Merritt Beck's journey is a testament to the ever-evolving process of self-discovery and adaptation. From navigating the complexities of ADHD medication in her youth to embracing a balanced approach to fitness and nutrition as an adult, Merritt's story is one of resilience, self-awareness, and a commitment to personal growth. This article delves into various facets of Merritt Beck's wellness journey, drawing upon her experiences, insights, and practical tips for those seeking to embark on their own path to well-being.
Navigating Life's Transitions: Career, Home, and Personal Growth
At the start of 2020, Merritt decided to move to Chicago. She flew up for a week and a half in January to look at apartments and make sure it was the right move for her. After an amazing time there, she decided to put her house on the market. Within one month of putting her house on the market, things took quite a turn. After speaking with her realtor, she decided it was best to take her house off the market for the time being. It seemed like a bad idea to have people coming and going in her house while trying to do social distancing, but it also seemed crazy to make such a major life change amidst so much uncertainty.
Oddly enough, the week she made the decision to take her house off the market, she actually received a solid offer on it. She was totally torn on what to do. On one hand, with the economy in such a bad place it seemed like a good time to get it sold if the housing market is negatively affected over the next year or two. On the other, it seemed nuts to move out of the safety and comfort of her home into an apartment in a new big city during a quarantine. In the end, she decided to go for it. They were all so hopeful that social distancing wouldn’t last that long, so she figured she might as well risk it! Her house was officially under contract on March 27th. Only two days later, Trump extended social distancing guidelines until at least April 30th.
As with most home purchases, the buyers did an inspection during the option period and ultimately came back with a price decrease request due to some things that they wanted to be fixed. Because she was already on the fence about moving out, she decided to just say “take it or leave it” and not negotiate on price any further. After a long fourteen-day option period, the buyers ultimately backed out the night before the option period ended! She feels like everything happens for a reason, and she's so relieved the buyers ended up terminating the contract. As much as she wanted to move to Chicago, she is not confident in doing so at the moment. She's decided to postpone her move for the year, if not indefinitely, depending on how she’s feeling at that time. At least if social distancing continues long term, she knows she has family and friends close by here in Texas, space to spread out in her house and backyard and the comfort of the familiar here in Dallas.
As with most things in life, the situation with COVID-19 is fully out of her control and in no way did she think something like this would get in the way of her move. She's planning to stay put in her Dallas house for the time being, and may reevaluate a move once things calm down… but for now, she’ll be here! While she may look back on this decision as an overreaction, she wants to feel happy and confident when she makes a big life change like moving to a new city, and she can’t say she was feeling that way when her house was under contract. She feels as if a weight has been lifted! She was already planning on doing some redecorating anyway if/when she moved, so she may have some new home content coming soon! She’s finally going to decorate her guest bedroom (it contained all of her old 2009 apartment furniture!), and make some changes to her master bedroom as well. She had some fun last weekend moving furniture around and has a good idea for what’s going to happen in her guest room, so the real fun begins with the changes in the master!
Read also: Ernst Dieter Beck: A deep dive into his crimes
Fitness Fundamentals: Workouts, Motivation, and Regimen
Merritt created a little home gym in her garage, so she doesn’t have a gym membership anywhere! She does her BBG resistance workouts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in there, and then go to Orange Theory on Tuesday and Thursday. She buys class packs of 10 to 20 at a time. Every OTF studio she’s been to offers some sort of pack purchase as opposed to the memberships.
BBG is meant to build you up, not throw you off the deep end into an insanely difficult workout. When Merritt first started BBG she did the recommended “Pre-Training”, which is four weeks of circuits that help acclimate you to this specific type of HIIT workout. OrangeTheory is intense, but it’s also meant to be taken at your own pace. The BBG workouts are designed to take exactly 28 minutes (four 7 minute circuits), but if you take longer breaks it’s going to take you longer to complete the whole thing. On BBG, you have to press a button to start the workout, and once you’ve completed it then that workout is checked off for the week. You can also set the timer for your LISS (low intensity steady state - like walking, running, etc), and it keeps track of how many times you do that each week to hit your minimum. For OrangeTheory, after class you receive an OTBeat Report, which tells you how many splat points you earned, how many calories you burned, steps you took, etc.
To get out of ruts, ask yourself why you’re feeling unmotivated. Do you enjoy the workouts you’ve been doing? What’s your end goal? Do you feel like your progress has stalled or you’re not getting what you wanted out of it? It may be as simple as changing how you’re working out: trying different classes, going at a different time during the day that you’d be less likely to cancel, establishing a routine with a friend. Each BBG workout is designed to take you no more than 30 minutes.
With BBG it’s a mental countdown - she keep track of how many circuits she’s completed and how many she has left that day. Since each circuit is only 7 minutes long, it doesn’t seem as bad. With OrangeTheory, she keeps her eye on the TV screen so she can monitor how many calories she’s burning and how many splat points she’s accumulating! Now that she has an Apple Watch, she can keep track of how many calories she’s burned when she’s doing BBG too. As per Kayla’s instructions in the BBG program for LISS, she walks at 4 miles per hour outside or on a treadmill. If you walk this fast, you’ll complete one mile every fifteen minutes. You burn somewhere around 100 calories every mile you walk, so if you walk for 45 minutes at a 4.0 pace, you’ll walk three miles and burn around 300 calories! The faster you walk, the more miles you’ll accomplish in the allotted time, therefore burning more calories.
