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Chances are you feel busy and like there just isn’t enough time to fit everything into your day. If you’re like most people, the first thing to go is taking care of yourself. I mean sure, you still shower and eat (probably not the healthiest choices), but you probably don’t fit in those other important things like exercise, or having some quiet time to yourself.

One of the most important realizations I’ve had in my life came from reading this sentence in a  book (I forget which one!) “If you’ve created this, you can create something different”. I found it empowering because at the time, I didn’t like a few areas of my life and I was feeling stuck, powerless.

But that’s never the reality.

You see life is created by a series of decisions. When those decisions get repeated they become habits. All of us have good habits and bad habits. But what many of us don’t understand, is how to CHANGE a habit we don’t like, or create a new habit.

Join Dave Smith and I as we talk about what it takes to build healthy, sustainable habits so you can live with an abundance of health and good energy!

In this episode, you will…

  • Have a strategy to get exercise back in your daily life, even if you hate it.
  • Know what exercise actually is (and what it isn’t)
  • Understand the difference between urgency vs. importance and how these concepts affect your ability to prioritize your health
  • How to deal with your own excuse making behavior
  • PLUS some really cool tips to get you going and feeling your healthiest, best self yet
    [Tweet ““There’s an emotional toll that not feeling good in your body can take. The best time to fix that is now.””]

Episode Resources:

Exercise & Healthy Habit Building [Full Text]

Jen: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Energy to Thrive Podcast. I am super excited to introduce my guest to you today, Dave Smith. Hello and welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Dave: Hey. I’m super excited to be here.

Jen: Should we tell people it’s our third time doing this now?

Dave: You just said, “I never get sick of hearing your stories,” so get ready because I’m about to tell them for the third time.

Jen: I did just tell him that. One of the reasons that I’m so excited to have Dave is he was voted Canada’s Top Trainer of the Year. Am I getting that correct?

Dave: Yes. Technically it was Top Fitness Professional.

Jen: Top Fitness Professional of the Year in Canada in 2013. You’re going to be shedding some light on exercise and really healthy habit building.

If we get really honest and talk to listeners about what it really takes, in a multibillion dollar weight loss industry and with such few success stories, and yet you and I both have clients who are amazingly successful, what it takes to transform inside and out. Exercise is absolutely a healthy piece on that, but it’s not the only piece. Somehow you have to work yourself into it.

Maybe just talk to me a little bit about your story and why you became so interested in this and why you work with only women. This is an interesting fact about you.

Dave: Yes. I’m probably one of the few male trainers out there who doesn’t take any male clients.

Jen: I think you might be.

Dave: By the way, a little side note. I get some hate emails from men. I had one just the other day who wanted to work with me and was saying, “Why don’t you work with men?” He’s on my email list, “Everything you give is all about women.” In my head I’m just thinking, “Unsubscribe then, because it’s not for you.”

I was telling you that I think the reason that I work for women does go back to my origin story of getting into the fitness industry. Mine started when I was in high school.

I was the high school president, so I was doing this presentation in front of the school at an assembly. Things were going really well and I felt really good about myself. Afterwards, I was walking down the hall and a classmate of mine was walking towards me. She stopped me in the hall and said, “Dave, do you know what I noticed while you were on stage?” I was feeling really good about myself, so I thought for sure she was going to say, “I noticed how cute you were,” and in my head I was thinking, “Yes, I’ve got a crush.”

She said, “I never noticed how skinny your arms are.”

Jen: Devastating.

Dave: It was. It sounds so silly now, because this was 25 years ago, but as a teenage boy it was crushing. I’ll tell you, I had a lot of self confidence. I feel like I was really well adjusted as a teenager and I never had body issues before that moment. That one innocent comment completely shattered my self confidence and gave me body image issues. Literally the next day I went out and joined a gym.

Jen: One comment.

Dave: One comment. I think about all of the people who hear stuff like that and maybe don’t notice that was the thing that set them off or set them on a bad path. For some reason, that moment really stuck to me.

I joined the gym, completely for vanity reasons. I wanted to get rid of my skinny little arms. Lo and behold, I fell in love with fitness and healthy eating, and then helping other people to achieve that as well.

