Tag: inspiration

How to Stay Motivated!

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I know how hard it can be to stay on track with a health and fitness journey, and I have fallen off the wagon many times myself. It is HARD. If it were easy, everyone would be doing. It isn’t impossible though, and you just have to decide that you’re going to do this so that you can create a better life for yourself and those around you. You DESERVE to be healthy, happy, and confident! I found this photo online, and I thought that it was a great little tip for anyone trying to keep themselves on track with a health and fitness journey. It is also a great place to start if you’re thinking about making these positive life changes, because it allows you to prepare in advance to engage in positive self-motivating behaviours.

The first point says to take it one day at a time, which is great advice with respect to your nutrition and workouts. Tracking is crucial. Each day, you should track what you did. For your nutrition, you should track everything that you put into your mouth. I personally like to create a template of what I’m going to eat the next day a night in advance. It is MUCH easier to rearrange things to hit your macro ratios when you do this in advance, because once you’ve already eaten something, you can’t take it off your journal. Tracking is made SUPER simple with myfitnesspal, which even has handy apps for smartphones and tablets. Click here to learn more about tracking and macro ratios. In addition to tracking food, it is important to track what you do with your workouts. Once you complete a workout and have the number of reps you did on each exercise and what weight you used, you will then know what to do the next time you do that workout. It also helps to show you when you should move up in weight, and allows you to track your progress over time. Click here to learn about my tracking challenge.

Surrounding yourself with positivity is a big one. It is important that you spend time with people who lift you up instead of bring you down. Try to surround yourself with positive people who support your positive life choices. If you hang out with people that constantly bring you down, it is going to hamper your progress. Sometimes people close to you can even be unsupportive of your new shift to a healthier lifestyle and try to bring you down to their level. In many cases, they aren’t doing this to hurt you, but they see themselves reflected in your positive choices and don’t like what they see. They’ll realize that they should be making these changes too, but they don’t want to, so their subconscious tries to sabotage you and get things back to normal. This can be especially hard if it happens to be a spouse, living partner, or loved one. Click here to read more on this topic and what you can do if you find yourself in this situation.

One thing that you can do to help keep you focused is create a vision board. I actually put out a challenge to my health and fitness group a while back where I asked them to do this, so I won’t get into too much detail on this subject here. Essentially what this means is that you think in depth about where you are currently, and where you would like to end up. Then you create a board of all of the things you want to do when you achieve your goals, what you will look like when you achieve your goals, what is important to you and your family, things like that. If you’d like to take on this challenge, click here to read about it.

SMART with respect to goal setting is actually an acronym. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. I won’t get into too much detail here, because I actually have a blog post dedicated to this topic already. Click here if you would like to learn more about SMART and how it applies to your health and fitness goals.

One thing that helps many people stay on track is to reward themselves for achieving their goals. Some people find it helpful to reward themselves with a cheat meal at the end of each successful month. A healthier way to do this is to treat yourself to a new outfit. You could even just keep a jar in your workout area where you deposit a dollar for each workout that you do, and then when you hit your goal you can spend that money on something important to you. Maybe a spa day, who knows, that’s totally up to you! Be proud of all the small steps toward your larger goal, and allow yourself to be excited over those smaller successes.

Having belief in yourself is HUGE. It is really important that you believe that you can do it, because if you allow yourself to start thinking that you can’t do it, your thoughts will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and you will quit before you achieve your goals. If you’re struggling with something, tell yourself in your head that you can do it, even if you aren’t sure. Positive mental talk repeated over time will go a long way to helping you achieve your goals. Even if you can’t do something right away, there are all kinds of ways to modify moves. You just have to do what you can until you gain strength to do more.

Continuing from the last point, it is also super important that you don’t focus in on what you can’t do or the things you don’t like about yourself. Instead, focus on everything that you can do, the progress you’ve made, and the things that you do like about yourself. If you focus on the negative, you’ll never get anywhere. In order to be successful on your health and fitness journey, you have got to make an effort to shift into a more positive mental mindset. If you’re working out regularly and you’ve seeing results, this should happen naturally if you follow the advice in this article.

