In this Epic Begins With One Step Forward episode, host Zander Sprague sits down with bestselling author and health expert Esther Avant to uncover the secrets to sustainable weight loss and lasting wellness. They dive into mindset shifts, breaking free from all-or-nothing thinking, and why structure is key to success. Esther shares practical tips for balancing nutrition, fitness, and real life—without deprivation. If you’re ready to create lasting health habits, this episode is a must-listen!
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Food, Fitness, And Freedom: The Key To Sustainable Weight Loss With Esther Avant
Welcome back to another exciting episode of the show. I am so honored to be joined by Esther Avant. Esther, tell us who you are and what you do.
Thank you so much for having me. I am a long-term health industry veteran. I’ve worked in the health industry for twenty years. Everything from personal training to weight loss coaching. I own an online business and now branching into leading workshops and giving speeches about breaking down the barriers to better health. I’m also a bestselling author and a podcast host. I’m a Navy wife. My husband’s about to deploy, and I have a son who’s in kindergarten. We have lived all over. We’ve really crisscrossed the country and the globe, everywhere from Hawaii to Germany over the last fifteen years. I’ve done all of my things in the midst of all of the military things.
Thank you to your husband for serving. That is awesome. Thanks to you for supporting him. I’m sure at times it’s been challenging, especially with a small child.
There are moments. Usually, in hindsight, you look back and you’re like, “That was pretty tough when you’re in it.” You’re just like, “All we got to do is get through it one step at a time.”
Esther’s Journey Into Health And Nutrition
Health and nutrition, the last twenty plus years, what brought you to be interested in all of that?
It’s funny. At the time, it was the movie Office Space, which came out when I was in high school and starting to think about picking a major. About that. There was a scene in the movie, which now that I’ve watched it subsequently, I realized I’ve totally misremembered the whole thing. At the time, there was a scene where one of the characters asks, “What you would do if you had a dollar?” I had just discovered working out at the YMCA, and I thought that was fun.
I was like, “I guess if I had a lot of money, I would just want to work out all day.” I ended up majoring in exercise science and went to Boston University. It was in those college years and immediately post college that I realized becoming a trainer. I was in the gym a lot, but I had very little time for my own workouts. My career has unfolded as a combination of helping other people and also helping myself, which then, in turn, has helped me be better equipped to help others.
Congratulations on also being a bestselling author. I, too, am a bestselling author. It’s a really cool thing to say. What is your book about?
My book is called To Your Health: A Lifestyle of Health, Happiness and Confidence. It’s everything I’ve learned over the last twenty years of helping people lose weight. I have seen the discrepancy between what people want and what they think they need and what they need in order to be successful long-term. The book is a roadmap that provides both of those things. Everybody wants to know the best foods for weight loss and the best exercises for your bat wings and things like that.
We want to know the tangible, the tactical, like what should I be doing stuff? The book includes that, but it also is a deep dive into the other components that we need. How do we surround ourselves with support and normalize the lifestyle that we’re trying to live? How do we start thinking about our health differently? How do we approach building habits out of the all-or-nothing approach that we tend to take? How do we do it differently so that it sticks?
It feels livable, and the results that you get last long-term. It’s intended to be almost like a companion that you, as you’re going through the book, it’s not this get you really excited and then send you off on your own, but more so as you’re reading, you start implementing the things that you’re learning so that you feel like you’re getting guidance. You’re taking it one step at a time. By the time you finish the book, you are already seeing results, and you’re working on developing the confidence to know that you can continue.
I have to say my own personal journey. It took me quite a few years to realize that I cannot eat like I did when I was sixteen, no matter how much I wanted.
Not without consequences.
I could, but instead of not gaining weight, I found that I was gaining weight. People say, “Lose the weight.” Sometimes, I feel that it just gets temporarily lost but somehow finds me again. I’d love to lose it. I’d love to leave it way behind, but somehow, it always seems to find me. I am not a good hider.
I’ve heard people transition to using the word release weight because, with release, you’re just letting it go with no expectation of finding it again. Whereas, yeah, you lose something, you’re trying to get it back.
I think you’re right that finding what works for you and it does tend to be, “I’m going to do this diet. I’m totally cutting out carbs and sugars and whatnot.” My own experience is that long-term is not a sustainable lifestyle because you do end up going, “I’d really like a piece of bread.” I don’t have any other option. “I am hungry, but I don’t have any.” I also have found that the foods I should be eating frankly do not taste nearly as good as the epically good food that is, come on.
