Episode 10: Build a Healthy Mindset

Trainer Tips

Feb 19

WATCH ON YOUTUBE | LISTEN

Kick negativity to the curb in this heart-to-heart mindset chat.

In this episode, I talk about the essential mindset shift you need to make if you want to achieve long-term success in your fitness journey. Cultivate a mindset of body positivity that keeps you motivated as you build a body you love.

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(00:00):
I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can.

(00:21)
Hey there, friend. Welcome back to another episode of the Coaching Corner podcast. It's been a minute since I last posted to this podcast and I want to let you guys know that I have been thinking about you every single day. Long story short, this has happened several times over my career as a personal trainer over the last 10 years, but I always reach this point where I'm maxed out in terms of how many clients I can take on, but I want to be able to serve my community with more resources that you guys can use to put your healthy fitness lifestyle into action. So I have been working on distilling my coaching that I give to my one-on-one clients into several different formats that you guys will be able to use to help move along in your fitness journey. So I've got courses coming along as well as follow along workouts on my Vimeo channel, as well as some books and workbooks that you guys can use.

(01:21)
All of that stuff has taken a lot of my time, so I apologize for not being more present here, but I promise the time has been well spent and we've got lots of goodies coming your way. So don't worry, we are getting back on track with regularly coming out with new episodes of the Coaching Corner podcast, and I am still showing up live on my Twitch channel a few times a week to answer your questions and create new content. Make sure though that you have subscribed to my email list because that is where I'm going to be sending a lot of the goodies and announcements as these things come out. You can go to jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com. Make sure to also subscribe to this podcast wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts or subscribe on YouTube if you're watching me there.

(02:08)
Now, today's episode I'm super excited about because we are starting back up with a bang moving forward with the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm going to be giving you guys tons of tips on how to implement healthy habits into your life to improve your relationship with yourself and improve your relationship with your body as we move along. This episode was recorded when I was live on my Twitch channel. You can follow me on Twitch. That's twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you'd like to hang out with me while I'm live and ask your questions there. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.

(02:44)
I tell my clients, they always come to me with these ideas of like, I want my arms to look like this, and I want my belly to look like this, and I want my legs to look like this. Instead of focusing on trying to get our bodies to look a specific way, like that one fitness influencer or that one model, what I teach my clients is, first of all, let's focus on health.

(03:06)
A lot of things that you're doing right now that are not healthy and the result of those things is the way that your body looks and how it feels is in a lot of ways, things that you don't like. So I say, let's first focus on getting healthy, doing all of the things that your body needs in order to be its healthiest and however it is that your body looks when it is at its healthiest is how it should look, and your body will reveal to you what it's supposed to look like once you have all of those things in place where you are living your healthiest, when you're eating your healthiest, when you're exercising in a healthy way, when you are drinking plenty of water, when you're sleeping as much as you should, when you're managing your stress, what your body looks like at that point is how it should look when your body is at a healthy body fat percentage.

(03:58)
We can't tell our body where to store fat and where not to store fat. For some of us just genetically, we're going to be more predisposed to our body, storing more fat in our bottoms or up top, and we can't really change those genetics. But what you can control is the health of your lifestyle and how you eat and how you exercise. And I would challenge you to start trying to absorb the idea of I'm going to love my body and I'm going to appreciate my body and how it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can, and however it looks when I'm taking the best care of it that I can is how it should look. And I love it for that, right? I think that we need to approach it is more of a body positivity type mindset, but not the type of body positivity that says, oh, it's totally okay that I am unhealthy.

(04:58)
I mean, it is okay. I mean, at the end of the day, you're a grownup. Do whatever the fuck you want it is your life. But if you're unhappy with how, look, if you're unhappy with how you look now before you've made any healthy changes to your life, it's still very possible that you could be unhappy with how you look even when you are your healthiest because you may have a poor relationship with yourself and you may just always be wearing these lenses of looking at yourself, picking apart the things that you don't like. Because I'll tell you right now, there's bodybuilders who have gorgeous aesthetic bodies, and when they look in the mirror, they're looking for their faults and they've already decided in their mind to look for their faults. And so even though they had these beautiful bodies that are sculpted and amazing, they still don't like themselves very much because their relationship with theirselves has not changed.

