It would be easy enough to let a single diagnosis dictate the trajectory of your life. Let alone multiple chronic illnesses. 

Today’s guest is Loz Antonenko, an inspiring fitness instructor, life coach and published author of a book titled, “Get the F** Unstuck”. 

Throughout this episode, Loz shares how her personal health struggles became the catalyst for deep transformation—both mentally and physically and how it culminated in her current path as a wellbeing advocate and public speaker. 

From being diagnosed with a laundry list of chronic health conditions including ADHD, ulcerative colitis, fibromyagia, chronic fatigue syndrome, PCOS and PMDD (to name a few), to becoming a passionate advocate for mental and physical wellbeing, Loz shares how she turned life’s setbacks into stepping stones.

Learn about Loz’s simple, yet transformative concepts of tweaking “handbrake habits.” Daily practices, accessible to anyone around eating, breathing, sleeping, moving, and hydrating. With a compelling story, and her signature mix of infectious enthusiasm and grounded advice, Loz will have you thinking outside the box about how you’re approaching your wellbeing. 

Key Take Aways

• Loz emphasises that life often happens for you rather than to you, and personal struggles can serve as powerful catalysts for transformation.

• Loz’s unique wellness approach: Focusing on five essential "handbrake habits" that can significantly enhance overall health and wellness.

• Aligning actions with personal values a crucial step towards achieving life goals and maintaining physical and emotional health.

• Loz’s Insights For Navigating ADHD and Neurodivergence: Customised strategies can effectively manage ADHD symptoms without relying solely on traditional medication.

• Health is not about perfection but about consistent, sustainable practices that enhance life quality.

Episode Timestamps

Episode Transcript

0:00:00 - (Bec Guild): My guest today is Loz Antonenko. Loz is a qualified fitness instructor with additional qualifications in life coaching and cognitive behavioral therapy. Today she's going to share with us her inspiring story about how she went from having debilitating diagnoses like ADHD and ulcerative colitis earlier on in life to becoming an unstoppable force of nature as a life coach and motivational speaker who helps others achieve their goals and become unstuck working, which is the topic of a book she has authored. So, without further ado, I warmly welcome Loz.

Thanks so much for joining me for this chat Loz. I'm excited for you to share your messages with the audience that we have interested in building their brain health and their wellbeing and. And all of that fun stuff. So what I would love to do first is like, talk me through your background and how you came to be a public speaker and also, you know, obviously, so deeply ingrained in health and wellbeing.

0:01:00 - (Loz Antonenko): Well, first of all, thank you so much, Bec. It's an absolute honour and a pleasure to chat with you and to share with the people that are listening. And I think the story for me as to how I got to this position as a professional speaker and I guess, an advocate for being healthy and fit with simplicity is that my own personal journey kind of ended up pushing me in a direction which I'm in at the moment. I mean, if you told me 10 years ago that this is a life that I'd be living and this is the path that I'd be taking, I would have told you you were an idiot. Because there's no absolute way that I could have imagined that the. The shy, body-conscious, underconfident young woman that I was, that was, you know, in a. In a path of business with a degree in it could possibly be a health, fitness and wellbeing expert. But it just shows you that sometimes life happens for you rather than to you. And so many of us are attracted to the space of health and wellbeing through personal challenges and through personal experiences, as I know you certainly have been.

And for me, that journey started very indirectly at the end of high school. I was never a sick kid. As a small child, I was. I did suffer from chronic bronchitis, but I guess as a kid I was never really unwell. I struggled with ADHD and attention deficit challenges and I was medicated from 1998 before ADD was cool. I got diagnosed, actually, and they put me on dexamphetamine and that stunted my growth, actually stopped growing as soon as I started taking that medication, I'm exactly the same size I am. I'm nearly 40. I'll be 40 in a week and a bit.

I'm exactly the same height I was when I was 13 years old. Actually have clothes from when I was 13 that I can fish out and they're all cool again. They're all back in trend, which is hilarious.

0:02:46 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, I know. I see the same thing happening.

0:02:50 - (Loz Antonenko): I'm like, why would you bring low-waisted pants back, back. Like they would not drip tops. Like, yeah. Anyway, side quest, we'll come back. So I am warning you, I do have adhd, so there is a high probability that through today's conversation, we're gonna sort of go north, south, east and west under the overpass at the end of us and come back onto the highway. So I was medicated for adhd, but that was really it for me.

I ended up developing glandular fever when I was 16 years old. So I was quite unwell. And it's interesting because that was kind of non eventful in terms of like health. It was just a thing that happened. But I realised that was kind of the beginning of this journey for me. So Epstein Barr virus, very sick, sits in your system for a very long time, pretty much just dormant until something happens. And then at the end of high school, on the very last week of high school, when we're having our breakup, I had some bad pizza that was heated and went cold and then reheated and I ended up with food poisoning. And so I look at those two events, even though they were very separate, they kind of laid the foundations of what was to become a very challenging journey to navigate when it started to unravel.