As I transitioned into my career as a personal trainer, originally I was working primarily with male athletes, but I noticed I did have a couple of female clients and they were the ones who I felt like I really resonated with; this idea of dissatisfaction with self and having self wroth tied to physical appearance. Slowly over time I found myself working more and more with women.

When I shifted and became an online coach I said, “Enough with men. I’m working only with women,” because that’s my story, having body image issues that I wanted to fix so that I felt valuable.

Jen: I love this because I think you’re touching on something that doesn’t get talked about, the emotional toll that not feeling good in your body can take. I’m sure men suffer with that in some way, but you and I both work with women and that’s who this podcast is for, so we’re going to talk about that population and share that.

When you don’t feel good, when you struggle getting dressed in the morning, when you don’t want to have the lights on, when you worry about standing up in front of a group of people because of what you might look like or what people might think of you, it’s fatiguing. It becomes emotionally challenging and stressful to deal with.

What is a thing for your clients that sparks the desire for change?

Dave: I just want to comment on something that you just said. You said that it becomes fatiguing and stressful. This is something that I talk about all of the time. The unknown cause of weight gain or inability to lose weight is quite often stress.

Maybe this isn’t new news to your listeners. Maybe they’ve heard chronic stress – it can be environmental factors, it can be things that you eat, it can be over-work, all of these things are so common – but something that is so stressful that we never talk about is how we feel about ourselves. It is stressful looking in the mirror and not liking what we see.

Jen: Absolutely.

Dave: It’s this vicious circle of, “I don’t like the way that I look. I don’t like the way that I feel.” This creates stress. Stress becomes chronic stress. It builds up inflammation and then our body can’t lose weight. We’re stuck.

That word stuck, it’s so true. We feel stuck and that’s a horrible place to be.

Jen: It really is. I think what I want to help women get and what I want them to learn from you, whether you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s, is when time gets busy, because let’s face it, you have to have some emotional energy if you want to create change. For personal transformation you have to believe that you’re worth it, that you want it, that change is possible. How do you balance?

Women are living busier crazier lives more than ever before. How do you help them figure out how to make time for themselves and embrace this aspect of their life, the exercise piece? It’s a big thing. For me, I thought had more value washing the floor than I did getting out to go for a walk when I was overweight. Truly, I’m not kidding.

Dave: It is so true. It’s something that can easily be pushed to the back burner.

My first degree was in business. Something that we always talked about was this urgency versus importance 2×2 matrix. All of these things that seem very urgent in life, like washing a floor, if you’ve spilled something on the floor that’s urgent, that has to be done right now. But in reality, what’s really important in life? What’s important is being healthy, loving ourselves, being able to give back to our friends, family, and community. All of that stems from these lifestyle habits that are very rarely urgent. We have to place urgency on them.

Jen: Yes. You can constantly continue to push yourself to the back burner. No one is going to put you on your own priority list, unless you do. People are takers. I love people, but children are takers, partners are takers, business clients. Women give often at the detriment of their own health, sometimes.

Share a little bit about how you help. The outward behavior is exercise, but the internal belief system is…

Dave: One of the things that needs to be internalized is, “I take control.”

So often we victimize. I do this, too. It’s not just women, we all do this. My life is so busy, or work is so busy, or you just talked about these different types of people in our lives, these relationships that take, and it’s all true. I’m not saying that we’re not busy, because we are, and we do have people that have demands on our life. All of those external factors are outside of our control. You can’t control when your kids come home from school what they’re going to say.

What do you control? I think that’s really important to think about. What are the areas of life that we do control? There are many.

We control the messages that we tell ourselves. This is something that I just started doing. I know it’s almost cliché in the fitness world, but I had never done it, this idea of having a self mantra.

I took this course maybe 8 or 12 months ago about life coaching, it was sort of upping my education in terms of life coaching. One of the things that they had us do was to record ourselves basically giving ourselves a pep talk. We had to record it and say the same message 10 times in a row. I’m a perfectionist, so being able to say it succinctly 10 times in a row took me forever to record.

