Do you ever feel like you’re doing everything right but still feeling exhausted? This episode explores the hidden toll of perfectionism and why high-achieving women often push their bodies too hard without even realizing it. Allison Yamamoto, the founder of Ally and an exercise and nutrition coach, joins the show to discuss the warning signs that your fitness and nutrition habits may be hurting you rather than helping you. Learn how to break free from the grip of perfectionism, overtraining, under-fueling, and exhaustion while still performing at your best. Discover strategies to fuel your career and your body without running yourself into the ground.

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The Hidden Toll Of Perfectionism With Allison Yamamoto

Do you ever feel like you are doing everything right? You’re working hard, you’re staying disciplined, you’re crushing your workouts, but instead of feeling stronger, you’re feeling exhausted? I know that happens to me once in a while. What if I told you that your health habits might be holding you back? Our guest is here to help us break free from that very cycle. If you are tuning in here, you’re probably a high-achieving woman trying to balance it all, your career, your health, life, but maybe you’re feeling a little bit too thinly stretched.

If that sounds familiar, then you are not alone. This a conversation that you need to hear. We are going to be diving into why high-achieving women often push their bodies too hard without even realizing it. We’re going to talk about the warning signs that your fitness and nutrition habits may be hurting you rather than helping you. Finally, we’re going to be talking about how to break free from overtraining, underfeeling, and exhaustion while still performing at your best.

By the end of this episode, you are going to have some real strategies to fuel your career and your body without running yourself into the ground. My guest is Allison Yamamoto. She is the founder of Ally and an exercise and nutrition coach. Allison helps active women stop over-training and under-fueling to regain their energy, health, and freedom around food and exercise. Stick around with us because this conversation will change how you think about performance, health, and success. Let’s dive right in.

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Allison, thank you so much for being here on the show. How are you doing?

I’m doing great. I’m excited to have this conversation. Thanks for having me.

Me too. We are going to be talking about how high achievers in the corporate world can sometimes go overboard and push through some of the ailments that they’re feeling. Some eating disorders come about as major stressors. With you being a founder and an exercise and nutrition coach, and this is part of a series on wellness for women in the corporate world, what are some things from your experience that are immediate things that come to mind as far as these high achiever women that are almost giving up their health or their work world. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Perfectionism And Its Impact On Health and Wellness

One thing that we don’t often tie together is how perfectionism can show up not only in the workplace but then also how that can influence other areas of our lives. As an example, how that shows up with how we’re relating to exercise and how we’re relating to food. These can be such a huge spectrum in terms of how people identify and what behaviors are noticed. I can speak for my own personal story, which is that I identify as a high achiever and as a perfectionist. Throughout my career, I was extremely motivated to continue on the track to seek promotions and career growth, and very proactive and also very ambitious.

The thing that I never tied together was how that was also related to how I was showing up in exercise and how I was showing up with my nutrition and my food. Health was something I was always very interested in. It was something that I was passionate about. I learned a lot and cared a lot about exercise and nutrition for the entirety of my life, especially during the corporate world period of my life as well. It can be hard when you’re working a lot and working long hours and have high expectations for yourself in the workplace.

How we fit exercise and nutrition into all of that can be a lot that is potentially contributing to how we manage stress and burnout. It also can be an area where I noticed some of those same perfectionistic tendencies started to trickle into those other areas of my life. That could look like setting a lot of regimented structure around my routine in general. That would show up in my nutritional habits and the standards I set for myself around adhering to what I believed was optimal when it came to my health or my nutrition, as well as with exercise and wanting to be fit. Therefore, setting a lot of rigidity or regimented structure around my exercise.

That wasn’t necessarily in and of itself bad, but the extremes that we can fall into when we’re continuing to raise the bar and we’re continuing to push through some of the warning signs that can be demonstrated to us that we are getting into a place where we’re running the risk of overtraining or under fueling is where we fall into some of those pitfalls.

We’ve moved from a place of trying to be healthy and continuing to make choices that are in service of that goal and starting to enter a territory where it’s contributing to our burnout. Potentially, even risking some of the short and long-term health outcomes that ironically, we are trying to potentially prevent by being so optimized in discipline around our nutrition and our fitness in general.

