Yesterday, I shared with you some pretty crazy things I used to do in the gym, all because I was too scared to stop.

I received so many emails from women saying they have felt the same way, and even still do, but feel helpless to stop the obsessing. Many emails pertained to exercise, but surprisingly, many wrote in about feeling obsessed with other things too, like their food, their jobs or placating their boss/co-workers and even one woman mentioned that she often finds herself completely preoccupied with her husband’s happiness, to the point that she’s walking on eggshells all the time.

This is real life, ladies! We are all doing this on some level! YOU ARE HUMAN.

We are always on the awareness spectrum in anything. The awareness spectrum has extreme awareness to the point of obsession on one end, while the other end is complete denial and avoidance.

The middle of the awareness spectrum is the sweet spot. In the middle of the awareness spectrum, you’ll find is moderation, mindfulness, self-compassion and trust. This is ease.

Yesterday I shared with you how I’ve used exercise as a crutch in the past to control my body. If I could just control how my physique looked, attain that number in my head, I could be in control of my life. I would be okay. I would be adequate. Nothing could go wrong if I was physically perfect.

Well, besides the fact that perfection is a complete myth and chasing it is a never-ending path to misery, control is also an illusion. The idea that my body looking a specific way, or me “getting in all my cardio minutes” ensures I am somehow worthy is absurd. And yet, exercise obsession became a control mechanism for me for a long time, regardless of the rationality of things.

Well, until it didn’t work anymore. Until I couldn’t keep up with the 3-4 hours of exercise daily, and my body was slowly gaining body fat and my metabolism was slowly not responding anymore.

I remember precisely when I made the decision to quit the old way and take what felt like the biggest risk to try a new, more moderate approach.

I was terrified to try a new way, to give up the way I’d been doing things, despite the evidence that it actually wasn’t working anymore. I was terrified of letting up on my cardio because I thought I’d gain 50 lbs overnight. I felt so much urgency and anxiety about “getting and staying lean” that any kind of change in routine felt like giving up and letting go.

Ironically, it was exactly that: letting go. Not letting go into a larger dress size, but letting go of the mental prison I’d been living in. In other words, instead of trying to control everything (which wasn’t working anyway!), I started to trust … just a little bit.

I was on the tail end of a 6-month period of dieting for a string of shows and shoots. I was burned out, exhausted mentally and physically, and miserable with my obsessive thoughts about food and exercise. I was done.

Done to the point that I actually just threw my hands up and said, “Fuck it, I don’t care if I gain 20 lbs this week and I end up eating at McDonalds every meal, I am NOT prepping my disgusting diet food in Tupperwares this week, I’m going to wing it, figure it out and I don’t care about the consequences.”

This was the first shift, and it was around my nutrition. I stopped religiously prepping my food.

For some people, they love to cook and their stuff actually tastes good and they like it, but for me, eating my “diet food” was misery. And the whole process felt like a full-time job: buy food, chop food, prepare food, cook food, pack food away, eat food, REPEAT UNTIL EXHAUSTED AND DISGUSTED.

That was my first move away from food obsession. You’d think not prepping your food would make you feel more anxious, but for me it did the opposite. Because I didn’t feel the pressure to do all those thousand steps every week, it gave me some of my mental space back.

Sure, things felt up in the air, like, “I don’t know what my next meal’s gonna be,” but I also gained a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt in years. That freedom was THE AUTONOMY to choose my next meal, pick it out of thin air! How refreshing! And to my surprise, I didn’t start eating with abandon, because I think I had this sense that I was done dieting for events and competition, and that left me with no other choice but to figure it out.

I distinctly remember thinking, “I’m not doing any more shows so I don’t have the threat of getting up on stage to ‘keep me in line,’ I’d better figure this eating this out for the long haul.” It was the permission I needed to give up the urgency of the process. It finally gave me permission to take my time because … eating goes on forever! Ha!

Eating doesn’t have to be scary, it’s just food! And I will have to face it every single day, so I have to figure it out, I have to relax about it a little … relax into the process. And “relaxing” didn’t mean eating with abandon – besides, that’s anything but relaxing! – but instead, taking my time and not being so scared to mess up.

I stopped following meal plans and hiring coaches. I stopped living and dying by my ability to comply. I stopped berating myself for going “off plan” and I stopped weighing and measuring.

THIS TOOK TIME. Lots of time. Years.

But I started slowly trusting me. Because what coach or expert could possibly know me better than I did, if I did the work to get to know myself? Nutrition is just self-education. It’s introspection and independent thought. It’s having the courage to ask the tough questions and assume 100% responsibility for your process and outcomes.

It takes patience, resiliency, consistency and a whole lot of self-compassion. But making the switch is possible.

Cutting back on cardio and total exercise volume was ironically a little harder for me because hours of exercise came easy to me by this point. But the thing that convinced me to change was not so much the exercise itself – yes, I was exhausted and not getting results – but the fact that my cravings and hunger were out of control. I was doing everything in my power to resist eating chocolate all day long. And often, I'd end up eating tons of sugar-free chocolate thinking it was a better choice, only to still take in a ton of cals, develop acne and GI problems. Ugh. 

Anyway, Jade would say to me, “Well Jill, if you just let up on your exercise a little, your appetite would probably decrease.”

I’d be like, “Pffft. No way! I’ve always had a huge appetite, even if I cut my exercise down, I’d still eat a ton, and then I’ll just gain because I won’t have the exercise to burn it off!”

I know you are nodding along right now, because you have been there. We all have. We’ve either had the experience of needing to “burn off” our treats and cheats, OR we overindulge as "a reward" for such a hard workout! And the cycle continues ...

And so, you can see how “risky” it feels to cut back on cardio when you’re appetite and cravings are through the roof. You don’t TRUST (there’s that word again!) the process and you don’t trust that you won’t automatically gain. And Lol, because what does Jade know? ;) … well, besides being someone who knows more about metabolism than anyone else I know! Ha!

ANYWAY. It was a long process, and a scary process, but over time, I did slowly start cutting back on my cardio and hours of training. I’d cut back to 90 minutes a day instead of 2 hours. Then after a week, I’d cut back to an hour a day. And then stay there for a while, and then finally, I got down to about 30 minutes of cardio a day, and stayed there for quite some time.

But then I started adding in leisure walking. Not power walking. And not walking as “exercise,” but walking as restorative activity to reset my stress hormones and recharge my brain, lowering my anxiety, 60 minutes a day.

And about 6 months later, I realized something: I was no longer constantly hungry and I no longer felt the need to eat chocolate all day long. My appetite lowered and here’s the kicker … you ready? … I LOOKED NO DIFFERENT THAN WHEN I WAS DOING HOURS OF EXERCISE.

Case in point. Below. The left photo was taken in 2010 and I was doing 2+ hours of exercise daily. On the right, it's February 2015, 30-40 minutes of training 3-4 days a week, mostly metabolic conditioning and sprints. Both unfiltered: