesting because there are some aspects of it that actually became problematic for me. But nonetheless, if I hadn’t gone through that journey.

of how I feel about myself and how I value myself and my intrinsic worth based on how I look, I don’t think I could have gotten to this point.

Dani Taylor (04:58)
I think that’s really interesting and I know we are gonna talk about it. Before we get into it though, I was just thinking, Robin, so I wanna make sure for our audience that they have an understanding of what you mean when you say this, because a lot of people have like kind of a bristling reaction to the word fat being used as a descriptor or as like, you know, I was fat like as an identifier, right? And often when we talk about it on the podcast, we’re talking about it as a noun like,

Randall And Robin (05:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

Dani Taylor (05:24)
this is my body fat, right? Like it’s a thing. So I want to kind of hear your perspective as somebody that for a long time, just how do you feel about the word, I guess in general? So people don’t think we’re being like nasty, you know what I mean?

Randall And Robin (05:25)
Yep.

Yeah,

I’m of the camp of ⁓ folks that don’t use fat in a negative sense. It is a descriptor and whether that was weaponized against folks or used as a descriptor, I don’t think that it should be weaponized. think that it’s just a word. And having come deeply from the body positivity community, I think that was kind of a reclaiming for me.

Yeah, I, when someone says I am fat or you are fat, I’m a teacher and I do a lot of work to make sure that my students don’t see that as a negative word because it’s just a word. It’s not an insult. It’s a state of being.

Dani Taylor (06:11)
with you, but I know that as a no longer fat person, people do not want to hear me say it very often, you know what I mean? And of course, you also are no longer that. So do you want to talk about your transformation a little bit?

Randall And Robin (06:15)
Right.

Right.

Yeah, actually, that’s funny because I struggle when I say it. It’s so natural to me because it’s been a word that I felt comfortable using for so long. But now when I say it, I kind of bristle it myself because I’m like, oh, is that going to be perceived weird? But yeah, it’s just I don’t I don’t feel like a different person by any means. So any language or ideas that I have about things are the same. But yeah, my journey. So to say that I’ve like

Dani Taylor (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (06:46)
been fat my whole life is still true, but that has also yo-yo’d a little bit as well. You know, when you grow up larger, especially in like the early 2000s when like heroin chic was the aesthetic, you’re always diving in and out of sort of the fitness world. And that always was just really, that’s the word I’m looking for, not disruptive, disordered for me.

And so, you know, I like grew up going in and out of sort of binge eating and starving myself and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it never ended up anywhere necessarily positive for me. I just would lose a bunch of weight and then gain a bunch back and lose a bunch and gain a bunch. And I had never really gotten under like maybe like 190 pounds. You know, I’m 155 now and I haven’t been this size since like third grade. Like I’ve been

Dani Taylor (07:36)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (07:37)
upwards of 180 since fourth, fifth grade. But yeah, so I’ve considered myself up until maybe like COVID times to be fairly physically healthy. Like my blood work was good, my physical health was good. I was able to be like moderately, not intentionally active, but active in the world. And yeah, something happened around COVID times.

where no one was leaving their houses, no one was moving, no one was eating the best foods that they could for their bodies. And I think we just got kind of complacent. I was almost getting to a point where I was feeling like I was becoming disabled. And that’s not to say that fatness disables you, but I was so immobile and so not doing anything to treat my body well that I just was feeling fucking awful. Sorry for cursing.

Dani Taylor (08:22)
Nope, that’s all right. It’s all right. We have the explicit

warning on here. I have had people be like, why do you swear? I have my kids in the car. I’m like, why do you play explicit things with kids in your car? Sorry.

Randall And Robin (08:32)
And it was so I was so I was so Determined not to like weigh myself or focus on my weight that I wasn’t paying attention to that But the health aspects started becoming more and more apparent and I was like, I cannot ignore this I don’t know what weight I got to I know I got at least to 252 ⁓

So I’m almost at a hundred pounds loss, but I probably got above that. Yeah. My number is also a bit of an estimate. So we went about six or seven years without a scale because scales were evil. I didn’t want to know what I weighed. It didn’t matter because if I tried to lose weight, I would just yo-yo again.

You know, this was a, for both of us, I think this was a long journey. Although I would say the mobility thing that you brought up, that was relatively recent for you for that time period. Whereas I had had, there were always some things you couldn’t physically do, walking, getting around was usually not an issue for you. That was something that I struggled with for a very long time. And right up until the point that we just got sick of it, I was…

I was at the point where I couldn’t walk two blocks without needing to sit down. Something was pressing on my nerves and my back and causing sciatica or something. And I was in miserable, miserable pain. And before I started working out and changing my life, I was strongly considering, was getting to this point of acceptance of just being

disabled. ⁓ And absolutely, you know, there’s lots of people who are disabled. And I do think that we should have acceptance around that. And so that’s where some of the body positivity stuff comes in as well. You know, it’s like, we want to be accepting of that. It’s OK if you are disabled. That was always my mindset. You know, it’s a it’s a state of being. It’s not an identity. It doesn’t define it wouldn’t define who I was. So I didn’t necessarily have negative connotations about it.

Dani Taylor (10:02)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (10:27)
But that also means that I was trying to accept something that I didn’t necessarily need to at a point in my life where there was still time for me to change. I didn’t realize that at the time. What really happened for us was we were in a kind of terrible apartment situation and we had a parking garage and I drove to work and I took the elevator up to my apartment.

And so before we even started really working out the year before that, we moved to this apartment and I started taking the bus to work or taking the train to work. And so that meant that I had to walk at least two or three blocks to the station and then walk from the bus stop to my office. And just that little bit of extra mobility slowly made some progress and it started to get a little bit easier. Although I still had a lot of issues getting around at that

It wasn’t until later that things got significantly better.

Dani Taylor (11:19)
So when did you guys become, and it might be different answers for each of you, when did you guys become drawn to the body positivity movement and why? And before I even get into that, I just want to preface this with people think about it like there’s two camps, right? There’s the body positivity movement, and then there’s the fitness slash weight loss industrial complex. And I think.

Randall And Robin (11:41)
You

Dani Taylor (11:44)
that they both have areas where they’re great and they both have areas where they’re really problematic and toxic. So just leading with that. So I’m curious to hear how you guys got into it.

Randall And Robin (11:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Do you want to talk about that first? It’s definitely different for both of us. Yeah, it’s hard to even honestly remember because it was just like part of social media. I like felt like I slowly sort of moved into it. It kind of started with that years ago I was like really into pinup aesthetics and I like.

was spending hundreds of dollars wearing these ridiculous vintage dresses and dressing to the nines. And I think part of the conversation on social media for people who were in that little enclave of 50s people was just how the body standard had changed so much and how being thick used to be desirable.

And from that conversation started more of a conversation around like how fatness is being demonized. And yeah, just, think I was one of those folks who was like, I’m not saying that I was like creating the fat positivity movement necessarily, but I was like in the, in the roots. I was definitely there as it was happening.

And yeah, like you said, I really do think that people think of them as like two opposite things. For me, like Randall said, I felt like I needed to have the experience of learning to not hate myself ⁓ in order to do anything to make myself feel physically better, which just so ended up being losing weight. Yeah, I…

Dani Taylor (13:02)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (13:11)
getting I’m not I would not say that I’m out of the body positivity right I feel like people like you said people think that if you are working out or if you’re eating a specific way or doing any of those things with intention it means that you are like

Anti-body positivity, ⁓ which is so not the case for me. This is for me body positivity. I’ve finally come to a place where I love my body. I don’t look at it and think I’m disgusting like I did when I was a teenager ⁓ because I spent so much time working on my inner perception and other people’s perception of me and getting to a point where I just don’t care what other people think of my body, which takes so much work.

So yeah, now that I have the ability to not care as much what people think about my body, I feel like I’m able to focus on my health. Now the bigger struggle is feeling accepted by the people who think that they’re two different camps. So, yeah.

Dani Taylor (14:01)
Well, I agree

because when it was starting, like when the body positivity, I was also, I was there, I was watching, I was cheering it on, but also I was like, Danny, shut up. This is not your, this is not your space. Even though I really do think, yeah, I understand that there are bodies that are marginalized for sure in society, but also.

Randall And Robin (14:06)
Right. Right.

It should be everyone’s. ⁓

Dani Taylor (14:20)
people just don’t like their bodies that much, even if they’re technically like socially acceptable. And I think we can all learn to try to distance ourselves from what our bodies look like and find our worth in other ways. And I think it’s helpful for that, but.

Randall And Robin (14:30)
Right. And

a lot of it is rooted in fat phobia. That’s not any different than it was in the first place. And I think that that’s something that we should still be discussing and recognizing. And especially now that we’re moving back to that heroin chic era, I feel like that conversation still needs to be had. And we still need to center it around the fact that we are just fat phobic. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t also focus on making our bodies feel mobile.

Dani Taylor (14:34)
Right.

Randall And Robin (14:53)
I mean, have to say, I don’t think you can talk about some of the toxic developments within the body positivity movement without just talking about sort of our political climate writ large. This is something that has happened across the board.