The neat thing is that I put that on my phone. I walk everywhere and whenever I walk I put that on replay and it just repeats over and over again. It’s so awesome because that is something that I have control is what message I’m feeding into my brain. This message says, “Dave, you’re very confident. You’re competent. You have these skills. You’re changing people’s lives.”

As I hear myself in my own voice tell myself that, it’s so empowering and I just want to take on the world. That’s just one tip that worked for me and I think it could work for everyone.

Jen: It is so necessary. I really want to drive that point home. The inner chatter of so many women is, “You suck. You’re a failure. Why even bother? You’re terrible at exercise. You can’t stick to anything. You’re overweight. You don’t have time for this. This isn’t important. Why bother?” It is so negative and toxic.

The basic beginning work is to start to change your story about what you tell yourself. You always have an option; you can tell yourself good things or you can tell yourself bad things. Like anything, what we think is a habit.

Dave: That’s so true. You wanted to talk about exercise, so we are getting into exercise. All of this stuff leads into exercise.

I was telling you a story about a client of mine, also named Jennifer, who was quite overweight. When she came to me I think she was about 280 pounds and her self esteem was at rock bottom. The idea of her entering gym where there are people who are fit and people who are gym-goers, there was no chance that she was going to do that. If I forced her, or another coach forced her, there’s very little chance that would be successful.

Instead, what we starting looking at are what are the things that she can control. We looked at what she was eating for breakfast and how much water she was drinking throughout her day. These are simple things that even someone in a state of low self esteem can control.

Over the course of several weeks and several months, just those two things, she gained mastery over them and realized, “I control those,” and she started to see some weight come off. It wasn’t huge; I think she lost 20 pounds. It sounds huge, but for someone who has such a long way to go, that’s kind of a drop in the bucket.

The cool thing was this was a mental switch that was flipped for her. All of a sudden she realized, “I do have control over my actions. My actions directly affect my outcomes.” It was so cool because this person who originally came in as a victim, as someone who completely had no control, all of a sudden felt like, “I have control,” and she started going to the gym.

I’d really encourage anyone who is listening, don’t just take this as information. I guess my first challenge – Jennifer, hopefully you don’t mind me challenging your audience – would be to think about what do you love about yourself? What do you control? Do what I did, record your voice saying this 10 times, put it on your phone, and start listening to it every time you walk.

Jen: I’m going to do that.

Dave: Do it.

Jen: There are many reasons that I need to do that in my life right now. I think on our second take of this episode we talked about one word; that was mastery. Leading to the idea of consistency and persistence.

You said it was a couple of weeks. This client didn’t just have a good breakfast and drink more water on one day, or one day one week and then another day the following week. She made it something that she did consistently over time. That creates the habit building.

Let’s get into the exercise piece. For many women that I work with, they’ve had really bad experiences around exercise, either in high school or university, or the idea of putting on spandex and needing to pound it out for an hour is just so overwhelming and unappealing that it’s all or nothing. “I don’t want to do that, so I’m not going to do anything.”

How do you start to address getting started with exercise?

Dave: So many questions we want to cover. You hit on it right away, the idea of just starting is the most important piece. Whatever that looks like, it doesn’t really matter, just start moving your body.

As a personal trainer I get people all the time who are looking for that silver bullet workout. I can give you awesome workouts, but it’s all about your adherence. How committed and consistent are you going to be?

I’ll give you a little tactic or strategy that I use with my clients called ‘if, then’ statements. You might be familiar with these. The way that it goes is to think of situations or watch yourself fall into situations where your plans get thwarted.

For example, say you’ve never exercised before and you say, “I want to start going for a walk three times a week for a half an hour.” That’s a great place to start.

Jen: Dave, is that exercise?

Dave: 100%. Anything that moves your body is 100% exercise.

Jen: Exactly. There we go. Good point, listeners. If you move your body, that can be considered the beginning stages of exercise. Even walking.

Dave: Anything. Whatever it is, whatever you set your goal as, we’re just going to use walking as an example.

Jen: That’s perfect.

Dave: You notice that walk isn’t always happening. Take note of that and say, “What is it that is causing that to not happen?” Here’s where the ‘if, then’ statements come in.

