Feeling Broken, & My Path to Health and Fitness

Show Notes

I know how it feels to feel your body is broken, feel frustrated and feel like everything is stacked against you and your goals. Join me in todays episode where I walk you through my health story and how turning to fitness changed me from the inside out. I walk you through my personal story of heartbreaking infertility, learning of my Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism, and years of sever low back pain that stopped me from running. 

All of these things ended up pointing me in a different direction. I learned how to find health and strength. Looking back I’m grateful for this journey. I talk about how we feel a pull to be a victim, and how we can over come that. How we can live in our higher self vs one that is swayed by all the things that are out of our control.

*warning - I’m a cryer I may get a little emotional as I revisit my story. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Lindsay

Wife and mother of three. I have a deep passion for learning and teaching. I also really love lifting weights and fitness.

What is LiftingLindsay's More Than Fitness?

Dive into the joy of fitness with Lindsay and other guests exploring how it goes well and beyond the gym floor, the number on the scale, the size of your waist or the calories you're counting.

Welcome to the lifting Lindsay podcast. Today. I'm going to be getting a little bit more personal as they talk about, some struggles that I've personally had with, my health and, just a time in my life when I just felt like my body. Just broken. So broken. I was so frustrated.

I don't know if you've experienced personally, that feeling of, I mean, I think we've all experienced it in our life in general, right? When we're like, nothing is working like it should life isn't going perfect. Like it quote unquote should, right. We have these really high expectations of how things should be going.

And then I can have the life that I want when everything's lining up perfectly, but nothing is. And guess what nothing ever really will. It's just not even if you are on the outside, looking at somebody's public life and making tons of assumptions based off of their public life. Oh, everything's just going perfectly for them.

Everything's just going really well. And then you start coming. Your private life to their public life? Well, I can't achieve that because in my life X, Y, and Z is going on. And what we end up doing is we turn ourselves into victims. The truth is you have no idea what that person is dealing with on a day to day, you have no idea about the choices they make on a day to day basis that allows them to show.

And to achieve the things that they want to that for, you may seem like, well, it just comes easy for them. And I can tell you right now, somebody with experience that no, it doesn't come easy. I I've had people tell me, well, you're successful in dieting in cutting, because it's just easy for you. I'm like, are you kidding me?

We have to be so cautious about comparing our private life to other people's public life, because we have no idea the trade-offs that they are making on a day to day that take them out of victim hood and put them on the path to them achieving their goals. You, that is so powerful.

That's so important to understand. Do you know, you get to choose. You choose, ultimately, am I going to be a victim of my circumstance or am I going to choose different thoughts around it? Am I going to choose different behaviors and attitudes? Okay. So I think that that's really important to understand is we ultimately.

At the end of the day, am I a victim? And how does that show up? How can we know whether we are showing up in a victim mindset or not? Right now I'm reading a book that I'm really, really enjoying, and it is called the everyday hero.

The author Robin Sharma, I really love his stuff. And he talks about this are we being the victim? Are we choosing this victim mentally? Or are we stepping into the, what he refers to as the everyday hero? I just love that. I think that that's so powerful. So let me kind of go through some of the things that he talks about, when it comes to, these values that are going to take us out of the victim mindset.

First he talks about how we need to shift our mindset. From can't to can. So if you find at the end of the day, when you're thinking back on your actions throughout the day, did they lead to your goals or didn't they, if you find that you're saying well, but I can't do that because of this and this and this.

No, no, no, no, no, you can. You made a trade off. You chose. One is. One is stepping into, I'm an empowered individual who makes my own life choices and I'm not influenced constantly by outside influences. So one is a victim gives all their power away. The other who says, no, I can. I make my own choices.

I make my own trade-offs. And I think through these things, that's a place of empowerment. The victim mindset says, oh, I can't the hero mentality. This is what Robin Sharman says the mentality of no, no, no, I can. I can. And I choose, victim makes excuses, the hero delivers results.

So I'm sure you guys have all met this person and maybe you are this person. Let's just be honest with ourselves for a second. Maybe you are this person where. When you think about your goal, you instantly think I can't.

You can spot a victim by watching how they have a near instant reason to explain why their life isn't working out. And guess what? It never has anything to do.

Isn't that interesting. So that is so you can spot the victim mentality so quickly by that such people have recited these excuses. So many times they've actually brainwashed themselves into believing that they are true. They give all their power away out of their hands. Oh, I can't hit my goals because of the decision and guess what none of those have to do with them.

They're all on other people, other things. Other circumstances. And then he talks about how another victim mentality is living in the past. I actually don't believe that there's anything necessarily wrong with looking at the past if we are using it, to learn from it. But I love how he says they're living in the past.

I'll sit down and talk to clients and I'm onboarding. To, figure out what plan's going to work. And it is interesting sometimes when they will nothing works and then they list all of these things that they've done in the past and how they've they've never worked. And then once again, they'll talk about all of these things that are totally out of their control.