Warning Signs Of Overtraining And Underfueling

You have a lot of knowledge on how high achievers can show up. As you said, routines are great, but if you start going overboard and start becoming so rigid your health is becoming detrimental instead of something positive. You talked about some warning signs. You’re a high achiever and you think you’re doing well with your fitness and your nutrition. All of a sudden, it starts going into those things like eating disorders or massive stress where you start developing anxiety, depression, and things like that. What are those warning signs that we need to be aware of?

It’s worth noting also that some of the risks that these warning signs are starting to demonstrate are sometimes there is the eating disorder case, which is one very specific and also extremely important category within this area, and because it’s a huge spectrum, there are some instances where people are making some of these mistakes due to lack of awareness about some of these warning signs and the normalization of pushing through.

There are some instances where it’s a spectrum and there are people that have fallen into some of the beliefs around what good looks like when it comes to our fitness and nutrition that may not realize that those could be slightly disordered tendencies. That was something that for my story specifically, I struggled with. The folks that I see that I’m working with do not predominantly fall into the categories of I identify as having an eating disorder. I want to break that down because that’s one area where it might isolate some folks who still might resonate with some of these challenges that they’re experiencing.

Some of the risks are, as you mentioned, they could be going down the path of the mental health risks of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc. There are also physiological risks that we can go into a little bit more. It is bone health, menstrual functioning, and otherwise, which are also things that we often aren’t aware are the risks that we’re exposing ourselves to. When we talk about those signs, I like to break them into more of the physiological signs and then behavioral or mental signs.

Some of the physiological signs are anything from feeling tired. A lot of the conventional signs of burnout, like elevated levels of stress, are hard to manage or feel very chronic but there’s also lower libido. There are feelings of being cold a lot of the time or more often than what we might be seeing other people experiencing. It could be brittle hair or nails. It could be poor sleep quality or frequent urination. All of those are some of the physiological signs you could be noticing.

On the mental or even the behavioral side, I mentioned stress. I mentioned some of the other behaviors, but specifically, it could be constant fixation around food or feeling guilt when it comes to certain behaviors around food or feeling laziness around rest or taking a rest day. Feeling like you have to use exercise as a way to compensate for some of your behaviors around food.

Feeling that you are restricting either certain food groups or how much you’re eating, following a lot of rigidity around diets, and any of these pressures around clean eating. Avoiding certain foods and feeling guilty if you were to explore or have some of those foods is one of the common behavioral identifiers that this could be one of the experiences that you’re having run over training or under feeling.

Societal Body Standards And Pretty Privilege

There’s so much there. Previously when we originally met, we also talked about the societal body standards where you’re in the corporate world and you’re expected to look a certain way. How does that come into play with the conversation that we’re having?

A hundred percent. That’s interesting because that’s exactly what ties a lot of this perfectionism together, which is that in the corporate world, we have high standards for ourselves. We might believe, “I already want to be three levels ahead. I want to be five levels ahead. I can already see myself in these very aspirational positions and that’s attainable for me and I go after it.” That’s one of the most amazing pieces of that perfectionism mindset. Sometimes you do strive in a way that fuels that ambition, but on the other side of that, it can be these feelings of not being enough and feeling like you aren’t enough at where you are right now.

That motivator can lead to a lot of self-criticism and that can show up related to these body standards as well, which there’s so much, whether it’s images, whether it’s other people that we can compare ourselves to either online or in real life that we see either explicitly or not comparison related to body standard. Perfectionism can show up when we believe we will feel or achieve or experience XYZ if, and then it can go into some of these comparisons around our body as well when we have some of those high expectations and standards around our body.

In a similar way that we might have high expectations and standards for ourselves in other aspects of our lives, striving in a way that is fueling this belief that we might have that we’re not enough can be what motivates us to exert so much control around our food and around our exercise. That’s one area that is a motivator that can sometimes lead to some of these behaviors.

I like to bring it back to the perfectionist side because even in some instances where folks don’t necessarily identify and resonate specifically with those body standards, which is still very common, especially as women, this is something we often don’t talk about enough when it comes to how we’re relating in the corporate world or the pressures that we feel in general as a woman.

There are other motivators that the perfectionism side can impact when it comes to our food or when it comes to our exercise because of how much information exists right now and how much we can be influenced by extremist or prescriptive recommendations or advice when it comes to our nutrition or when it comes to our exercise. When we hear that same standard that I need to meet these expectations and I need to make sure that I’m optimizing my health, that can lead us to be more regimented around some of that advice that we take to heart and follow to a T.

That’s one thing that we might notice those commonalities if you reflect on it in terms of how you might be showing up in that workplace, I know this was true for me, and how we’re responding to or internalizing some of the advice that we’re seeing can be based in a more fear-based or a fear-mongering type of either nomenclature or method of delivery when it comes to our health as well.

The Role Of Fear And Control In Health And Wellness

As women, we tend to be people pleasers, to begin with. We want to make sure that everybody has everything that they need, and when we’re in the corporate world and we’re working so hard, we want to continue to advance in our careers with the promotions and the raises and stuff like that. There’s a lot of, as you said, fear-based. They’re like, “I got to do better, I got to do well because I want to get promoted. I don’t want to get fired for whatever reason.” All of that stress and anxiety is so prevalent, especially these days.

You talked a little bit about social media. In this day and age, it would be so difficult to raise young girls because of all the social media and they’re constantly being bombarded with information about how they look. I understand that girls as young as 9 or 10 years old are now into a whole skincare routine, like an entire 30 to 40-minute skincare routine and their parents are buying them all these products and stuff. I’m like, “You’re ten. You shouldn’t be worried about that yet.”

It’s always good to take care of your skin. It’s going overboard where we’re so worried about the physicality of the body and not necessarily about the mental health and how we can promote the intelligence of girls and their efforts. Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset, talks a lot about how instead of saying good effort, good job, we’re like, “You’re so pretty.” I know we also talked about pretty privilege. Can you explain to me what pretty privilege is?

There was so much that you said there that I wanted to respond to. One of the primary signs that I didn’t mention that will likely particularly resonate with your audience is menstrual disturbances. This is either skipping a period or missing periods altogether. That’s one of the most obvious warning signs in women. One of the things that you hit on perfectly, which is something that we underestimate is oftentimes when we think about health, we think about food and we think about exercise and we’re underestimating the role and importance of stress as it relates to our health.

“Oftentimes when we think about health, we think about food and exercise and we underestimate the role and importance of stress.” – Allison Yamamoto Share on X

That’s one of those things that is factored into the equation from our body’s perspective when we’re thinking about our menstrual health. Oftentimes, when we’re in this state where we’re trying to optimize everything around food and exercise and exhibit so much control, then it could be contributing to our stress, which is another area where in a very interesting way, that’s not always super intuitive, that it could be impacting our menstrual health as well. It could be impacting our overall health when we think about it holistically. Especially for folks like myself, who would identify as a perfectionist, we often tend to be more high-stress on a basic day-to-day experience.

I know for me, that’s true. When I was starting to reflect on some of my behaviors around food and exercise and how that was making me feel and realized that it felt like I did have to exhibit so much control and so much optimization around how those areas were fitting into my life, that in a way I could start to realize that that was something that was stress-inducing. The whole narrative that you were mentioning around fear is interesting because it’s something where for the high achievers, and especially for folks that are in your audience who are trying to seek that next level, that next promotion, which is something that I can very much relate to.

Sometimes this belief is that through our sheer discipline and our willpower, we will continue to work harder and harder and harder. That is how we’re going to achieve. That is something that when applied to our bodies as well, exerting that much discipline constantly is motivated by this belief that it’s contradictory to this belief of trust and having a little bit more trust in how things are playing out where you are right now, and how your body can process some of these things if there isn’t so much control being inserted. Breaking down some of the aspects of control that are counterbalancing to this idea of trust in some of these areas can be an interesting area to explore.

It’s a little bit counter, but I thought that you bringing up that component about fear is something that I see often in clients that I’m working with, which is this notion of how that fear and that control relate to this other side of the coin, which is trust and belief and confidence in yourself and where you are right now. That’s something that we’re seeing in the corporate area as well as how they’re relating to and potentially putting themselves in situations of overtraining and underfeeling. I wanted to respond to that.

