Personal trainer Jayd Harrison gives tips for people who started their fitness journey with fat loss & are now struggling with body dysmorphia during their muscle-building phase.

More on this episode: https://jaydharrisonfitness.com/coaching-corner-podcast/2023/11/27/episode-9-how-to-combat-body-dysmorphia

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/vCK6oGQNQe8

Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and in today's episode, I'm going to share with you some clips from a coaching call that I did in my coaching Corner Discord server. Now, every month I get together with my subscribers, my clients, and my supporters, plus through my Discord server. In these coaching calls, I usually do a little bit of a live lesson. If you're interested in participating in one of these coaching calls, make sure to join my Coaching Corner Discord server and subscribe at the supporter plus level. And I had a really great question during this call, which came from one of my supporters and subscribers, which is how to navigate body dysmorphia, which I think impacts a lot of us. It doesn't matter whether you're a beginner or a more intermediate and advanced exerciser body dysmorphia impacts almost everybody, and really it all comes down to what kind of relationship you have with yourself and with your body.

So as a health coach, this is something that I deal with with my clients a lot, and I gave some of my tips for how I handle that with my clients, and also some recommendations for how to change your mindset to get a better relationship with yourself and to combat that body dysmorphia and keep it from crippling your progress. Now, keep in mind that this episode does have some sensitive topics like eating disorders and body dysmorphia, so big trigger warning for that. But if you are in a good head space and you want to learn how you can begin to navigate these things, keep listening or keep watching. Also keep in mind that this episode is available in a video format on my YouTube channel, as well as an audio podcast format. Wherever you get your podcasts, make sure that wherever you are, you subscribe so that you get notified anytime there's a new episode. Now, let's get into the discussion.

What do you recommend to help with the difficult feelings that can come with bulking as you put back on weight and start filling out in places you'd rather not? I love this question because I wanted to talk about mindset today. That's really

What I wanted to focus on is

Mindset. That's something that a lot of people struggle with, especially if you are entry into your fitness journey, was fat loss. Your fitness journey is just your journey of taking better care of yourself every day better and better care of yourself in terms of eating better, in terms of giving your body the level of activity and the type of activity that it needs to feel its best. No matter what your starting point is to your fitness journey, the ultimate goal is to every day be a more well version of yourself, a version of yourself that eats better, a version of yourself that

Takes care of your body better.

Now, some people start that journey with fat loss and their goal when they first start their fitness journey is they want to lose a lot of weight. That's like half of the people who come to me, honestly, half of the that hire me as a personal trainer come to me because they want to lose fat, and that's the start of their fitness journey. And then we have other people who come to me and they're like, I want to build muscle. I want to get strong. I want to be that. And I love both starting points. There's seasons to life. There's seasons to your fitness, and there's going to be seasons for prioritizing fat loss. There's going to be seasons for prioritizing building muscle, and they're going to look different. You're going to move through them differently. The techniques that you need to use, the strategies that you need to use in order to advance in those phases, in those different seasons are going to be different. And the mindset that you have to have while moving through those different seasons is also going to have to be different. So this is why fitness is such a beautiful thing because it can pair so well with a mental health and personal growth journey. If you started with fat loss, you probably started with a relationship with your body and a relationship with food and a relationship with exercise that was not good.

I think that's most people who start their fitness journeys in fat loss. The reason why their bodies look and feel the way they look and feel is because ultimately your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, your relationship with exercise is poor For whatever reason, we develop toxic relationships with these things because of the things that we experience in our life, the things that we're exposed to as kids, that coping mechanisms that we develop because of trauma, because of stress. And so if you want to reach your fitness goals, especially if you're starting off with a poor relationship with food, with your body, with exercise, ultimately what you want to do is tackle both at the same time. Do the physical things that you need to do, eat the way you need to eat, exercise the way you need to eat on the one hand, but you also want to work on your mindset, which is your relationship with your body, your relationship with food, your relationship with exercise.

So you kind of have to work on both at the same time, and both, they both help each other. They feed into each other. As you work towards one, you start feeling stronger. You start losing weight that helps to encourage you and improve your mindset. You start to believe in yourself a little bit more, and that makes you want to stick to your programs. You stick to your program more. But inevitably, we all eventually hit bumps along the way. Motivation. It's something that's not always there and that sucks. I wish that it was there, but it's just a feeling, it's an emotion. It's an emotional state. It's a mindset and our emotions, our mindsets, they change like the weather. So what we want to do, if we want to keep making progress is develop at the same time that we work on our physical health, what we eat, how we exercise, and also we work on our mindset, how we think about these things, our relationship with food.

We also want to build habits and discipline. Habits and discipline is the other piece of it that we really need to focus on. Habits and discipline is like our day-to-day sort of commitment to doing what we need to do to at least not backslide, right? Sticking to a, or first of all, creating a plan of what you're going to do and how you're going to work on your mindset, but staying consistent with it is something that you also need to focus on. And so one of the ways that I encourage everybody, clients, subscribers, followers, how you can tackle all of these things at the same time and juggle them at the same time is keep a journal. Keep a journal of some type. You can keep an electronic journal. You can keep a physical pen and paper journal, but keeping a journal is one of the most crucial things that you can do to help yourself stay disciplined and accountable, track your progress and know what your plan is and stick to the plan.

That's where we can also think about our mindset and just observe when we experience these changes, when we experience these obstacles, but when these obstacles happen for us, and they can be internal, just the loss of motivation, the loss of the desire to even want to do this shit anymore, right? That's an internal obstacle. It could also be an external obstacle, like maybe you experience a big life change, maybe something traumatic happened in your life, maybe there's just been a big change in your routine. These are external obstacles that make it hard for you to stick to your fitness plan or to your nutrition plan. The key here is to see these things as what they are, which is obstacles. And so this is where developing this growth mindset and a vision of your fitness and health journey as a journey, this is a journey that you're taking.

It's a long distance journey. And when these things come up, the first thing that we want to do is remind ourselves that the way that we feel and the difficulties that we're experiencing, it's an obstacle, not a stop sign, right? It's an obstacle, not an off ramp. It's not a cliff, right? It's an obstacle to overcome or to maybe figure out a way around, course correct. Yeah. Sometimes we can remove the obstacle. Sometimes the obstacle that comes up is something that we actually have control over and we can remove from our lives. Yay. If that's the case, wonderful. A lot of times it's an obstacle that it's not really within our power, and that can be internal and external. Having anxiety and depression is an internal obstacle that is semi-permanent. It's not one that you can totally control. Your brain health is not always something that you can control, and so the key here is to view it though as an obstacle, although your brain may want to tell you, oh, it's over and I'll never reach my destination, or I'm just going to lose all of my progress.

Be aware of all the mean things that your brain says to you when you hit obstacles and develop that self-awareness. And this is where keeping a journal can be very helpful. Observe, what are the things that your brain is telling you when you hit these obstacles? Identify the obstacles. Identify what they are. What's preventing you from being able to stick to your plan? Just observe, right? Observe how your system responds to those obstacles, because this can be the beginning of helping us figure out a way around them or figuring out how to dismantle them. But the key here is to observe without judgment. That's a really key part of having a growth mindset, right? If you want to continue to move forward in your fitness journey, part of developing that mindset that's going to keep you going is to learn to move with mindfulness. Mindfulness meaning you are observing yourself, you're observing your environment, and you can observe yourself without judgment.

If you can take a perspective of yourself as an organism that is doing its best to survive in the situation that it finds itself in, you are doing the best that you can. Your brain is doing the best that it can. Your body is doing the best that it can, given the restraints and the pressures that you have in your life, those things are real. They have a real effect on you, and I think we sometimes tend to internalize when we are experiencing, when we're coming up against obstacles, we tend to turn that onto ourselves, like the presence of this obstacle in our life means that we interpret it as this thing is here, it's an obstacle. This obstacle exists. Therefore, I am a failure, or therefore, I am never going to make it. And I want you guys to cultivate an awareness to be able to observe when your brain is doing that.

When you identify those limiting mindsets, that's where we got to do the inner workouts. That's where we have to do the workout in our brains and try to address that underlying need that's unmet or heal that trauma, that's unhealed in whatever way that is most helpful for us. For some people, that's therapy. For some people that's listening to EMDR music and meditating. For some people, that's group therapy. However it is that you deal with your unhealed trauma or your mindset, whatever it is that you need to do. Journaling, meditating, all of these things are tools that you can use to tackle those limiting mindsets when they come up, right? Recognize when your brain is projecting up a limiting mindset and call it what it is. I think that's a limiting mindset. I'm not sure where that comes from. Maybe there's an underlying need that's being unmet or something that I'm insecure about, and sometimes you can kind of turn to yourself inwardly and be like, Hey, what are you scared of right now?

Where's that coming from? What are you trying to protect me from by saying that? And if you can dig a little deeper of why and figure out what's at the core of that limiting belief or at the core of that mean thing that your brain is saying, sometimes it's just it can give you an opportunity for personal growth that can help you overcome not just this obstacle in terms of your fitness overall. I want you to live a healthier life up here overall, and how you do one thing is how you're going to do probably how you do everything. So if you can use your fitness as a way to uncover these limiting mindsets as they come up, then you can tackle them and it probably will help you to overcome whatever obstacles you're facing in your fitness so that you can actually get back on track.

And it probably will also improve other areas of your life, those limiting beliefs, you probably carry them into many other aspects of your life. So cultivate that mindfulness, cultivate that observation without judgment, and then you can develop a strategy for tackling whatever the unresolved need is or the unmet need is, or tackling the unresolved or unhealed trauma, and just try to identify those things with compassion for yourself. Wait, pausing to acknowledge the action of thinking can help disrupt the spiraling that can lead from the thought important principle of meditation, but takes time to learn, and it takes practice. Just like exercise, just like learning to squat, just learning to do pushups. It all takes practice. And again, try to move through your workouts, try to move through your thought life with observation, not judgment.

That's kind of a key thing that I want us all to sort of take into how we do our workouts and also just how we move through life. Our thoughts and feelings are impermanent, and they pass, they do, but sometimes they come back up, right? When we have a trigger, when we have a trauma trigger or something that, and a limiting belief that maybe we picked up from our environment, like our parents or siblings or friend group, that's going to cause a recurring loop in our brains, and that recurring loop can wreak havoc on our ability to make progress in our fitness and in other areas of our life. So sometimes recognizing the thoughts can be enough. Sometimes recognizing it will be just enough for you to step back and course correct in your brain. Sometimes, however, there's an unresolved trauma there that you need to do some work on, and that work might look like, like I said before, that might look like doing talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, therapy, journaling, meditating.

Sometimes you have to do some deliberate inner work and practice new ways of thinking and new ways of moving new different types of exercises. Somatic exercise. Sometimes you have to do something to help yourself break that loop, right? Here's the thing, also, just like fitness, when it comes to adjusting our mindset, you want to have a variety of tools in your toolkit, because what works at some point may not work later. Just like the cues for the different lifts that we do. What cues work and help you to execute a really strong squat six months later, those cues may not work for you, and you need new ones. You need to think of your squat differently in order to execute it. In order to be able to move more weight, you have to kind of change your approach to it. And I think it's the same thing when it comes to our mental health and our mindset when it comes to our mental health mindset and our mindset towards fitness. It's good to have in your toolkit many strategies that you can pull out and try at different times, because if one thing isn't working, at least you have something else you can try.

So while you're trying to improve your fitness, you really should also be on a personal growth journey and really trying to learn everything that you can about mental health and specifically the types of mental health issues that are specific to you and your brain. If you are ADHD, if you have ADHD, if you have autism, your needs and your approach towards food, towards exercise is going to be a completely different experience, and you're probably going to need different strategies from someone who's neurotypical, right? If you're someone who has bipolar and you go through stages, phases of being manic and phases of being more low energy, then your approach to your fitness journey is just going to have to look different. And the whole goal here is to, like I said, again, observe without judgment, try to observe yourself as this creature. You are like your own little pet organism, and you have to learn what your needs are, and you have to learn what you're sensitive to and learn different strategies that can help you to address the things that you're sensitive to.

So it's super important to be on a personal growth mindset. So when you identify the things that you're sensitive to, for instance, maybe a little bit of body dysmorphia, I would encourage you to try to journal this out, journal this out, what's going on in your head? Let's get a little bit deeper in terms of what exactly is your brain saying? When do these thoughts come up? When do these negative thoughts about your body come up while you're in this bulk? What are the triggers, right? Is it when you're looking in the mirror in the morning? Is it when you're getting dressed? Is it when you're putting your clothes on? What are the situations where you have this unhelpful thought? And then get specific, observe what these thoughts look like, spell it out. It like bullet points. Make a list. These are the things that my brain says to me that make me feel bad about my bulk, that make it hard for me to stick to my bulk plan. Write it out.

And once you have it in front of you, then it's time to question yourself and think about where are these things coming from? What limiting beliefs might be underlying these things that my brain is saying to me. It might be underlying a fear that you're going to end up where, right back where you started. That's typically what people say when I have people who start from a fat loss journey and then they lose a bunch of fat and their metabolism slows down, and then it's time to start focusing on building muscle. A lot of people really struggle to build muscle because as that muscle starts to accumulate, and when you're eating a surplus, you're going to put on a little bit of fat. It's just part of it. It's very hard to not put on a little bit of fat when you're bulking. It's temporary, but it's there and it can sometimes be triggering.

So I would encourage you to interrogate yourself, question yourself, question these thoughts, and try to identify what is the underlying fear, what's the unmet need? What's the underlying trauma? Maybe that is kind of giving root to these things that my brain is saying, because then you can engage with that and you can maybe start to say, well, of course, I'm not going to end up where I was when I started, because now I know so much more than what I started. I already have so many habits built into my life that probably will never go away because I know what I need to do to take care of my body now. So you're starting from experience. You're not starting from scratch. You have so much more knowledge. You have so many habits that are just, this is something that I think we all need to be reminded of.

Sometimes when you're going through something and you're afraid that you're going to lose all of your progress, just look back and really, and this is where your journal can be helpful too. Really think about everything that you've added to your life, every single way that your life has changed since you started your fitness journey. And really just list it out. Map it out completely. Because when you do that, you'll realize, oh, shit. First of all, I'm a lot further along than I probably thought I was. And second of all, a lot of these things that I've built into my life, I don't really see them going away anytime soon. Even if you were to backslide a little bit, you started from here. Even backsliding is still way ahead of where you started. Do you see what I mean? I gained six pounds in a month, and it made me immediately jump to, I've messed this up.

Do you know? I think that there's a couple of underlying things and anxieties or fears that may be giving rise to that specifically. That's the kind of language of a child who's afraid of getting in trouble, right? You're not going to get in trouble. You're not going to get in trouble, especially even if you think, because everybody calls me the muscle mommy. So think of it like this. If I'm your muscle mommy, right? I'm just happy that you're trying. I'm just happy that you're trying. Even if you were to gain 50 pounds, which is not going to happen in any short period of time, I'm just happy that you're even thinking about your fitness, right? That's still a step ahead, right? As in progress feels difficult to accumulate, but easy to undo. But you have to think about, this is where I think it's probably important for you to write down every single way that

Your fitness journey has impacted your life and changed your life. All of the little habits of your life that you've changed, because you're now on a fitness journey that includes how much you walk every day, that includes your approach to your food, how much water you drink, how just your day-to-day routine is different, right? You've made it hard for yourself to completely backslide. You've built things into your life that actually, even if you gain a little bit of fat, you are never going to be back at your starting point. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. I hope that you found it helpful. Before we go, I just want to stress to make sure that you are prioritizing your self-care. It's not easy to change the relationship that you have with yourself and with your body, and it's always going to be a good idea to talk about these things with a certified specialist, like a therapist.

A lot of people have therapy covered in their insurance programs, so check that out and see if you have some coverage to talk to somebody, if that's something that is really impacting your fitness progress or your overall mental health. At the end of the day, this is all about building a healthier lifestyle so that you can be happier, right? So make sure that you're taking care of yourself. Before we go, if you want to get nutrition or exercise tips delivered to your email, make sure to sign up for the email newsletter on my website. Just go to jd gaines.com or jade harrison fitness.com. Have a great rest of your day. I'll see you guys in the next episode. Make sure that you drink your water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and I'll see you next time.