Right? Like we know we’ve got, I’ve always been very left wing, but we’ve gotten increasingly partisan, right? So right wing people are getting more right wing and getting more rigid and more isolated and creating echo chambers for themselves. And left wing people are doing the same thing. You combine that with like COVID and everybody at home and.

you know, people are creating these like online echo chambers for themselves. And there’s just an element of like toxic politics that has kind of seeped into that. And it’s not just the body positivity movement. It’s kind of been all over the place. But, you know,

Body positivity used to be about like loving yourself and accepting your body at any size and not determining your own value or worth or attractiveness based on whether you’re fat or not fat or somewhere in between. And at some point, know, and I was part of this too, I felt it, but there was like an anger that kind of bubbled up.

under the surface within all of these communities and a militancy kind of developed. then it became, there was this like culture. I know there’s like these fat influencers that say you can’t even talk about exercise. You can’t even talk about thinking about what you eat. And I just don’t like that’s, that was never what it was about. So I don’t know how we got there. I do know that ⁓ I felt some of that anger and resentment towards like

you know, norm, what we’d call like normative society around body and image. And certainly the fitness community does not help writ large for the most part, the way that people talk about fitness and talk about how people who are fat are lazy. It’s like, no, ⁓ I’m in pain and I’m tired. And like, please spend a week in my body and then tell me what it’s like to go throughout the world, you know? And also it’s like, so,

I never talked about where I got into body positivity. I would say it’s always kind of been there. It’s been an element within left-wing political communities for at least probably 20 years. What we’re talking about is when body positivity started to become more of a norm, at least within, I would say, the progressive half of the country, where it was just expected that you adopted these views. And if you didn’t, you would…

face a lot of harsh criticism or social isolation as a result of that. And I think most of that was positive, you know, other than the elements that got rather toxic. But, you know, what happened for me through this was when I met Robin, I was actually on a fitness journey. I don’t know if you remember that. I saw you that summer and I had just…

spent the last like six months losing a good amount, nothing like I’ve done now, but it was a good amount of weight for me at the time. I think I’d went from like, you know, 290 to 245 or something like that. And I felt pretty good at the time. I thought that was kind of like the peak of what I was capable of doing. And what ended up happening was that just like life happened. One, I got into a new relationship. Sorry.

Dani Taylor (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (18:12)
That’s fine. There was a lot of like, you know, going out to dinner and going, you know, going out to eat. We did that a lot. That was like our recreation was going out to eat. We also just spent a lot of time at home watching movies and just kind of being lazy. And then also about six months after we met, like destroyed my ankle and had like three months where I couldn’t work out. And then

Dani Taylor (18:13)
You

Randall And Robin (18:34)
Also, I was in grad school and it was a very stressful time in my life. And I think what ended up happening was that I couldn’t work out for a while. I was already developing kind of some bad habits around food because we were eating out constantly and not even remotely thinking about how many calories it was. So it was kind of a perfect storm of all those things together, but I didn’t realize that at the time. What I realized two, three years later was that, wow, you know, I’ve gained a bit of weight back.

And if I ever try to lose weight, know, it wasn’t the first time I’d lost weight. As many fat people, people who’ve lived lives as fat people can tell you, actually like fat people do know how to lose weight and they’ve done it many times. And what often ends up happening is that they yo-yo, right? You lose weight, you’re thin for six months, a year, maybe a year and a half, and then you gain it.

all back and usually you gain more. I said I was around 350 pounds in 2023. I’d never been that big before. I’d been 305, I’d been 310, I’d been 315, I’d been 290, 295. I’d always orbited around this like 20 pound kind of window of when I’m fat, this is how heavy I am and when I’m actually exercising and looking at what I’m doing, I’m a little bit leaner, not like I am now, that’s a whole different thing.

Yeah, you know, I don’t know where I was going.

Dani Taylor (19:55)
I think

that’s really important thing to talk about because I do think a lot of people in general but also in the fitness space do think that overweight people, they just don’t know how. They just don’t know how to do this and if we can just educate them then they’ll just know how to do it and they’ll be able to do it. And that is so insulting because most large people, especially people who have been large their whole lives, they know more about dieting than the average person by a lot actually. It has very little to do with that. It has more to do with

Randall And Robin (20:10)
Great.

Dani Taylor (20:23)
life circumstances and can you make it stick? Like do you have not the knowledge of what to do, but like the lifestyle setup to do it consistently and like kind of hang on to it. And that’s, that’s what you can’t just learn that in a book. Like it’s way more than that.

Randall And Robin (20:38)
No, one of the things

we talk about all the time is how, you know, there’s like this assumption that if you are fat, that also means that you’re lazy. But having been to the point that we were both essentially disabled, like I do have a disability and I can talk about that in a little while, but to the point that we were like feeling like we were immobile.

Dani Taylor (20:47)
Yes.

Randall And Robin (20:59)
What a lot of people don’t realize is that when you are inactive and you are larger and you are carrying that weight, like it is hard as fuck to just actually move your body. It hurts. It’s exhausting. Changing your food habits is…

completely different. think that we associate them because when you’re like working on yourself, you’re doing both of those things. But just moving when you have a body that feels disabled is so hard. And so to like call it laziness is just so reductionist because it’s really not necessarily even about being lazy. It’s just it feels impossible. When you get to that point, it feels like you can’t physically do it. also, OK, I don’t sleep super well now just to be just to be transparent. But

⁓ Even, you know, getting a restful night’s sleep was difficult because I would just wake up multiple times per night in pain because I was heavy and I was laying on one spot and it just start aching and it would get sore. Sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and feel like someone had taken like a little hammer and chisel to my spine. You know, and the last thing you want to do when you wake up feeling like that and you can barely move is go to the gym.

You know, getting out of bed feels difficult at that point in time. So how are you supposed to do that? But I would say one of the things that has been really important for us to, we both kind of knew this before, but one of the things that’s really important to our success, I think so far, is that motivation comes and goes. ⁓ I’ll be very motivated and then my motivation will go to zero. What matters

Dani Taylor (22:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (22:29)
And you talked about this kind of in terms of like lifestyle, right? What matters is your routine. You know, when you’re motivated, that’s when you build your routine. And then you build the discipline and the habit of sticking to the routine. So we’ve been doing this now, how long has it been? I don’t know. Almost two years. Almost two years. My motivation has gone from a hundred to zero, probably four or five times in that time period.

Dani Taylor (22:41)
Yeah.

Randall And Robin (22:57)
but my routine hasn’t changed. I go to the gym four days a week. I run two to three days a week. And I do that no matter what, unless I’m sick or injured. If I don’t feel like it, doesn’t matter. It’s gym day, I go to the gym. Don’t feel like running, doesn’t matter. It’s run day, I go run. Same thing with tracking my food. So I weigh pretty much everything I eat with a food scale.

and I track my calories with Chronometer. I’ve tried MacroFactor. I’ve tried MyFitnessPal. We have all of our recipes in Chronometer now, so that’s just the one we stuck with. But, you know, it doesn’t take very long, at the time, it felt like a lot. Mentally, it felt like a lot. Now that it’s a habit, it feels weird not to do it. No, than anything else.

Dani Taylor (23:37)
man, I have so many questions right now. Okay, so you’re 350 pounds and 250 something pounds and both really having a hard time even moving your body. I’m guessing, but you guys can tell me that you did not wake up and go, and now I’m gonna start going to the gym four days a week and running three times a week. Like what was the start? Because when it’s hard to just walk up the stairs, like how do you get started on exercising?

Randall And Robin (23:44)
50 something. Yeah.

Dani Taylor (24:05)
or moving or anything like that.

Randall And Robin (24:06)
Yeah,

that other way is the way that I tried every other time in my life, and that’s not how my body works anyway. So I actually, I’ve had chronic pain issues my whole life and have been trying to find answers. as you, I’m sure know, people don’t like to, doctors don’t like to listen to women and their pain problems. So I’ve never gotten anywhere with that. But a few years ago, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

Dani Taylor (24:26)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (24:31)
And that was, you know, some rabbit hole that I could dig through on the internet to see what I could do to feel better. And what I learned was that if I built muscle, I could potentially be in less pain around that. Actually, before that, I also started taking I’m on psych meds. One of the ones that I take just like makes me a little less hungry. And so I was eating a little less and I started realizing that I was getting a little smaller. And so my body was lighter and I was just able to like

walk a little bit more. I was doing like little at home, like aerobic type videos, super, super, super low impact, just because it was like, wow, I can move. And apparently if I strengthen myself, I’m to be in a little less pain. And so I was kind of getting into that journey on my own. And then we went to Hawaii and I…

had the time of my life, I was snorkeling, I was like, my God, I feel capable of doing these things. I don’t know if I would have been able to do this a year ago. And I don’t know, during that trip, I don’t know, something seems to click for you where you’re like… Well, okay, so was a couple things. Okay, so what I would say is the year before that, we had moved into this apartment. So I was taking the bus to work every day.