I know your question was more so related to pretty privileged. I can give maybe a high level on this. If there’s maybe a specific area that you’re interested in, we can dive in a little bit more there. At a very high level, this relates back to your questions about body standards and how body standards are showing up in various areas of our lives. For women, especially, there can be pressure to believe that you want to look a certain way to achieve certain results that you want. That could be something, anything along the lines of “I’ll be happy when I feel like I learned in a certain way” to “I’ll achieve more confidence if I look a certain way,” or attributing our successes or other areas either in the workplace or maybe in our personal lives to how we’re looking.

No Woman Left Behind | Allison Yamamoto | Perfectionism — Perfectionism: For women, especially, there can be pressure to believe that you want to look a certain way to achieve certain results that you want.

This then ties back to some of the body standards where if I am able to achieve some of these things, then, I guess what you can say is it’s like a core driver. I see this a lot in the folks and the clients that I’m working with and I resonate with this as well, which is this very close relationship between how they’re valuing their confidence or how we’re valuing our deserving of certain things back to our bodies, whether it’s conscious or not conscious.

Some of those things can keep us trapped in some of the routines that we have around food and exercise. Identifying what those drivers are that are keeping us trapped is something that I highly recommend as one of the first starting points in dismantling what is keeping us feeling trapped in our routines. Perfectionists who are structured can be more prone to getting into that cycle of being trapped.

That’s something where I have a free resource if folks are interested in starting to understand what is the root cause for them when it comes to their routine and keeping them stuck in some of those habits that to them likely feel pretty safe, whether it’s serving them on a high level or not. I’m happy to provide that for your audience as a free thing if they’re interested in starting to understand what that individually for you, what those drivers could be, and what that could look like.

When you started talking about trust, I do a lot of energy work and it’s so interesting how a lot of these thoughts that come up in our head or come up in our heads that we think about. A lot of it is unconscious. You don’t even know that it’s happening. You don’t even know why you’re behaving, why you’re doing the things that you’re doing until you start doing that inner work. It’s one of the things that we don’t talk a lot about because it all boils down to you feeling like you can trust yourself, feel safe within yourself, and love yourself.

Dismantling Limiting Beliefs And Achieving True Wellness

That’s a core thing of what you were talking about, that you need to do that reflection work as to why you’re feeling and thinking the way you are. You can start uncovering some of those limiting thoughts and ideas and reframing them into something more positive. Give me an example, if you would, of a client where you might be working with them with a framework to start dismantling some of those thoughts. All of that stuff is external and I’m glad we’re having this conversation because your physicality, your body, your health, that’s all external. A lot of times that is a result of stuff that’s happening internally. What are some of the things that you work with your clients on for that?

I can give a specific example, which is I was working with a client and one of the routines or traps that she was struggling with was around this relationship with food and exercise. One of the beliefs, and I think that this is where it starts, is uncovering what those beliefs are that are sometimes beneath the surface. This is why I value the programs that I offer for folks, they being a component that is very individualized because the beliefs that we have tend to be, and when we explore them, specific to our own history and our own experiences.

“The beliefs that we have tend to be specific to our own history and our own experiences.” – Allison Yamamoto Share on X

One of the beliefs that I was exploring with a specific person was the relationship between food and exercise. The belief is that to feel more permission around having certain foods or removing certain guilt, feeling a certain way, that hinged on this very specific exercise regimen that she was working on. Once we were able to identify that belief and start to explore it a little bit further, we realized that a lot of what was driving that was her understanding that essentially, the way that her body was expending energy was dependent on this exercise that she was participating in.

That is something that completely makes sense in the context of when we’re going back to social media and the society that we live in, where there’s a lot of narrative around having to earn your food or burn certain things, that relationship becomes easily tied together in our mind. In reality, when we think about our energy expenditure, part of dismantling that belief was starting to explore what the truth facts are in this area. Part of it was education, which was that when we think about energy expenditure, a huge portion of our energy expenditure is what we’re doing without any exercise at all.

We have a lot of bodily functions, we have processes, we have metabolism, we have temperature regulation. There are a lot of things that we’re doing such that if we were to do nothing in the day, it would require a fair amount of energy. There’s a lot of energy that goes into these other components like need, which is us doing daily activities such that there was, for her specifically, a huge overestimate in terms of how much energy she was expending as a percentage of her total energy in these specific workout sessions.