So I went to university. I had a scholarship in information technology. And about halfway through my university studies, I started getting quite unwell in terms of I was rapidly losing weight, I started pooping blood. And there's no way to sugarcoat that I thought I had bowel cancer. And I'm in my early 20s, freaking out. I got down to 40 kilos and was basically taken to hospital. Push and pull from one specialist to the other. They diagnosed me with a condition called ulcerative colitis. So for those of you playing along at home, ulcerative colitis is a form of inflammatory bowel disease.

There's a few different types of inflammatory bowel disease, but I have ulcers that develop in the lower part of my bowel, normally triggered by stress. So I had a specialist and the specialist said, okay, well, here's a bunch of corticosteroid drugs. This is probably going to stop you. Yeah, I know. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, here's some drugs that are going to help stop the bleeding. Maybe look at following a gluten free diet.

Like there's some studies that show that that can reduce inflammation. Slap me on the bum, sent me home. And so what then happened was, okay, I stopped the bleeding and I started putting weight back on. But then I kept putting weight back on and I kept putting weight back on and I gained 26 and a half kilos in about six months. I was very unwell. My fatigue level started going through the roof. I then got pushed and pulled from one medical specialist to the other. I started accumulating all these medical acronyms after my name and then got diagnosed with polycystic ovaries, got diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, a thing called pmdd, Premenstrual Dysphoric disorder. Like more acronyms than anyone you should really have to think of, right?

And at no point did anyone link any of this stuff to anything. It was just these are all just random things. And unfortunately, the mainstream model of health in, you know, the system that we live in, it segregates the body into different systems. And so, right, you've got one specialist that says one thing, but there's literally no correlation between your symptoms with this specialist and symptoms with another specialist.

0:06:15 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:06:15 - (Loz Antonenko): And so I was finding that every month when I would have a period, I would get a flare up of my ulcerative colitis. And I asked both my gynecologist and my gastroenterologist what that was about. And they were like, I don't know, I know nothing. And I'm like, well, the reality is.

0:06:29 - (Bec Guild): Until really, really recently, almost all studies were done on men. Like they did know about these kind of biorhythmic fluctuations we have with in 100%.

0:06:40 - (Loz Antonenko): And human beings are very complex micro, you know, we're not microorganisms, we're big organisms, right? And we have a lot of little micro functions. We are systems, we are chemical cocktails, we are electricity, we are all of these things. Yet when you are really unwell and you're dealing with multiple diagnoses, it's very confusing and overwhelming. So I ended up having to take six months off university and it was much to my dad's disappointment.

I look back now and I really, truly believe that growing up in a household with a lot of stress significantly contributed to me developing autoimmune Diseases as a kid. My dad is very hard on me. He was, he was in the military for a period, like for a very long time. And then he quit and he started his own business. But you know, it was always very strict and, and my mum was a nurse, so an empathy, very outwardly caring and generous with her emotions.

But I started to realise as a child quite young that I had to wire myself for success because as soon as I started getting good at something and I achieved things, my dad would tell me how proud he was of me and that was his way of expressing love. So there's a lot of different things that start, you know, in hindsight. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah.

0:07:52 - (Bec Guild): It's funny how that works, right?

0:07:55 - (Loz Antonenko): So I end up returning back to university and graduating, but I was so incredibly unwell. I, according to the medical system, I was actually okay because I wasn't actively in a flare up with my ulcerative colitis. But my gut health was poor. I started going down the route of integrated medicine. I mean, lucky for me, my mum had a really open mind and being in the medical field realized there were certainly massive gaps in that space and she started to look at ways that she could help. So my whole family like went gluten free.

I had like all of these allergies as I saw a naturopath, I saw an integrated person functional medicine and started to slowly unpack my health in a different way, framing it with a different lens. But then a really big momentous period of time sort of occurred between 2015 and 2016. And this would completely change the trajectory of my life to take me to where I am now, like being in this field personally and professionally.

0:08:55 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:08:55 - (Loz Antonenko): So out of university I started a business with my dad. So I, I basically graduated, was very unwell, was offered all these amazing job opportunities. I was offered a job writing feminist policy. I had a job lined up writing feminist policy for the Office of Women. And I also had applied and moved to the next stages of the cadetship program with the accc. So smart kid, but no confidence to do anything and I was tired all the time. So I'll do the most rational thing and I'll buy myself a job. So my dad and I went into business and we started a business in the mobility equipment and rehabilitation space. So we were selling things like scooters and wheelchairs and hospital beds and things to wipe your butt with and things to turn on tax with. So I had literally no experience in that space.

But we built up a very successful business over a period of time. And for about eight years. That was what my life looked like. So very predictable. I was very average, like, with my body confidence. I like. It was never about how I looked or how I. How I trained. I wasn't training actively. I wasn't really giving consideration for my health. I thought I was eating healthy. And then in 2015, my dad and I had a physical altercation in our mobility shop.

My dad had hit me across the face and everything that I knew to be true about my life, because I pretty much engineered my entire life around the expectations and belief systems of my father, came crashing down. But that was just the beginning. Six months later, my husband, who was Chinese, Ukrainian, two cultures where you really don't talk about your feelings and your safe face, he committed suicide.

0:10:28 - (Bec Guild): Oh, gosh.