And it’s just like one of those like what they call like a 15 minute neighborhood where you can walk to the grocery store, you can walk to the post office, you can do anything you need to do. that was integrated into our life the year before. So I had started losing weight. I don’t know how much, it wasn’t very quickly. I wasn’t tracking my calories, but I was moving a lot more and I was eating just a little bit less. Robin was eating a lot less because of the medication that they had gotten onto.

And so because Robin was eating a lot less, I just wasn’t eating, like I wasn’t just like stuffing my face constantly like I had been doing before. So I definitely lost a little bit of weight that year, probably around 20 pounds without really trying. And this apartment is also a walk up. So that meant when I went to work or I took the dog out for a walk, which we do three to four times a day, I was going up three flights of stairs.

⁓ You do that at 350 pounds. That’s hard at 350 pounds and that’s a workout. So I was getting a little exercise even if I wasn’t being super intentional about it. But yeah, then we went to Hawaii and a couple of things happened. So one, I had lived in Hawaii previously and there were a lot of things. I used to be very active outside. I used to go surfing. I used to go snorkeling. I loved it. And when we were there doing stuff, you know, we had fun but…

I would try to do things I used to do and my body just like wasn’t capable of it or I would like fall or I would hurt myself. Even just like getting out of the pool. I couldn’t lift myself out of the pool very well. And you’re supposed to be like weightless in water. That was a bit concerning, right? So there was all that. And then at the same time actually, my mom went into the hospital. And so this was the thing that I think

Dani Taylor (27:07)
You

Randall And Robin (27:18)
really clicked for me. So my mom had a very rough like 10, 11 months from that point until this past May where she actually passed away from just a cascade of complications. And it wasn’t about weight. This was not about weight at all. My mom was not particularly, I mean, she wasn’t like thin, but she wasn’t like particularly overweight. That wasn’t a…

health concern for her. What it was was that she just didn’t take care of herself at all. So, you know, she would go an entire day without eating and then just eat like a bag of gummy worms or go an entire day without drinking any water whatsoever. Maybe have like three sips of a Gatorade or something. And she didn’t, you know, we feared for a while that

she could have some long-term health complications as a result of her lifestyle. And we tried to talk to her about it and she was kind of stubborn about it. But what ended up happening was that she went into the hospital for a gallbladder removal surgery, something that is extremely common and happens all the time in United States. And that set off a cascade of health complications that eventually took her life. Part of the problem was

her lifestyle and not taking care of herself. So like the water thing I mentioned, because she never drank water, because she was severely dehydrated all the time, her kidney function was poor. It wasn’t to the point of a health crisis yet, but her numbers were bad before she got ill and went into the hospital. And what had ended up happening, long story short, a lot of things happened, but eventually some of the health complications actually contributed to a massive heart attack that she had.

in the hospital while she was there. And they could never treat it effectively because they couldn’t put enough contrast dye. They couldn’t use the contrast dye they needed to take proper imaging of her heart because the contrast dye is not great for your kidneys. And so if your kidney function is already borderline or poor, it could just instantly kill you if they do that. It could cause like acute kidney failure. So they were never able to treat

her heart attack, they had talked about putting in stints, doing some different things they never did. And I just had this realization that like, you know, she never really thought about what she ate or what she put in her body or what she was doing. And it ultimately like took her life in a very indirect way. You know, she didn’t get diabetes and get so heavy that her body just like couldn’t take it anymore. It was literally just like, you know, she just

wasn’t being like responsible adult with her body. And one of the things that’s happened to me in the last few years is I’ve finally become more of an adult. At least I feel that way mentally. I’m 42 now and I would say it’s taken about that long to get me there. But I just started like being like, no, ⁓ I need to be responsible. I need to pay my bills on time. I need to be responsible with my finances. I also need to like…

eat brown rice most of the time, probably, but it’s better for me. And just general things about your health and your body as you get older that come with adulthood and coming into middle age, that was all part of it. So all of those things happened at the same time. There was the inability to do things physically that I had done when I’d been in Hawaii previously. There was the health complications with mom. There was the fact that I knew I’d had a really hard time getting around.

and something just clicked and I just decided that enough was enough and while we were there we were having this conversation and then when we got back we just like instantly put it into place. We said this is going to be what we’re going to do and this is going to be the schedule and we’re just going to stick to it and at first it was four days a week at the gym, it was like two days on, then with then a rest day, then two days then or two rest days and then two days on again.

and you were just working at home at first. We had a gym nearby, it’s kind of expensive. So I joined the gym, started going to the gym. You were still kind of weird about going to the gym? Yeah, I mean, I have, especially being a fat, fem person, I’ve just always been really uncomfortable at the gym. I’ve had a lot of really horrible experiences. Do you remember that joke that everybody used to do where if you see someone ugly, they would be like, your team.

Dani Taylor (31:31)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I remember that.

Randall And Robin (31:32)
No? Okay. I haven’t heard in a really long time. When he

was in grad school, we were using the gym at the college and it’s full of frat bros. And I had already had so many negative experiences at the gym, but this group of guys walked past me when I was on a bike or something and they’re like, your team. And I was like, every negative experience that I had had at the gym was trumped by that one.

Dani Taylor (31:54)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (32:01)
I basically refused to go to a gym after that for a while, for the most part. And so I wanted to go back to a gym. But I have like one, negative association because I’ve had these like bullying experiences there. And two, just like I’ve had negative experiences at the gym anyway, just because I associated it with like punishment. So didn’t even want to go. So like I said, I was doing like low impact stuff at home. And then eventually I was like

Dani Taylor (32:20)
Yes.

Randall And Robin (32:26)
Yeah, I’m feeling better, I’m moving better. I really do want to build muscle. Let me just go. And we have a gym literally across the street from us. It is really expensive. But it’s also just like we live in a queer neighborhood and it’s like mostly just a bunch of cis gay dudes and they don’t care what I’m doing at the gym. No, I get hit on a lot more than you Yeah, I don’t get eyes on me. But it just like completely changed my relationship with the gym because I just go and nobody’s looking at me. I don’t care what they’re doing. They don’t care what I’m doing.

Dani Taylor (32:40)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (32:53)
Suddenly now I enjoy being there, which has never happened to me before. And now I think you could pretty much go into any gym space and be pretty okay. don’t think I am. We’re going to my hometown next week and I am a little bit nervous about going to the gym there just because it is one of the gyms where I had all the horrible experiences when I was younger. So I’m going to go and I’m sure I’ll be fine, but I’m still like a little nervous. I’m going to like run into someone or I don’t know. I think this is going to be like a healing experience for you. Yeah. Probably.

Dani Taylor (33:08)
Mm-hmm.

That’s what I was gonna say. Like you maybe can overcome it and then feel differently about that gym. I mean, I

would say gyms are intimidating just in general if you don’t go to them often. But I always tell people like most 90 % of the time, no one gives a shit what you’re doing. No one’s even paying attention to you. Yes. Yeah.

Randall And Robin (33:24)
Yeah. ⁓

Nope. They’re obsessed with themselves more than anything else.

Dani Taylor (33:35)
And I also usually say like the biggest, scariest looking most jacked dudes, like those are usually the friendliest guys if you need help because like that’s their obsession, right? This is their hobby and they’re so excited someone else is like interested in their hobby that they’re more likely to be helpful. But I don’t want to make it sound like, you know, but those bad experiences never happen. It just sucks that you had several of them happen to you, you know?

Randall And Robin (33:41)
It’s true.

And unfortunate,

know, as far as I can tell, they almost always only happen to like fem presenting people because that never happened to me. You know, ⁓ I’ve been huge. I’ve been smaller. ⁓ I’ve been super out of shape and no one’s ever given me a hard time because I’m just a big guy at the gym lifting weights. And that’s acceptable in our society. you know, I’m sure. Yeah, I mean, I’m sure that kind of thing happens everywhere. I think that ⁓

Dani Taylor (34:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you’re definitely right.

Randall And Robin (34:24)
California is where we both grew up. California has a specific bro culture that is just so misogynistic that I feel like maybe it happens more there just based on the amount of experiences I’ve had versus when we lived in like New Jersey and Philly. I never had anything like that. Yeah, that’s true. But you also, when you live over there, you learn to have angry bitch face all the time. think that might be part of why I have an easier time at the gym here because I’m like, don’t look at me. Yeah.

Dani Taylor (34:34)
Maybe.

I’m

Right.

So you guys came home from Hawaii and from then on, it was like a deliberate journey. Cause it sounds like up until that point, you guys had both been making like small like lifestyle changes, but then it was sort of deliberate.

⁓ you explained the exercise thing. Before we get into the food part, which I really, really do want to talk about, because I think that’s definitely like the kind of trickiest mental stickiest stuff, but at any point, did you feel like the body positivity movement or the fat acceptance movement or anything like that had kind of like, I don’t want to say lied to you because it makes it sound like deliberate, but did you feel like, God damn it, I heard from so many people that it didn’t matter.

how much body weight you carried, that that had nothing to do with your health, but you were starting to notice some correlations between some things. Did you have any of those kind of like pissed off feelings a little bit?