With this next point, the tracking I discussed above will really come in handy when it comes time to recognize your progress. It really helps to have a record of where you started versus where you are now, and seeing that progress firsthand can be really motivating. This can be in the form of a food journal, exercise charts showing progress over time with reps and weight increases, progress pictures, weight, measurements, etc. Any and all of these things will help you to recognize the progress that you’ve made along your health and fitness journey, and you should focus on that success. It doesn’t matter if you are still a long way off from your larger goal, and you shouldn’t let that discourage you from continuing. As I said before, focus on the positive!

One thing that helps a lot of people when it comes to staying motivated is to visualize themselves achieving their goals. So in this instance, you would sit down and relax while thinking about what you’ll look like when you achieve your goal. Think about what you will do when you achieve your goal and how it will impact your life and the lives of those closest to you. It may help for you to refer back to your vision board for ideas before you do this, and you can even update your vision board over time as you think of new ideas.

Another really important factor to staying motivated is to be kind to yourself. This may sound silly, but it really is crucial. If you are always down on yourself, pointing out all of your flaws, mentally criticizing yourself, et cetera you should focus on shifting to a more positive mental mindset. If you’re unable to do that on your own, you should find someone that you trust to talk to, or consider seeking professional help. If you are suffering from depression, you may find that cardio helps. I have never personally been diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I was going through a really tough time in the years leading up to making the shift to a healthier lifestyle. I was engaging in a lot of self-bashing, and I criticized my every flaw in the mirror. This behaviour wasn’t healthy. When I started doing Turbo Fire, a high intensity interval training program that focuses on cardio, I found a significant improvement in my mental mindset. I’m by no means a doctor or an expert, so I cannot say that this will work for everyone. However, based on my own experience, I think it is a great place to start.

Lastly, DO NOT compare yourself to others. Especially those who have been exercising and eating clean for a long period of time. I struggle with this a bit myself sometimes because I have a lot of friends that do fitness competitions. You have to remember that those people worked hard for a long time to get to where they are, while you may be somewhere in the beginning stages of your journey. Everyone is different, and we all go through different things. The weight loss process is not the same from everybody, and comparing yourself to someone else is only going to hurt you in the long run.

I hope you found this article on how to stay motivated to be helpful, but if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way! If you have been considering making some positive changes with respect to health and fitness and you just aren’t sure where to start, you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group.

Make S.M.A.R.T. Goals

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There are five factors to smart goal setting that will make you much more likely to achieve success with your goals. The word SMART is actually an acronym, and it stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant/realistic, and timely.

First of all, your goals should be specific. Anyone can say “I want to lose weight”, but not follow through. If you say “I want to lose 30 pounds in the next 3 months by eating clean and workout out at least 5 days a week” you have a MUCH better chance of achieving your goal. To get specific, you should refer to your vision board and think about where you are versus where you want to be. You should start thinking about how you’re going to achieve your goal and come up with a specific plan to follow, and then think about the five w’s (where, what, when, why, and who – as in with whom will you be working with on this journey) It helps to have someone do this with you, so I highly recommend finding a partner.

Next your goals should be measurable. This means keeping track of things. I discussed above tracking nutrition and exercise, but you should also keep track of weight and measurements. Do your weight and measurements in the morning after you’ve been to the bathroom and before you’ve eaten food. This is the best time to get an accurate answer, while if you wait until later in the day your food and water intake may have bloated you out a bit and added a bit of extra weight to the scale that shouldn’t be there. Also keep track of your clothing size, because it will feel great to know where you started and where you ended up. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, TAKE PICTURES!! Weight and measurements can sometimes be super discouraging because your progress doesn’t always reflect in the numbers. This can happen as you put on muscle, which is denser than fat. This causes your body to shrink while your weight may seem to stay the same or only lower slightly. Pictures are my favorite way of tracking progress.

Sometimes people aim a bit too high, and that is why it is important that your goals are attainable. Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, spent a couple of weeks working out almost every day and following through on your nutrition, and then phased out? A lot of people have, myself included. Where did we go wrong? We expected to see awesome results in a very short amount of time doing something that is not necessarily sustainable. Going from no exercise and diet to exercise daily and all diet is a huge transition. When you embark on a health and fitness journey, you need to realize that the weight wasn’t put on overnight, and it certainly is not going to come off overnight. It will take time and effort to achieve your goals, so you need to pick a workout plan and a nutrition plan that is going to be sustainable over time.

Next is to ensure that your goal is relevant/realistic, and this is where you really need to evaluate your goal to find out if this is something that is really important to you. If you determine that it is, you need to think about the reason behind it – because that will come in handy later if you start to feel yourself slipping and losing motivation. You need to figure out the root of the reason you want this if you’re going to stick with it, otherwise you won’t mentally associate it as being a priority. Once you realize that this is important to you and you figure out the primary reason that is driving you to do this in the first place, your next step is to assess that specific goal plan that you created to determine if it can help get you to where you want to be with respect to health and fitness. Your goal also has to be realistic. You can’t set a goal to lose 100 pounds in one month, because that would be setting yourself up for failure. Choose a goal that is realistic and attainable, and it will give you motivation to keep pushing. Too many people set goals they can’t achieve, and then they give up because they get frustrated. You can avoid that from the beginning simply by setting realistic goals.

Lastly, your goal should be timely. Deadlines are great for getting people to move their butts into action, and you should definitely use that to your advantage. If your goal is to lose 30 pounds in 3 months, you can break that up into smaller increments and set a goal to lose 10 pounds each month. You could even break it up further and set a goal to lose 5 pounds every 2 weeks. This helps you to focus on small goals little by little. Each time you hit one of your smaller goals, you’ll be excited to be inching closer to your larger goal, and it will give you motivation to keep moving forward.

I hope you found this article on goal setting to be useful, but if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way! If you have been considering making some positive changes with respect to health and fitness and you just aren’t sure where to start, you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group.

What was your excuse again?

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As I was catching up on the Dancing with the Stars premiere show, I was absolutely dumbfounded by one of the performances. Noah Galloway is a true inspiration for people all over the world. Not only is he a true hero, but he shows us all what it means to persevere through hardships and do things that nobody ever thought possible.

This performance actually made me tear up, and it really made me appreciate everything that I have taken for granted. It is a true blessing to be able to exercise on a daily basis, and he has had to learn how to do it without two of his limbs. If he can do that, the majority of the people out there saying “I can’t do that” for whatever reason – can do it too.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right” Henry Ford  

I love this quote, and I think it is perfect here. Noah says in his highlight reel that what he lacks in limbs, he plans to make up for with hard work and determination. THAT is what it takes. Stop thinking you can’t do things, and start telling yourself that you can do things if you work hard enough! It might take a lot of practice, but eventually you can get there.

My Transformation: Body and Soul

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In honor of #ThrowbackThursday, I thought I would post an old photo of myself! I look at this photo from Christmas at my grandparents house a few years back, and it amazes me how different things are now. I had no confidence in myself to speak of, so I would do my hair all fancy and wear nice makeup to try to instill confidence in myself. I still do those things lol, but now it is just for fun!

For me the best part about having lost this weight is simply regaining my confidence. I love that I no longer avoid public places, and I can actually have fun. I love that I finally get to experience things that I was forcing myself to miss out on because of my weight, like swimming and tanning on the beach. I love that I finally got out of my shell and went after a dream on mine this summer! Until summer 2014 I hadn’t flown in an airplane, I hadn’t left Canada apart from going shopping in the states a couple of times, and I hadn’t travelled or explored much at all apart from the smaller cities surrounding my own. I am so proud to be able to say that I’ve now flown 6 times, I’ve had the opportunity to explore Barcelona, Paris, and London, and I’ve found a new passion that I can’t see ever going away. I NEVER would have had the confidence to do that prior to finding Beachbody and changing my life through this health and fitness journey. 