0:10:30 - (Loz Antonenko): And I can stand here as I'm on my treadmill at my desk, having a conversation with you and 100% saying that that moment was pivotal. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I know that I can actually reflect back at that and actually see that for what it has been. It doesn't mean it was easy. It doesn't mean you get over it. But then. Then a month after that, my grandpa died. And as somebody that had built an entire life around very masculine paradigms and having to hustle and grind and achieve, these three really significant paternal figures in my life were no longer there. These male role models, these. These Yang energies, they were gone. And I had a really great psychologist at the time. And, you know, I'm still quite sick. Right?

0:11:14 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:11:15 - (Loz Antonenko): And she just said, you need to go find something to do that's going to help you move through this stuff. Because a lot of the stuff that you're going to have to go through, there's a lot of legal things, it's going to take time to heal.

0:11:24 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:11:25 - (Loz Antonenko): And so I started going to a gym properly. Like, I kind of was a member of a gym, but I was one of the 60% of people that never go. And. Right. So I started going to the gym and it was interesting because I would go just before closing time. We wasn't a 247 gym that I was at at the time, and so I'll go on the treadmill and I just was in my own space, in my own zone, didn't want to have a conversation with anybody.

So I did that for a little while. And then one night, a lovely volunteer at the gym, an old fellow, I still see him, he's in his 80s now. I see him and I surprise him. He never answers his Phone. So I just rock up at his house, surprise him. But he said, look, I'd love to help you lift weights. And I remember looking down at the gym area at 8:30 at nighttime and the only people that are there are middle aged, balding blokes who are sweaty, grunty and stinky.

And I said, mate, like, I'm not really interested because I don't want to look like that. And he said to me, you can't, you can't look like that because you don't have like testosterone hormones. Like you couldn't, you would have to like take hormones like, oh, okay. Because you'll get tone and you'll feel really good and you'll start to, you'll start to have a better mindset. And I was like, okay, well I've never had conversations like this with anybody in my life.

So instead of bee-lining for the treadmill, I went down to the weights area the next day. And it's interesting because these balding, middle-aged, sweaty, grunty, stinky men were actually really, really nice. And they were very, very helpful. And you know, they're old school guys training in a gym. And so we were having conversations about things that I actually never engaged in conversation with anybody about before Beck. I mean, we were talking about personal development, we started talking about goal setting, started talking about nutrition… They introduced me to podcasts, I got introduced. So this whole world is like, you.

0:13:09 - (Bec Guild): Just happened upon a gym full of enlightened men.

0:13:12 - (Loz Antonenko): I know, well, it was a PCYC, had a lot of cops and other people who I guess had a lot of life experience.

0:13:18 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:13:19 - (Loz Antonenko): And so over a six month period, not only was I starting to engage in this brand new culture and attract this new culture into my life, which was so polarising to the life that I'd had, it was quite negative. I was quite a pessimistic person, very glass-half-empty person. Oh my God. I've got these amazing, uplifting, high-vibing people in my life. My body started to change, my health started to change, my gut started to heal, and in six months I made a decision to, to do a bodybuilding show. So my husband was very fit and he wanted to do a show, but he had no confidence to do that. So I thought, I'm going to do one. In testament to him, unfortunately, what then ended up happening is I, I have adhd, as I said, and so I get really hyper-focused on things.

Instead of doing one show every two to three years, I did about 13 shows in 14 months. So I went to the App. Yeah, I know.

0:14:11 - (Bec Guild): Good grief.

0:14:12 - (Loz Antonenko): I went to the absolute extreme and.

0:14:15 - (Bec Guild): Way to punish your body, too.

0:14:17 - (Loz Antonenko): Right, Right.

0:14:19 - (Bec Guild): With what? Yeah, we had in the background 100.

0:14:22 - (Loz Antonenko): And through that journey. It's interesting because in that world and in that little. In that little microcosm that is like the bodybuilding space, there's a lot of behavior that goes on there that I think is quite normalized within the bubble. But looking on the outside, looking in now, it's so obvious how toxic it can become. And so it's interesting. At one of my last shows, I wanted to have a glass of wine the night before, and my coach said, hey, look, babe, why don't you consider snorting cocaine, because there's no calories in that?

And I was like, what hell have I? Just like, what am I in. What is this? I had 100,000 ish followers on Instagram. I was being externally validated for my toxic behaviour from the outside. So, you know, I was chasing likes, and everyone's like, oh, my God, you look so amazing. I was counting every single calorie in. I was training three hours a day. I was on social media for seven hours. I was still running the mobility store on my own.

I had to engage staff and put my big dog pets on. It was so much through that journey, they found a tumor in my brain, on my pituitary gland, and also a hole in my heart, so. Which I'd had from birth, which I did not know about. So I had to go, yeah, yeah. So I had a pfo, a patent for Ramen Ovali, which they call a pfo. And so I have a septal occlusion device in my heart now. But, you know, I kind of went through all that. I had surgery, and I had, like, massive injuries. And kind of when that penny drop moment occurred with that comment from my coach, I was like, this is insane. What am I even in? And I met another guy who I would end up marrying, and he said to me, like, what are you even doing this for?

And I think I identify over a period of time that I actually had this massive gap in my life. I was very inherently unhappy. I was so stuck. Even though I looked great, I was so embedded in this toxic culture of needing all of this external gratification, and I needed people to help me manage my life. And so, because I've been such a curious person my whole me, I started my first business at 15. So I'm always about problem-solving. And that's how you get into it, solving problems. I went, okay, I'm going to go and become a personal trainer.

And so I thought, okay, if I can study and learn about that, even just for myself, I don't really want to actively work with people, but I want to learn about the human body so I could be a better coach and the coaches I've had. So I went into my certificate three and certificate four in fitness. And then I realised after finishing that I was like, oh my God, like I. I literally learned nothing about how to have conversations with people and help solve people's problems. So then I studied life coaching and then I studied nutritional stuff and cognitive behavioural therapy. There was about 13 different modalities that I ended up covering over a period of 18 to 24 months. And it's interesting, none of that had the intention behind it of, oh my God, I want to work with people. This is going to be a career change. This is what you're actually going to do. It was like, I actually need to do this stuff for myself.

I need to learn about this stuff. I want to understand why I have become so stuck in my life. Not just in my life actively, but in my health. And all of a sudden my health miraculously got better. Like, wow. It was not really that crazy. But it's funny how when you start to unpack it and realise the cause and effect of a lot of the inflammatory things that were going on, it was pretty clear to me that stress was a massive trigger. My gut health was a massive trigger.

My cognitive capacity, having ADHD was massive. I actually went off my ADHD medication, haven't been medicated since. And I kind of got to the end of that and I completely changed my life again. So I came back to a new normal, a sustainable lifestyle. I had developed not, you know, counting on my calories and not training obsessively. And people started to notice and people were like, oh my God, like, how did you do that? And I was just like, well, I just do what I always do, which is I never give up and I keep going.

But then I realised, get on with it. Yeah, right, right. And some of us are just wired for resilience. And I realised that actually that's not that common. So I reverse-engineered how I'd gotten unstuck and I created a process that was replicable that I could actually educate people on and take people through. Then I accidentally wrote a book, because that's what happens accidentally.

0:18:26 - (Bec Guild): Okay? You just tripped over and fell.

0:18:28 - (Loz Antonenko): And there it was, and there was a book. It was interesting because I reflect on those really hard times and they were the biggest catalysts for change for me. And here I am now. I've sold that mobility business. So I actually sold it only a few months ago after nearly 20 years of running it. And now I'm full time doing this stuff. So I do believe that the harder you work, the luckier you get. I don't feel like I work a day in my life.

I've gone from being a coach to a professional speaker and an author and I guess an expert and an advocate for helping people realize that getting unstuck and being in just a state of, to begin with, good health, with air quotes around it because it's just good, it's not as hard as people think. And I, and I believe that we live in a capitalist society which is run by big Ag, big pharma, big Food, and people who have little knowledge, loud mouths and great marketing skills who are just trying to sell you something.

And a lot of the spin that they put on that typically is that you must have this thing to be successful, you must have this thing to be healthy, you must have this thing if you want to thrive, if you want to unlock your money mindset. But no amount of 4am Ice baths, saunas, affirmations, handstand push ups are going to get you unstuck from your life if you are not eating, breathing, sleeping, moving or hydrating at just a baseline level. I mean, nine out of 10 deaths in Australia are caused from chronic disease, most of which could be prevented if we just looked after ourselves. And that's kind of the premise of everything that I teach now, like being healthy is easy.

0:20:06 - (Bec Guild): This is the concept of your book.

0:20:07 - (Loz Antonenko): Which is called oh, get the, Can I, can I say a swear word?

0:20:11 - (Bec Guild): I guess so. We can always beep it out.

0:20:12 - (Loz Antonenko): Okay, well, it's called get the f*** unstuck. So you can say get the f unstuck if you wanted to. And the premise of that book is exactly that, that we sort of drive around our cars, which is our body, with these five handbrakes on, and I call them handbrake habits, and that's our eating, our breathing, our sleep, our movement and hydration and they all interconnected. But if we just focus on unlocking one of those handbrakes and we spend four weeks focusing intimately on working out how we can just make it a little bit better, what you find is the other handbrakes automatically start unlocking themselves and getting unstuck isn't that challenging.

The biggest thing is that we get distracted by lots of other peripheral things that we think are going to save us. So the biggest game changer I find for people is actually their eating is terrible. And most humans, especially in the Western world, in Australia and America, we follow the standard Australian or the standard American diet. And if you abbreviate that, it abbreviates the word sad. Right?

0:21:09 - (Bec Guild): True. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I think a lot of us don't know what you don't know. There's a lot of information flying around about what is or what isn't a really great diet. But with a sum total of those habits that we do, you know, 8 out of 10. But often what happens is people will focus on the one or two times that they slip up. And you know, that, that, I mean, that's superfluous, really. It's the stuff that you do every day that matters.

0:21:34 - (Loz Antonenko): It is. And it doesn't have to be perfect every single time. In fact, it's never going to be perfect every time. And if you're seeking perfection, you need to bark up a different tree.