Say that you’re often coming home from work, you’re feeling overwhelmed, and you end up sitting down on the couch. Once you sit down on the couch it’s game over. We all know how quickly that can deteriorate into a night of not doing anything.

The if part is, “If I come home and find myself sitting on the couch, then what am I going to do to combat that?”

The way this could work is, “If I find myself sitting down on the couch, then I’m going to text my friend,” or, “then I’m going to walk to the park,” or, “then I’m going to get up on putting my running shoes.” Whatever it is.

Once you set up these ‘if, then’ statements or these ‘if, then’ rules, I know it sounds so simple but it’s so powerful because it takes away the decision making process and engrains that as a habit. “I just sat on the couch,” if, then statement, and go do it.

Honestly, it’s so powerful. I know it sounds so simple, but it really works.

Jen: I think really living life can be quite simple. It’s us who get in the way of our own success.

I shared with you that I’m getting married in a few weeks and I had found my own self care and commitment to myself just in the toilet, just all these reasons. I know that sometimes I need to pay for accountability. I need to have somebody hold me accountable to show up.

I booked my sessions with a trainer and it meant that I had to go, I couldn’t cancel on myself anymore. Once I did that, I was back into the groove of it. I felt much more confident and capable to manage my time to fit this in, when before I had kind of been spinning in overwhelm.

Talk about why sometimes reaching out for help is so important. Tell me two things. Women often think, “I’m smart, I’m accomplished, I’m so successful in so many areas of my life, I should obviously be able to do this on my own.” I always think if you could have, you would have by now. What blocks people from reaching out for help when they really need it?

How do you get the past the – I don’t know if it’s shame? For me, I was sort of like, “Ugh,” but I knew I wanted to be successful and I’m very self aware that I couldn’t do it on my own, I needed help.

Dave: It’s interesting that you say that, because I would say that comparing men and women, women are much more apt to admit that they need help and to actually reach out for that help.

Jen: Compared to men?

Dave: Yes.

Jen: That’s interesting. I think that’s probably true.

Dave: It certainly true. I think that we all have a long way to go into that breaking down barriers of being able to ask for help. But, you hit the nail on the head. We want to feel like we’re intelligent, we want to feel competent. There’s something very vulnerable about saying, “I don’t have it all figured out.”

There’s an awesome book that I just read called Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. It’s a super popular book, but the whole idea is about vulnerability. It’s not specifically talking about fitness, but as I was reading it I just thought over and over again, “Wow, all of these messages are so appropriate for losing weight and being fit.”

Just being vulnerable, like talking about our insecurities, talking about where we wish our life was and actually being honest with ourselves – and with a coach, a friend, or a family member – being honest about “if this is where I want my life, why isn’t it there?”

Jen: I agree. Sometimes I think our power comes back when recognizing life is often a set of circumstances and choices that we’ve made along the way to get where we are. It was no surprise to me, I could look back when I was overweight and understand why I was. I didn’t like it, but I’d be like, “I don’t know why I can’t lose this baby weight,” while drinking wine and eating chocolate chips. I knew it, but I wasn’t ready to change it – until I was ready to change it. That’s a critical thing.

A lot of women will do radical things with exercise to try to create rapid weight loss. Why doesn’t that work?

Dave: Well, it doesn’t work because we end up failing, and when we experience that failure we don’t want to experience it again, so we stop.

Jen: We stop. That’s it. There are so many women who will try crazy exercise routines, or on the elliptical, or you see them at the gym for an hour running, and they’re really not changing anything. Nothing is changing for them.

Dave: It’s for everyone. We don’t like to do what we’re not good at and we like to do what we’re good at.

I’ll tell you a story about myself. When I started going to the gym, again my whole purpose was vanity. I wanted to get rid of the skinny arms. I quickly realized there are certain types of exercise in the gym that my body does well with and there are other ones that my body does not do well with. Again, this is so vain of me to think about it, but it was all about arms back then.

Doing bicep curls is something that, even today, I am really weak at. It was the thing that I didn’t want to do, because I’m looking in the mirror and I’m lifting this little tiny weight and all these guys around me are lifting these big weights, and I feel ashamed of that. The tendency would be for me to go into the gym and do anything else other than bicep curls, but it’s not going to get me to where my goal was in that moment.

The idea that I like to give to clients is when you go into the gym or when you think about approaching exercise, the chances that you’re going to have a tendency to gravitate towards what you’re good at, likely that’s not what you actually need. Instead of going all in and saying, “I hate weight training, but I know that I need that to build muscle, to increase my metabolism, and to burn fat, therefore I’m going to start training with weights five times a week,” you’re going to hate your life, so don’t do that.

Instead, this is a little cliché, but think about what is that baby step? Maybe have a 20-minute resistance workout in amongst your other workouts that you like doing. Just start there. It goes back to what we talked about earlier, mastery. Master that and pretty soon it’s not going to be something that you hate anymore. That’s where you can start to grow at.

Jen: I’m going to ask you a question that my hunch is you probably get emailed about probably every second day, if not daily, which is that magic bullet. Women who want to know, “Dave, what is the best kind of exercise for me to do to see weight loss happen?” I want to know what you think about that question and what your answer is.

Dave: I love that you asked me that. Thank you for asking that question, because I do want to dispel myths. There’s probably going to be a lot of online marketers out there who hate the fact that I say this.

There isn’t one. Ladies, if you ever see a workout touted as “this is the women’s fat loss workout,” or “the get your body back after having a baby workout,” that’s BS. It might work for some people, it might work for you, but there is no magic bullet.

From a science perspective, in the last six months I went through some DNA testing. It was fascinating. It shows you so much about nutrition, about vitamins, just things that your body is predisposed to deal well with or not deal well with. One of the areas is exercise and it shows different types of exercise that your body is predisposed to seeing good results from.

Jen: Oh, that’s interesting.

Dave: I love this. It is expensive, so I know it’s maybe not in everyone’s budget to do. It is really great because you can see this and it very blatantly says, “Your body is different than their body,” because if you compare the results they’re not all the same.

I was taking a client through hers last night and we were laughing because our own results could not have been more different. If I had put her on a program that works for me or works for you, she might get no results and be really frustrated with herself thinking she’s a failure and Dave sucks as a personal trainer, and everyone is angry. The fact is we’re just unique.

Jen: I’m really clear having been a personal trainer when I was younger and I love exercise, I’m lucky, I enjoy it and I like the feeling of it. Something that I’ve really come to be aware of through my own challenges over the past couple of years and it’s my own mantra, “Strong mind, strong body. Strong body, strong mind.” If one of those or both of those are weak, then I feel like I’m living life pretty small, that I’m not very resilient.

Sometimes I don’t know how to strengthen one or the other. I usually tend to try to strengthen my body, because in the gym or on the trails if I do those last three reps, if I keep going past when I want to stop, it reminds me that I’m stronger than I know. I use that as a metaphor for handling life’s challenges.

If a woman right now has not exercised and her belief system is she wants to, what would be the steps to bring a non-exerciser and get them to be more consistent with exercise? What types of exercise should they do? I know that there’s no magic bullet, but what would you say?

Dave: For a non-exerciser, we sort of touched on this already, pick something that you do have control over.

I think the worst thing to do as a non-exerciser is to go to the gym, just because there’s so many barriers of entry. I know this sounds silly, but you need the right shoes, you need the right outfits, you need to find the right gym, you need to learn about the equipment, you need to find a time that you can go. There’s so many barriers there.

Whereas, you and I talked about moving your body. For non-exercisers, how can you move your body literally for five minutes per day? I’m not downplaying this, literally five minutes per day.

Jen: Yes. I want you to say that again, because there is this belief that it has to be 30 minutes, or 45 minutes, or an hour for it to be of any benefit. Five minutes, really could it?

Dave: That’s a message that is quite often spoken nowadays, that it doesn’t take much. For the listeners, I want you to really pay attention to what I’m about to say. You have a choice. If you’re a non-exerciser, you have a choice. You can either dive in right now, get your gym membership and start doing these things that are really hard and that you probably don’t like, and I’m not saying this is right but research shows your chance of success is about 4%.

