Sunset Series: Simple, Consistent Health with Shaela Daugherty

Sunset Series: Simple, Consistent Health with Shaela Daugherty

Amy Connell, Host

Shaela Daugherty, Guest

Amy: Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Graced Health Podcast. This is actually a really special one because it is the final interview we will be having here on the podcast. I mentioned a few weeks ago that the Graced Health Podcast is coming to an end — next week will be our final episode. So these last few weeks, I have been introducing you to podcasters who I know, who I trust, and if you are looking for some additional voices in your ear after mine is gone, I gladly, and with so much care, offer these podcasters to you.

So today I am talking with a friend of the pod, Shaela Daugherty. Shaela is the host of the Simple Fitness Habits podcast, and she has been on the show a few times. We'll talk a little bit more about what Shaela does. But Shaela, welcome to the show.

Shaela: Yes, and thank you so much for having me. It's a little bit bittersweet why I'm on here today — you guys have been so lucky to listen to Amy for the last few years. She's amazing, and so this is kind of sad. Not kind of — it is sad. It's bittersweet.

Amy: Yeah, it is. I mean, it definitely comes with emotions. I am an Enneagram 9, and one of the things about 9s is they really like connection — they really like chatting with people. I've done my CliftonStrengths, and connection is one of my top five strengths, so this has definitely been a highlight of podcasting: getting to connect with people like you. You're in Florida, I'm in Texas — when else would we have even gotten a chance to meet through our podcasts?

So I will definitely miss that, and I reserve the right to come back on at any time, but probably not for at least some period of time. I don't know — I know God well enough to say that I don't know things, and I'll follow wherever He leads me.

Shaela: Obviously.

Amy: So yeah. Well, let's start, Shaela — this is more of an introduction of you for people who haven't met you. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Simple Fitness Habits.

Shaela: Yeah, so Simple Fitness Habits, my podcast, has gone through an identity change over the years as it's grown and as the Lord has led.

Amy: Haven't we all?

Shaela: Right? Me too. It has grown into a place where I get to sit with women, be in their ears like you get to do, and just make health really simple. That's the premise of it — how can I make health the easiest part of your life? Because if it can be the easiest part of your life, you're going to do it, and you're going to be consistent with it, and you're going to feel really good about it too. So that's really what it's grown into: let's get fit together, but let's make it really easy and figure out how to make that consistent in your life too.

Amy: Yes. And one thing I didn't say is you are a personal trainer, so you come with that expertise, and you have certifications in everything from prenatal to menopause and everything in between.

Shaela: Yes. And experience with all of these as well.

Amy: Okay, but Shaela, that doesn't totally make sense if everybody doesn't know your full story from this past year, because you're in your early 30s. How can you have experience with menopause, my friend?

Shaela: Yes, I'm so glad you brought this up. I've been a personal trainer for almost 10 years, and a nutrition coach, and I got all these certifications — prenatal, postpartum, all the things, yoga, nutrition, corrective exercise, you name it, even a perimenopause chronic health issue certification.

Then in late 2025, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The kind I had was triple positive, meaning it was positive for every way you could be positive for breast cancer as a woman — hormone-based, both estrogen and progesterone, and HER2, which is a receptor in our body. So that meant that for me, at 33 at the time, I would be thrust into chemical menopause and then permanent menopause, plus taking hormone blockers on top of that for continuous, lifelong treatment. So when I say I have experience in every facet of this, I do.

Amy: Yes.

Shaela: It's there. And that's how the podcast evolved, particularly during that diagnosis. Health had to become the easiest part of my life. The podcast name is Simple Fitness Habits — how could this be the simplest thing I could do? Because at that point it's life or death. If I can move my body, I can heal better and recover better. So how can I make this simple? How can I make this easy? Going from not being in menopause to — wow — all of a sudden here's a treatment, here's a shot, and now you don't have ovaries anymore. Okay, let's figure this out and work with it, and figure out how to still enjoy it and make it simple in the middle of the really, really messy mess of life.