Randall And Robin (35:35)
Yeah.

A little bit. And it’s less like I was feeling duped and more like I knew that already. I had already gone through so many health things that I objectively knew that there was some kind of correlation. I do think that it’s true that we oversimplify fatness as it relates to health. I don’t disagree with that at all. But yeah, I already knew that if you don’t move your body…

Dani Taylor (35:54)
Definitely.

Randall And Robin (36:00)
that you’re gonna feel like shit if you eat nothing but really fatty, really high carb, simple carb foods that I’m gonna feel low energy all the time. But I think the thing that felt different for me was like, though like, I don’t even know how to explain it. Feeling like it was never gonna matter.

Like there gets to be a point where if I continue not moving my body intentionally, if I continue eating this way for so long, then eventually, yeah, my blood work isn’t going to look as good. And eventually, yeah, I’m not going to physically want to move because it hurts. Those were the things that didn’t necessarily feel like a lie. I just like got the confirmation that like, yeah, if I go a really long time without doing any of those things, I’m going to feel awful.

I’d say there’s a couple of things. I was definitely doing some like internal gas lighting, you know? Trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter at all what size I was or what I ate, that I could be healthy, that I can even be fit without those things. But there was also a part of me that felt like any attempt that I made to intervene would also make me worse. So it wasn’t that I…

part of me knew that there was a problem, but I was also very convinced that any attempt to really fix anything or change anything would, yeah, I’d lose some weight and then I would immediately gain it all back, gain more back, be in an even worse position. And yo-yoing is worse for your body than just being big. So, I’d been through this many, many times. mean, I probably…

lost and gained weight maybe 10 or 12 times in my life already. It was like every other year I was doing this for the last 30 years. I just felt like I just have to, I genetically am bigger or genetically have more food noise. And I did have a lot of food noise. A part of it was that I was anxious, depressed, who isn’t, but you know.

Dani Taylor (37:54)
Yeah.

Randall And Robin (37:55)
It contributes to the fact that I was thinking about food. I’d be eating, okay? And I would be thinking about what I was getting next. And that still happens to me sometimes, but it’s much better now. And I also have the tools. I feel like this journey has also repaired my relationship with food. And we can talk about that a little bit a bit too.

Dani Taylor (38:02)
Right.

Yeah. I

do want to just clarify, like, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m saying, if you’re fat, you’re going to have health problems. Because one, I think the definition of fat is incredibly broad, right? And I think people who are technically BMI-wise, whatever, like overweight, I know plenty of people who are overweight and super healthy. And I don’t think their weight is going to cause them any problems down the line at all.

Randall And Robin (38:21)
no, I didn’t.

Yeah.

Right.

Dani Taylor (38:35)
Obviously there’s like limits to that. I agree, like when I’m reading these things from like fat activists, I’m always like, come on, like you’ve got to, you also, we can’t just straight up deny science. Like we can all say, yes, it doesn’t matter what size you are. You deserve to like yourself. You deserve respect. You deserve to be taken seriously by medical professionals while also being like, and also all of the data says that if this continues for the next 20 years, here’s where you’re going to be.

Randall And Robin (39:01)
I agree with you. Although, you know, I will say that my blood work was always fine. ⁓ I have to get blood work every year. I have psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, so I’m on an immunosuppressant. And my blood work was always, I mean, you know, it’s much better now, but it was within the averages of healthy adults for the last, you know, 20 years, basically, that I’ve

Dani Taylor (39:01)
and there’s not a moral judgment, you know?

Mm-hmm. That’s great.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (39:26)
I’ve gotten blood work done. So I never had any signals there telling me, okay, yes, you’re big, but this is critical. This is like actually causing you harm. And I just think it’s more complicated. And if you look at the research on obesity and the medicalization of fatness, the science is a little complicated too, you know? But we…

Dani Taylor (39:49)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (39:51)
on both sides of the spectrum, we tell too simple of a story. You know what I mean?

Dani Taylor (39:55)
Yeah, I think

one of the most recent ones, and I can’t remember the body fat percentage for men, but it was like the people who, the women who live the longest have something like 30 to 35 % body fat.

which I thought that was very, very interesting. Because to me, when I think about it, that makes sense. And I also think about elderly people, when they pass away, a lot of them will pass away for failure to thrive. They just got nothing left on their, they got no meat left on their bones at all. And that makes it really hard to survive. yeah, it is more complicated. It’s definitely more complicated. But you mentioned the food noise also. And I think that’s something that a lot of people who don’t struggle with food noise can’t even comprehend.

that genetic, like I do think that a large part of it is genetic. And I think with the GLP-1 drugs out there now, like we’re starting to actually be able to sort of map it and see it. Like, no, these people really do have more food noise than these people ever did. And that’s probably why they struggled quite a bit more than this group. And there’s a lot to talk about with GLP-1s, but I think that’s one of the things that’s gonna like, I really do think that’s gonna hopefully change the way we perceive when people are struggling with

Randall And Robin (40:54)
Yeah.

Dani Taylor (41:01)
food noise and overeating and things like that.

Randall And Robin (41:04)
Yeah, think the one where I’m like trying to like think of anything that felt like lies within the fat or body positive positivity community. And I think that one of the things that did feel like that was that there was so much conversation around like you cannot be addicted to food. cannot, know, having food noise is not a real thing. And like, sure, no, maybe you can’t be addicted to food, but the addiction that applies to every single non-physical addiction is a dopamine addiction.

and foods that make us feel good give us dopamine. And I think that for me, like I’m someone who struggled with many different kinds of addiction throughout my life. And I think that the one that persisted the longest was just the dopamine that I received from food. So like for me, food noise is seeking contentment. Like I wanna be comfortable, I wanna be happy and food has always done that for me.

I feel like that’s gotten a lot easier for me since I started taking the psych med Wellbutrin which does kind of similar things to GLP-1s. Not why I’m taking it, it’s just also happening a little bit. So I don’t have that as much, but it’s still something that’s like ingrained in me. I don’t know that everyone has that experience where they’re like seeking dopamine.

Dani Taylor (42:07)
I don’t think

everybody has, as a coach of two decades, I do not think everyone has that. I have that experience, but I know a lot of people that just literally don’t. Like they just don’t have that at all. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Randall And Robin (42:17)
Well, that’s bizarre to me, the idea of like not having to deal with that all the time. It

also becomes like an escalating and self-perpetuating cycle. So especially when you start to have like physical, you start to have like mobility issues, right. And you just physically feel bad, like you’re tired, you’re in pain. It’s hard to get around. You know, food is…

is a fun thing and eating out is a fun thing. It’s a social thing. you end up like, what ended up happening was that we centered our lives around it. So even like, let’s say we were planning a vacation, we would start with everywhere we wanted to go eat. I, vegans actually do this a lot. Yeah. I this is an unhealthy thing that, ⁓ how’d I never become vegan? Maybe this never would have happened to me, but, ⁓ you know,

Dani Taylor (42:53)
We do it. Giacomo and I do it. We do it.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (43:06)
the new vegan place, this different place, they do this different thing. ⁓ wild, have vegan fried Oreos at this one place. We gotta go try it. Maybe some of that is worn off because we’ve had that now for quite a while. certainly coming from starting being vegan in the 90s through that era, was like, that’s crazy. Wait, there’s a vegan version of what? We have to go get that. And so you end up eating pancakes and all these like.

Dani Taylor (43:13)
No.

Right.

Randall And Robin (43:31)
crazy, hearty, high calorie dense things and all those foods are totally fine. I actually still eat those foods now, but I do it in a way that’s very different and I just have a different relationship.

Dani Taylor (43:39)
Let’s use that as

like a great transition into like, okay, so both of you had kind of mentioned that you had had like unhealthy relationships with dieting at some point or with food at some point. For me, I find that this is definitely sort of the slipperiest slope for people because I understand why people.

are afraid of dieting, especially if they’ve tried it in the past and it kind of led to some disordered behavior or worse. And now they’re kind of back at square one and like they know that the way to do the thing they want is to follow this caloric deficit over a period of time, but they’re like, is it worth it? Like to do that. And how did you guys sort of face that and was it hard and did anything come up for you while you were trying to create these sort of ⁓

nutrition guidelines for yourself.

Randall And Robin (44:28)
⁓

I mean for me again like going back to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome thing is I was just like how can I build muscle and I had heard from him via you I think just like

Making sure that you’re meeting your macros every day is like the way to ensure that you’re building muscle because you have enough protein and yada yada yada and ⁓ Yeah, I was like, okay my intention here. It wasn’t even necessarily to lose weight at the beginning I just wanted to build muscle and so I was like, okay I guess I need to track at the very least my protein intake. So I started tracking just my protein intake I tried really hard not to think of anything outside of specifically building muscle But then as soon as I started doing that and really prioritizing protein my hunger cues

went down even more because protein is so filling that I just didn’t feel the need to eat. And then that became such a natural thing for me that I was noticing the calorie deficit. I was wearing a watch

Dani Taylor (45:11)
Hmm.