You can try that. Maybe you have tried it before. Or you can say, “What can I control and what can I master?” You can control and master moving your body for five minutes. I really hope you take that choice, because that mastery and the self confidence that you’re going to build can lead to you going to the gym and being very successful.

It might be a month from now, it might be six months from now, it might be a year from now, but guess what? You probably have a lot of life left, so even if it takes a year for you to go through that process you’re going to be in a place where you actually can succeed. Whereas, diving in right now, like I said, there’s a 4% chance of that actually working.

Jen: That’s crazy. The research is so good on exercise adherence. I think that moral of the story is do something, try something. If you don’t know what you like, get curious. If you haven’t done Zumba, try it, go with a friend.

I’ve taught fitness classes. The hardest thing I’ve ever done was becoming a fitness instructor. No word of lie. It was also one of the most rewarding things, I loved it. But, I know so many people were so hesitant to come to a class because they didn’t want to look stupid. There is no such thing.

Dave: Totally.

Jen: Having the guts to show up is 90% of the challenge. Once you’re there, it’s easy. It’s deciding to go, getting off the couch. I sometimes argue with myself all the way as I’m driving to the gym, “I don’t want to go. Well, you have to go. I don’t want to go today. Jen, just go for 10 minutes. If you don’t like it then you can leave.” I hardly ever leave.

I think that this is such a fun point. I get asked about exercise, too, and I never start with exercise with clients because we need to build up some of the other healthier habits around what you’re saying; good breakfast, hydration, maybe better sleep, maybe some healthier food choices more consistently.

Dave: The idea of moving our bodies, it feels so good and it does make us more likely to fulfill some of those other habits. I agree with you, getting into a gym routine isn’t step number one. Moving your body just has so many positive ramifications, it’s worth it.

I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent, but it does all tie back.

Jen: Go for it.

Dave: I was doing this experiment with another fitness coach friend of mine, we were using an app called Toggl. What you do is you set up different ways that you spend time in your life. We were doing it because we really wanted to make our time more efficient to work less, to work better and have more time for things that we really say are important.

I had things like movement, I had work, I had sleep, I had eating, I had chores. One that I had that I wanted to really get rid of was what I called screen time, that would be like Facebook or reading news or whatever it is.

The app is called Toggl because you literally just toggle a switch on when you start doing something and then Toggl another switch when you start doing something else. Then at the end of the day or at the end of the week it gives you a report of how you spent all of your time.

My accountability buddy and I decided we were going to do this for a week and then we were going to share our reports. It was so motivating, because any time I would go and start reading some article online I had toggled my switch and I thought, “Johnny is going to see this and I don’t want him to see me wasting all of this time.”

One of the outcomes of this was that I wrote a blog post talking about people who say they don’t have time for exercise. This exercise was so revealing for me, because it really made me look for ways to combine things that I said were important to me. I say that movement is important and I say that relationships are important, but as I was toggling I saw that movement was really important, because I love exercise, but I actually don’t make a whole lot of time for these relationships with people that I say that I love.

I started to think about ways that I could combine these. One you mentioned was to grab a friend and go for a walk. There’s tons of exercise that I do that is solo exercise and now it has become my mission to always grab someone to do that with me. I know this sounds silly, but it has been something that I’ve really struggled through. If I grab a running buddy and this running buddy isn’t running at my pace, I need to be okay with that because it’s sort of killing two birds with one stone and fulfilling something that I say is valuable.

I said this was going to come full circle. I say to the listeners that if losing weight, if being fit, if being healthy, if exercising is something that you value, how can you pair that? We talked about moving for five minutes. How can you pair that with something else that you also are already doing or that you say is valuable? It could be spending time with someone. If you really enjoy watching a certain TV show, is there a way that you can move a little bit during that show? If you’re a podcast listener, is that a way that you can throw on your podcast and go move your body?

Once you start to do that, it does kill two birds with one stone and it also gives us so much time back, which I think we can all use.

Jen: Oh, yes. I followed you on Facebook when you were doing that experiment, I remember you sharing some posts about it and I read your blog post. It’s crazy what we do that wastes time.

Dave: Oh my gosh. Even for people like you and I, we’re coaches. I know when I wrote that post I was embarrassed about all of this screen time that I had. Man, I watch a lot of YouTube.

Jen: Absolutely, or researching, or just even like the amount of hours people are spending on SnapChat, Facebook, Instagram. You think five minutes, like you said.

When we talk about moving your body to people listening, if you can’t get out for a walk, do 30 air squats, take a break, do 30 more. Do 30 lunges. You can just do bodyweight exercise in your own home. You don’t even need any equipment for this.

I think sometimes we create all of these barriers in our mind about what we think exercise needs to be. I love that your message is just move. Throw on your best most favorite party song and dance it out in your living room, if you want. I do that with my kids when we need to change the mood a little bit sometimes and it’s fun.

Dave: All of these things, it’s not new news. We’re not talking about anything that is rocket science. I would like to again challenge the listeners and say how are you actually going to make that happen? It’s a psychological construct that is going to create that change.

Psychologically, what are you willing to commit to? What is your five minutes or 10 minutes? If you’re already an exerciser, upping the ante just a little tiny bit. How are you going to make that happen? What is the routine? What are you going to pair it with?

I don’t know if there are comments in the section where you’re going to post this.

Jen: There is.

Dave: Comment and tell us. I would love to hear it. Jen, maybe I can jump in and give some feedback. I would love to see what are the steps that you’re going to actually apply as opposed to just listening to this and saying, “That was an interesting podcast.”

Jen: For the listeners, you can find all of the things that we’re talking about here and be able to comment on what you’re going to choose to do by going to JenniferPowter.com/007. That will be where you can drop down into the comments and share.

I think you and I could both moderate and give some support, some high 10s and some acknowledgement that change can be hard, but the more that you do it and stay consistent with it the easier it gets. The hardest part is starting. No matter what it is, the hardest part is starting.

Dave, tell me, you also just wrote a book.

Dave: I did. Actually, you were a contributor to this book.

Jen: That’s amazing. It was so exciting. Tell us a little bit about your book and tell us how listeners can find you, because you’re such a perfect complement to the work that I do with your focus on exercise and your online programs. Let’s just put that out there to people listening and share a little bit about your book and how it all came to be together.

Dave: The book has been a long time in the making, it’s called Can’t Lose: 14 Winning Weight Loss Secrets for Women Who Think They Can’t Lose Weight. The reason that I called it Can’t Lose is because we used the word stuck in this conversation right now and so many women feel like, “I can’t lose weight.”

I wrote this book and a lot it is interviews with people like yourself, so I have 14 experts in all different areas of weight loss talking about different issues. Not every single one of them is going to be the answer for every single woman, but I guarantee that every woman who reads that book there will be one, or two, or three, or even four interviews that those are the reasons why you feel like you “can’t lose,” because you can.

For me it was no more marketing, let’s get by the marketing. I give the book away for free, so I’m not making money on it. It’s really just to get that honest message out there.

Jen: We’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well. We can also learn more about you at MakeYourBodyWork.com, which is an awesome URL. You can make your body work, I love that, because you can.

I hope to have you back. I think that you are just such a wealth of expertise and have so many clients who have succeeded in spite of their own doubt in the beginning. That right there provides inspiration.

I know that sometimes the thing that people need to hang onto is the hope that change can happen or that you can create change in your own life too. I hope that we’ve shared that message that absolutely you can. It’s often just making the decision that you want to.

Dave: It is. I know a lot of the stuff that we talked about was so simple, but let’s take these simple ideas and put them into practice. To comment on your podcast show, I think that’s a great first step. If anyone listening has questions for me about their specific situation, email me. Jen can put a link to my email in the show notes for you as well.

Jen, you’ve been a guest on my podcast. My podcast is a Q&A podcast, so for your listeners if they have specific questions maybe that could even be a future episode on the podcast.

Jen: Awesome. You have lots of resources available to you here. You can email Dave, you can find him on Facebook, comment if you’re listening and you’ve been stuck with exercise like we talked about and share what you’re going to do.

Dave, thank you so much for coming on today.

Dave: Honestly, my pleasure. It’s always great chatting with you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Jen: Awesome. Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll catch you on the next episode. Bye for now.