Amy: Yes, and it has been really messy for you. Thank you for sharing that.

Shaela: Yeah.

Amy: I just can't imagine — you had no on-ramp to menopause. You had no perimenopause.

Shaela: No, it was just like — snap — here we are.

Amy: Here we are. Yes. And your modeling of making things simple, I think, is transcendent to anyone, because we all have messy stuff. We were talking before we got on — I mean, it's very different, but my world has been messy this year too, with the loss of my dad.

Shaela: Mm-hmm.

Amy: So that's... but you're making it simple for us. This is how I end all of my podcasts with my guests: what's one simple thing you want people to remember? So I love the alignment there that we have with simplicity.

Shaela, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the woman who listens to your show. What is she looking for? What does she need to hear? What's resonating with her?

Shaela: Yeah, so my listeners range all over the place. I love it when I get to talk to somebody who listens, because I'll get random messages on Instagram or through email, and they'll say, "Hey, I listened to this episode..." It's always interesting for me to think, "Okay, where are you at? What stage are you at?" And we're all over the map.

I think the biggest thing women come for when they hear Simple Fitness Habits is, one, the simplicity, and two, I'm in the middle of this. I'm living it. I'm figuring it out, I'm stumbling as I go, and I'm sharing about it as I do. Yes, I have all this knowledge because I'm trained and have expertise in all these areas, but that doesn't always train you for the messy parts of life that we were talking about.

So when they come, they're hearing a different perspective: "Oh wow, okay, I can do this, because we can make it simpler, and this is something I can be consistent with." They're coming for encouragement — faith-based encouragement. I believe in the Lord, and everything I do has that interwoven into it. So we talk about what it means to love the Lord and love your body through the lens of loving the Lord, and what are some things culture may say that we, as believers, need to look at differently. That's a big piece of it. And then, of course, the workouts — talking about how to get consistent with your workouts — and the nutrition piece, how do we make that simple too.

Everything, if you're wondering what the lens of my podcast is, runs through that filter: how is this going to make it really simple? So if you need a place where you're thinking, "How do we have fewer decisions? How do we lower the barrier? I just need a simple plan" — Simple Fitness Habits is going to be your bestie.

Amy: Yeah, and that's what we need right now. I have gotten so disillusioned with the wellness industry and all of the nonsense that's out there — all of the "you must do all of this, whatever it is, maxing." It just gets overwhelming, it gets confusing, and there's so much out there that just makes me want to pull my hair out. So I really appreciate that space you've developed to keep it simple, because that's what we need. It doesn't have to be this hard — it really doesn't. I love that you're doing that.

I'm wondering, Shaela, has there been anything on your show that surprised you? I know you have a lot of expertise in a lot of things — has there ever been a topic where you just thought, "Okay, I'm just going to throw this out there," and then it landed totally unexpectedly?

Shaela: Yeah, actually — when you gave me these questions ahead of time, I went back and looked at my podcast episodes from this year. I'd already gotten feedback on some of them, but I went back and looked at the analytics, at which ones were the most listened to, and that surprised me a little bit.

Some of the ones that landed really well: I did an episode about 75 Hard — is it harmful or is it helpful? That got a lot of people reaching out to me saying, "Oh wow, this was an interesting episode" — a very different perspective, because, like you mentioned earlier, we're in a society where more is more. We have ChatGPT at our fingertips when it comes to health and fitness, and people are asking it, "What should I do about this, how should I do this..." all these things.

So the one about 75 Hard, one about micro workouts and how important they can be for consistency, one about "what if the church got health wrong," and one about freedom in your body. I obviously had opinions about all of these, and I had a guest on one of the shows, but one of the things that struck me as I was reviewing this question was that the reason these landed so well is because there are so many women quietly wondering, "Is something wrong with me because I don't want to do this," or "I can't get this done — am I just not disciplined enough? Why isn't this challenge working for me?"

