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It’s time for a new conversation to start on what it takes to truly get healthy from the inside out.

I’m tired of the old conversation around health – especially the one around weight loss – where the focus is just on the external.

Today the diet industry is worth $64 billion dollars.

That is insane.

The quick fixes and fad diets that are promoted do far more harm than good and yet in playgrounds, gym change rooms and school parking lots they still get talked about.

The search term “quick and easy weight loss” pulls up over 24 million results. Yet I bet if I were to ask any woman on the street if there was a way to lose weight quickly and easily she’d look at me like I was crazy. Because the truth is known, it’s just not talked about.

[Tweet “Quick and easy doesn’t work. True change takes time, especially when it comes to your body.”]

In a world where women are living busier lives than ever before, self-care has become a non-priority and food & wine have become trusted coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and constantly feeling overwhelmed.

This isn’t good.

My hope is that this podcast is going to be part of the solution that will inspire healthy change for millions of women around the world.  

Please the join the conversation with me!

Episode Resources:

To subscribe go to: www.jenniferpowter.com/review

ENERGY To Thrive: A new conversation on health, fitness and weight loss [Full Text]

Jen: Thank you so much for tuning in to the first episode of my Energy to Thrive Podcast. I’m beyond thrilled that you’re here and I’m super excited that this day has come and that this has launched.

Here’s what I want to do in this first episode. Number one, I want to share why I’ve created this and what the conversation is going to be about and why I think it’s so needed. Second, I’m going to talk a little bit about my story so you can get a feel of who I am if you do not know me. Also, what you can expect in the upcoming episodes, because they are truly awesome. I’ve already prerecorded them and they’re ready to go, so you’ll be able to get access to those immediately.

The purpose of this podcast, Energy to Thrive, why the title? It seems like not that long ago, but we’re going back about five or six years, where when people asked me how I was doing I would say things like, “I’m surviving. Hanging in. Hanging on.” One day I just got so sick of hearing myself say that and I had this thought that this cannot be the reason that we are all here, to survive. Shouldn’t we be here to thrive?

I kept having this conversation in my head about what it takes to live with energy to thrive, because at that time I definitely wasn’t. I was a mom with two young kids, I had a baby and a two year old, and I wasn’t thriving at all. That’s where the title name came from.

Really the purpose of this podcast is to open up and just really create the deeper conversation that I think women need to be a part of to challenge ourselves to get real and honest with where we’re at, what we’re coping with, and how to be truly healthy from the inside out.

The inside out piece is important. I am a weight loss and fitness expert and sometimes I feel like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so shallow,” but the thing is that I’ve walked that path. I’m an exercise physiologist, I’m an emotional intelligence practitioner, a life coach, and after my second child I found myself carrying a good 35 to 40 pounds extra, way more than I needed. It was about 18 months later where I was still joking about how I couldn’t lose the baby weight in spite of all these things I was “trying” to do. I got tired of that. I’ll share more about that in a second.

In my current work with women I hear these conversations every day that they’re having with themselves and I’m also hearing what they’re doing. It breaks my heart. As you know, the weight loss industry is this multi-billion dollar industry that preys on the insecurities of women. When we feel desperate, scared, and horrible about ourselves, we become willing to do anything – the quick fix, the fad diet, the juice cleanse, the injections, the drops – hoping that somehow we’re going to find that magic pill.

As smart as so many of my clients are, they’ve done this. They’ve been like, “What I’m doing isn’t working.” You get desperate, so you try and you fail, then you try again, and you fail, and the psychological toll is horrible.

I don’t want people to live like that. This podcast is meant to open the conversation and to take it to a deeper level. Here’s the thing. If I’ve been able to create permanent, long lasting, healthy weight loss and sustained weight, I’ve been able to live a really good life without gaining and losing pounds, I’ve stayed at the same weight once I got to my goal weight, and my clients do too, then I know that there are millions of women who need to jump into this conversation and to get real with what works and how to do it, especially when women are living such busy, crazy, chaotic lives.

Stress is at an all time high, anxiety is at an all time high, feeling overwhelmed and burnt out is at an all time high, and self-sacrifice and putting yourself at the bottom of your priority list has become the norm for so many people out there. I think it’s time for that to shift. That’s the purpose, ladies, to take it deeper, get real, get raw, get honest, and to hopefully move the needle on your health mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, whichever way, because it’s all connected.

Let me just share a bit. I spent my 20s being a pretty active woman, running marathons, I did Iron Man. I never really had to think too much about what I ate or my weight, I was happy with it. I was probably one of those women who could always talk about thinking I could five pounds, but when I look back at pictures now, no, I was just fine.

It wasn’t until I got married and had kids and really just found myself in the thick of motherhood where my babies were taking all of my time and attention, which trust me I adore that, but I had very little energy left over for me. What happened was this very slow progressive downward slide into a lack of self-care. For me, I was living in a city where I didn’t have any family, I had moved to a new community where I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have friends, and I found myself extremely isolated.

I don’t know about you, but when things are tough I wasn’t one back then to broadcast it. I kind of kept that struggle to myself, because I didn’t want to be seen as less than. I thought, “I have a really great life,” which I did, but I wasn’t doing well on the inside. So I withdrew. Where that took me was not down a good path. I tell you that. It was to a place where I felt really lonely, I was overwhelmed, I was sad.

Honestly, one of the things that you’re going to learn about me is I am a pretty open book. I will share from my heart and I will definitely not pretend to be fine all of the time. I’ll tell you what was really going on and what is really going on in my life as these episodes progress.

Back then I didn’t really realize it, but my marriage was in big trouble too. I had a business, different than what I have now. We were struggling financially. I was looking after my kids all day with no help and then working at night really late into the morning hours, and then breastfeeding, and just burning the candle at both ends. I turned to food and to booze as a treat.

I would come upstairs after putting the kids down and I would immediately get a glass of wine, grab a handful of chocolate chips, and head into my office. I didn’t just have one handful, I would go back and get another handful, or maybe I would grab something else. Just something to give me that comfort, that relief, that “I’m a good person and I deserve a treat” sort of mentality. Then the next day I would complain about, “I don’t know why I can’t lose this baby weight. Clearly I just need to exercise more.”

Let me stress this. Even my own thinking, as somebody who has a master’s degree in this, thought that was that the answer, that my health lay in adding more onto my plate by adding more exercise into my already busy lift. So I did, I tried, I decided I needed a challenge, “If I challenge myself then I’ll have a goal and that will push me to succeed.” So I signed for a triathlon, got a coach, and the long story short is that I proceeded to run myself into the ground. I had to deal with adrenal fatigue and recovering from that and just chronic exhaustion.

What I learned along the way was the answer to weight loss is not in exercising in more. It is truly going to the deeper level of what is going on with you. My problem was how could I find washing the floor to be of more importance and value than taking care of my own self.

The other thing that I realized along the way is that with the plethora of food blogs, fitness blogs, magazines, and websites out there telling us what to do, there is not a lack of information or education. We all know that it is important to eat well and to move our bodies. Why don’t we do it?

That’s where I think the real success for my clients comes from, is digging into the deeper why, understanding what is going on for us emotionally, and pushing through that barrier to change. I’m so excited to share the guests that I have coming up with you, because they all have such good information.

I’m taking it back to December in Calgary, where it was a super cold day and I was out running with my group and I was at the pack. I can’t even call it running, to be honest, I was jog-walking. I had tears pouring down my face, my heart rate was skyrocketing, I felt horrible, and I just knew things weren’t right. My running coach came back and asked, “Jen, are you doing okay?” and I just said, “Oh, I’m fine. Just got a bit of a cramp here.” He said, “Okay. We’ll meet you back at the store.” So I trudged along through the snow, in the cold, with tears freezing to my face, wondering, “What the hell am I going to do?” because I simply could not continue to live like this or to feel like this.

That was my pivotal moment. I just decided to change. That meant a radical overhaul of my entire lifestyle. I dove back into the research around weight loss, health, and fitness, and I got support and I got help. Fast forward six months and I lost that 35 pounds, I was more fit and more energetic than I had been in years. I changed. I was able to go through an emotional and physical journey that honestly was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Hard, yes, absolutely. I had to face things that I didn’t even know were going on.

Here I am five years later and I haven’t gained a pound. I have two kids. I’m not extreme in my approach or my methodology. I’m a health coach and, yes, I do eat sugar. Not a ton of it, but it’s in my lifestyle. I will still have the odd glass of wine and I still bake with my kids. What I want to do is teach you how to be able to get that freedom with your body and food again as well.

What you can expect… This is going to be where I will be sharing some of the best and brightest experts that I know in the health space. We will be talking about everything from hormones and inner critics, relationships, prioritization, self-care, sex, all of it, you name it, because everything together creates our internal and external health. If we don’t take care of one of those components, if we ignore it or pretend it doesn’t matter, or sacrifice a certain aspect of our own self and spirit, then how can you ever be really truly healthy? I don’t think you can.

My goal is to impact not just thousands because I’ve been able to help more than 1,000 women right now with the work that I’ve done over the past five years, but millions. If this is a multi-billion dollar industry, then I know that there are millions of women who are trying to find the answer, who are trying to get to the root of what is going on for them, and they just simply don’t want to keep living feeling awful about themselves anymore.

That’s it. I just wanted to give a quick introduction and share a little bit about me. You can find out more on my website at www.jenniferpowter.com. If you think that this is a conversation that you want to be a part of, that the information I’m going to be sharing is going to be helpful to you, then go subscribe to my channel on iTunes. You can get a quick link to that by going to jenniferpowter.com/review, that will take you right to the iTunes page where you can sign up.

Thank you for tuning in and listening. I cannot wait to continue this conversation with you. Bye for now.