Once we started to develop that understanding and dismantle that core belief that she had had before, then we were able to start to move into how we would start to replace that core belief that she had around exercise. I’m reducing this to that very beginning portion of it, but there’s a lot there in terms of how those emotional experiences then were showing up for her because we’re talking about emotions like guilt, that you can’t just overwrite, that you can’t just rewrite overnight. The start was in identifying what the belief was.

It was in starting to understand and dismantle some of the myths that belief was constructed upon and then working together to start to expose some of the emotional ways that were showing up in her day-to-day so that we could change some of our habits. We’re contributing to underfeeling and overtraining, causing menstrual disturbances that she was experiencing and causing her to maintain this hyper fixation on food. This needs to exhibit a lot of control around food, which was helpful once we were able to develop the identification of that belief.

This is one example of many of how those types of myths or advice or things that we see that we don’t always realize are feeding into us from different areas, whether it’s an exercise class, social media, or things that we have picked up on over time. Maybe from things that people have said to us even throughout our lives, and how those are now maybe presenting in areas that are keeping us trapped in that cycle now.

That is so interesting and that inner work is so important. One thing that people don’t realize is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Working with a coach like yourself and myself, where I’m a certified high-performance coach, so we do a lot of the reflection work and a lot of peeling back the onion and the different things that we work in. Doing that reflection work with a coach can guide you because you can try to do the work by yourself but if you don’t know where to go or how to tie in those limiting beliefs with thoughts that, as you said, all of the thoughts that we think are rooted in our childhood.

It doesn’t matter how good of a parent you are, you never know what one sentence you can say to your child and they can have this trauma for the rest of their life and they can be living into this trauma. I knew this woman once and we weren’t working together, but she said that when she was five years old, she asked her mother for a gumball and the mom was in a hurry. She said, “No.” The little girl or my friend at the time, she’s like, “As a five-year-old, I was like, ‘I’m not even worth five cents which is the value of a gumball.’”

That’s why she lived her life as not being worthy of things. That’s how she lived her life. A lot of these thoughts and beliefs can be transmitted in our bodies from one exchange that you could have had in your childhood, which most of us have many different exchanges. With a coach like yourself, we can start breaking down those things so you can start identifying them. What would be a process that you bring your clients through to start dismantling those limiting beliefs?

I will say that a lot of the time when we’re starting, we usually start the process with an understanding of the exercise and the nutrition component. A lot of this is coming down to what in the routine is working and isn’t working right now. How is that contributing to some of the warning signs or the health risks and how can we start to address some of those issues? When we’re trying to address the problem of if you are overtraining or if you were under-fueling in a way that it is impacting your stress levels, it’s impacting your menstrual cycle, or it’s impacting your mental health or your physical health.

As I mentioned, it could be impacting like increasing your risk of injury. It could be causing performance stagnation and even impairing your ability to recover appropriately and build and maintain muscle. It could be causing digestive issues. The first thing that we’re starting with is how do we start to identify areas in nutrition and exercise that might be contributing to some of those other factors that you’re experiencing. One of the things that’s super illuminating for a lot of folks is I recently was working with a client who had a lot of these unexplained symptoms and didn’t realize that they were all tied together.

She came to me and she was experiencing digestive issues. A lot of people have recommended various elimination diets. She was experiencing these menstrual disturbances and a missing period. She was also a fairly high achiever, but she was also experiencing a lot of irritability and mood swings. She didn’t realize that those were all rooted in this very core root cause around her energy availability. She is a high achiever. She was a runner. She was running a lot, but it wasn’t her main thing.

She was mostly focused on her corporate career and her job. She was very much more identified in that area, but she also enjoyed running. She was trying to be fairly competitive about it and was generally trying to follow a lot of this like dietary advice. When we started working together, it was interesting because there were a lot of these unresolved things that luckily ended up being resolved during our time together because it was all rooted in these same core issues that were ingrained in her routine around food and exercise.

That’s where we usually start, identifying what’s happening. What are those lifestyle factors that you’re doing today? What are some changes that we can start to make or mistakes that we’re seeing that we could maybe re-correct to start to see improvements in some of these other symptoms that we’re seeing? Through that and some of those changes, we start to work through how introducing some of those changes starts to challenge any of those beliefs, if any, that might come up.

