The Bit That Makes People Quit
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the previous episode, I talked about how my new approach to diet and exercise - working smarter, not harder - had been a challenge because things got worse before they got better. Many listeners wrote to me asking me to delve a little deeper into this uncomfortable phases so, in this episode, I'm talking about the 'messy middle'.
Forget about the metrics, this 'messy middle' was more about the mental and emotional discomfort that started to show up. After years of being rewarded for control, I let go. I stopped restricting, I stopped over-training, I decided to let go of the idea that doing more would yield bigger, better and more impressive results and what I saw was - nothing.
Actually, not nothing.
I saw all my metrics going in the 'wrong' direction. Did I panic? Of course I did!
Yet, when it would have been so easy to quit, to go back to those old behaviours that had always given me the quick result and felt virtuous in their doing, I held fast and even though I'm still learning and it's not as though I'm through the worst of it, I can now see signs that this new approach, which requires far less stress and strain, might actually be working...
Let's chat about the 'messy middle' over on Substack...
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hi and welcome to another episode of the Emma Gunn Show. Thank you so much for joining me. It's always a |
| 0:13.5 | pleasure to spend this time with you. I am going to respond, if you will, to the feedback I had from last week's episode. So if you miss last week's |
| 0:24.4 | episode, I will give you a sort of a brief rundown of what I was bleating on about. So I was |
| 0:31.6 | talking about the fact that change usually feels worse before it gets better. And it's kind of this idea that if you're putting |
| 0:40.7 | in some sort of effort to reach a particular result, in this instance we're talking about |
| 0:46.3 | changing diet and nutrition and training in order to, A, achieve a particular physique goal, |
| 0:53.6 | which is to lose body fat and gain lean muscle, |
| 0:56.0 | but also secondly, and perhaps most importantly, is to, as a 48-year-old woman who has only ever |
| 1:02.4 | known or only ever had proof, had the data that doing more means getting better results, |
| 1:10.1 | it's switching that way of thinking to, well, can I |
| 1:13.6 | be more efficient? Can I actually get better at this? Can I get better results if I actually |
| 1:18.0 | change my approach and don't constantly max myself out? So that's the sort of two-pronged approach. |
| 1:24.8 | It's not a two-pronged approach. It's just diet and nutrition and it's exercise |
| 1:29.1 | as well, but also a complete shift in what I knew to be true. And last week I was saying that I had found, |
| 1:37.3 | I'm in week five now, sort of six. I think I said this before. I actually started this in the period |
| 1:43.8 | between Christmas and New Year as like a dummy run to sort of see how I'd get on this before. I actually started this in the period between Christmas and |
| 1:44.6 | New Year as like a dummy run to sort of see how I'd get on. But I didn't count it because I wasn't |
| 1:49.0 | being in any way as I wasn't being as rigid. Not that it's been rigid. That's sort of the whole point. |
| 1:54.2 | But I just sort of, I had a dummy week. But let's call this officially week five. And I would say that week's one, week one, you just have that joyful kind of, oh, this is fun, this is different, and you don't really know, so you just do. |
| 2:09.1 | And you don't think about it too much. |
| 2:10.8 | And then week two and three, three in particular is where you start to think, is this working. |
| 2:17.2 | Is this, am I going backwards? What's |
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