An entire industry is devoted to making processed food delicious so we overeat and buy more of them.
There’s an entire industry devoted to making these processed foods delicious so that we overeat them and buy more. That’s so we’re up against a pretty big machine in that regard.
Even if you’re going more, let’s say not processed food, but you’re still trying to eat, in my opinion, a delicious steak is always preferable over roasted broccoli. I’ve come around to liking broccoli. I learned how to cook it so that it does taste pretty good. Used to hate broccoli. It’s not my favorite, but I’ll eat it. Again, “Broccoli or steak. I’ll take the steak because it tastes better, but it’s not as good for me.”
Building A Better Relationship With Food
There’s a deep-seated biological thing that we’re all fighting. A million years of evolution says, “Yes, you want stuff that has some fat because we don’t know when you’re going to get it again.” The difference is that we get it again in four hours. Not like, “It’s been a whole week since I had some protein.” We’re laughing about this. I’m trying to make light of it, but how do you help your clients? It’s a mind shift as much as it is whatever. There is a mind shift that has to happen about your relationship with food.
I think that’s a big part of it. One that a lot of people overlook is reminding yourself that you’re making choices. No one is making you or no one is going to make you do one thing over another. I think that’s a really empowering thing to remember. Just by having human brains, we have those moments of toddler tantrum where it’s just like, “I don’t want to. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t want it.” Reminding yourself that you don’t have to. You are choosing to because you want the result of having done the thing or having done the thing for long enough that you see a change.
It’s all choice. You could just decide, “I do not care about my health. I’m going to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever quantities I want. I’m going to move or not. I just don’t care about what will make me healthy. I’m just going to do whatever indulges my immediate pleasure.” You can do that. The reason that you’re not is because there’s something more meaningful than that to you. I think anytime you’re faced with a choice, reminding yourself of that. “I don’t have to choose the broccoli. I want to choose the broccoli for whatever reason.”
I don’t think I would ever say that.
You could train yourself to remember that. You never need to eat broccoli. There are plenty of healthy people that exist that never touch the stuff.
I get it.
Put yourself into a certain box. I think that’s one piece of it. Also, we have a tendency to live in extremes where we tell ourselves, “Either I’m doing this or I’m doing that.” Instead of, “I can find a combination of those two things, meet myself in the middle, and find what works for me where I really like steak. I don’t want to picture a life without it. I’m going to continue to eat it. I’m also going to add a vegetable to my meal a lot of the time.” You can find that middle ground.
“I can have steak, but I’ll only have it twice a month or something.” You said a small word which is really important when I talk about people on their epic journeys, because you’re right, we tend to have very tunneled singular vision and we forget that important word, and. There’s not or there’s and, “I’m on my epic journey, and I’m still doing I want to build my nutrition business and in the meantime, I need to have a job that’s helping pay the rent because I cannot do that.” With food, I love food. I’m the first to admit that I don’t think about fruits and vegetables. I think about the protein first because vegetables get in the way of the protein. “Let me eat all the protein I want.”
Protein is important.
We tend to live in extremes instead of finding a middle path that works perfectly for us.
It is but like anything, moderation. I’m in my fifties. I do not need ten ounces of steak anymore. This whole size of your palm. I got big hands, so I’m lucky. Your hand might be decidedly smaller. You look at it go, “The palm on my hand.” I go, “Yeah, I can lay that whole twelve-ounce stake in my palm. Most of it’s in my palm. I’ll fold it up. Yeah, I’m eating with my palm.”
Squish a little bit.
It is interesting. I’ve worked hard on that mind shift of my relationship to food to say, “Yes, I want to eat less of something, but I can have it occasionally.” I’ve done all kinds of wild stuff where I was really watching all the mouse. Counting all the macros. “I’m almost up to all of my carbs that I’m supposed to have. What do I do?” Sometimes, I just take it.
What I found is let’s say I’m at a party and I’m like I don’t want the potato chips or the tortilla chips or whatever, but I feel like, “I really want one.” I’ll have 1 or 2. Honestly, I get the taste in my mouth but then versus like absolutely not. I’m on the way home. Go eat a whole bag of chips that, like, give yourself a little taste. If you love dessert but you’re like, “I ate a lot today. I don’t need.” Take a bite of cake. You’ll be okay. You’re not going to like hit maximum density. Self-control is a big part of it.