For example, if we’re focusing on energy availability, which is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making. It might require them to make changes in some of their food routines, for example. In doing that, it starts to uncover what are the things that feel uncomfortable. Why does that feel uncomfortable? That is the process that we usually use to start to understand how some of those things come to the surface. One of the things that can be hard and one of the benefits that I love to see when I’m working with folks is that we’re addressing those things hand in hand.

As we’re working through some of these changes around nutrition or some of these changes around exercise, it’s going alongside some of these changes that might be uncovered around body image. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when they come to me is trying to address any of these things in isolation and then it feels hard or the changes aren’t sticking. They get stuck in this other place that doesn’t feel super comfortable where they constantly feel like they’re out of their comfort zone.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to address issues in isolation, and then it feels hard or the changes aren't sticking.” – Allison Yamamoto Share on X

Especially for me, and I can speak for my journey maybe as a case study here that it wasn’t until I started to address some of these things more holistically that these changes started to stick. I experienced more freedom in my routine that had been keeping me so stuck and sobered out for so long. I had never realized that these things were interconnected and that there were frameworks that existed for working through these things together. I took the hard approach of trying to treat these things in isolation and not realizing that for me, that was the way harder path.

Allison Yamamoto’s Journey From Corporate Executive To Wellness Coach

Again, you don’t know what you don’t know. Working with a nutrition and exercise coach is so important. To me, it all boils down to that inner trust and safety and trying to figure out where your mindset is and why you think the things that you’re thinking. Speaking about your career, I want to transition a little bit to your story. You were working in the corporate world. You were a high achiever. You started connecting the dots with your nutrition and exercise and how that was affecting your life. Tell us a little bit about that. The second piece to that is, how did you end up leaving the corporate world and then becoming a founder and a nutrition and exercise coach? Let’s talk about your story.

I guess I was in college. I was an NCAA cheerleader. I was double majoring. I had a lot of expectations for myself going into the corporate world. I started my career working in tech, but I always had a passion for health. At the time, I was transitioning out of cheering and going into the running world. During that time, I got increasingly involved in running to the point where I was passionate about fitness and training. I was starting to train and get the right education and support to be able to help other people with their training during that time. I also was interested in health.

I ended up switching over to the health tech space and growing my career to the point where I was doing essentially executive-level work at various startup companies in the health tech space. That’s where you can see the ambition and corporate-hungry side of me come out. At the time, I believed that was my dream job. I thought that my dream job was working as an executive at a health tech company. That was something that has been a huge learning for me, which was that when I was in that role and when I was having that experience, it was different admitting to myself that wasn’t what I had wanted.

Even though that was something I dreamed about and tried for so long and worked so hard to try to get to that point, it took a long time for me to admit to myself that it wasn’t the right fit for me. I ended up during this time in parallel having my own struggles with nutrition and exercise to the point where I was experiencing a lot of unexplained, at the time symptoms, including mental disturbances and going through a long and confusing journey where I was in and out of the healthcare system and confused about whether or not I even had an issue.

Through that and my own struggles in my recovery journey, that is also what inspired me to help other people. I also went back and got a lot of nutritional training and expertise in this area around overtraining and under-fueling. I was doing this as a side project. I had, over time, developed a team of clinicians that had been advising me and the programs that I was developing and how I was supporting other people. Through that, I was doing that on the side as a passion area.

Eventually, I had found so many rewarding experiences and helping other people that I decided to scale this out so that other people would never have to experience the confusing and somewhat isolating experience and journey that I had had in my recovery to streamline that and help other people through their experiences. That’s what inspired me to take that jump in transition into the programs that I offer today, and my focus area is the company that I’ve developed.

It was not the path that I had expected to take when I originally entered the corporate world but it also helped me understand a lot of the folks that I work with are in the corporate world and they are having those experiences. I have zero shade towards the corporate world. There was a huge amount that I learned from those experiences.

I still have a lot of close colleagues who are thriving and loving the journey that they’re on in that space. A lot of the people that I work with also are navigating those experiences and that side of their lives as well. It does come with specific challenges when you’re in the corporate world about how stress can come into it, and how rest can come into that. It’s something that I can very much empathize with and something that I see is very common for the folks that are coming and working with me and my team.