Most of all, I just love that I’m not sad and down on myself all the time anymore. I have become a much more positive person overall. I am kind of shy and awkward by nature when it comes to talking to new people in person, but I have seen a dramatic increase in my sociability since starting this journey. I’m not nearly as shy and afraid as I used to be, and it has allowed me to meet more people than I have in years. If you’re struggling with your weight and dealing with depression or isolation because it, please come and talk to me. Beachbody changed my life, and I would love nothing more than to see your life turn around for the better too. 

Send me an email to hfmxj@stu.ca with the subject “I’m ready to transform” if you’re ready to take this leap!

What a coach should do

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I always felt out of place at the gym before I started this fitness journey. I always felt like everyone was staring at me and making fun of me behind my back for being so overweight. I couldn’t stand to go to the gym, because the whole time I was there, I was more focused on watching the other people to make sure they weren’t staring at me. It seems silly to people who never experience this, but you’ll most likely understand to an extent if you are overweight.

The fact of the matter is, chances are they aren’t actually paying any attention to you. Even if they are, their opinion doesn’t matter! I think a majority of people would look at someone overweight in a gym and think “Good for them, they are doing something about it and working towards being healthier and happier!” Everyone has to start somewhere, and anyone who really matters will be proud that you are making that effort to better yourself.

You shouldn’t have to worry about people putting you down for your weight to try to “fat-shame” you into working it off. Getting down on yourself and feeling like crap about your body the way it is now is NOT going to help you get results. What will help you get results is being motivated and encouraged by a positive force. Someone who will help you learn how to love and appreciate the small steps forward, and who will help you through the small steps backward without judging you for them.

That is what I had when I started my fitness journey almost 2 years ago, and it is a big factor in my becoming a coach. I would LOVE to be that person for you!

Click Here if you are ready to start working on your own health and happiness :)

Create motivation through determination

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I hear all the time “I don’t have the motivation to work out“, and I cringe. I know the feeling, I was in the same place a few years ago. I did not want to work out at all, and I had so many other things to do.. Including watching a bunch of television, Netflix, and surfing the internet. If I had just been willing to give up some of my TV and internet time, I could have easily found the time to do my workouts. IT WAS AN EXCUSE. I simply hadn’t made it a priority.

In the beginning of the journey, it is not about having the motivation to do it. Instead, it is about making a CHOICE to make it a priority to start eating healthier and working out. Make this choice to create a better body and a better life for yourself and the people that you care about. Once you start seeing results from that choice, and it starts positively impacting your mood and other areas of your life, that is when motivation kicks in and pushes you to continue. Don’t use a lack of motivation as another excuse to stay inactive, get moving and create your own motivation through determination!

Click Here if you’re ready to get started!

Overcoming hurdles

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This quote could not be more true! Cardio and I have never been friends. It is something that I have struggled with since I was a child, and even into adulthood. I never would have thought that I would be able to do a Turbo Fire workout, and even as I started the program I still had my doubts. I remember the first time I tried Turbo Fire, and even the next couple of times, I honestly thought that I was going to keel over and die. I was sweating buckets, I had to pause the tape every few minutes to get a drink of water, and my heartrate was so high I was actually starting to worry about my safety.

I pushed through though, and I’m not going to say it got easier, but I will say that I GOT BETTER. People usually say that it gets easier, and in a way it does. By the same token though, it doesn’t necessarily get easier- because as you get better, you find yourself pushing harder, doing more, bringing it just that much more. You can jump higher, kick and punch harder, master moves you couldn’t do when you started, and even get through workouts without having to pause the disk.

Believe in yourself, because you CAN do it. It doesn’t matter if you have to pause the dvd a hundred times to calm your heart rate and get a drink of water. It doesn’t matter if you have to skip moves because you genuinely don’t have the strength to do them. It  doesn’t matter if you have to follow the modified version of moves. All that matters is that you TRY, because the next time you try the workout you could be strong enough to do it. As long as you are trying, you are still burning calories! Push through it, and over time you will be amazed at what you have overcome.

