I was trying to burn off every bite of food I ate

Published: Wed, 03/11/15

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This morning, I published a new blog all about how to sustain your motivation to exercise. I sprinkled in some of my own motivational strategies, but mainly brought in the big guns, aka, Jen Sinkler, creator of Lift Weights Faster 2.0 to share with me her tried-and-true approaches to getting to the gym regularly.

One of the things I admire the most about Jen is her never-ending ability to stay inspired to train. She loves exercise, but more than that, she loves to learn new skills, get certified in new methods, and meet new coaches and trainers in the industry to learn from them. It’s one of the reasons she was open to doing some of the Metabolic Effect workouts I introduced her to a few years ago, and why I was able to contribute my own workout, ‘Delt Domination’ to the latest Lift Weights Faster 2.0 program (for the many of you who have already purchased, let me know what you think once you do it! Muahahaa).

Now, what I really want to talk about today … the wrong kind of motivation.

For the first several years of Jade and I’s relationship, I was deep into competition mode, training like crazy and dieting for show after show, never feeling good enough in my body. I’d be up ay 4:15am, in the gym at 5am for cardio #1 before I started training clients at 6:30am (yes, I said “cardio #1” because there was always a cardio #2).

Jade would often comment, “I can’t believe how consistent you are with exercise, you never miss, it seems like getting to the gym is never hard for you.”

And it wasn’t. But I would always reply with the same thing, “Well, I think I am just so terrified of gaining weight that skipping just isn’t an option.” And we’d have a laugh about it. But … um, sadly, I was completely serious.

I’d exercise for 2, 3, 4 hours every day, not because I enjoyed exercise or because I loved seeing my body transform. No. I exercised like crazy because I was terrified.

I was terrified to stop. I was terrified that if I did even a little less that I would gain 50 lbs overnight. I was terrified that I would have to cut back even more on my eating if I stopped exercising. I was scared that my body had now adapted to a certain threshold of cardio and I’d have to keep doing even more if I wanted greater results. And there’s some truth to that last one because at one point, I was doing 2 hours of cardio just to maintain. I wasn’t getting any results! And yet I couldn’t stop. I remember crying to Jade because I was so miserable trying to “get in all my minutes” every single day.

And I was terrified about how I’d “burn off” my food if I did any less cardio.

How is that healthy, mentally or physically? And it’s certainly not sustainable. I was a slave to exercise, and I hated it, but over time it just became how I operated in my mind. I had calorie goals daily. If I was a certain # of weeks out from a show, I’d have a daily calorie-burn goal for exercise, starting around 1000 cals/day at 12 weeks out, and it increased every week as the show approached.

HOW IS THIS HEALTHY, SUSTAINABLE OR EFFECTIVE? It’s just not. It’s a prison. No wonder I’d gain all the weight back and more after each time I dieted down. I was running on absolute empty by the show date, that I had zero mental reserves to do anything besides binge afterwards. It’s the Deprivation-Indulgence Scale phenomenon, and I’ll be discussing it tonight on my free webinar on food obsession (register here).

I wasn’t even going to share this old photo because it’s not something I am proud of but it so poignantly represents the prison I was living in at that time that I have to. This was taken in October 2009 on one particularly self-loathing day:
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Looking back now, I am really sad for all of this. Although I will always be grateful for the experiences and the craziness of my dieting days, man, I’m tearing up just writing that because beneath all the fear around exercise and eating, I can see that I was actually just terrified of myself.

And doing more and more exercise was simply a control mechanism for me to “feel okay” and “be okay” and “be good enough” and “if I can just stay lean enough, I’ll be worthy.”

Well, I can’t be surprised that hours upon hours of exercise wasn’t ever effective in doing those things, at least not now, years later.

But I wanted exercise to be my ticket to adequacy.

I was something I was good at, it was something I could do more of than anyone else, I won shows, I won races, I was athletic and I was motivated. Or so I thought. Turns out I was only motivated by the fear of not being good enough.

And while I believe whole-heartedly that exercise, specifically weight training can boost your self-confidence, I think it’s a bell-shaped curve. For me, exercise became a crutch – something that if I just did enough of and never missed, it meant I was in control of my body. And if I could just control how my body looked, then I’d be in control of my life, too.

The opposite of control is trust.

And I didn’t trust myself at all. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t trust that if I stopped exercising as much, that I could handle the fallout. I didn’t trust that if I gained a few pounds that my life wouldn’t collapse. I didn’t trust that if I gave up exercising as much, I’d have anything to offer the world. My ability to exercise all the time, regardless of effectiveness was my contribution and the way I derived a sense of purpose. Wow. WTF? And yet, it’s true. Sadly.

I want to share with you the steps I took to go from someone who did hours of cardio every day to now, where I have not stepped on traditional cardio machines in over a year, and I now exercise 30 minutes a day 3-4 days a week, focusing on more metabolic resistance training, like those from Lift Weights Faster 2.0.

So, with that said, I’ll be sending you an email tomorrow with those steps outlined, if you feel like you are caught up doing endless amounts of exercise despite being miserable and also not getting the results you want. If you are there, I feel for you. I hate that for you, because it’s an incredibly scary place to be. You want to pull back, but you feel like you can’t. I completely get that. I will share with you what I did, tomorrow.

I’ll also be sharing my personal photos – from way back then, compared to now. I look the same despite doing a fraction of the exercise, and maybe even a little leaner now. It’s so weird to me, and even sad, that it took this long to figure it all out.

So many women have commented that they “wish they could be where I am,” and while that’s nice to hear, I don’t ever want you to forget that it’s taken me YEARS to navigate a new way, to figure all this out.

It took some courage to try something new, and a lot of messing up and tears and desperation and misery. This journey is just that. You don’t wake up one day and just “switch gears.” You slowly pry yourself away from your old ways, kicking and screaming, until something else feels just a tiny bit better. And that takes time, patience and a whole lot of self-affirmation and introspection.

Anyway, that’s tomorrow! ;)

For now, I want to remind you that Jen’s Lift Weights Faster 2.0 workouts are all 30 minutes or less, using any equipment you want (there are plenty of bodyweight only workouts, dumbbells-only, full gym and everything in between) – but what there is not is traditional cardio on a machine! And if you are brave enough to believe the actual truth about exercise – that intensity trumps duration every single time when it comes to results, sanity and sustainability – then you have to get and use Jen’s workouts.

I’ve been training for the last year this way. And my body – and my mind! – are better off for it.


AND! When you get it from my affiliate link (above), between now and Friday at midnight PST, you get automatic free enrollment into my 4-Week Food Obsession Boot Camp which begins next week!

I’d love to hear from you if any of this has resonated with you. As much as I get scared to share these stories, I think it’s time we all come clean and begin helping ourselves find a new way. I still have a lot of shame that I am working through, but I always remind myself what Brene Brown says: “Shame cannot survive being spoken.”

If you feel like you need to get it out too, write back and tell me how you’re doing.

Until tomorrow …

Love,
Jill