I think that that comes from meeting yourself where you are. I think part of why it can be really hard to make nutrition lifestyle changes is because we picture this end vision as if we’re completely different people. We’ve overhauled everything, and that’s unappealing. We don’t even start to go down the road. The reality of it is that there are so many opportunities to be a little bit healthier than we have been. All you need to do is take that first step.
What is one small thing that you can fathom changing? Once you’re there, the next small step either reveals itself or feels a little bit more doable. With time, you can look back and see that you have really made a lot of positive changes, but you’ve never felt like it’s been too much at once. I love your emphasis on coming up with parameters for yourself. I don’t think most of us do well following rules that other people put upon us, but I do think our brains like having some structure and something to hone in on.
When you tell yourself, “I can have this much. I can have it this often. I can have a little bit.” You’re giving yourself, you’re constraining your choices a little bit, which helps eliminate the overwhelm, but you’re still giving yourself some autonomy, which feels good in the moment and eliminates the rebelliousness of if I can have it now, I want it more.
Having A Structure In Your Weight Loss Journey
I talk about the importance of structure in whatever your Epic journey is, but we’ll focus on weight loss. Structure is so important. Psychologically, structure makes us feel comfortable. Generally, we want to feel comfortable. As adults, somehow we go, “No, I don’t want any structure.” The fact of the matter is, and this is my opinion, I don’t have any study behind it, but it’s my working with people for the last two decades. Not having structure, we flail around.
Exactly the word I used, too.
As an entrepreneur, if I don’t have structure in my day, I don’t know, “I’m doing this at this time. There’s a hundred things I need to do, but if I don’t create structure for myself, half of things get done.” It’s funny. We’re talking about exercise. I rediscovered that I’m structure boy. I like structure. When I decided that I wanted to run a marathon, I joined a team and training, which is the fundraising side of lymphoma and Leukemia. Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I was like, I signed up first for a half marathon, because I was like, “Let’s incrementally.” They handed me a training schedule. All of a sudden, that monumental task of running 13.1 miles got so easy.
It’s just a matter of doing it.
I’m like, “I look at the thing, go run for 30 minutes. No problem.” I was done for the day. I didn’t have to worry about like, “I’ve done my training. On the weekend, go run 6 miles. I’m not saying that was easy, but still do it. Another thing that you mentioned that I think is really important. Talk about it. People who listen to the podcast all the time are like, “Here come more marathon analogies.” They are really important, is waypoints along the way. I was fortunate to be able to run 10 halves, 4 fulls and a 50K ultra. I’m not running as much these days are really at all. I’m riding my road bike, but mentally, 26.2 miles is a really long way. I was fortunate to run the 2014 Boston Marathon. I did not time qualify. I want to be really clear.
Those are damn near impossible.
No doubt. I have a funny story at the end of this little thing. When I started to run the marathons, I’m like, “I got to break this down to be achievable.” This applies to weight loss also have goals along the waypoints, because you’re like, “If I can get here, we were talking about setting. I’m only going to have steak twice a month.” No problem. You’re like, “I get to have steak this coming Saturday. I can make that.” Along the way, my first goal was 13.1 miles, because now I’m halfway through. It was mile 17 because I have single digits. I got nine miles left, single digits left. It was mile 20. I’m like, “Now I can start to count down the miles. I’ve only got three more miles to go.”
Sometimes, that felt like a really long way. It made it much more bite-sized. I call it my pizza analogy. We tend to eat pizza once slice at a time. Unless, of course, there’s a teenage boy around, in which case you’re stuffing in as much as you can as fast as you can. If you hesitate and you slowly eat it and chew it, you’re not going to have any pizza. I know because I was a teenage boy, and I did that. You’re right. Structure makes us feel comfortable. There’s psychological that’s why we’re like step out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a structure where how things are going to go. You mentioned having a son, I believe.
He’s six and a half.
Creating And Implementing The Structure
When you first have a child, any sense of structure is like a little cute thing that you love very much, but then time terrorist comes into your life. Things that seemed so easy before, like taking a shower, all of a sudden you’re like, twelve hours went by and “I still didn’t get my shower and I could have done it quick. I don’t know what happened.” How do you help your clients? What do do for yourself for creating that structure and having structure become part of your habit? You talked about habits, and habits are really important, but they’re seem hard to build.
It’s important to take note of how you think about structure because a lot of us resent it. I have one client in mind who has a demanding Monday through Friday job, and almost all of her time is spoken for. She’s in meetings. She doesn’t have any control over her schedule. It’s all very regimented. As a result, the pendulum swings the other way on the weekends. She’s like, “I want no structure whatsoever because I need to try to make up for how structured I just was over the past week.”
For a long time, she struggled with the weekdays felt pretty easy because she would work out at the only opportunity she had. She would eat what she brought to work. It was pretty easy to stay focused. It would all go out the window on weekends when she would wake up late and just lay around the house and at some point get hungry, but then it was already mid morning and then they would throw off all her other meals. They just felt like an unorganized disaster. We had to work through her feelings about having some structure on the weekend because initially, she was just like, “No.”
Very resistant. “This is the last thing I want.” Over time, this helped her see that structure doesn’t need to be rigid. We’re talking about putting some anchors in place that help you do the things that help you feel good and help you reach the goal. Maybe it’s not that you continue to wake up at 5:00 AM like you do Monday through Friday. Of course, you want to sleep in. Your body wants the extra sleep. You should do that. Maybe your structure is within an hour of waking up, “I’ve had something to eat, and I’ve moved my body for ten minutes.”
You’re then anchoring that morning to a semblance of structure. You have maybe a couple of those other touchpoints throughout the day. Something that a lot of clients are really successful with is time ranges. I think we’ve all experienced the early part of the day getting away from us. Our first meal is late, and then we’re not hungry for the second one, but then we’re hungry before dinner. It just deteriorates.
If we say, “By 10:00 AM, I want to have eaten breakfast. Sometime between noon and 2:30, I want to have eaten some lunch. That way, I know if I do those things, I’ll be hungry for dinner at a reasonable time.” That’s what structure can look like. It’s not making Saturday and Sunday look like, “Every 30 minutes, I’m accounting for exactly what I should be doing.” That’s more realistic. I think more helpful to realize you can have the best of both worlds.
I guess being a mental health professional and I did my internship in a school-based, I was doing middle school and high school students. One of the things that I realized was somewhat in college, but less so in college, but up through high school, structure has been your friend. There has been, know where you need to be first period, second period, third period, all the way for however many class periods you have in your school.
Anybody can put words on paper and call it a book. But getting it to a polished version that is worth reading and can change people’s lives is a much different thing.
In fact, after the first week of school, you don’t get very worried about how to get from one class to another. That’s all structure. When you drive to the store, you know how to get to the store. You’re not really stressed about how do I get to the store? I love to use this example. Imagine you’re like, “I got to go to the supermarket.”
You go out and you start making random lefts and right. If you’re driving someplace new, now we all have GPS, and it tells us where to go. I’m old enough to remember living outside of LA and having the Thompson guy, which was a yellow page-sized map. You’d be like, “I need to get to here.” You’re going from one page and then you go to the next agency. You don’t know where you’re going. It’s really stressful. Why? It’s because there’s a lack of structure. You don’t know. When you’re driving to the supermarket, you’re thinking about, “Did I forget anything on the list?”
There’s a little automatic like, “I know to take a left at this light and do this,” but that does create a problem for a weight loss journey, whatever. We, as humans, tend to like structure. We tend to have that tunnel vision I was talking about. I worked in the corporate world for twenty years. I drove to work the same way. Even though I talk about it and I’m like, “Yeah.”
I didn’t often think about alternative ways to get to where I wanted to go. On our epic journeys, there are multiple ways to get to our destination. If we entertain that just because it works for you, maybe I need to modify that a little because it doesn’t work for me. What I need to do is get up and within not an hour, but 30 minutes, have something to eat because I get hungry or whatever.
Even though I slept in, the first thing I want to do is work out, so nothing gets in the way of my workout. I get up at five in the morning. Why? It’s because there’s nothing that will get in the way of my workout. Seems to work well. It was hard when I started it. I was running in the dark and the rain and the cold, but I did come to love that time. I felt so much better.