0:21:42 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, that's a stressor as well.

0:21:44 - (Loz Antonenko): That's 100%. And I always suggest to people, you know, apply the 80 20, will 8020 rule. 80% of the time, be on point with everything. You know, do your best, but 20% of the time, and this is about reducing your threshold of unacceptable stuff in your life. I mean, when you start to feel good, nothing tastes or is as good as healthy feels. So when you start to actually feel great and get those results that you've been seeking for a while, like your energy's back, your mojo is improving, your cognition at the beginning of the end of the day is actually not declining. You're not reaching for sweet things or caffeinated beverages.

Your sleep actually improves, your skin improves, your gut health improves, like all the things that are sometimes more subjective than objective measures. The reality is, is once you hit that point where you like, oh my God, actually, I feel good, you'll be less likely to do the things that make you feel bad. In fact, you become more sensitive to the things that make you feel yuck. And so you were actually reducing that threshold. And I think the biggest challenge, Bec, is that people's threshold these days are so big that they'll just let things slide and slide and slide and slide and slide until it's some cataclysmic implosion in their life. And like, oh my God, I got to try and fix the thing now. And then it's, you know, it's a lot harder to reactively try and fix something rather than proactively trying to, to do things.

0:23:06 - (Bec Guild): Yeah. And what I like about the way that you kind of break it down into handbrake habits is that, you know, they're these small, easy things that people can do daily like, that are so underestimated but actually have a profound impact. I, I know. I, I also find myself saying certain aspects of the same habits to people till I'm blue in the face. And people think, oh, my God, it can't possibly be that simple, but it is.

0:23:32 - (Loz Antonenko): It is.

0:23:32 - (Bec Guild): Choose your foods well and you're, you're well nourished and you have the resources and the capacity to heal and, you know, make things like neurochemicals and, you know, 

(Loz Antonenko): Right. 

(Bec Guild): Go to the toilet. Like, nobody's more upset than a person that's constipated. So, you know, that's obviously foundational. I love that you include hydration. You know, it's just, it's like a 1 or 2% loss in hydration starts to impact brain function.

0:23:58 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, sleep, because we know that the brain detoxes when it's asleep. And, you know, it's so underrated and so many of us don't put enough, you know, focus on it and movement, we know that that builds nerve growth factors that improves brain health. And then, of course, breathing, which is my, my actual favorite because of the way it activates the vagus nerve. So, yeah, all of these things combined, if you can think, what's kind of the name of the podcast, actually think better and feel, you know, think better. You feel better if you, you know, the brain is that kind of central computer system running everything.

0:24:34 -  (Loz Antonenko): So, yeah, we've got, we've got this… Interrelated connectivity between our physiological state and our emotional state. And so your emotion is energy, emotion. And so it's quite easy to start changing your emotions physiologically if you make a physiological shift. But at the same time, if we can create physiological interventions in our life where we're just optimising what it is that we do. I mean, I'm actually having a conversation with you on a walking pad at my desk because I'm all like, well, I may as well. Like, I'm just going to be sitting down and sitting is a sport our bodies aren't trained to do. So why would I not use this opportunity to get a little bit more movement? And I think it's just thinking a little bit more laterally. So many of us, we are conditioned to sit within this little box that society puts in us. Okay, We've got a lot of work from home stuff now. So people are spending more time in the house. There's no separation of duties between what goes on at the house, what goes on at work. You know, we're sitting so long in poor posture. So it's really quite challenging to have good breathing patterns when we've got, you know, what we call tech neck and we're can't activate our diaphragm. So straight up our brain isn't getting the level of oxygen that it actually needs to be at any reasonable level of cognition.

0:25:46 - (Bec Guild): Yes.

0:25:47 - (Loz Antonenko): Not drinking enough water. In fact, we're just drinking a lot of hyper palatable drinks that are engineered or formulations because they're not even food. Yet, we're under nourishing our brain and we are always put sleep on the back burner when we're trying to be productive. Sleep is the first thing to slip. Yet sleep is where our glymphatic system is able to detoxify so that we can actually wake up fresh and be back on the ball. 

And so we're constantly fighting this uphill battle every single day because we're under this immense pressure with the cost of living going up to have to be productive, productive, productive. And, productivity has become. Being productive has been the new normal. Yet it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, if you just spend a little bit of time, the reality is you're already doing the five handbrake habits. Like every single person on the planet is eating, is breathing, is sleeping, is moving and is hydrating.

(Bec Guild): Hopefully, yeah.

0:26:42 - (Loz Antonenko): Without any of those things. Yeah, but without any of those things, we would die.

0:26:46 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, 100%.

0:26:47 - (Loz Antonenko): Right. So if we can just get ourselves to a baseline, reasonable level of good health, we would relieve the burden on the medical system. Most of us would feel okay. Our productivity literally. We would remove the glass ceiling of potential that sits over pretty much every single one of us. I think the world would just be a better place. 

Yet, we continue to reach for these big hacks. You know when, when you are stuck, you do really elaborate gestures to try and prove to yourself that you're getting unstuck. It's like I'll go and go to Tony Robbins and walk on hot coals and I'll ra ra my hands in the air. I'm going to download every single app, a mindfulness app. I'm going to download and read every book that's ever been written about this thing. But information acquisition does not equal transformation.

