Ep 77 | Part 2: How to De-Shame Your Fitness Journey and Build a Healthier Relationship with Food
If you've ever caught yourself saying "I'm so bad" after eating something, or beating yourself up for missing a workout, I want you to know—you're not alone, and there's actually a much better way to approach all of this.
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Jayd (00:00):
If you don't like the way that you are behaving towards food or towards fitness, yes, you want to notice that you want to make changes, but shaming yourself and beating yourself up is not the most effective way to get you to make those changes. Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for over 10 years and I've created this podcast to share with you some tips and tricks to help you to get strong and get lean without shame and without burnout. In today's episode, we're picking back up on the discussion on how to desham your relationship with fitness and with food. In the last episode, we went over several different strategies that you can use to help detach shame from how you approach your body, your fitness and food. And in today's episode, I'm going to share a few more tips to take it a little bit further.
(01:04)
Now, this is just one of many of the types of lessons that I give to my fat loss transformation clients in my 90 day fat loss transformation program. So if you want a little bit more guidance and help on your fat loss journey, check out the link to the fat loss transformation program that's in the show notes or in the video description below if you're watching on YouTube. And also, don't forget to like this video if you are watching on YouTube and subscribe to the channel so you always get the latest videos as soon as they drop. If you're listening to this podcast episode, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the show so you never miss an episode. And without further ado, let's talk more about how to desham your relationship with fitness and with food.
(01:53)
For many of us, the way that we see ourselves and the way that we see our fitness level and the way that we approach food is something that brings a lot of shame. Many people try to use shame as a motivating force to help them to change their behavior. So maybe you've done this before where you've noticed that you haven't been making the best food choices and choosing the most nutritious foods. So you start beating yourself up and saying things to yourself in your head or out loud like I'm so bad, or I was so bad, or I ate something so bad, and you may take it even further and be super duper mean to yourself. This is super common and it's a learned behavior, and it's also a really ineffective way to motivate yourself to actually make the changes that you want to make.
(02:45)
Humans and other animals are much more motivated through methods of positive psychology versus negative psychology. So a punishment and shame-based way of altering behavior is not as effective, it's not as efficient, and it just feels really bad in comparison to a more positive psychological approach that puts the focus and the emphasis on the desired behaviors and also puts an emphasis on trying to understand what kinds of factors lead to the not desired behaviors. So we want to take a look at our health and at our behaviors as a whole system. Then there's many things that influence how we behave and how we think and how we feel. So if you don't like the way that you are behaving towards food or towards fitness, yes, you want to notice that you want to make changes, but shaming yourself and beating yourself up is not the most effective way to get you to make those changes.
(03:53)
Instead, I want you to try to adopt a growth mindset. One that says, I may not be where I want to be, but I am in the process of learning how to do better and I'm practicing being better. So adopting a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset one that says, I am bad or I am just destined to this is just my body and this is how it's going to be, right? A fixed mindset, a defeatist mindset, a nihilistic mindset is not going to help you to make those changes. You kind of have to see yourself sort of like as a pet or a child that you're trying to raise. It's kind of like reparenting yourself, teaching yourself and learning how to see food differently and how to move differently and how to see yourself and your body differently and you're not going to be perfect at it, but you don't have to be right.
(04:51)
You can make big changes in your body without being 100% perfect. Your body reflects what you do most of the time. So when you do little shifts here and there to your behavior to move the needle forward, those little shifts add up over time. Over time, as you get better and better at practicing the food behaviors and the exercise behaviors that you want to see, you get better at doing them more consistently, and then that is what your body will eventually reflect. So one way to take a positive psychological approach in this process is to really place an emphasis on your progress and on your consistency. It is easy to analyze yourself and pick apart your performance or pick apart all of the things that you see that are negative. That's the easiest thing in the world to do. It is also one of the most destructive things that you can do, especially when you're in the beginning phases of trying to learn a new skill or trying to learn a new way of doing things.
(05:56)
You have to give yourself space and grace to mess up because it's part of the process. As a side note, I did give an entire podcast episode on how to reframe your relationship with failure in terms of your fitness and in life. And if this is something you struggle with, you probably would benefit a lot from going back and listening to that episode. That's episode 74. It's called Why Failure is Actually Your Friend, even when it Doesn't feel like it. I'll link that in the show notes and in the video description below. So again, it's more important that you focus your attention on the progress and the gains that you're making as you're trying to make changes in your life, and also focus on trying to stay consistent. Note that consistency does not mean perfection. Your body reflects what you do most of the time.