Merritt sticks to her workouts, even on vacation. BBG is a workout you can do literally anywhere - even if the workout tells you to use weights, every move is easy to modify based on what you have available. And since there are only three days a week she HAS to do BBG, there’s really no excuse not to do it. It takes 30 minutes! Since she does a lot of walking on most trips, she just take a break from cardio on vacation… but she NEVER skip a BBG resistance workout. She’ve done them on the floor of her AirBnBs, she’ve done them in tiny gyms with no equipment… she just gets it done.
Read also: Weight Loss Guide Andalusia, AL
High intensity workouts with interval training (like BBG, OrangeTheory, FlyWheel Barry’s Bootcamp, etc) are very, very effective. You push yourself to the max and keep your heart rate high for a certain period of time, which creates an afterburn (where you continue to burn calories the rest of the day). Strength/weight training is also very effective. If you’re looking to get into running, she’d recommend doing HIIT too! If you’re really, really new to running, try walking at a brisk pace for 30-45 minutes three times a week for a week or two to get your body warmed up to the idea. Then, try running one full mile a 2-3 times a week. Each week (or every other week), add one more mile to your routine and work your way up! Having personalized instruction is really nice and you can customize your workouts based on what you’re trying to achieve. Personal trainers teach most of the same moves BBG employs, so it’s not unusual to see people doing burpees, box jumps, etc at the gym.
Nutrition and Diet: From Restrictions to Balance
Merritt is trying to make healthier choices where she can, but letting herself indulge when it sounds/feels good to her. For awhile there she was letting herself eat pasta every night! And while that’s fine for a bit, she really feel (and look!) her best when she’s eating more vegetables and less gluten. For breakfast she’s been having either fruit or oatmeal with her coffee! Last summer she was all about peaches while they were in season, then moved on to pears in the fall, and now she’s enjoying grapefruit. The oatmeal is just your typical Quaker Oats flavored packets - she loves the Peaches and Cream and Strawberries and Cream! Not super healthy, but it’s satisfying and filling, even for a single small packet. As you can see, she don’t have a huge range of recipes she uses! She's a creature of habit, so once she find things she loves she’ll make them a ton.
Over the last couple of years, she’s generally stuck to a pretty clean diet throughout the week: lots of veggies, lean meats and fruit. Other than the occasional weekend splurge, big night out or a few days of travel, she’s been good about what goes into her body. Because of this, and the fact that she was eating pretty clean before she started this journey, she has not had a dramatic drop in her weight. Honestly, if she’s lost anything, it may be a pound or two. Losing weight wasn’t her main goal, but she would have liked to have lost a few pounds. The one big improvement for her is that she doesn’t crave sugar quite like she thought she did, and that she actually has a sense of self-control. It’s been gratifying proving to herself she do have the will-power to withstand her cravings! Every time she used to crave sugar she would satisfy the craving with fro-yo, a popsicle, a cookie… really whatever she could find.
She do want to continue not eating processed foods, added sugars, etc, but she will be adding back in some dairy - cheese, mainly. It’s a big part of her favorite meals, adding flavor, texture, etc to salads, veggies and the like. Before Whole30 she didn’t really ever consume alcohol during the week, and drink socially on the weekends. She's going try to be mostly paleo when cooking for herself at home going forward, and then let herself off the hook when she’s out with friends. She doesn’t subscribe to a particular plan… mostly because she travel a lot and want to be able to eat things she want when she want to! While following a meal plan works for a lot of people, she’s found plans difficult to adhere to when she’s traveling or dining out. So she just try to approach eating with the 80/20 rule. For the majority of her meals (usually Sunday-Friday), she eat clean, healthy ingredients: vegetables, meats, and fruit.
The best piece of advice she can offer is to just not buy snack-y things. She doesn’t keep anything that would be considered a “snack” in her house when she’s trying to eat healthy - that means no popcorn, chips, nuts, candy, yogurt, etc. Sounds drastic, but if it’s around she WILL EAT IT. So in that case, bring drinks: La Croix, make tea, etc. More often than not, your body is craving water and not actually food! And if you’re really desperate for a snack, make it an easy one to eat. Bring a pre-sliced apple to work in a Zip-Loc bag.
Read also: Beef jerky: A high-protein option for shedding pounds?
She think the problem with diet fads and trends is that most of them aren’t realistic. Many of them are great for initial weight loss (or cutting something out of your diet for a short period of time), but most are too restrictive or impractical as a long-term solution. It’s all about portion control and identifying which foods are good for you and ones that aren’t. It’s not telling you that you can’t have certain things, but it’s suggesting moderation and balance. She feels like sweetened coffees taste too sweet now! If you can just commit to drinking bitter coffee for a week (it’s painful, she KNOW!), you will actually get used to it like I did and acclimate to it not having sugar in it. But if you really can’t stand it, add unsweetened almond or coconut milk to lessen the bitter taste and dilute the coffee a bit!