And so many of us are just there. Oh, I'm just gonna acquire all this knowledge about this Stuff. It's like you actually have to do the thing. And yet there's then conversations at the flip side of that. I was like, oh, let's just manifest this. I'm like, I'm gonna call on manifesting. Like, hey, I'm, I'm human design. Like I'm a manifestor. Right. Like, I literally can put an idea out there and it will happen.

0:27:52 - (Bec Guild): It's the steps you take.

0:27:54 - (Loz Antonenko): Yes.

0:27:54 - (Bec Guild): It's not magic. It's not magic. It’s the intention that's set behind it.

0:27:59 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah. And it's just, you know, every decision then is enacted in accordance to will it take me higher towards my value system? 

(Bec Guild): That goal. 

 (Loz Antonenko): Will it take me. Yeah, take me towards that goal, that intention that I've set, or will it detract me from that and distract me? And I think in terms of adhd, as somebody that isn't medicated because I don't believe I have to be. I'm frustrated by a lot of middle aged women at the moment who are seeking positive diagnosis for ADHD because they're like, oh my God, I can't get shit done. I'm like, actually, darling, probably what's happening is that your values… So you have a whole heap of values that you live your life by. Like, ideally it might be family, financial stability, whatever that is. Right now, your values and your actions are completely misaligned. And you can tell. Like somebody that values family time and stability who is erratically running around home late from work every single night because they're pushing and pushing for productivity straight away, immediately you can see there's a misalignment.

I'm pretty confident that if we were just to align your actions with your values, you would probably equilibrate a lot of your emotional instability, a lot of your impulse control would probably be released and you're probably fine, that maybe some of those distractions and that doom scrolling that you're doing every single night to escape probably would fall by the wayside to some degree. It doesn't mean that there isn't an element of neurodivergence. Hey, I'm all about like people who are neurodivergent. Right.

But I think there is a tendency to jump to a diagnosis these days when a lot of the time I believe it's a misalignment because of cultural conditioning.

0:29:29 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, the diagnosis probably, or the, the desire for a diagnosis probably comes from a place of, you know, wanting to be able to say I told you so. Like, it's. Yeah, it's sort of this outward, like see something isn't quite right because you can feel it inherently in the way you're approaching things or the way you're doing things or the inability to do certain things as well. Like I see that with a lot of the content that a lot of the quote unquote, ‘ADD influencers” are posting is like. It's sort of like normalising these kinds of behaviors that might, you know, rub certain people up the wrong way. But the fact is we're all biologically different. And if we all got how boring would that be?

0:30:06 - (Loz Antonenko): 100%. I mean, the spice of life sits in the, in the shades between the black and the white, Right?

0:30:11 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:30:12 - (Loz Antonenko): And I think that rather than seeking like a diagnosis, because the reality is if you seek a diagnosis for adhd, the only solution in the mainstream medical model is pharmacological intervention.

0:30:22 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:30:23 - (Loz Antonenko): And so like, if you had no intention of being medicated in the first place, why bother putting a label on yourself? Why don't I just embrace the eccentricities and nuances of who you are?

0:30:31 - (Bec Guild): Yeah.

0:30:32 - (Loz Antonenko): But then also put some measures in place to give you some non-negotiables so that you are actually on track and you're not so distracted. You actually get some achievement of goals. Like people like, how do you get so many things done in your day? I don't have a daily routine and I used to. There's actually a really elaborate video on my YouTube channel of my daily routine. I look at it and I'm like, what the. Because it used to be so complex.

0:30:56 - (Bec Guild): Does seem to be this inherent ability. And I've worked with a lot of people with add, but there does seem to be this inherent ability for people with that to actually almost like expand time. It's like you, you have physiologically set up to achieve five times more than the average person in the smallest amount of time. And there's. Yeah, there's. I don't know what it is, but it's very interesting.

0:31:20 - (Loz Antonenko): Well, I believe that I think most people construct time in a very linear fashion. Fashion. It's like I go from here to here to here. I run on what I call parallel time. So I'm like, oh, I'm running here, but I'm also running this other timeline at the same time. And there could be like five or six parallel projects going on at once. And so because my brain's like, oh, I like that. And I like that. To me, that's so normal. I think I've done that my whole life. You know, I'm a professional speaker, I'm a group fitness Instructor, I'm a personal trainer, I, I write books, I even sing on stage sometimes. You know, like just why not?

0:31:53 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, right. 

 (Loz Antonenko): You know, dancing, singing, 

(Bec Guild): Great for your nervous system, singing.