(06:48)
So I mean 60% of the time if you make the right food choices 60% of the time, if you get up and you move, that's what your body is going to reflect. And if you do more than 60%, then your body's going to reflect that even more. So think more about trying to get your numbers up and get the frequency up of when you make the choices that you're trying to make to change your relationship with food and to change your food behaviors or to change your fitness behaviors. Think about trying to get to the point where you're doing that most of the time and then when you mess up or you miss the mark, don't sweat it. It's part of the process and it's not what your body is going to reflect anyway. So that's what I want you to do when you're looking at your performance across the board, when you're trying to eat more vegetables, when you're trying to eat more protein or stick to a certain number of calories, whatever the goal is that you've set for yourself at the end of every week, I want you to take a look back and reflect on how you did.
(07:47)
If you met that goal most of the time, or if you met that goal more often than you did in the previous week, that is what I want you to put your focus on. That's where you should focus your attention, not on your mistakes and what went wrong, what you need to place more importance on is what you did right, and look at the factors around what happened that allowed you to more consistently make the right choice. We don't want to just focus on what went wrong and what caused things to go wrong, although that is important, but you also want to place as much emphasis if not more, on when you were able to actually meet the mark and what factors might have contributed to that so that you can replicate it in the future. Now, another mindset that's going to help you out a lot in changing your relationship with fitness and des shaming it is to redefine what being on track means.
(08:42)
Again, being on track does not mean perfect. It doesn't mean that you never splurge or that you never binge or that you never eat. Treat foods, in fact, like we talked about in the last episode, I think that it's actually good to plan for enjoying treat foods and going off plan or off track every once in a while to help keep yourself motivated and to boost your metabolism. There's nothing wrong with taking a diet break, especially if it's within a short contained time period or if it's just once in a while thing. As long as it doesn't become your habit or what you do most of the time, a little splurge here and there is not a big deal. It doesn't mean that you're off track either. And also keep in mind that if your definition of success or being on track is impossible because you have this expectation of never splurging or never going off plan, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment.
(09:41)
You're setting yourself up for feeling like a failure. You need to give yourself more flexibility. And when you splurge every once in a while, you can tell yourself that's part of the plan and then it can do my body some good and related to that, another thing that can help you is to give yourself permission to be human. As humans, we are never going to be perfect and we don't really have to be perfect to survive and to thrive and live meaningful, joyful lives. Carrying around an expectation of perfection is just going to keep you stuck and miserable because think about it, when you start beating yourself up for not being perfect, do you actually really feel super motivated to try again or get back on track? Most of the time? For most people, it just makes you feel like crap. It's not inspiring, and it also just puts a cloud over the entire endeavor.
(10:39)
I would so much rather you give yourself some leniency and expect to make mistakes because that's what it is to be human and to flow with that as part of the natural state of things, hitting bumps along the way, making mistakes. These are all part of our growth process and our failures, like I talked about in that episode on failure, are really crucial data points for us. They can teach us things about ourselves, about our weaknesses, about things we have to work on that we wouldn't learn otherwise unless we bumped up against some kind of failure. And also, you're not a machine. You're going to have events that are going to pop up and they're not going to fit within your perfect plan of how you're going to eat and exercise. You're going to have holidays, social gatherings with friends or with family or just interruptions to your schedule.
(11:36)
You might get sick, you might have to take some time off, and things will not be exactly how you wanted them or how you planned them to be. But keeping that flexibility in mind of being able to go with the flow and just try to make the best choice among the choices that are available to you is such a better way of going about things and will keep you more motivated than getting really frustrated or shaming yourself because things didn't go exactly how you wanted them to go. Cultivating that kind of mental flexibility will not only help you to stay motivated in your fitness, but it's going to help you in a lot of different aspects of your life. And finally, one more thing that I want you to take away from this discussion on shaming your relationship to food and to fitness is I want you to start to get into the habit of noticing When you start to get onto that shame spiral, noticing that it's happening and then planning to interrupt the shame spiral is one of the most important skills that you can master on your fitness journey and in life in general.
(12:41)
So you really want to be mindful and paying attention to the things that you tell yourself in your mind. When you start to have those self shaming thoughts creep in, like, I have no self-control. I'm so bad, I'm never going to reach my goal. When you start to hear those things or when you notice that you're telling yourself those things, you need to step back, notice that it's happening first, and then name it. Say, this is the shame spiral, or I'm on the shame spiral right now. Identify what it is because that is one step towards giving you some power over that shame spiral. Notice it, name it, and then interrupt it. So one really great way that you can interrupt and correct the shame spiral is to take whatever you're hearing and flip it into something that is more of a growth oriented statement.
(13:34)
So if you notice yourself saying something like, I have no self-control, that's a fixed mindset statement. It's like a judgment on your character, and there's no room for change or growth. And the more that you tell yourself things like that, the more you begin to believe it, which makes it hard for your system to make any changes. So instead, you want to correct that statement, follow it up by saying, I'm learning self-control. I'm growing in this area. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to X, Y, z, whatever the thing is that you're beating yourself up about. When you reframe it in this way, you actually give yourself room for growth and for change, and your mind, your nervous system, they hear that and they set you up for that growth. So try to practice reframing the negative self-talk in a way that allows for room of growth.
(14:36)
So great ways to do that are to say things like, I'm still learning. Fill in the blank. A lot of the shame spiral negative self-talk comes in the form of I am statements where you tell yourself that you are something and you describe yourself with all of these negative adjectives. When you notice that you're saying those kinds of things to yourself, that is a key indicator where you can stop, you interrupt it and say, oh, that's the shame spiral. And then you want to immediately follow it up, but consciously either in your head or out loud rephrasing what you just said to yourself in a growth oriented mindset way. So instead of saying, I am fill in the blank, you could say, I'm learning to X, Y, Z, whatever the verb associated with that thing is. You can also say, I struggled with whatever the thing is, which rephrases it in a way that's like, this is not defining who I am.
(15:37)
The fact that I had this issue doesn't say anything about me as a person, but it also indicates that I'm actively in a process of engaging with this thing. So I've struggled with or I struggled with is another reframe that can help you to go from a fixed mindset, shame spiral to a growth oriented mindset. You also want to be careful about projections of the future. When you say things like, I'll always be fill in the blank, or I will never fill in the blank. Those are often the types of statements that you'll say to yourself when you're on the shame spiral. And instead you can say, I'm working on fill in the blank. I'm still learning to master fill in the blank. So there's a lot of different ways that you can reframe how you speak to yourself in a way that isn't defining who you are based on your undesired behaviors or your undesired habits, right?
(16:41)
Your habits and your behaviors are the result of many, many factors, and many of them are not necessarily within your own control, but you do have the power to change your behavior. But it does take becoming mindful of the factors that contribute to it, but also it involves you adopting a growth mindset where you practice believing that you can change, that you can grow, and you can strengthen your ability to change and to grow by recognizing when you start talking to yourself with a fixed mindset and practice the growth mindset and practice statements of a growth mindset. So that's what I have for you today, a follow-up discussion on how to desham your relationship with food and desham your fitness. Now, there's still so much more that we can talk about and go into, which I do with my training clients who are part of my coaching programs.
(17:38)
If you're specifically looking to burn fat, I highly recommend that you check out my 90 day fat loss transformation program where I'll help you to lose up to 25 pounds in 90 days in a way that is safe growth mindset and positive psychology oriented, so that you can burn that fat and keep it off for good and not hate yourself in the process. So check out the information for that in the link in the show notes or in the video description below. Now, I'm just taking on a few more clients here, so if you're interested in this program, I recommend signing up today because those slots are going quickly.
(18:20)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and also check out my socials. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. That's J-A-Y-D-I-G-A-I-N-S. Join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel or check out my other videos on my YouTube channel. And make sure to subscribe if you're watching here on YouTube or follow the show. If you're listening to the episode, I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you take care of yourself. Notice those shame spirals when they happen, and practice a growth mindset. If you have any questions or strategies that you would like me to cover or talk about, leave them in the comments below this video on YouTube, and I'll see you next time. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your veggies, eat your protein, drink some water, and take good care of yourself, and I'll see you soon.
Let's Talk About Why Shame Doesn't Actually Work
Here's the thing: so many of us have learned to use shame as our go-to motivator. We think if we're hard enough on ourselves, we'll finally change. But honestly? That's just not how our brains work.
When you tell yourself "I have no self-control" or "I'm so bad," you're not lighting a fire under yourself—you're actually creating resistance. Instead of feeling motivated, you end up feeling defeated and stuck. And let me tell you, that approach is exhausting and it just doesn't work long-term.
Humans—all of us—respond so much better to encouragement than punishment. That's just how we're wired.
What If You Talked to Yourself Like Someone You Love?
I want you to try something different. Instead of the harsh criticism, try adopting what I call a growth mindset. It sounds like this: "I may not be where I want to be yet, but I'm learning. I'm practicing. I'm getting better."
Think about it this way—if you were teaching a child or training a puppy, you wouldn't expect them to get everything perfect right away, right? You'd be patient. You'd celebrate the small wins. You'd understand that mistakes are part of learning.
That's exactly how you need to approach yourself. You're basically reparenting yourself, learning new ways to think about food, movement, and your body. And guess what? You don't have to be perfect at it. You can make huge changes in your body without being perfect even once.
Here's the Truth About Consistency (It's Not What You Think)
Ready for some really good news? Your body reflects what you do most of the time, not all of the time.
Let that sink in for a second.
If you make good food choices 60% of the time and move your body regularly, that's what your body is going to show. And if you do better than 60%? Even better. But those occasional slip-ups, the pizza nights, the missed workouts—they're not ruining everything. They're just part of being human, and they're not what defines your results.
So when you mess up (and you will, because we all do), don't spiral. It's literally part of the process.
Flip Your Focus to What's Going Right
I know it's so easy to pick apart everything you did wrong. Our brains are kind of wired to do that. But here's what I want you to do instead:
At the end of each week, look back and ask yourself:
What did I do well this week?
When did I make the choice I wanted to make?
What helped me succeed in those moments?
If you met your goal more often this week than last week, that's amazing! That's progress. That's what deserves your attention, not the one time you ate the whole bag of chips.
Yes, it's worth understanding what went wrong too. But give at least as much attention—honestly, even more—to what went right. Because that's what you want to do more of.
Let's Redefine "On Track"
Can we be real about something? Being "on track" doesn't mean being perfect. It doesn't mean you never enjoy treats or never take a break.
In fact, here's a secret: planning for occasional splurges or taking diet breaks can actually help you stay motivated and even boost your metabolism. There's nothing wrong with enjoying yourself every once in a while, as long as it doesn't become your everyday habit.
If you've defined success as "never eating anything fun ever again," you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure. And that's just not fair to you. Give yourself some flexibility. When you do splurge, remind yourself it's actually part of the plan—because it should be.
You're Human, Not a Robot
I need you to hear this: you will never be perfect, and that's completely okay. You don't need to be perfect to be healthy, happy, or successful.
Life is going to happen. Holidays will come up. Friends will invite you out. Your schedule will get disrupted. You'll get sick. Things won't go according to plan—and that's just how life works for everyone.
The secret isn't having the perfect plan. It's being flexible enough to roll with whatever comes your way and make the best choice you can in the moment. That flexibility? It's going to help you not just with fitness, but with everything in life.
The Game-Changing Shame Spiral Interrupt
Okay, this is one of the most important things I'm going to share with you. Learning to catch yourself in a shame spiral and interrupt it is literally life-changing.
Here's how it works:
Notice What You're Telling Yourself
Start paying attention to your inner dialogue. When you catch thoughts like "I have no self-control" or "I'll never reach my goal," just notice them.
Name What's Happening
When you recognize that negative self-talk, call it what it is. Say to yourself, "Oh, there's the shame spiral again." Just naming it takes away some of its power.
Flip the Script
This is where the magic happens. Take that negative thought and turn it into something that leaves room for growth.
Here are some examples:
When you think: "I have no self-control"
Try instead: "I'm learning self-control. I'm getting better at this."
When you think: "I am lazy" (or any other harsh label)
Try instead: "I've struggled with consistency, but I'm working on it."
When you think: "I'll never reach my goal"
Try instead: "I'm still learning to master this. I'm a work in progress."
See the difference? One version shuts you down. The other opens the door to change.
Why This Reframing Thing Actually Works
When you talk to yourself with growth-oriented language, you're literally telling your brain that change is possible. The more you practice these reframes, the more you'll start to believe them. And when you believe you can change, your whole system gets on board to support those changes.
Look, I'm not saying your habits and behaviors are completely in your control—there are tons of factors that influence how we act. But you absolutely have the power to shift your behavior. It starts with paying attention to those patterns and practicing this growth mindset approach.
The Bottom Line
Here's what I want you to remember: deshaming your fitness journey doesn't mean giving up on your goals or lowering your standards. It means being smart about how you motivate yourself. It means recognizing that you're a human being who's learning and growing, not a broken machine that needs fixing.
The next time you feel that shame spiral starting, take a breath. Notice it, name it, and flip it into something kinder. Give yourself credit for showing up, for trying, for learning. That's what actually creates change—not the beating yourself up part.
Your fitness journey should make your life better, not fill it with shame and misery. You deserve to feel good about taking care of yourself. And with these tools, you absolutely can create the changes you want while actually being kind to yourself along the way.
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