Tag: support system

3 Ways to Let go of Negative Emotions

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As humans, we all make mistakes. We all say and do things that end up hurting those around us, and sometimes, those that are closest to us. Now when you are the one that gets burned, the big question as to whether or not you should forgive often remains unanswered because we tend to have issues seeing past the hurt.

One thing that I have come to learn lately is that holding onto anger or holding a grudge against people typically does more harm to you than it does to anybody else. When you feel betrayed, it can be easy to fall into the self pity trap. A lot of the time you’ll throw yourself a pity party, bash the person that hurt you, make passive aggressive jabs in the form of internet memes, etc. I have done this myself, and I see it all the time on Facebook from others as well. I think a big reason that we do this is to try to convince ourselves that we hate the person that hurt us, as though hating them will somehow take away the negative emotions surrounding that which caused you pain in the first place.

The hard truth is that doing those things doesn’t actually work to reduce the negative emotions that you are feeling, in fact, it can be doing the total opposite.  For this reason, I want to share with you what I have found to be truly beneficial in these types of situations.

Change your social media attitude.

Skip the self-pity, angry, and/or depressing posts on social media, and instead, find some positive, motivational, and inspiring things to post instead. Our lives are our creation. We get what we put into the world. If you are focusing on the negativity of your situation, you will actually end up attracting more bad into your life while repelling the good. Focus on putting positivity out into the universe, and you will start attracting the right people into your life. Not only that, but if you are consistently being positive (even if you don’t necessarily feel happy at the time you make the post), over time this will actually initiate a mental shift and you will genuinely become more and more happy over time. From a psychological perspective, this is what is called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Exercise regularly and focus on a clean diet. 

Seriously. Just do it! I can tell you with 100% honesty that exercise helps as a mood enhancer. I know this from experience. I have been on and off with fitness for three years now, and in that time I have fallen off the wagon several times. During those periods, I would be inactive with my workouts and I would struggle with my nutrition. Every time that happened, I would start to feel what I call “brain fog” coming back and I would revert back to being depressed. This is just a state of mind where I am always a little tired and groggy no matter how much sleep I get, and I start to be less cheery and happy overall.

Studies have shown that those who exercise regularly tend to be happier than those who are inactive, and even that activity can help to not only treat depression, but also to prevent relapse. Until you have experienced this firsthand, you probably won’t believe me. When I am angry or upset sometimes I will do Combat, which is a martial arts based fitness program. After half an hour to an hour of that, I feel so much better! It doesn’t have to be Combat either. Maybe you prefer dancing, or maybe you hate cardio and would prefer to take up something calming like yoga. Whatever the case may be, exercise can help you to clear your head, regain confidence when it has been shaken, and just feel happy and healthy again.

Surround yourself with friends.

Sometimes life gets in the way of our friendships and we let too much time pass between visits, or even talks. One thing that I have learned is that though you can be strong and independent, sometimes you just need to have a group of friends in your life to hang out with from time to time and take your mind off everything else. It is important to nurture those relationships, and to make an effort to keep those people in your life.

These days it is far too easy to lose touch with people, so you may find yourself in a position where you don’t feel like you have any friends. Trust me, I’ve been there! In those cases, what I challenge you to do is to go through your friends list on Facebook and make a list of people that you used to be good friends with. Next, I want you to reach out to those you wish were still in your life, and simply invite them out to do something. This takes strength, because it is most likely going to be way out of your comfort zone. If you can do it though, it may help to totally turn your life around.

These are the three biggest shifts that I have made in my life after a rough patch, and since making them, I have been much happier. In life we are bound to get hurt by people that will not see the fault in their actions, that will never apologize for hurting you, and who will do everything in their power to shift the blame from them over to you. The best thing that you can do when this happens is learn to forgive them. Not because they need forgiveness, but because you deserve to be free.

Let go of that which you cannot control, and instead focus on doing that which makes you happy. For me, that just happens to be spending time with friends, traveling, and working out. If you can determine the activities that make you the happiest, focus on those and then the rest will just fall into place.

Call to action!

If you’ve been throwing a pity party as described above, I dare you to try these three steps for 2 weeks and come and tell me how you feel when the 2 weeks are over. I am willing to bet that you will find yourself to be in a much better place mentally and emotionally after a few weeks of consistency with these positive shifts. You’re not going to forget about what hurt you, but you will eventually be able to forgive and let go. I am serious about the telling me how you feel part too! I want to hear about your experience with this challenge, so feel free to message me privately using the contact me form and let me know how you made out.

Thanks for reading, and I truly hope that this helps!

xoxo

Jess

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.

Do your relationships hamper your progress?

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Don’t let other people tear you down. There are going to be people out there that are going to try to discourage you from making positive life changes and/or tell you that you can’t do it. This may even come from someone close to you, like a friend or family member. This hurts, but you can’t let them beat you down to their level.

If you’ve watched Extreme Weight Loss with Chris Powell over the years like I have, you’ll have learned that sometimes the people closest to us will try to prevent us from being successful on our journey simply because they aren’t ready to make those changes themselves. Sometimes they do it without even realizing it, and though they would never intentionally do something to hurt you, their subconscious wins the battle and they say or do things that can set you back.