(05:50)
So I can absolutely help you to change how your body looks by getting healthier, and I can help you to get the most toned or lean and just healthy looking. But if you don't do the inner work to change your relationship with yourself and to question and challenge the beliefs that you have about your body and about yourself, you're going to be right back where you started. Maybe you'll look different, but in terms of how you feel about yourself, nothing will have changed. So I think that the first thing that you need to do is start to cultivate a mindset of body positivity in the sense that you tell yourself, I'm going to take the best care of myself that I possibly can. We're not going to work out to punish ourselves. We're not going to starve ourselves to punish ourselves for how we look or for overeating.

(06:45)
Our mindset going into this journey is going to be, I'm going to learn to take the best care of myself that I possibly can because let's be honest, nobody else is going to do that for you. Almost all of my friends have small children. Almost all of my friends have babies. I'll be bouncing little Kai on my knee and just looking at him or little Addie or little Annie, and I'm just like, how amazing it must be to just have a giant person totally in tune with your needs, just taking care of you When you're unhappy, you need a nap, you need to eat something, maybe you need some exercise, you need to get your wiggles out. There's some giant person who can be like, you know what? Let's go outside and play. Let's have a snack and then make you a snack and orchestrate your day.

(07:35)
But as adults, we don't have that. There's no giant person who's going to take care of us unless you're in a particular kind of relationship, but for most of us, you are it. You are the big person in your life. You're the person who has to take care of you, and nobody is going to do it better than you because you alone are able to be in tune with what you actually need. Once you learn how to listen to your body and trust it, to tell you what it needs something, once you learn how to listen to your body, once you learn how to listen to your brain and to your central nervous system, then you learn how to take better care of yourself. So we want to enter into this journey with this mindset of, I am going to take the best care of myself that I can and I'm going to learn how to take better care of myself, and as I learn to take better care of myself, I'm going to take better care of myself.

(08:31)
So that's kind of the mantra that I want all of us to have as we enter into this journey of trying to eat better or into this journey of trying to exercise and just take care of ourselves. The whole point is why you're here. Why you want to start eating better is because you want a better life. You want to thrive, but you're not going to thrive if you make all of the changes that I teach you how to make and you haven't changed your relationship with yourself, and you haven't changed how you see yourself and see your body. So moving forward, we're going to try to fix that mindset. We're going to cultivate it. We're going to practice things to ourselves. We're here to take the best care of ourselves that we can. I am the only one who can take care of me, so I'm going to strive to take the best care of me that I can, and I'm going to keep learning how to take better care of myself.

(09:22)
So that's the first thing that I want all of us to think about when it comes to our fitness journeys. And I want us to try to move away from that shame-based mindset that everybody, if you've tried to get in shape before or if you tried going on diets or if you tried those crazy high intensity programs like beach Body or whatever, it's all about it trying to exhaust yourself. It's all these extreme things of, it's almost like you're going this, I got to punish myself. I got to whip myself into shape. And that is based on a really old fashioned authoritarian model of influencing, and it doesn't work. At least it doesn't work, and it's not healthy. If you want to establish a healthy dynamic with yourself or with any person, whether it's like your child or an animal, if you want to be in a relationship with someone and you want to have a good relationship with them, if you have a dynamic with that person of if they mess up, you're going to punish them and you're going to make them suffer, that's not going to be a healthy relationship.

(10:32)
And I'm sure you probably have been in relationships like that. Maybe you were in a relationship like that with your parents or with a romantic partner or with a friend. It doesn't feel good to be in a relationship with somebody who when you mess up and even if you mess up because you don't know better, you know that you're just going to be punished for it. All this does is create a cycle of fear and shame, and you cannot grow, right? You cannot grow in that kind of a context. So instead, if you want to develop a better relationship with yourself, you're going to have to develop some compassion for yourself. And self-acceptance, we're going to have to practice some self-acceptance. At the end of the day. Most of the time, people's behavior is driven by survival. We're all just trying to survive. We're all just trying to survive.