It just shows me that women are tired. We're tired of believing that health has to be extreme before it counts. I think that's why there was this mix of interest — the 75 Hard episode, then the peaked interest in micro workouts compared to 75 Hard, but then also, "How did the church get health wrong, and how do I find freedom in my body?" It all landed in this same square, basically, of consistency — understanding and learning that your workouts, your health, all through the lens of faith — but the consistency is actually the habit.

That's where all of these episodes converged: we think the workout, the nutrition plan, the challenge, the Bible-study-based workout plan might be the fix, the next thing that's going to get us to where we're going. But at the end of the day, the deeper skill is learning how to keep returning — when we miss a day, when somebody gets sick, when there's a death in the family, when somebody's diagnosed with something, when your schedule changes and life gets hard, gets messy. Those episodes really reinforced a lot of what I teach: lasting health isn't built through intensity. It's built through simplicity. And I think more and more women are craving, "How do I make this actually work in real life?" Because I'm tired of ChatGPT-ing all my macros or having it write my workout plans for me.

Amy: Right. Well, that's a great lead-in to something I wanted to invite you to talk about, which is the Stronger Collective — because consistency, no pun intended, is something you use so much, and you have a lot of micro workouts in there. I call them "fitness snacking." I did an episode on that too — same thing, different term.

Shaela: Love that.

Amy: Unlike in our personal training world — side note, sometimes Shaela and I will be talking about a particular movement, and we're using different words for it, and it's like, "Oh, you call that this, I call it that — okay, now we can move forward." It's fun.

So, fitness snacking — but tell people a little bit about the Stronger Collective.

Shaela: Yeah, absolutely. For those of you who haven't heard about it on Amy's podcast before, or in her emails — Amy is actually one of our trainers inside the Stronger Collective, and she has a few programs in there for us. At the simplest level, think of it like Beachbody, or the Sweat app, or even the Apple Fitness app with multiple trainers. But it's faith-based, and that's our edge.

We have different programs from different trainers, and every month we say, "Here's our workout." It might be from me, it might be from Amy — over the summer we had a program from our trainer Jess. We say, "Here's the workout, here's how we can stay consistent."

There are a couple of really neat things about the Stronger Collective that I love — honestly, there are so many, but when members first come in, they take a quiz, and it says, "Based on your results, here are some suggestions for your workouts." It gives you a little emoji — seed, rooting, growing, or flourishing/harvest — and says, "This is where you're at based on your answers. Just hold onto that and remember this."

Then we have a tool we recently built called the Stronger Weekly Reset. You go in, tap it, answer four questions. First it establishes, "Here's where I'm at, this is the stage I'm at." Then it asks, "How did your last week go?" And you say, "It went well," or "it didn't go well," whatever that is — what made it easy, what made it hard, do you want to stay on the same workout program you're doing (we call it the Stronger Drop program, the one we drop every month), and you can say, "Yes, but I have less margin," or "I'm normal," or "I have higher capacity."

Then it says, "Based on everything you told me, here's exactly what you need to do this week — here's how you can ebb and flow, here's the plan, and here's a messy-day fallback too." It's really neat, because that seems to be the hardest part for a lot of us — we know what workouts to do, or we have a program, but we don't want to have to think about how to scale it if we can't get the whole 30-minute workout in. We think, "If I can't do the full 30 minutes, well, then I just can't do it at all." No, no, no, ma'am.

This new tool — which you and I both talk about so much — gives you a plan based on what you have going on that week, and even if that plan doesn't work, there's a messy-day fallback too. A little double dose of grace, right there. And even in that, there's encouragement in the community — we all share similar values, and it's just easy. That's the point: how can we make health easy for you? You log in, press play on your workout, do your workout, maybe hop into the community, let people know what's going on, answer a question or two, and then go about your day — you don't have to think about it.