Randall And Robin (45:22)
like a fitness watch and ⁓ then it just kind of became a natural part of things. And rather than starting with focusing on a caloric deficit and creating kind of that disordered thinking, it started with something different for me. And I think that that had an impact because it wasn’t necessarily about losing weight until I realized that I had lost like 50 pounds and was like, what’s happening? I would say it was the same thing for me too. So when we came back from that trip, I wasn’t committing to being on a diet. I wasn’t even committing to cutting.

I was committing to making responsible choices, like eating more whole foods in my diet than I was before by tracking, being mindful of my food. And the only way I knew how to do that was to track it. And it wasn’t about a calorie target right away. It was more about like, I’m gonna eat brown rice versus white rice more often than I do. Like when that’s the option, I will pick that nine times out of 10.

and I am starting, I’m gonna go to the gym. So I’m gonna start setting a protein goal and trying to hit that protein goal. And, you know, pretty quickly after you’re tracking your calories, one, I think if you’re just tracking your calories, you’re less likely to overeat. You may not always hit your deficit goal for the day, but you’re almost never gonna eat in a surplus if you know you’re

if you’re actually forcing yourself to be actively conscious about it, at least for me. For me, was like always, I’m gonna like be purposefully unaware of this. And that always made it easier. But if I see it, then I’m much less likely to do it. But also when I started, my BMR was like, I was 350 pounds. So my BMR was like, I’d go for a walk with the dog and do a couple of things and I’d burn like nearly 4,000 calories.

Dani Taylor (46:59)
Ha ha!

Randall And Robin (47:02)
You know, and so when you’re tracking your food, eating that much is almost impossible, it feels like. And I was also eating 230, 240 grams of protein a day. Like I just wasn’t hungry. Like you’re kind of like forcing yourself to eat at that point. I’m much leaner now and I’m getting to a point where cutting is a little bit harder.

You know, especially because I’m also running and doing all those things together as hard running definitely increases my want for food and for carbohydrates. So that’s made it a little harder, but you know, just lifting, not running and eating about 3000 calories a day and 230, 240, 250 grams of protein a day. It’s just impossible to keep overeating like that, especially because the other thing we were doing.

by being more mindful was just like using less oil when we cook things. We went from using like a bottle of oil, pouring from a bottle of oil into the pan, we would make things to using the little spray bottles and just stuff like that. Prioritizing protein over simple carbohydrates or at least making sure that we prioritize that first. Yeah, it just kind of…

fits in, it’s not that hard once you actually like structure your life that way. I think the thing that made it not that hard for me, literally having medication that is easier for me was that I really was only focusing on protein. And so it allowed me to into the mindset of like, yeah, I can eat, ⁓ I can’t think of food that I like to eat that isn’t great for me. I could eat pancakes or something. pancakes because that’s a lot.

Dani Taylor (48:31)
You

Randall And Robin (48:34)
I could eat like a, let’s say I wanted a Nugo bar, or not a Nugo bar, I don’t need a Nugo bar any day. A Joker bar. Let’s say I wanted a Joker bar. I can still have that. I’m still making sure that I meet my protein goal and I’m still eating significantly less. So it really doesn’t matter. Like I, I am a dirty cutter through and through. Like if I’m cutting, if I get into the mindset of limiting myself from eating specific things, that’s not sustainable for me. I still have to have a burger.

Dani Taylor (48:37)
Mm-hmm.

mm-hmm.

Right. So you were

like flexible dieting without even knowing that you were like doing flexible dieting basically.

Randall And Robin (49:04)
Pretty much, pretty much. And then once that became the norm for me,

it’s like, cutting is not easy anymore. At 155 pounds, you gotta work for it. ⁓

Dani Taylor (49:12)
was gonna ask that. was gonna, while Randall’s talking about his 3000 calorie cut at the beginning, I was like, well, I bet Robin

didn’t have that, quite that experience.

Randall And Robin (49:20)
Right. My first six months

I was eating 3,200 calories a day and I lost like 60 pounds in four and half months or something. So for me what’s funny is that at the beginning when I was at 250 pounds I was really full eating like 1,500 calories. That is not the case anymore. I’m not full at 1,500 calories.

Dani Taylor (49:29)
Mm-hmm, yeah, that’s why.

Mm Yeah.

Yep.

Randall And Robin (49:44)
I haven’t actively cut in like a handful of months now just because right now I’m really focusing on building muscle. But yeah, I’m eating like 2,100 calories a day or something like that. And that’s like, some days I have to really work, I have to really work to stay there. ⁓ Just because like with more activity, I guess makes me a lot.

Dani Taylor (49:58)
Yes.

And you guys just both have less energy stores in your body. That’s when I tell people that’s what body fat is. It’s stored energy. And once you’ve burned through a good chunk of it, your body turns those signals, those hunger signals back up. Cause it’s like, yo, we’re like getting low here. so it makes perfect sense to like both of your journeys make perfect sense to me, but was there any point, you know, Randall, you said you like basically weigh everything that you eat. Like, was there any point where that felt

Randall And Robin (50:16)
Right.

Dani Taylor (50:28)
disordered or like you were kind of coming close to a line because a lot of people think one of the most disordered things you can do is track your food and I understand that for numbers for some people numbers are like it can get real sticky real fast but I’m curious if either of you felt that way

Randall And Robin (50:43)
afraid that I was going to because it had before. And so I was really hesitant. He was actually encouraging me for the first like couple of months to do that and I was like no I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. And then you know I got to the point where he was doing that really really religiously. I do the majority of the cooking and so I kind of had to do it for him anyway.

and then it just became part of the routine and as soon as that felt like a norm for me, the disordered feeling never came up and I was like, okay, maybe this is doable if I am in a healthy place. If I were still five years ago, like really, really struggling with food consumption and my like perception of self, it probably would have felt disordered. But where I am right now is…

it didn’t at all. I agree with that. Yeah, I think it was a similar experience for me. But I am terrible at intuitive eating. Most people are. know, you try to keep a count in your head. Plus, we were eating out so much and like we were eating out four or five times a week, sometimes more, certainly during like peak pandemic of work from home, don’t go outside. That way we’re at Alfredo. We were eating out like probably like seven, eight meals. We were doing a lot of DoorDash. It was very expensive.

Dani Taylor (51:26)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (51:47)
outrageously expensive. We didn’t have the money for that either. We were in like massive amounts of debt and just eating out and just getting, you know, really unhealthy. But you try to do take a mental note, but it just doesn’t work. It’s never worked for me. Anytime I’m not tracking, I’m gaining weight, basically. So, you know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel unhealthy. I’m tracking sometimes I’m tracking

Dani Taylor (52:04)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (52:10)
28, 2900 calories and that’s literally my BMR. So I’m tracking myself to like maintenance, know, ⁓ BMR plus exercise. ⁓ So like I’ve just gotten used to it and it feels normal now. It’s just like, I don’t know, you brush your teeth in the morning. It’s just a routine thing. It’s not something I have like a mental complex about. I just track my food. That’s what I do.

Dani Taylor (52:15)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (52:34)
Whether I’m cutting, whether I’m trying to gain weight, whether I’m trying to maintain my weight, I track my food. It almost feels more disordered not to. My birthday was the other day and for the first time in two years, I was like, I’m not going to track today. And all day I felt like weird and panicked and was like, feel like I’m just either I’m not eating enough because I don’t know how much to push myself or I’m just going to eat this thing because I feel like I want to. But do I actually want to because it

Dani Taylor (52:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (52:59)
I don’t know. mean, maybe that is like have such a specific idea of like what my food intake is gonna look like. It just felt really, I don’t know. It felt like I was capable of just like doing whatever the hell I wanted and feeling really bad about it. Whereas when I’m tracking, I like don’t ever do that weird thing that I used to do.

Dani Taylor (53:00)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I really, I think about

it like balancing your checkbook, like just knowing what you spent and what’s coming in and what’s going on. Now I know a lot of people have some weird emotional relationship to opening their checkbook also. So I guess maybe it’s a better analogy than I’m giving it credit for. But you know, if I just was not looking at like my credit card statements for a month, I too would be like, no, no, we’re definitely spending too much money. Even if we weren’t, so I don’t know.

Randall And Robin (53:26)
Right.

You hit this.

Dani Taylor (53:40)
I think you guys both touched on this a little bit. I think that a lot of people start tracking, okay, this is big picture stuff. A lot of people start dieting because they hate their bodies, right? Not because they wanna feel better. I mean, they think they’re gonna feel better when their body looks a certain way. They think they’re gonna feel differently about it. I got a rude awakening for them there, but.

you know, a lot of people start tracking their food because they dislike their bodies. And I think that that’s where a lot of the disorderedness comes from is that the tracking feels like some sort of punishment or limit rather than just like data points of what happened day over day. so I understand why it happens, but it just, doesn’t have to be that way.

Randall And Robin (54:01)
Yeah.