(11:24)
We're all just trying to stay alive from one day to another. And a lot of the behaviors that you have are likely coping mechanisms that you picked up at some point in the past, and they worked at some point in the past and helped you to survive from one day to another. Even behaviors like overeating and binge eating, a lot of times people engage in those types of behaviors because they are under extreme stress and they have no dopamine and binge eating or returning to food and comfort eating may be the only kind of comfort, the only relief from the stress of their environment or the relationship or whatever it is. So that behavior was a coping mechanism that helped you to survive this very, very stressful period. And the problem becomes when that coping mechanism no longer serves us. So if we want to switch that behavior, if we want to stop that behavior, we're not going to do it by causing more stress on our system, by shaming ourselves and punishing ourselves either by over-exercising or starving ourselves a bunch.

(12:30)
That's why people end up on these binge-restrict cycles, because you're not going to fix the binging behavior, which is a coping mechanism of stress by adding more stress to your life. Do you see what I mean? It's not going to work. So changing your relationship with yourself to where I want you to take this approach of I'm trying to build a healthy relationship with myself, one that is accepting of where I am, and also approach yourself with a little bit of gratitude because some of the behaviors that you have may have been the one thing that kept you alive at some point in the past. So in that context, they were a good thing. But now, once we understand, once we learn the role that those things played in our lives and keeping us alive at that time, we can give ourselves other options that don't cause these negative side effects like weight gain or messing up our insulin sensitivity, for example, with the example of overeating or eating lots of sugary food.

(13:30)
So just try to keep that in mind, these behaviors that you are struggling with with your eating, try to have a little bit of compassion for yourself because those behaviors at some point probably saved your life, or they at least helped you to survive something that you were going through that was really stressful or hard. But you can give yourself other options. And here's the thing is if you don't change that relationship with yourself and learn how to give yourself other stress relief mechanisms, you're going to find yourself falling back on those behaviors again and again and again because they're kind of programmed into your system at this point. So you're going to have to open your mind to maybe accepting these behaviors is like, yeah, this is something that I did and it helped. It did have its place, but I can grow and I can learn other coping mechanisms.

(14:22)
I can learn to self-soothe in other ways while I also learn to eat in a way that supports how I want to look and how I want to feel. So as I teach you how to eat better, I want you to really try to reflect on your current patterns and view them with compassion. You bored eat. Sometimes dopamine, dude, people with ADHD are really susceptible to this people with ADHD and people with autism, ASD, because it's stimulus, right? And a lot of times we need the stimulus or we think we need that stimulus, but when you learn how to give yourself other stimuli that help to give your brain the dopamine release that it needs, or to help stimulate you the way that you need in a way that you're not adding more calories than what your body needs or putting food into your body that isn't really good for you, you can learn other methods.

(15:21)
So that is the mindset shift that I just kind of want to introduce as we head into this journey of transforming our bodies and transforming our lifestyle around how we eat or how we exercise. We want to have that relationship with our body. We want to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves, and we want to approach ourselves with compassion and understanding while at the same time we're learning how to do better. Because you know what? In the past, if you had had access to the knowledge that you're going to gain through your time here, and if you were put into an environment that was healthy, you probably would've made different choices. You can only do so much with the information that you had at the time, so you did the best that you could with what you had. And a lot of these behaviors, they start as when we're children, right?

(16:17)
If you're a child in a high stress environment, that might be where you learn to stress, eat, or binge or restrict or whatever. And as children, we don't know any better, or even maybe later in life when you're a young adult and you're just sprung out onto the world, it's just there you go. Get a job and pay bills and whatever situation that these behaviors may have started and you were doing the best that you could with what you had at the time, and you might not have had the knowledge or the stability to be able to do better. And that's okay. It's okay. You're still alive, you're still here. So as long as you're still alive and you're still here, we can still do better. So we're going to learn how to do better, but I just want to make sure that we have that attitude moving forward or that we're going to try to practice having that attitude moving forward.

(17:08)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Make sure to stay subscribed to this podcast because I've got a lot more juicy content coming your way about how to eat better and exercise to build a body that you love. I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you are eating your veggies, eating your protein, drinking water, and prioritizing your self-care. And I will see you soon.

ABOUT JAYD HARRISON

Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media: