So, you’ve decided to finally go all-in and get your health in order. Good for you! But maybe now, you’re asking yourself, “How do I love the body I have while I’m working for the body I want?”
And that’s a valid question that I think needs to be addressed. So, in today’s episode of the Feel Amazing Naked podcast, I am talking to Amber Brueseke about how to work hard for the body you want but at the same time, love the body you’re in.
But before we dive into all the good stuff with Amber, I just want to remind you that I am hosting a special, one-time-only workshop called Grounding Day Live, in just one week as of airtime for this episode!
In this workshop, I will tell you the 3 reasons you struggle to make time for yourself, and I will walk you through the key steps to success in creating your own Grounding Day process. Don’t miss out on this one-time-only opportunity to learn how to get a handle on your time. Sign up today!
Amber, The Accidental Entrepreneur
Although Amber’s father encouraged his children to be entrepreneurs, she was adamant that the entrepreneurial life was not for her.
She was all for the security of a regular paycheck and a steady job. Who cared if starting her own business could possibly mean more money? She’d take a steady income, thank you very much.
Amber’s love of science, health care, and helping others led her to pursue a nursing degree. She ultimately married a physician and became the mom of two kids. But nursing wasn’t paying enough for Amber to consider daycare for two kids, so she became a stay-at-home mom.
However, she did not want to lose what her career had given her: something that she loved and was highly engaged with.
So, she took up fitness. She eventually became certified in group fitness and began teaching group fitness classes. She did that for 8 years but a couple of years ago, she had a light bulb moment: in spite of teaching multiple fitness classes every week, her body never changed.
And so, she decided it was time to set and achieve some physical goals.
She ran across someone talking about Macros on Pinterest and the science behind it made sense to her. She dove in, and in 8 weeks had lost 10 lbs and had the first 6-pack of her life. She had always worked out but when she married exercise with nutrition, she achieved a new level of health and fitness.
After achieving several more personal goals, she knew she wanted to help other women achieve their personal fitness goals as well.
Her online business, Biceps After Babies, has allowed her to work 1:1 with over 1,000 clients, helping them to work for the body they want while loving the body they have.
You Don’t Need Another Diet
When Amber begins working with a new client, she often has some groundwork to do first, especially if the client has previously followed any typical diets. When women try, and fail, on typical diets, they continue to drag the baggage of those diets with them into the future.
For example, if the diet was super restrictive, her clients want to be super restrictive with their macro numbers. If the diet had a ton of certain rules to follow, the women want a list of rules to follow.
It’s hard for us to let go of the things we learn from diets. But Amber helps her clients understand that another diet is not what they need.
What they need is freedom.
Macro counting is a tool. If you choose to use it, you are the one wielding the tool. Don’t take that tool and use it in a damaging way instead of a building way. Don’t rob yourself of the freedom to use the tool to help yourself by turning it into another diet.
What About Intuitive Eating?
It seems like everybody and their brother is talking about intuitive eating these days. But let me ask you a question that I don’t see people asking:
If you’ve never learned about basic nutrition and what foods fuel your body, what intuition are you following?
When I was first beginning to take my health back, I used macro counting for several years. It helped me to understand what foods were fueling me and how. I learned what my body needed and how to use food to meet my goals without constantly depriving myself or going on a diet.
Now, I don’t need to use macros anymore. I can eat intuitively. But that is only possible because I know intuitively what foods are fuel for me.
If you don’t have a basic understanding of nutrition and food as fuel, your intuition will be faulty and you won’t achieve the results you desire, which will likely lead you to another restrictive diet.
Tracking macros is a tool to use for specific periods of time. Once you learn the information the tool provides you, you can move into maintenance mode, and pull the tool out when you have certain goals you want to achieve.
Work on the Body that You Want While Loving the Body that You Have
Amber and I find that the majority of our clients want to lose weight for increased self-confidence. These women are just sure that as soon as they lose 25 lbs or can fit into a size 10, they’ll feel better about themselves.
And frankly, if they only lose the weight, their self-confidence may seem to be higher for a while, but it won’t last. Because their why isn’t inner growth and change. And believe me, external change can only carry you so far.
That’s why Amber developed a saying for her business:
Work for the body you want while loving the body you have.
You can absolutely pour yourself into meeting health and fitness goals, but understand that reaching those goals won’t make you love yourself. You have to learn to love yourself now, even as you continue to strive for the body you want.
The Be-Do-Have Model
Amber has recognized a pattern among women; most of us live by a “do-have-be” model. We think that if we do the thing we need to do, (lose the weight we need to lose), then we will have the body that we want, which will cause us to be happy and confident.
And what Amber does is she turns that model around and focuses on teaching women that we can be right now who we think we will be when we reach our goals. We can be confident today. We can be happy today.
This confidence and joy cause us to do the things we need to do in order to have the results that we want.
Stepping into the person you want to be is the driving force for the rest of the steps. Once you start living like the woman you long to be, you will do whatever it takes to actually have success.
What Does Confidence Mean to You?
I absolutely love the question that Amber asks her clients when they start on this Be-Do-Have model.
“What does confidence look like to you? And how will you know when you feel confident?”
All too often, we hold self-confidence up as a goal when it’s actually something that we can possess right now within ourselves. Self-confidence isn’t a tangible thing that you will see in the mirror one day when you finally lose that last pesky pound.
Self-confidence is in the way you carry yourself and what you believe about yourself.
How do you live this model out? Well, think of something you would do if you could reach your weight loss goal. Maybe you would finally wear shorts again, in public.
The way you follow the Be-Do-Have model is you put on the shorts today. You wear the shorts now. You don’t wait for some magical day when all of a sudden you are filled with self-confidence.
Self-confidence comes from taking action and thinking the thoughts of a confident woman.
What Do You Have to Lose?
It boggles my mind sometimes how we follow a failing system, like restrictive diets, and when they don’t work, we find a different restrictive diet to follow. And on and on until we kill our confidence and any hope we have of ever reaching our goals.
What if you did something totally different? What if, instead of trying yet another diet, you took the time to do the internal work to become a new person?
Here’s the thing friends, if you do the thought work necessary to be a new person, even if you never lose a pound, you will feel better. You truly will be that confident woman you’ve been hoping the diets would make you.
But no diet can help you be more self-confident. Only by doing the deep internal work, and by living like you already are that confident woman, will you ever feel confident.
So, what do you have to lose by trying something new? The old diets and restrictions haven’t worked. Are you ready for something that does?
The Secret of True and Lasting Change
Amber shared her secret method for working with women in this episode, which is this:
“I will teach you how to eat for fat loss and how to achieve your health and fitness goals.
But the way I do that is going to be through internal and thought work. And once you get a taste of what it feels like to achieve your goals…once you see that you actually can change yourself…you will be hooked on that feeling and it will spill out in every other area of your life.”
Once you recognize the power you have within yourself, you will go on to change your entire life. Whether that means you start a business or you write a book or you completely own being a full-time mom, you will be that person you always wanted to be.
That person that deep inside, you already are.
There may be many layers of this onion that you have to peel back before you get to all the root causes. If you don’t know where to start, I am here to help.
SCHEDULE A FREE DEEP DIVE CALL WITH ME HERE.
XO,
Amanda
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