Making the shift from junk food to healthy food and from inactivity to activity on a regular basis is not easy. It takes hard work and dedication. This process is made much more difficult if you don’t have a support system to lean on. For example, if you live with a spouse or significant other that doesn’t want to make healthier choices, or if your friends constantly invite you out to places where you’ll be tempted to eat poorly.

What I would recommend that you do moving forward is to start analyzing the people in your life. Think about the people that mean the most to you, and the people you spend the most time with. Once you’ve figured that out, you should then have an open and honest conversation with each of those people. Say, “listen, I have decided to start eating better and working out because it is very important to me that I get healthy and/or lose weight. As my family member/friend, I was really hoping that you would support me on this journey.”

If they are the type of person that says or does things that bring you down and work against your health and fitness goals, you can add something like “You are very important to me, and I don’t want to damage our relationship. However, I feel like you sometimes say and/or do things that make it more difficult for me to stick with my positive life choices. I would love for you to join me on this journey, but if you aren’t ready, I at least need that discouraging behaviour to stop. Otherwise I might have to take some time away from you for a while until these new life choices have had the chance to become habits”

This isn’t always an easy conversation to have, but it is important if you want to be successful. If you’re open and honest with them about what you want and how you are feeling, they will likely be open and honest with you in return. It may be just the push they need to agree to these changes themselves, and it could really strengthen your relationship. However, if they refuse to join you and they continue the negative behaviour, you really should consider taking some time away from that person to work on yourself. You need to surround yourself with positive people that support you and your health and fitness goals, otherwise your chances of being successful tend to dwindle.

As for household relationships, like children and/or spouses, think about who does the grocery shopping. Is it you? If so, just gradually start reducing the amount of junk food you have in the house! Your family might not like it at first, but if you replace the junk foods that they enjoy with some healthier options, they will get used to it over time.

You need to be a positive role model for your friends and family. SHOW them that it is possible to make these life choices and what kind of results can come from making those choices. Invite them to join you on your workouts. Talk to them about how you are feeling now that you have started this awesome journey, and make them want to join in.

If you have children, this is more important than ever, because children will model after you when it comes to food choice in most cases. If you constantly eat junk food and allow them to eat junk food, they are going to learn that junk food is good. If you don’t eat junk food regularly and you don’t keep junk food in the house or allow your kids to eat it regularly, they will learn that junk food is not good for you and that they can only have it as a treat once in a while. The problem is that many people are eating junk food ALL DAY every day. For example kids get sent to school with chips, cookies, fruit roll ups, lunchables, gummies, etc. Instead, send your kids to school with healthier snacks like fruit and veggies.

If you teach your children healthy habits early in their lives, they are less likely to become overweight or obese going into adulthood. I wish that I had been forced to learn healthy habits when I was a child, because I could have avoided all of the years that I spent depressed and in self-imposed isolation because of my weight.

Send me an email to hfmxj@stu.ca with the subject line “I’m ready to transform” if you would like to make me your free Beachbody Coach. I look forward to speaking with you, and I can’t wait to watch your mind and body transform over the course of your health and fitness journey.

Are people trying to sabotage your success?

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You probably wouldn’t expect this, but people (including those closest to you, like friends and family) do tend to sabotage others unfortunately. A lot of the time they will do it subconsciously, and they don’t realize that they are doing it. This happens because you act as a mirror to them, meaning that you reflect their bad choices.

Seeing you make positive changes in your life makes them feel bad about themselves because they know they really should do it too, but they don’t have the strength to do it. Instead, they try to bring you back down to their level and get things back to the way they once were. When this happens you need to be clear with those people that they need to accept that you’ve made these changes, and don’t let them discourage you from doing something that is going to improve your life.

It can be really hard, especially if that person is your significant other. Unfortunately I’ve seen many cases where one member of the relationship chooses to change their life for the better, and the other does not. What tends to happen here is the person that chose to make good changes will revert back to old habits to ease the pressure, OR the relationship will end up on the rocks.

This can be REALLY scary for people, because essentially in some cases you are choosing between your relationship or your health. The way that I see it though, is that if your significant other can’t support you in your decision to get healthy and they would prefer to make you keep your unhealthy habits – they simply do not deserve to be in your life. You should surround yourself with positive people that motivate and encourage you, not people who try to bring you down.

Having a good support system is crucial for most people to be successful on their weight loss journey, so it adds a lot of pressure when those closest to you are not supportive. If you have someone (friend, family member, or otherwise) like that in your life, I would strongly recommend that you sit them down and tell them how you feel. If they still won’t budge, I would consider how much you really need them in your life. If you don’t want to cut them out completely, it would definitely be a good idea to at least limit the time you spend with them temporarily. Once you’ve fully established your new healthy behaviours as habits, you can then reintegrate them into your life if desired.

Click Here if think you could benefit from some extra support through myself as your FREE Team Beachbody coach as well as through our challenge group of like-minded individuals going through their own transformations,