I think that I think that it really has to do with mindset because I have done I have tracked through Crash diets where my intention was just to get smaller Orbiting around self-hatred and it had felt like that I got to the point where I wanted to see is how few calories I could eat I was eating like $1200 1200 calories a day or so before we got married Just because I wanted to see how tiny that number could be and how tiny I could get

It’s funny is that like I’m the smallest now without that mindset. Exactly. So yeah, like you said, I’m not going to be happier with my body at a smaller size. The insecurities that I had bigger are literally exactly the same things.

Dani Taylor (54:50)
and eating like almost twice as much.

Well, that’s kind of what I want to talk about next is like,

you guys have changed so much. Like maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll do that for a thumbnail. Like get a picture of you guys as a couple a couple years ago. And just a picture of you as a couple now. Cause I mean, you guys look like a different couple now. And I imagine that you are also kind of per se. mean, if people haven’t seen you in a few years and see you, they’re probably like, Whoa, what? Like, so people’s perceptions of you are probably quite different than they were before.

Randall And Robin (55:13)
Yeah, yeah.

Dani Taylor (55:30)
Robin, you probably have experienced this more because I feel like people in women’s bodies just get that a lot more where people feel like they, it’s perfectly acceptable for them to comment on your body and where it is and what has changed. But before we talk about other people’s perceptions, how about the perceptions of yourself? Because I really do think that it’s misguided. I understand why people feel this way, but especially when they have a large number of pounds that they want to lose, they think that once they get there,

Randall And Robin (55:40)
Yeah.

Dani Taylor (55:55)
suddenly they’re gonna love their body. that did not, if anything, it more highlighted the things I didn’t like about my body because now I was like, well, now I know I have the power to change, so let me change everything that I don’t like. And it got worse, it got much worse for me before it got better.

Randall And Robin (56:10)
I mean, so I can only speak obviously from my own experience, but the things that I didn’t like about my body, even when I was like much more fat positive than I had been, the things that I disliked about my body were not my size. They were like skin folds and like…

you know, weird facial features, skin sitting in strange places that I didn’t like, and those things have only gotten worse since I’ve lost all of that fat. Like that’s not, I think like, I think about like skin removal surgery all the time and I’m like, yeah, I could do that and I still want to, but I’m probably still gonna have the same insecurities I would. Now I’m gonna see a scar there in the place that I, you

And now I’ve got new insecurities where like I used to have such a nice tight little jaw and tight little cheeks. Now I like look five years older within the span of two years. So no, like my insecurities have not, by any means, better. You do not look five years older in the span of two I know you think that. Yeah. This is the problem though, right? Like our self-perception is fucked up no matter what you do. ⁓

Dani Taylor (57:13)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (57:14)
It’s actually really hard for me to understand my body even like now. Because when I look at myself, like I’m still fat. My fat sits in the same place as it did before, because that shit is genetic, right? So it’s like, when I look at myself in the mirror, I’m like, yeah, I can tell I look a little smaller. I do not look 135 pounds smaller to myself. It has slowly, I’ve

Dani Taylor (57:25)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (57:39)
I’ve slowly started to realize it. My self perception has been changing probably over the last, I mean, I’m sure it’s happened the entire time, but I’ve noticed it the last like six months. But it’s like, I’ll go try on clothes at the store and just be like, I’m like, wait, what? I wear what now? A large is huge on me. A large, most brands of large clothing are,

Dani Taylor (57:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (58:04)
big on me now. I had lost 60 pounds and I bought a new winter jacket that was super snug and tight. It’s two sizes too big today. ⁓ I thought that that would be enough. I’m wearing like size 34 pants, which I’ve never, like, I think the last time I did that was ninth grade. But I don’t, I still don’t,

Dani Taylor (58:15)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (58:29)
I perceive it. It’s like, I needed all these data points of like, okay, here’s some like pictures of me when, know, lighting is everything, right? Here’s some pictures of me in good lighting. Here is, you know, here are the size clothes I wear from this brand and this brand and this brand. There’s like a, it’s like, I didn’t really believe it at first. Like the first time we went to the mall and I tried on larges and they fit. You’re like, it’s a fluke. Right. thought it was a fluke. was like, I thought this brand was just like bigger than the other ones.

Dani Taylor (58:37)
Mm-hmm.

you

You

Randall And Robin (58:59)
And then I would, then I ordered a large again, or I would read the measurements and be like, no, I have to get like the extra large. And I get it it would be massive. And then I’d get the large and the larger would also be kind of big, like certainly bigger than shirts I was wearing before. And it’s just like, I still don’t totally understand that. Like I’ll put things on or try things on and I just like, I’m confused. Like my brain is a little confused.

And enough of that confusion has slowly changed my self-perception a bit, but it’s a journey. It’s a never ending journey. I also think that one experience that you don’t have, that a lot of people with uterus’ experience is like, we are constantly on a hormonal cycle that changes the shape of our body and the size of our body. And no matter how comfortable I am in my body, there’s still at least a week where I’m super bloated and my clothes don’t fit comfortably and I…

get into this idea of like, think that I gained weight and I’m like, dude, I think I gained a few pounds. I think I gained a few pounds. Which is so funny that I’m like even looking at numbers because that never, that hasn’t mattered to me in years. But now that I’ve like gotten to a certain spot, I don’t want to see myself gain weight because I want to see that I’m like on a trajectory or that I’m at the very least maintaining where I am. So yeah, every time my pants feel tight, I’m like, what’s happening? What did I do? And then I remind myself like, no, it’s always going to be like this.

Dani Taylor (59:54)
Hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:00:15)
when you know how much you’ve eaten. So that’s the thing, right? I know, I’m eating over 2000 calories. So I keep thinking that something’s going to shift and eventually I’m to start gaining again. I’ve been eating that way for probably six months now. And I know you talk about this a lot, and you tell your listeners this a lot, the scale fucking lies. Like the scale lies to you so much. Especially depending on what you’re doing too. So like when I started running,

Dani Taylor (1:00:17)
Mm-hmm, right.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Randall And Robin (1:00:43)
I was burning so many more calories. The scale was actually not moving for, and it wasn’t just for like two weeks or three weeks. was literally like when I was in an intensive training running block, it could be 12 weeks, it could be 16 weeks. I would basically stop losing weight that entire time. Sometimes I’d even gain weight and then.

Dani Taylor (1:01:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:01:07)
I get into like kind of a running deload where I’m doing much less. Maybe I even take a week completely off. And then like that first week, nothing happens. And I’m like, Hmm, maybe I was eating too much. Maybe I wasn’t tracking correctly. And then like a month, a month and a half goes by and just like boom within a week, I’ve, I’ve dropped 13 pounds. ⁓ It’s like, bodies are weird. And the data points we have are all

Dani Taylor (1:01:26)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bodies are weird.

Randall And Robin (1:01:34)
averages. I went through this with like chat GPT, I read articles online, I read research papers, like most people do not, like everyone has water retention and inflammation that causes you to like kind of hold on to weight depending on what you’re doing. Salt intake obviously also plays a role, but like it’s unusual to have that significant of water retention for that long of time and also like that doesn’t…

Dani Taylor (1:01:35)
Yes.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:01:59)
there’s supposed to be like a limit to that. And for my body, it seems like that’s very very high. Because I’ve gone three months without the scale moving at all, and then I’ll lose 15 pounds within a span of three weeks. Like it’s just wild.

Dani Taylor (1:02:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm, yeah. I think,

I mean, to me, it’s like a big whoosh effect, basically, so there’s that. You may be more prone to just like edema in certain places as well. And running is super inflammatory. Like, so that could be a part of it as well, but yeah, you have to take the scale with a big old grain of salt and you have to trust the process and not be like,

Randall And Robin (1:02:26)
Right.

Dani Taylor (1:02:36)
flip out and try to change everything all at once because, but it’s really hard. Like it’s super hard when you’re doing it on your own. You guys have each other to like fact check off of and be like, don’t do anything crazy. Just keep doing what you’re doing.

Randall And Robin (1:02:46)
Yeah. It is,

you know, you know, if you’ve been through this successfully, you know, not to like worry about the day to day fluctuations of the scale. Maybe you even tell yourself, okay, I’m not, I’m going to keep weighing myself for three weeks. Not going to change anything for that amount of time. But for me, it’s been like two to three months where

Dani Taylor (1:03:06)
Yeah, well you’re

also very deep into this Randall, right? And it’s like both of you are and you’re not gonna see the same speed of change, not even close as you saw at the beginning and that’s tricky too when you’re like, wait, but at one point I was losing this much like every week and now it’s like I’m lucky if I lose that much in a month. ⁓

Randall And Robin (1:03:26)
That’s

part of it. Although I will say that my weight loss, like once I actually let my body settle, the data points, like the long-term data points for like, if I look at the last like four months, it’s been on track, like pretty close. ⁓ It just, you just don’t see it like for long periods of time. And that’s really quite difficult to, when you feel like you’re doing everything right, actually when you know, you’re not, cause there are periods where you’re like in denial.