0:31:57 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah, but you know, like, why not wear the tutu? Why not try and embrace that? Because for so long I had suppressed that part of my personality. It wasn't actually till I met my husband that I have now that some of that stuff actually was able to be expressed because I, I, the dynamic that we have, I mean he's so fun loving, he's a professional muso and you know, he's just this ridiculous larger than life character. And it's just been amazing to actually watch myself lean into and, and refine the person I am. And so instead of allowing these situations, these ‘shituations’ - shitty situations that I sometimes find myself in to define me, because so many of us fall prey to victim mentality, labeling, mindset, I would argue that they've actually been able to refine the person that I've always been and helps actually. I really like that. And sometimes I'll try something on, not literally, but figuratively. I like try on a version of myself or like a more amplified version of something. I'd be like, oh, that's, and that was, I mean the bodybuilding thing was one of those like, it was hyper, it was extreme. I was hyper feminine, you know, I was hyper masculine and hyper feminine all at the same time. And it just wasn't sustainable. And so I think that reaching for these external reasons as to why you are is not that useful to proper, sustainabl, long-term change and your overall happiness, health and vitality.

0:33:19 - (Bec Guild): To be fair, I would imagine just listening to talk as well about your own experience that a lot of like the clientele you're probably attracting are also people who have ADD or aspects of that to their personality because they kind of, you know, like you said, going down the path for diagnosis. It's kind of paint-by-numbers medicine, is that you've got this, you're this round peg for that round hole and therefore you get this particular set of treatment. You know, that's really what we're thinking with a diagnosis. But you know, when you work with somebody I guess more independently and individually, like you can kind of dial up or dial down aspects of lifestyle and personality and like you said, lean into certain things where resisted in the past. So I, I would imagine that yeah, a lot of people with ADD are just naturally going to…

0:34:12 - (Loz Antonenko): You're right! And some of us are heart shaped pegs trying to fit into round holes. And, and, and you, you're 100% correct in identifying that they are the, the typical archetypes of the people that I work with. I work with a lot of young men with autism, which is very interesting because it was never a client group that I ever sort of deliberately went out to attract. I work with a lot of young men with autism and ADHD and neurodivergence. But I also work with a lot of women over 40. And I'll tell you what, there isn't a big difference between them. 

Because what I love though, about working with these cohorts of particular individuals is that when people are at that critical point in their life where they, okay, so for example, women over 40, a lot of women over 40 or even 50, they're at a stage with their identity where, you know, they've been a mom or a wife or whatever, like, whatever those labels are, 

(Bec Guild): They’s at crossroads.

0:35:03 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah. And they have, you know, an existential crisis of sorts. So because, you know, there's, there's a level of independence with their children. All of a sudden they've got like, who the friggin hell am I?

0:35:13 - (Bec Guild): Yeah. Their hormones are also changing 100, 100%.

0:35:17 - (Loz Antonenko): They're like, oh my God, I gained like 30 kilos. I don't understand why. So then what do they do? They join a gym. So that's why I work as a personal trainer. The pure reason I work inside a gym and online as a PT as part of what is that I know that's where I'm going to get to meet people, to have an intervention moment with them and re-educate them and re-route them to probably the habit that's actually going to be giving them the biggest needle shift.

The same works with young men with autism. I find that a lot of young men with autism, they felt segregated and marginalised most of their life. They don't feel seen and they don't feel heard. They feel unsupported and as a consequence, have very limited confidence in themselves to be able to do things. And so a lot of their emotional regulation, if they've got some sort of funding through, maybe the NDIS can be managed through exercise and physical interventions. And so I end up working with them as a support worker or a personal trainer. And it's great because you tell them to do something and you ask them to train to a certain level and they just take you completely literally. 

(Bec Guild): Yep. 

(Loz Antonenko): I have a couple of clients and we just have the biggest laugh. Like I have one client and I use a scale of like the rate of perceived exertion or rpe, which we talk about in fitness, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, I want it to be this, okay, out of 10, and so I have a conversation after an exercise with one of my clients in particular, I'd be like, so on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard was that? And you'll go, well, I'd say It was about 5.37623 recurring.

But, you know, it's just so funny. And I know like with other, with other clients that have autism, they will always do 20 more than I ask. So I just know that now. So I just sometimes have to regulate them. 

(Bec Guild): Yeah. 

(Loz Antonenko): But it's great because they achieve these amazing things because for the first time in maybe their entire lives, they've got somebody there that is completely relatable. And you know, I don't have autism.

I actually sometimes can be quite conflicting with autism because I'm so like, I just pre frame that with every single client. I'm like, hey, I'm just going to be really honest with you. I have adhd, I'm not medicated. I understand that you have autism. Sometimes that can be a little bit clashy. Just if I get excited, I'm going to speak really loud and really fast. And if it's too much and it's giving you a sensory overwhelm, make really awkward eye contact with me or tap me on the shoulder and I'll be aware that I'm just giving you sensory overload.

And I think the fact that I even just had that conversation with them Bec, just completely disarms them because they're like, oh my God, this chick is so weird. I really enjoy this and it's been awesome. And the same happens with women who are, you know, in that perimenopausal, menopausal, post menopausal part of their life. Sometimes they want to be seen and heard and getting those women results. I mean, every single client that I work with gets incredible results because they're at a point where they just want to do the work. They're like, stuff is I'm sick and tired of feeling urgh or blergh. They're the typical words that I get thrown in words and they just want more mojo. And so just re educating them on, okay, like, do you understand about your protein requirements? Do you understand that as you get older your calorie, your amount of calories per day actually decreases, but disproportionately, you need to eat more protein. You understand about your skeletal strength? Do you even know about that?

