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In this episode I’m chatting with Carrie Jo Bradley, personal trainer and health coach on shifting our focus to fitness and improving athletic performance. As a health coach who works with mostly women, she understands that setting and achieving goals that revolve around getting faster, stronger, or simply doing more than you thought possible, can have amazing impact in all areas of our lives.
Inside the Episode:
01:32 – What to do for fun when you live in the middle of nowhere
02:35 – What lit a fire in Carrie to improve as an athlete
03:45 – Setting the goal to complete her first half marathon
04:42 – She didn’t win… did she??
05:02 – What this newfound confidence meant to her
08:58 – Becoming a health coach
09:57 – The difference between leading classes and working 1:1 with clients
11:18 – “Behind every behavior is a belief”
12:40 – Carrie’s process to help clients set SMART goals
13:10 – If anything was possible, what would you want to do?
13:30 – #1: See it and create a vision
18:27 – #2 Believe it (assume the identity)
21:16 – Silencing your inner critic
22:11 – “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and GOSH DARN IT…”
22:28 – Strike a power pose!
23:26 – Where’s that negativity coming from?
24:20 – The impact of removing the negative self-talk loop
25:20 – #3: Act Like it
26:08 – Taking baby steps is still moving forward
26:43 – The mental energy of decision making
27:36 – Create a habit but keep it fresh
31:32 – The Unplugged Run
32:58 – Carrie’s 3 tips
33:03 – Use the power of pretend to believe in yourself
34:22 – Watch your fear-o-meter
35:15 – Uncover your Why
Episode Mentions:
Connect with Carrie:
Did you know you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down? This free printable guides you through setting any kind of goal…the SMART way
Carrie Jo Bradley is an ACE-certified health coach and group fitness instructor. She helps moms manage time and training so they can reach their athletic goals. Her journey from ordinary mom to #badathmother inspires Carrie to help other women believe bigger for themselves. Home base for adventures with her husband and two girls is Vancouver, British Columbia.
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In this episode I chat with Functional Nutritionist Jill Kay about taking a holistic approach to recover from burnout. We talk about the moment she knew she was officially burnt out, what she did to recover, and the process she uses with her clients to do the same!
After the year of COVID we could all use some self-care strategies to bring ourselves closer to centered, steady, and refreshed!
In this episode:
03:25 Her turning point “couch incident”
04:23 Jill’s recovery journey
04:50 Saying no
05:30 Resting more
06:22 Giving it time to take effect
07:49 Listening to her intuition, letting go of guilt
09:25 How do you want to feel today?
10:40 4 activities you can use to relax
12:30 Moms need to do this
13:48 How often should you ‘check in’?
14:49 Why she works with clients for 3 months at a time
17:33 What I love about Jill’s approach
20:03 Why lifestyle change requires management of expectations
21:16 Jill’s top tips for avoiding burnout
25:32 What to do if you have a ‘couch moment’
Connect with Jill:
- Jill Kay is a Functional Nutritionist and owner of Down to Earth Wellness. She helps outdoorsy women beat burnout so that they can feel more energized, calm and back to the weekend adventures that feed their soul. Jill combines a functional nutrition and scientific approach. She offers 1 on 1 coaching as well as online workshops.
Introducing the Results Without Restriction Podcast!
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The show where RESULTS have nothing to do to with weight and everything to do with setting and reaching health and fitness goals that focus on what we’re achieving, not what we’re losing.
We’ll talk about deprogramming from diet culture and get expert advice on reclaiming your relationship with food and movement.
I am your host, Laurie Mallon. I’m a certified personal trainer. I’m a former women’s health coach and a certified yoga instructor. Now, this episode is really the origin story for Results Without Restriction, how it all started, how it’s going, and how it ended up as a podcast.
How it all started…
In 2016, I was working as a certified personal trainer and had been running an online personal training business for about a year when I started to notice a pattern with my clients.