I love that you were able to finally admit to yourself that that wasn’t your actual dream job. It’s so funny. It happens to a lot of us because I became an executive in the corporate world. My experience in the corporate world was great. I always got promoted and I was a high achiever and I kept moving up the corporate ladder. In the end, it was like I think I’m ready to leave.

By serendipity, I was able to leave. It’s been such a wonderful thing to help people and understand how to help them. As coaches, it’s so important. I love the term that you use, underfeeling. The underfeeling happens to everybody. A lot of times, it’s because people don’t know where to go and that’s why coaching is so important because we can help people navigate what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and things like that.

The Importance Of Rest And Recharging

I love that you were finally able to step away from the corporate world and into your passion and that you discovered it because so many people are still struggling to discover their passions within the corporate world. I love that you were able to leave and then start your own journey in the health and fitness industry, specifically for corporate people. That’s amazing. You have given us a lot of great information. Is there one actionable tip that you can leave the audience with from the conversation that we had?

I was thinking about this because you mentioned this segment. When we’re talking about beliefs, the belief that we often need to challenge when we’re perfectionists is the belief that rest is lazy. One actionable tip that I recommend anyone try if they haven’t already done it is to try to assess what in their life or day-to-day right now they find to be energizing, meaning that it fills them up and brings them more energized energy, and what they find depletes their energy.

If you find that the ways that you’re managing stress are very repetitive and they’re not very diversified, then I would encourage you to try to reflect on other things, even if you don’t know for sure, you might hypothesize would be energizing. Challenge yourself to start to experiment with those things without judgment that any of those things would be construed as lazy.

This is something that has helped me in times when I felt hyper-stressed or burnt out or stuck, which is being able to take a critical eye on how many things I’m investing in throughout my day to day throughout my life that I’m allowing myself and permitting myself to do that are filling up my energy. They’re re-energizing me. Not just not depleting my energy but they’re actively bringing me more energy. They’re re-energizing. That would be my one actionable tip.

Energy is so critically important for our day-to-day. I love that you’re giving yourself permission to rest because that’s so important to be able to rest without that guilt. A lot of times, sometimes when you feel that guilt, that depletes your energy as well. Does that make sense?

Definitely.

Allison, thank you so much for this conversation. This has been wonderful. I would encourage anybody to make sure that you are taking care of yourself, taking care of your health, your energy, and your nutrition. If you are trying to look for anybody who can help you, Allison’s information will be on this episode. With that, Allison, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much. I enjoyed this conversation.

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That was such an informative and very important conversation that I had with Allison. I’m going to break it down to the three biggest takeaways so that you can start making changes. The very first one is that overtraining and under-fueling aren’t things that just athletes do. Many high-achieving women unknowingly push their bodies too far, leading to burnout, hormonal imbalances, and chronic fatigue.

The second takeaway is that perfectionism is sneaky. The same discipline that makes you successful in your career can also make you overly rigid with food, exercise, and rest, sometimes at the expense of your long-term health. This is the final takeaway, your body is always speaking to you. Symptoms like extreme fatigue, mood swings, and missing periods are not random. There are signs that your body needs more support, not more discipline.

Allison leaves us with one tip. She says to stop associating rest with laziness, which is phenomenal because sometimes when I do a rest day, I feel lazy because I didn’t accomplish anything, but I am going to take my rest day without any guilt or feeling lazy. Take a moment to reflect on what truly energizes you and make time for those things without guilt. Great tip from Allison.

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This episode was all about giving you permission to balance ambition with well-being. You can excel in your career and take care of your body. It’s not an either-or. I also want to recognize my podcast, No Woman Left Behind. It was mentioned by FeedSpot as being one of the top 40 best self-improvement podcasts for women. Thank you, FeedSpot, and thank you to all of the listeners for tuning in and for your support. I would greatly appreciate it if you could subscribe and share this podcast with your network, and you will get a download every single Friday. Remember to be brave, be bold, and take action.

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About Allison Yamamoto

Allison is a founder and coach at Ally which helps active women stop overtraining and under fueling to get a regular period and feel more free around food and exercise.

As a former NCAA cheerleader, product executive, and marathon runner, Allison struggled with RED-S and disordered eating for several years.

Her recovery inspired her to share her frameworks combined with the Ally clinical team’s research to help others do the same.