That's the sweetest part: it takes so much decision fatigue out of it. You don't have to worry about how to scale it if it doesn't work, or if you don't have enough time — we have micro workouts, we have express workouts, we have Strong in 20 from our trainer Jess. Or if you need mobility work, there's Trainer Amy. If you need bands, there's Trainer Amy. There's a lot of variety, and it's easy to navigate — log in, do it, done.

Amy: Yeah, highly recommend. We'll put the link to that in the show notes if anyone is interested. And I know you open the doors a handful of times every year, but you're never going to have to wait too long —

Shaela: No.

Amy: — when you're listening, you won't have to wait too long. Shaela will take good care of you.

Shaela: Yes. Get on that waitlist, because there are special things that come to the people on the waitlist in between the big live launches.

Amy: Yes, awesome. Okay, Shaela, you mentioned those four episodes, but beyond those, is there one particular episode you'd point someone to if they said, "Okay, I want to check this out"?

Shaela: Yes. I'd probably send anyone to episode 194, titled "When You Don't Care About Your Health Anymore Even Though You Want To, and Three Shifts to Feel Motivated Again." I chose this one because it really brings together what Simple Fitness Habits is about. It's for the woman who isn't necessarily giving up on her health, but maybe she's coasting, or just needs something a little different. She may know what to do, but she doesn't feel connected to why it matters anymore.

This episode gives the baseline of what we're about — let's build a connection between our faith, our bodies, and the responsibilities God has given us — but it's also practical, with ways to begin caring about your health again without immediately overhauling everything. Just some tiny mindset shifts. Simple — we're all about simple here. I don't want any woman ever leaving my episodes thinking, "Wow, okay, I need to add 15 things to my to-do list." I want her leaving with one simple next step, like you do with your listeners.

So this one captures the heart behind the podcast — the faith perspective, the practical teaching, the simple health rhythms we talk about throughout the show. After that, you'll see a few more episodes with updates about the show and about my breast cancer journey. So if you want to hear more about my story, that's episode 200. But 194 is the place I'd send you first.

Amy: Okay, all right, that's good to know, and all of that is so important. It's funny — I was just with a girlfriend, and she's had a messy year too. She said, "I've got to start taking care of myself... and this, and this, and this." And I said, "Can I treat you like I would treat one of my coaching clients?" Because I still do one-on-one coaching, not training but coaching. She said, "Yeah, please." I said, "Just for your sake, list all the things you want to change in your life — maybe that's movement, maybe that's watching your caffeine intake, maybe it's drinking your water, getting some sunshine. List them all down. Pick one. Do it for a week. See how that goes. If you've got it, then do the next one."

Because it can feel really overwhelming, and I told her, "If it takes you a year to get through it, then it takes you a year." It's that forward progress, done very simply.

Shaela: Absolutely.

Amy: Yeah. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes for anyone who wants to check it out.

Shaela, I just want to thank you — for your friendship, for trusting me in your community and in the Stronger Collective. You mentioned before we hit record that maybe I could come on and do some live classes — I would love that, at some point in the future. So let's definitely stay in touch. But I just want to thank you, not only for the wisdom you share with your community, but also for the vulnerability.

Shaela: Right.

Amy: It's been a hard year, I know, and you're doing it with grace, you're doing it with faith, and I think teaching us all a lot.

Shaela: Thank you. And thank you for having me on — and I know this chapter of your journey is coming to a close, but listeners, they'll still be able to get emails from you, right?

Amy: Yes.

Shaela: Okay, good. So Amy will still be in our pocket, friends — she'll still be there, still in your email. But thank you for all you've done, even within the health and fitness community. You guys don't know this, but on the back end, Amy has so many connections with people — because she's a connector, and she loves making connections on the podcast. She's always quietly encouraged people, and I just want to thank her for that, and for this show, and what it's meant to so many of us. It really has changed the way people think about their bodies and their health, and the Lord has done that through you. Thank you for being a willing vessel for that.

Amy: Well, it is God — it's an honor that He had me doing that in this season.

Shaela: Yeah.

Amy: And that is all for today. Go out there and have a graced day.