They all came to me for weight loss and they all measured their success by the scale. Now, no matter how much I told them that their weight alone was not the best way to measure progress, they would not hear a word of it. See, these women, my clients, were all women, had consumed a steady diet of fatphobia for years. Their relationship with their body had degraded into a constant battle of trying to shrink it down to fit an ideal.
Now, I’m using ideal in air quotes here. Not sure where these “ideals”, again, air quotes came from. But each client came to me with a very specific number that they wanted to hit either on the scale or on their clothes, and they were willing to sacrifice so much to get it, so much peace with themselves and so much enjoyment that they just insisted on living this restrictive lifestyle in order to achieve an arbitrary goal.
I say arbitrary because these numeric goals that they had set, they rarely had anything to do with health. Now, of course, they would say that the weight loss that they were after was to help them be healthier, but the habits that I saw them forming were really anything but healthy habits like chronic dieting, food obsession, body shaming, and that’s themselves and other people.
And as a woman who’d fought her own battle with chronic dieting for years, I just, I couldn’t do it anymore.
So I went back and I got a certification from ACE to be a health coach because I wanted to do more. I didn’t just want to help women change how they look with fitness programs. I wanted to actually help women be healthier and to have goals to work towards that really had nothing to do with the scale.
So I created my health coaching program called Results Without Restrictions as a way to help clients redefine their idea of achieving results and the focus was on approaching health, but without a scale. So I wanted my clients to see how they could move forward in their individual health journeys while focusing on what they could add.
So that included an intuitive eating practice, a mindful movement program complete with yoga and meditation to help get stronger, avoid injury, and strengthen that mind-body connection and a way to find movement that they enjoyed without a focus on burning calories or earning their next meal.
I also wanted to show them how to add strategies to manage their time and their stress level. And finally, as it pertained to nutrition, specifically ending that confusion that most of my clients had about what exactly they should eat.
So many of them had been on diet after diet and they had internalized all these food rules that contradicted each other, and they got to the point where they had no idea what to eat anymore. I wanted to focus on how to add more fruits, vegetables, and other nutrient dense foods to their diet, but without a single word telling them what they can’t have.
So how is it going?
I’m no longer taking clients or running programs. I wanted to continue working in this space, promoting the idea that we can achieve results in a way that has nothing to do with weight or the scale results without restriction has become now a collaborative platform where health and fitness professionals from all over the globe can come together and create this hub of resources that further this mission.
I wanted to create this podcast as a place to really have informal fun conversations with these trainers and coaches who aren’t out there profiting on fatphobia and contributing to that billion dollar weight loss industry, but rather helping their clients break that chronic diet cycle and help them set and reach goals that they may not have even thought of if they’d stayed focused on their weight goals, like running their first 5K or weightlifting and getting stronger, practicing more yoga and getting more flexible.
So let’s talk about where it’s headed
..and that hopefully is a place where anyone can come and learn about getting healthier without getting a big fat dose, pun intended, of diet culture.
Now that said, here’s what you won’t find on results without restriction. You won’t find weight centric or weight loss talk. You won’t find any reference to scales or measurements. You won’t find us talking about calorie counting, carb counting, or intermittent fasting.
You won’t find us talking about diets for the purpose of weight loss. Now, we do discuss diet with a lowercase “d” as it it relates to intuitive eating and discovering what foods feel good in our body and what foods we just plain like to eat. You won’t hear us talking about any sort of body shaming or assessments about anyone’s health based on their size. Results without restriction is an inclusive body positive environment.
We believe in health at every size, and we believe in body respect.
So what do we wanna talk about here at Results Without Restriction?
We want to talk about non diet nutrition awareness. We wanna talk about mindful movement diet culture awareness. We wanna talk about dismantling our own subconscious fat bias and fat phobia.
We want to talk about that mind-body connection and using tools like yoga and meditation, visualization and affirmations. And of course, we’re gonna talk about setting and achieving health and fitness goals that actually promote better health and this list is going to grow as our understanding of these topics expands.