Do you understand how strength training can be integrated. You understand that we need to diversify things because there's no point being able to lift heavy shit and run really fast if you can't reach your ass to wipe it or reach your toes to do up your shoelaces. Because being in the mobility equipment business, we sold multiple bottom wipers every single day. They're a device that extend the reach so you can reach a bump and elastic shoelaces. So firsthand experience seeing that in action in my community. Yeah, I think putting that into perspective for women, they're like, oh, I never thought about those things because always like.

0:39:00 - (Bec Guild): Until it's pointed out to you. Right? Like, I know I can remember being at a, at a conference once. And it was… Must have been talking about ageing or longevity and just saying that surprising amount of people, people who can't get from a standing position into a completely laying down position and back up. You don't really consciously think about it. You're like, well, I'm getting up and down all the time. But you start to realise that as you get older, there does come a time where stuff like that is no longer inherently easy and you can't quantify it. Sometimes you just wake up one day and you're like, hang on a minute. Yeah, that used to be easy and now it's not. And so, yeah, like that. They are these fundamental things of, like those are showing signs of ageing. They don't have to be. And they're reversible, often with, with movement. But yeah, until it's sort of like that, you don't realise it until it's pointed out.

0:39:46 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah, but this is going back to that. Reducing your threshold of what's unacceptable in your life. Because if we can start to become a bit more sensitive to what it feels like to be good, it means that any time that anything starts to waver, we start to notice it immediately. And this is that reprogramming and re education of people. Because we're always just like grasping at things external to us to try and solve our problems. But if we can actually go internally and have a better relationship with our bodies and actually be more in tune, it's surprising what you can find out. Like, I am actually having this conversation with you. I've got two tumors growing inside my brain right now. And it's funny because I immediately knew something was off. And I asked for blood tests because I'm like, something totally isn't right. And I have a growth of my pineal gland. And it's been really challenging to navigate because your pineal gland is the gland that regulates your melatonin, which is the sleep hormone, but consequently has an impact on your cortisol when you wake up. And so I started to notice I was really fatigued. I'm like, okay, I've hit my threshold now of what's unacceptable in my life, this fatigue is not normal.

I asked for a blood test through an integrative doctor. Because my mainstream medical doctor literally was like, there's nothing wrong with you. And as I got a brain scan and I have, like, a half a centimeter thing growing on my pineal gland. And so, only because I was so in tune and sensitive to changes inside my body when. Which 10 years ago, there's no way I would have noticed.

0:41:12 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, yeah.

0:41:13 - (Loz Antonenko): It's such an amazing superpower. But we're constantly distracted by all of these things that we're never really given an opportunity. So we have to create those opportunities. I think that we always seem to wait to be asked to do something, but invite yourself to the party, guys. Like, invite yourself to be educated and go, do I want to keep feeling crap? What's the cost of me feeling the way that I'm feeling in 12 months now? Not even just, like, at a financial level, but at an energetic and productive and physiological level. Like, if you don't have time and money to invest in your health while you're working and while you're young, you're gonna have to have it when you're older, when you're not well, yeah.

0:41:49 - (Bec Guild): At the opposite end of the spectrum, it catches up with you eventually.

0:41:52 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah, the piper gets paid.

0:41:54 - (Bec Guild): Yeah, definitely. Well, and that's probably a really great place to wrap up with that profound last statement. But before we go, let people know, how do they find you? How do they work with you? Give people all the details.

0:42:10 - (Loz Antonenko): Yeah, sure. So the best place to get any information from me is actually my website, which is lozlife.com but also social media. If you look up the. The handle @ lozantonenko, you spell it as you say it, it'll probably be in the show notes. If you're watching this, it's probably at the bottom of my screen at the moment. But Loz Antonenko on all social media platforms, on YouTube, I do have some amazing videos that are in the pipeline at the moment that are really educational. I have an interesting, warped sense of humour, so I do like to do things with a little bit of humour on the side. What you see is what you get with me. Wysiwyg. If you do IT, I'm exactly as I am, but you can also have a look at my book as well. So get F** the unstuck. You can get it in hard copy anywhere where you buy good books. You can also get the audio book version narrated by yours truly as opposed to most audiobooks where you have to where you want to like listen to it on two and a two times speed.

0:43:02 - (Loz Antonenko): You probably want to slow mine down. 

0:43:07 - (Bec Guild): That's so funny. I listen to everything on two times speed.

0:43:10 - (Loz Antonenko): You would not be able to hear me. I would be like a chipmonk…And then it's also an e book version. So anywhere you can get it, on Kindle. You can get an audible anywhere where you get your ebooks or your audio books. That's probably the best place to start or just reach out. Send me a DM. I'm really friendly. I literally respond to every single message that gets sent to me.

0:43:30 - (Bec Guild): Well, thank you so much for your time. I truly appreciate it. It was really, really fun to talk to you.

0:43:36 - (Loz Antonenko): Oh it's been such a laugh and an absolute pleasure. Bec. Thank you so much.