Dani Taylor (1:03:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Good.

Yeah.

Randall And Robin (1:03:55)
Right? Like you’re doing things and you’re not tracking it on purpose. Like you’re just, but you know you’re doing everything and you’re like, is there something wrong with my body? Have I destroyed my metabolism? No, I haven’t. That’s rare. That’s much more rare than people think it is. ⁓ And also it’s like, I’ve never, I haven’t once through this entire journey crash dieted. So there’s no reason for that to happen. It’s just, you know, you, you, you, the self doubt.

Dani Taylor (1:03:55)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:04:20)
creeps in when you go through such long stretches of not seeing progress that you expect to be there. I don’t know. It’s just confusing.

Dani Taylor (1:04:28)
I mean, it is confusing and it’s hard and the closer you get to this imaginary finish line, the harder it gets, like exponentially harder it gets. That’s, I mean, that’s really the, that’s the moral of the entire story, I think. But before, I wanna make sure we talk about like other people’s perceptions of you.

Randall And Robin (1:04:34)
Yeah, you’ll never be happy, totally, unless you just are happy with yourself, like, because it doesn’t…

Dani Taylor (1:04:52)
I know we kind of talked about this little bit in person, but Robin, know like some people kind of like shut you out after you kind of became a thin person because they took it as a personal attack. And that is absolutely something that I have experienced in my life and still do sometimes. So I’m curious to hear, cause you’re much more recent.

Randall And Robin (1:05:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there’s like a whole, are different camps of different reactions ⁓ that I’ve experienced. But I think the one that was like the hardest for me is people who are fat positive. I essentially lost like my friends and the friends that I do have that have stuck around. I still like get little hints that they’re talking about me or I have a friend that like blogs and she’ll blog about ⁓ how toxic it is to see people posting before and after photos and ⁓

It always kind of feels like it’s like a dig toward me. And I get it because I’ve been on that side and I’ve had the mindset of watching someone work out or celebrating changes in their body is inherently fat phobic and inherently problematic. But at the same time, like having experienced the physical feeling of change in my body, I am excited about those changes. I’m proud of myself for having done all of that work to like I have a butt.

never had a butt in my life. You built that. Yeah, exactly. Those are the things that I get really excited about and take photos I want to post because I’m like, look at what I made. But I have lost friends and that has been really painful. But I’m also watching some of those friends go through like severe disability from rejecting any kind of movement in their bodies.

And so like part of me is really sad because I’ve lost these friends. Part of me is angry because I feel like demonized. And then another part of me like worries for them because I think that if there is not some kind of mindset change for them that they’re going to end up in a position where they are completely immobile. So yeah, that is the one camp and I think that’s the camp that affects me the most. There’s also like the camp that I expect, which is people like celebrating my weight loss, which is what I, yeah.

Dani Taylor (1:06:47)
also feels weird, But it also feels weird.

Like even though you’re excited about it, it’s like, no, you shut up. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I went through.

Randall And Robin (1:06:50)
Yeah. Right, right, right.

Exactly. You don’t know why I’ve lost weight? Particularly because there are a lot of people, like I work in a school and you know, it’s a lot of people in one building and they talk and a lot of people are like, rumoring that I’m using GLP-1s and I’m like, which I have no issue with people using them, but I’m like, no, I worked so hard. Stop.

Dani Taylor (1:06:57)
Right.

Randall And Robin (1:07:11)
So there’s that camp. And then there’s this other very unexpected camp. And I don’t know if it’s because we live in Seattle and people’s perceptions here are just different and they’ve grown a lot over time of people who just don’t say anything. Or if I bring it up, they seem uncomfortable and don’t know what to say. Or they explicitly say, yeah, I’ve noticed, but I didn’t want to comment on it. Right.

Dani Taylor (1:07:28)
Mm-hmm.

I mean, that’s kind of nice, I guess, of the three.

Yeah.

Randall And Robin (1:07:37)
That’s what I would have wanted, but at

the same time, I’m like wondering, you know, when they don’t say anything, it leaves me wondering like what they’re thinking or if I haven’t changed that much and it’s just like some weird dysmorphic thing happening in my head where I’m like, do I look the same? And they just don’t notice. Yeah. Living in Seattle is weird because, you know, it’s like a bastion of progressive politics, which is, which is a positive thing, but people don’t know that it’s like, I’ve had to give people permission.

Dani Taylor (1:07:52)
Okay.

Randall And Robin (1:08:03)
to acknowledge what’s been happening, that it’s been intentional, that I am happy about it. Just to be very clear for anyone who listens to this, I still consider myself a body positive person. My journey is about me and how I feel and my sort of self perception and also what I want for my life. And most of that includes how I feel and what I’m physically capable of, but I do also have some physique.

Dani Taylor (1:08:07)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:08:30)
goes along with that. again, that’s my like own thing. It’s my own process. It doesn’t, hasn’t changed how I feel about anyone else or my perception of anybody else. You know, the only thing that I do get sometimes is sad for people who are struggling only because I know what that feels like. And I know that, at least for me, I know that I had a ton of food noise. I know that I was genetically large. I had all of these kind of

factors, I’ve yo-yoed for years and I’m just in a different place now. And so I know now that it’s possible, you know? And I think it’s possible for most people. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or even doable. You have to be at the right place at the right time in your life. Everything else has to line up. ⁓ It’s not so simple, you know?

Dani Taylor (1:09:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it’s

not so simple. And I understand like on paper, it’s eat less, move more. Like I understand that it is actually quote unquote that simple, but, that’s how so many fitness professionals like to talk about it, but it is so not that simple. Like your life needs to be like pretty calm, right? You can’t have crazy things going on if you’re gonna do it well. You have to mentally be in a good place with yourself and.

You have to have the right knowledge and the right tools. And I mean, you have to have enough money to not be like super worried about your basic bills. You have to have, or you should probably have access to health care. Like it’s a much bigger thing than I think a lot of people are willing to admit. And especially in the transformation space, right? It’s very easy to be like, if I did this,

anyone can do it. And I think that’s like the douchiest thing you can say. Like, because that’s not necessarily true. Like if you did it, maybe a lot of people in a similar situation to you could also do it. You know, but there’s a lot of people in different situations. I’m trying think if there’s anything else I wanted to cover here. All right, final bit, juicy, juicy gossip stuff. Well, it’s not really because I don’t know any names, but

Randall And Robin (1:10:07)
Yeah, I’m just… Yeah.

Exactly. Right. Yeah.

You

Dani Taylor (1:10:29)
How do you

feel about in the body positive movement, the fat acceptance movement specifically, which I feel like is like a kind of a branch of the body positive movement. There have been all of these influencers in that space that over the last decade have just like moved up and up and up in their job of being an influencer, I guess. And now, you know, they’ve for many years talked about how, you know, health at every size, your size doesn’t matter, blah, blah, blah.

Randall And Robin (1:10:36)
Mm-hmm.

Dani Taylor (1:10:55)
but now GLP-1s are readily available and they are in the privileged influencer position to be able to afford to take them. And even though they’ve shunned people for losing weight for the past decade, now that they have this simpler path.

Now they are taking them and their followers like can’t, like they can’t afford to do that. And they are like feeling pissed and abandoned and betrayed and all of those things. Like, have you guys seen any of that sort of stuff?

Randall And Robin (1:11:22)
Definitely. And I don’t really know what to make of it because I’m not in their heads, but I know that in my experience in the fat positivity movement, I still had a lot of the insecurities that I claimed that I didn’t sometimes. And I don’t know that I would have, if I had had access to GLP-1s, if I would have taken them, but I do think that it speaks to like…

Dani Taylor (1:11:28)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:11:43)
the same mindsets persisting. And I think that like having lost weight, I know that it that my body feels better. And I think that that is probably what a lot of those people are experiencing, whether they’re including movement or not. So they’re probably experiencing that. But I don’t know other other people’s reactions to it, I think are probably not that different than their reaction to my losing weight. I’m not an influencer. I don’t have tons of people that give a shit what I do. But

I’ve had that experience and I think that it’s probably about the same. Though I don’t know. I don’t reserve any judgement or anything necessarily. just… It feels weird to watch. It does feel weird.

Dani Taylor (1:12:22)
It feels weird to watch, I agree. And

I don’t really know how I feel about it either. I guess I feel like once you have a platform of a certain size, like I guess you have a, or at least you should have a little bit more responsibility about what you post. So I don’t wanna say, right, Yeah, that’s true. And I don’t wanna say those folks like encouraged people to gain weight.

Randall And Robin (1:12:37)
But no one does. The people with the biggest platforms are the least responsible with those platforms. In many cases.

Dani Taylor (1:12:48)
I don’t think they did, but I do think they discouraged people from losing weight for sure.

Randall And Robin (1:12:49)
Some of them did. From losing weight, right.