Want to join me for an episode?
If you would like to come on the show and talk about your experience with intuitive eating or you know, shifting your mindset away from diet and weight loss to better health, I would love for you to join me for an episode! If you are a coach who specializes in any of the topics that we’re all about here, I would love to have you on as a guest!
In either case, you can find a form for that by CLICKING HERE
We already have some amazing guest lined up for you in upcoming episodes, and I am so excited to start sharing them with you!
Thank you so much for stopping by and checking out the post! I’d love to know what kind of content you’re interested in! Request an episode by filling out a 30-second survey and I’ll make it happen!
Meditation can be a life-changing practice if you struggle with stress or anxiety. Meditation has been shown to rewire the brain to return to a calm state and teaches you how to manage your racing thoughts or excessive worries.
You may not know this but 20 years ago I struggled with crippling anxiety and panic attacks. I went to the doctor for anti-anxiety pills but instead got a lesson in meditation. Learning how to quiet my mind has been an invaluable tool in managing my anxiety since then.
If you’re struggling with constant worry or a brain that doesn’t relax, you may want to create your own meditation practice. It doesn’t have to be complicated, you can start right now!
Here are 4 steps to getting started:
1. Create space
Literally and figuratively. Find a place where you’ll be able to sit in peace for a few minutes at a time (to start). Free of noise, distraction, traffic, or anything that will disrupt your meditation. Put a comfortable pillow, chair, blanket in the place where you’ll meditate to designate it your meditation space to help your mind and body transition into your practice.
If you can’t designated one space for meditation, don’t sweat it. The great thing about meditation is it literally can be done ANYWHERE, but most people find that having a designated spot for it helps get into the right mindset for the practice.
Also, carve out a time in the day when it will be convenient for you to meditate. Most people prefer to do it early in the day, that way it doesn’t get postponed or eventually left undone by a busy day or being too tired later on.
2. Pick a style
Figure out what kind of meditation you want to do. I’ve listed some beginner-friendly ones here:
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Breathing meditation – focus only on the breath. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
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Counting meditation – the same number sequence is repeated over and over.
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Mantra meditation – focus on a word or phrase for the duration of the session.
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Sensation awareness meditation – scan through your body one part at a time and just tune in to the sensations of your body at that time. No judgement, just awareness.
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Walking meditation – Sitting meditation usually provides the greatest benefits, but you may need to start with small steps. Walking meditation is useful for beginners or as an alternative on days when a regular session isn’t feasible. Walk around your own living room or backyard. Walking automatically puts you in touch with your body. Observe your posture from foot to head. Align your breath with your steps. Pause frequently to create a slow and restful state of mind. Take a moment to stand up straight. Lift each foot gently, and roll from heel to toe as you place it down in front of you.
To start, just pick one type and see if it resonates with you. if not, you can move on to another type. Most beginners start with a guided mediation.
3. Start Small
For most people, one of the most difficult things about meditation can be finding the time to squeeze a session into your busy schedule. You can start by meditating for five minutes or less!
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Stop on red. You may start looking forward to red lights if you use them for a refreshing break. Focus on your breath and appreciate the world around you.
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Take advantage of routine tasks. Empty your mind and your dishwasher at the same time. As you remove forks and plates, clear out nagging resentments and doubts.
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Ease stressful moments. Meditate on whatever disturbs you. Being annoyed with a salesclerk who rang up your purchase without putting down their phone could remind you to listen more attentively to family and friends. Let it be a teachable moment that creates more harmony.
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Express gratitude. Happy events are also worth pondering. Stop to give thanks for hot chocolate or spring flowers
4. Join a Guided Meditation Group
Guided meditation sessions with a group leader take care of the agenda for you.
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Find a community. Yoga studios, public libraries, and local hospitals may offer programs. Browse online or check bulletin boards in grocery stores and coffee shops. Start your own group through Meetup.