Click Here if you are ready to start overcoming hurdles!

Thinking of giving up?

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SO many people start exercising and dieting, make it a week or so into their new routine, and then quit when they aren’t seeing the results that they want. This is really sad, because if they would just hold on a little longer they could have gotten some great results. What is important to remember with weight loss is that you didn’t put the weight on overnight, so you can’t expect it to all just fall off overnight.

You just need to have faith that if you continue then the results will come, because they will! Like I said, it didn’t take a week to put that weight on, so it is unrealistic to believe that it will come off in a week. If it does come off that quickly, chances are it is through unhealthy means or extreme changes, and the weight will come right back on when you return to typical eating/exercising patterns.

Do it the right way and stick to it! You won’t regret it if you do, but chances are you will regret it if you quit! Think of it this way: The time is going to pass regardless of whether or not you are eating clean and working out. Would you rather be following the plan and working toward your goals, or would you rather not ,and then find yourself in the exact same position – or worse – a few months later?

Only YOU have the power to make the choice to change your habits. Nobody can force you to eat good foods, just like nobody can force you to do your workouts. Just like that old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. I can tell you what you need to do to get fit and healthy, but whether or not you do it is totally up to you!

Click Here if you’re finally ready to take that leap of faith!

Are fad diets any good?

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Doing super restrictive diets, like many of the fad diets out there claiming to help you lose weight fast, is not a good idea at all! Sure, you will most likely lose some weight, but chances are as soon as you go back to eating normally you will gain it all back. What you lose with fad diets is the water weight, which comes back as soon as you get back to your normal eating habits. You WILL NOT maintain that weight loss, so what is the point in picking a diet that is not sustainable long-term? What is even more important to note is that it is simply NOT HEALTHY.

Instead, find a variety of healthy foods and meals that you enjoy, and then create a new healthy lifestyle around those foods! Eating healthy doesn’t have to mean depriving yourself of junk food 100% of the time either. It is important to have a cheat meal every once in a while to not only help you stay on track, but also because it revs up your metabolism. As long as you don’t completely pig out and you eat in moderation, one cheat meal is not going to hurt you every now and then – it can actually be beneficial! If you deprive yourself entirely of things you crave for a long time, there is a higher risk of going on a binge at some point. If you plan out your cheat meal and use it as a reward for progress, you will curb those cravings for a while and help yourself continue moving forward. 

Furthermore, you can still have “cheat” meals without it entirely being a cheat. For example, when I crave junk sometimes I will have a plate of nachos made with organic nachos, salsa, and cheese. If your kryptonite is chips, try cooking some homemade popcorn and just melting a bit of real butter to put on top with some sea salt. I also like having homemade pizza every now and then, and I just measure out my toppings so that I know how many calories I am consuming and I can organize the rest of my day around it. 

You need to remember that one bad day is not going to make you gain a bunch of weight. That works both ways though, because one GOOD day is also not going to make you LOSE a bunch of weight. Results will come over time, and with effort.

Click Here if you would like to be coached by me, and added to my private Health and Fitness group.

Quote of the day

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“Choose your relationships wisely. Being alone will never cause as much loneliness as the wrong relationships. Be with people who know your worth. You don’t need lots of friends to be happy; just a few real ones who appreciate you for who you are. Oftentimes walking away has nothing to do with weakness, and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth, but because we finally realize our own worth.”

This is SO true. I never did understand the people who spend their lives getting into relationship after relationship after relationship just to avoid being alone. Personally, I would rather wait it out for the REAL thing. I want someone who loves me for me, and that is what everybody should be striving for. We all deserve to be happy, and keeping negative people around will only bring you down.

Only YOU hold the power to eliminate the people constantly spouting negativity from your life! Give the negative people in your life the boot, and focus on spending more time with the people who treat you as you deserve to be treated. If you surround yourself with positive people, you will find that you start to become a more positive person yourself. 

Click Here if you would like to take me on as your FREE coach!