The level of shame that I had for working out was so bizarre. doing anything, even if it’s not with the intention of losing weight, feels like it’s contributing to fat phobia when you’re of that mindset. Listen, when body positivity has gone to a place where you’re stigmatizing your diet or your body the other way,

That’s a problem. There has to be a healthy middle ground here. think autonomy is supposed to be a problem. It is. It’s supposed to be about being a… You have autonomy, you can make your own choices. Size does not directly dictate health. It’s more complicated than that. It is more complicated than that. There are fat people who are extremely athletic, extremely active, extremely strong.

Dani Taylor (1:13:20)
You look so frustrated.

Randall And Robin (1:13:40)
They don’t eat unhealthy things, they just eat a lot. And ⁓ they have good blood work and they have good mobility. Those combinations are rare, but they do happen. it’s not like, it’s not a simple thing, but health and fitness and all of these things, everything is averages, right? It’s the law of averages. And so usually if you’re a little more muscular and you have a little less fat, you’re gonna feel better, you’re gonna be more capable. That’s true for most people.

Dani Taylor (1:13:43)
Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:14:08)
But the whole value judgment thing is where it’s a problem. And then the GLP-1 thing is a whole different thing. I don’t know. I feel weird about it because I don’t want to… If it helps anybody, please, good. It is little scary to me that there are basically like what I would consider thin people taking GLP-1s. That is very scary. I would also say like, you know, I don’t think it’s for everybody.

Dani Taylor (1:14:20)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Randall And Robin (1:14:32)
I am someone who has a lot of food noise and I did it without and I did it without because I created the right structure at the right time for myself.

Dani Taylor (1:14:41)
Well, and you also

mentioned that up until that point, your blood work had been good. Like if had you been on the cusp of like pre-diabetes, maybe it would have been harder and a GLP-1 could have been helpful. I don’t I’m actually, a fan, I guess. In the broad scope, I’m a fan of GLP-1s. I think they’re gonna save a lot of lives. I do think there’s a large group of people that are like abusing and misusing them.

Randall And Robin (1:14:45)
Right? Yeah.

also just think that it’s contributing to kind of like the pendulum, the pendulum switching back to, you know, like, I don’t know if you’ve seen like photos of Kelly Osborne, just things like that are really scary. And I do think that it’s like worth saying, I was thinking about this while you were talking about health earlier, is that like, even losing weight, those health metrics that you’re seeing are not necessarily going to improve. There are some things that are not necessarily correlated with your individual health. Like I’m always gonna have…

Dani Taylor (1:15:08)
Yes, super thin.

Yeah. Yep.

Randall And Robin (1:15:31)
tachycardia because of my EDS. That’s one of the things that I was like, okay, that’s really my only health concern other than like the physical mobility. So when I lose weight, then maybe that will stop being an issue. No, if anything, I noticed it more now because I’m monitoring it and it has gotten better. I think like my resting heart rate has gotten significantly better. But as far as like active movement goes, my heart sucks. It’s always gonna suck. ⁓ But you know.

Dani Taylor (1:15:43)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Randall And Robin (1:15:58)
Meanwhile, my recipe

Dani Taylor (1:15:58)
You also…

Randall And Robin (1:15:59)
heart rate’s in like the 30s.

Dani Taylor (1:16:01)
Mine’s not. Mine’s much higher than that. What was I gonna say? Yeah. Yeah, for people who run a lot, or endurance athletes, it’s kind of normal, but I think I do a decent amount of cardio, and mine’s nowhere near that, and that upsets me sometimes. But you said some… Jesus. If that happened to me, I’d be dying. The alarms should go off somewhere.

Randall And Robin (1:16:01)
I don’t know if it goes back. I’ve gone to the doctor about it few times now, so it’s fine, I guess.

Yeah, my rest and heart rate when I sleep is like 39. That’s weird.

Right,

Dani Taylor (1:16:27)
But you said something way at the beginning of this podcast where you were like, yo-yoing is worse for your body than being fat, right? Well, I also think that that is true of a thin person as well. Yo-yoing is terrible for a thin person and they do it just as much. like, if a thin person loses 15 pounds, but 10 of those pounds were lean body mass and then they gain 10, 15 pounds back, but it’s not lean body mass, they’re in a much worse position than where they started. So, you know.

I think a lot of the rules that apply for someone who’s quite large also apply for someone who’s quite small as well. this, yeah, the heroin chic sort of look that’s coming back in is very scary. Those people are going to suffer bone loss and malnutrition most likely and lots of other problems that for some reason we just don’t like view them with the same like your lazy POS lens as we do.

the ailments on the other end of the spectrum. We’re just like, that poor thing, they’re suffering so much, their poor mental health. Like, I don’t know. It’s tricky.

Randall And Robin (1:17:31)
We just need to find a happy medium where the goal is actually feeling good and having autonomy rather than these huge social shifts. It seems like in either direction it just gets toxic. Just stop stigmatizing people’s fucking bodies. That’s it. And don’t stigmatize food. We eat normal things now. We use less oil. The major changes we’ve made are just less oil.

Dani Taylor (1:17:47)
Yeah. And that’s the name of the episode right there.

Randall And Robin (1:17:59)
our foods are less calorie dense in an invisible way. ⁓ And then, you know, having a protein target and honestly, I wouldn’t even say I track my macros. I track my calories and I track my protein. don’t really care. As long as I’m not eating too little fat, that’s going to cause like a hormone disruption or something. Some days I have higher fat days and sometimes I have higher carb days, but I have a protein floor that I always hit.

Dani Taylor (1:18:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. In your protein.

Mm-hmm.

Randall And Robin (1:18:25)
That’s, and I have a calorie target and that’s more of ⁓ like a range. It’s like a window of 200 calories that I wanna be within. ⁓ And I’m just not overly rigid about it. And if I have a day that’s closer to maintenance, that’s fine too. ⁓ You know, no big deal. Tomorrow’s another day. And the important thing is that my structure doesn’t change. My habits don’t change. I always track my food. I go to the gym when it’s time to go to the gym.

Dani Taylor (1:18:34)
Right.

Yeah.

Randall And Robin (1:18:53)
I run when it’s time to run and that’s it.

Dani Taylor (1:18:56)
Well, this has been a really awesome conversation. Can I share your social media handles?

Randall And Robin (1:19:00)
⁓ sure, you feel free. Yeah. Yeah.

Dani Taylor (1:19:03)
Yeah. All

right. So Randall’s is Knish of Death, K-N-I-S-H of Death. And Robin’s is, do you want to do the Tofun? Tofunist Fitness? right. Tofunist Fitness. And we’ll put them in the description as well. Yeah, very fun. Robin has impeccable style. And Randall has great music taste. So they’re fun to follow.

Randall And Robin (1:19:14)
yeah, tofu nest business.

you

Thank you. Robin does have

impeccable style.

Dani Taylor (1:19:30)
Yeah, it’s crazy. Like, creep your house, I creep your outfits, I can pull off zero of that. Actually, you can’t really see it, but I have a pretty cool, I have a pretty cool little situation going on, but I still dress like Morticia. I can’t help it.

Randall And Robin (1:19:36)
Your house is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. We have to come

visit. We love you guys so much. Seriously. ⁓

Dani Taylor (1:19:45)
We miss

you guys. Hopefully you can come out to the East Coast. Although I also would like to come out to the West Coast again sometime soon. Robert lives in Oregon again. So we have more reasons to come out West and visit. ⁓

Randall And Robin (1:19:54)
⁓ yeah. You know, something that guy said to me a long time

ago kind of stuck with me too, you know? He said it to me years ago and I didn’t really implement it, but I always think about it. I think about it all the time. And I was like complaining about the fact that I think it was one of the times where I was bigger than I wanted to be and I wasn’t hitting my goals the way I wanted to like fitness wise. And he was talking to me about the idea of consistency and just like…

how being consistent is a lot more important than being perfect and have you really been consistent and how long have you been consistent for? So props and a shout out to Robert for that because I actually think that’s one of the things that’s actually helped me get here today.

Dani Taylor (1:20:33)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And he does, he has that as part of his like building a body on a vegan diet talk. He talks about consistency and man, that guy’s a good speaker. He’s so good. Even when I’ve heard the speeches like 10 times, even if he’s just annoyed me with something that he said before he started speaking, every time he starts talking, I’m just like, God damn, he is a really great speaker. So, all right, I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode of Muscles by Brussels Radio.

Randall And Robin (1:20:51)
Totally. Yeah.

Dani Taylor (1:20:59)
⁓ If you are looking for any kind of one-on-one coaching go ahead and fill out the coaching assessment down below You’ll hear back from one of the coaches within a business day Be sure to follow Robin and Randall at Tofu nest fitness and at Knish of death and then you can also follow myself at vegan proteins Jocomo at muscles by Brussels Sawyer at soy boy fitness coaching Ben at Ben a Mitchell. Yeah, Benny Mitchell and Alice at vegan proteins Alice and if you have any questions or

Ideas for future podcasts just shoot them to us coach at vegan proteins calm and yeah, thanks so much for listening Thank you guys so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. awesome, and we will talk to you guys later Bye,

Randall And Robin (1:21:33)
Thanks for having us, Dani.