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Locate a meditation instructor. Effective instructors come in many shapes and sizes. Ask about why they teach meditation and how they lead a session. As long as you feel comfortable with them it may be a good fit.
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Work with distractions. Meditating in a crowded room may feel different than sitting down alone in your bedroom. If trying to screen out distractions makes it difficult to concentrate, try accepting them instead. Remain aware of your surroundings. If a door slams or a phone rings, gently bring your focus back when you’re ready to resume.
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Go at your own pace. Meditation comes more easily for some practitioners, and your powers of concentration will probably rise and fall from day to day. Listen to the instructor when you need more guidance. If you already feel clear and connected, you may want to follow your own thoughts instead.
You can start a meditation practice today even if you’re short on time and juggling many responsibilities. Practical meditation techniques can put you on the path to managing stress and enjoying greater peace of mind.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor or Registered Dietitian. The information presented is purely to share my experience and for entertainment purposes. As always, check with a doctor before making any fitness or nutrition changes. The author and blog disclaim liability for any damage, mishap, or injury that may occur from engaging in any activities or ideas from this site.
Mindfulness and Meditation…Do They Really Work?
Well…yes, they do really work. The fact is, science shows definite health benefits for people who use mindfulness and meditation.
Before we dive in, let’s just make sure we’re on the same page when we use the words mindfulness and meditation.
Meditation is the ancient practice of connecting the body and mind to become more self-aware and present. It’s often used to calm the mind, ease stress, and relax the body.
Practicing mindfulness is one of the most popular ways to meditate. It’s defined as ‘paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.’
Mindfulness meditation is well studied in terms of its health benefits. I’m going to talk about a few of them below, and refer to it as mindfulness for the rest of the post.
The link between mindfulness and health = stress reduction
Have you heard the staggering statistics on how many doctors’ visits are due to stress? Seventy-five to ninety percent!
So, if you ask me, it makes a lot of sense that anything that can reduce stress can reduce health issues, too.
Mindfulness reduces inflammation, it reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and improves sleep. All of these can have massive effects on your physical and mental health.
I’ll briefly go over the research in three main areas: mood, weight, and gut health. But know that the research on the health benefits of mindfulness is branching into many other exciting new areas too.
Mindfulness for mood
The most immediate health benefit of mindfulness is improved mood.
In one study, people who took an 8-week mindfulness program had greater improvement in symptoms according to the “Hamilton Anxiety Scale.” They were compared with people who took a stress management program that did not include mindfulness. It seems that the mindfulness training was key to lowering symptoms.
Other studies show that mindfulness has similar effects as antidepressant medications for some people with mild to moderate symptoms of depression.
While mindfulness isn’t a full-fledged cure, it can certainly help to improve moods.
Mindfulness for gut health
Recent studies show a link between stress, stress hormones, and changes in gut microbes (your friendly bacteria and other critters that help your digestion).In theory, mindfulness-based stress reduction could be a way to help prevent negative changes in the gut’s microbes.
Also, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) seems to be linked with both stress and problems with gut microbes. In one study, people with IBS who received mindfulness training showed greater reductions in IBS symptoms than the group who received standard medical care.
The research here is just starting to show us the important link between stress, gut health, and how mindfulness can help.
TL;DR –
Science is confirming some amazing health benefits of the ancient practice of mindfulness meditation. For moods, weight, gut health, and more. Do you regularly include it in your life? If so, have you seen benefits? If not, would you consider trying it?
BONUSES! Guided meditation videos, apps & podcasts
Want to learn to be more mindful?
Sign up for the free 5-Day Change Your Mindset Challenge!
Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor or Registered Dietitian. The information presented is purely to share my experience and for entertainment purposes. As always, check with a doctor before making any fitness or nutrition changes. The author and blog disclaim liability for any damage, mishap, or injury that may occur from engaging in any activities or ideas from this site.