Personal Insights: Identity, Growth, and Relationships
Merritt loves her life, and while she’s not in a rush, she would eventually like to meet someone. She loves being a hostess and having friends over for game nights, parties, etc. She is the least picky eater she know! She’ll eat just about anything. She loves being active! She live in a somewhat small neighborhood in Dallas, and have several friends who lives just a couple blocks away. She had severe ADHD as a child and adolescent. She was on medication (Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta) throughout elementary, middle, high school and college. While she wouldn’t say she’s completely grown out of it, she’s figured out the best way to work where it doesn’t affect her as much. For example, she do way better working at home in silence than she do in an office where other people and sounds can be a distraction!
She taught herself how to read music and play the piano in high school. She had just transferred schools and wanted to join the choir, and the director told her she had to learn how to read music in order to be in the choir. So she spent all of her free time on that outside of school! She’s not great at piano because she has poor hand dexterity and never really had lessons, but being able to read music gets her by when playing a lot of sheet music. After being bullied in middle school and changing schools after eighth grade, it took her a few years to find where she felt she fit in. She’s a control freak and a planner. She love a routine and adhering to a schedule! She’s done her makeup the same way for over a decade and rarely swap out her go-tos for new products/brands… that’s why you don’t see many beauty posts on her blog! She also take after her grandmother quite a bit. She was the only other natural blonde in the family! She went through a punk faze in high school while she was trying to figure out where she fit in. She died her hair purple, pierced her own ears, wore skater clothes and there was also some pretty bad behavior… it was… a journey.
Her dad’s death changed her in many ways, but it wasn’t until years later she realized exactly how. She’s definitely hardened - she very rarely get emotional and tend to figure things out for herself as opposed to asking for help. She tend to hold her anger and any negative emotions in, and they can sometimes burst forth in an impulsive, out of control manner - it’s something she’s always working on. She’s more independent and don’t rely on other people for many things, because she felt she needed to be with her mom and sister dealing with their own grief - at times she felt she needed to be the strong one. She is the opposite of a night owl.
Lifestyle and Leisure: Balancing Wellness with Enjoyment
Merritt shared personal updates from the last week/weekend, including some of her favorite restaurants, a couple places worth meeting guys around Dallas, and more. Georgie is one of her very favorite Dallas restaurants these days she want to say it opened right before the pandemic or maybe mid pandemic. It's pretty new to Dallas, but it's an elevated restaurant concept by Curtis Stone who's a pretty famous Australian chef. The service is fantastic. The menu is diverse and so delicious. They have incredible cocktails and the bread is so freakin good. It comes with salted butter.
Georgie has a small to go shop behind the restaurant called the butcher shop and it sells ready made foods for every meal they have like chia pudding parfaits and yogurt and granola bowls and fresh fruit and juice for breakfast. You can also get green salads and grain salads and other kind of lunchy kind of things. And then they also have heavier dinner items and one of the items we got was a turkey shepherd's pie and it was so good and all we had to do is he did in the microwave, no baking required. We also got a Ferro bowl with marinated mushrooms and two green salads. Also delicious and like I said ready to go. But the butcher shop also has charcuterie items cheese wine. If you're like looking to host something and want gourmet stuff last minute the butcher shop is also a sandwich and a coffee shop so like big really have it all so if you're looking for a quick lunch to go or you want to grab stuff it's kind of like an an eat sees a smaller eat sees there's not nearly as much as you can get in an eat sees but kind of the same vibe gourmet foods that are ready made ready to go so quick and easy.
Rise is another one of her favorite restaurants. It's one you've probably seen her post about on Instagram a bunch her friend Rachel and she go so often I feel like that's one of our go to spots. They both love a souffle but this time her mom and she split the rice salad and we each got a truffle mushroom souffle. They always have special seasonal souffles too but the truffle mushroom is one of her go tos as is the ham and cheese that is obviously classic. But rice is such a great spot for a lady's lunch. The inside is so cute and cozy. They have these pretty string lights up and it's kind of dark in there. So definitely a cozy winter spot. But there's also a covered patio which is great for lunch with lots of natural light and can make a great venue for like a baby shower.
Shinsei is another favorite spot of hers. Some of her favorite things include the Katinas crispy rice the tempura spicy tuna roll. She love that one. It's like crunchy on the outside and there's no seaweed or anything. It's really delicious. The Press sushi is excellent and then the Thai fried rice can't miss that either. Shinsei is also a number of really amazing specials including two different truffle dishes and you guys know she love me some truffle. One was a yellowtail sashimi with like a lemon ponzu with black shaved truffle and it was such an interesting combination of flavors because you know truffles are certainly more savory, kind of a rich flavor and then lemon sort of cut that it just was the best combo and she was sort of hoping to see that on the menu this time but this time they had a black truffle spicy tuna roll and both were incredible.
If you're looking for a spot to meet people in Dallas, definitely check out in wood tavern, another fun one that's right down the street is timeout tavern, it's a little smaller, but they have some games and things they have pool and they have like photo.