Esther’s Not Yet Moments
There’s a saying in running that you rarely regret a day that you went on a run, but you always regret a day you didn’t run. I love to ask people this question. My guess, which is in the book, I have two important words that are not yet. “Have I reached my weight loss goal? Not yet.” Sometimes you reach it faster other times, but in your own life, 1 or 2 of your not yet. Things you dreamed of doing or you want to do, but just it’s not yet.
I love that. That is one of my phrases, too. Right now and not yet are two. Something that I have been working on instilling in my son is saying, “I’m not good at this.” I’ve done it enough times now that he’ll pause and be like, “Yet.” I’m like, but that’s it. It’s just that you haven’t had enough time or enough practice.
I think that’s so eye-opening, the doors that open for you when you realize, “I can learn and do anything. I just haven’t chosen to yet.” I have a second book that I want to write. “I just haven’t done it yet because I want to focus this time.” My first book came out six months ago, and I want to spend some time talking about it, marketing it, and continuing to sell the first book before I add a second one. I know that the skills that I’m developing in doing that now will only benefit me in the second book.
That’s a in the next probably 3 to 5 years type of thing. The second one is I want to get paid to be a keynote speaker, and I’m actively pursuing the pre-work for that. I’ve started booking local gigs and doing breakout sessions and things like that. Working on honing my message and making sure that by the time that does happen, I feel really confident in the message that I’m delivering. That’s another thing. My goal is to get paid for some speaking-related engagements this year.
That’s generally the idea, Esther.
Keynote potentially in probably two-ish years.
Those are awesome, not yet. I fully support them because I feel you. Although I’m not writing my next book, I never thought I’d write three, but somehow I did. Writing a book is a non-trivial. Honestly, it’s not just, “Let me write the book.” As you know, the editing process and proofreading and stuff. I had professional proofreaders, but I had to read what they said. I’ve said before that I joked that when my book came out, I didn’t want to see it for about three months because I just reread my book like seven times. I’m like, “I just know, please.”
“I know this is very good. Also, I do not want to even look at it.”
“I am tired of what I’ve said.”
It’s true. It’s interesting. I learned so much when I first learned about your podcast, the writing process was such an obvious epic journey from I have no idea what I’m doing to I’m going to set this goal anyway. I’m going to figure it out to all the steps leading up to it and just how many there are so that anybody can put words on paper and brain dump and call it a book. To get it to a polished version that is published and that is worth reading and you can change people’s lives is a much different thing.
It’s an epic journey.
Yes.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
Esther, this has been absolutely wonderful. How can people find you, get a hold of you, get a hold of your book?
Thank you for asking. My website is EstherAvant.com. Just my full name. It has links to the book, which is called To Your Health. You can buy it wherever books are sold. I also host a podcast called To Your Health, and I’m most active on Instagram and LinkedIn if you’d like to connect there.
Cool. I want to thank you so much. Truly an epic conversation.
Thank you for having me.
No problem. I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. Very exciting. I have a TV show now. If you would like to be a guest on my TV show, go to EpicBegins.com, click on the link to apply to be a guest, and I’ll see if I can get you on. As always, I want to remind people that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Esther Avant
- To Your Health Podcast
- Esther Avant on Instagram
- Esther Avant on LinkedIn
- To Your Health: A Lifestyle of Health, Happiness and Confidence
About Esther Avant
Esther is a health industry veteran with 20 years of experience, passionately guiding busy people to break through the barriers to better health. In her 20s, despite being a personal trainer and nutrition coach, she wrestled with an all-or-nothing approach—swinging between strict diets, over-exercising, and overeating, pouring energy into her health without seeing the results she felt she deserved.
That struggle taught her the value of consistency and balance, a middle ground she now lives daily, juggling a business, family, and health goals while prioritizing mental, physical, and emotional well-being over the scale. Through her work, Esther shares practical tools and new ways of thinking to help audiences focus on what matters, lean on those who can help, and take compassionate ownership of the process. Her audiences leave empowered and motivated to build sustainable habits that enhance every part of life.
Esther is keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, co-owner of MADE By ME Coaching, author of the bestselling book To Your Health: A Lifestyle of Health, Happiness, and Confidence, and host of the To Your Health podcast. Esther is also a boy mom and Navy wife who has lived and traveled all over the world while writing, speaking, and coaching. Buy To Your Health: A Lifestyle of Health, Happiness, and Confidence: https://a.co/d/eeoPl0B Find out more about her at www.estheravant.com