They didn't work because all of these reasons totally out of my control.

Another victim mentality is being busy, busy, busy. On the opposite end of that is being productive. I see this in fitness a lot. There's a lot of busy people in fitness. They're moving all the time, but their focus is actually on all the wrong things.

So they go to the gym, they kill themselves for an hour or two hours. Then they also kill themselves for another hour doing cardio. They're not taking that same intensity and bringing it towards food. So they feel like I'm doing all the things. I'm busy, busy, busy, but I never reaching my goals. It's all out of my hands.

Well, no, no, no. It's, you are busy, but you're busy putting your energy towards the wrong things. We could actually save you time. Minimize your gym. Really emphasize your nutrition and health culture in your home. You will be less busy and you will be more productive. And it is funny to watch some women have a really hard time giving up the busy.

No, no, no, but that's my medal of honor is the busy, busy, busy is the lifting. To seven times a week and I can't give that up. Maybe if we hang up that metal and actually choose a better goal, life balance, nutrition, health, culture, education, we could save you time and have you hit your goals and you'll have more time for family.

That was a huge shift for me. When I went from lifting six times a week to lifting four. I did not want to hang up that metal of no, no, no, no, but I love lifting I'm but I was plateauing. Because I was busy, busy, busy, but I wasn't focusing my energy on where it needed to be, which was rest and recovery per my goal. So it is , really interesting.

This does have to do with my journey and where my body was.

, 13 years ago and where it is now. So I began talking about how I just felt like my body was so broken. I was having all of these health issues. I was frustrated. I wanted to fall into victim and I actually didn't have the education to get myself. So, let me kind of walk you through some of the things that I was dealing with.

Well, when I first started dating Alex, my husband, one of the things that I told him was I want 12 kids guys. I come from a huge family, so it's a Brady bunch family. My mom was married, had seven. My dad was married, had three. They got married and had.

I love my huge family and growing up, I just always wanted 12 kids. Well, I told that to Alex while we were dating. Can we just take a moment here and think , wow, that must've been true. Love if he didn't run so fast away from me.

It must be true love. Right. So I was so excited to get married, to start this family and years go by and nothing. Nobody could have prepared me for the heartbreak of infertility. And I just remember thinking at one point, literally everything within my heart wants to be a mom.

Everything about my body was meant to create. And then to sustain life after creation and to give and serve. And my heart just ached to be a mother and no one could have prepared me for that heartache of wanting something so good. And what I felt like was such a righteous, beautiful, wonderful desire of my heart and not being able to have that.

And I just remember thinking, oh, In some ways it was, I had to really fight, not feeling good enough. It's like, oh, I can't, my body won't do this simple thing that I felt like nobody else struggled with. And that was really hard for me. And, then I remember going to the doctor and, , getting kind of a checkup.

See if we could do something about this infertility. And, and he noticed that there was this growth in my throat and we went and got some scans on it and it was this tumor about the size of an egg. And I had to go in and get it surgically removed. And while they were in there, the tumor, they said, had been growing so fast.

It was bursting the vessels around and, I didn't realize at the time it had engulfed half of my thyroid. So when they took it out and it was actually acting as an independent thyroid, so they took it out and when they removed it, they also noticed, so half of my thyroid was gone, but they noticed on the other half, that was still there.

That, there was a lot of scar tissue. So now I have hypothyroidism because I only have half of a thyroid function. And sometimes when I tell people I have thyroid issues and they're like hyperthyroid and like no hypo. And they're like, what? You look like, you would have an overactive, I'm like, Nope, underactive.

I only have half of it, but they saw all this scar tissue. And that was an indication of this autoimmune disease that I have where this autoimmune disease actually attacks my thyroid. And, , it's called Hashimoto's. So I have to stay on top of getting my blood work done, getting my thyroid levels checked, and I really always push that.

They check with T3 levels too. So TSH and T4 and T3. And, I'm in there usually every three to four months, getting things checked and making sure that everything is okay. and sometimes I think people. When they hear, I have Hashimoto's they're like, oh, well, we'll just do this special diet and it will go away.

I'm like, but I only have half of my thyroid in that half. That's there as kind of feeble. Like I will forever be on medication for my thyroid. So that's something that I've just accepted, but at the time it was hard. It was frustrating because here my body wasn't working. I could not have.

And they didn't know why. At this time I had spent years on medication. I had done, artificial inseminations at this point. And now it's like, okay, now your sirens also don't work here. So your hormone levels. And it was frustrating. And it also was scary the first few weeks, because what had happened was they read. This tumor that had been acting as an independent thyroid. So I was hyper at the time and, then they removed it. Now I'm hypothyroid. Now they're trained to at the same do a bunch of blood work, try to balance out my hormones and they have me on these medications. And at the time I think it was just one level thyroxin and.

They're trying to balance everything out. And within seven days, my weight to shut up five pounds and I was like, oh, okay. That's something we're trying to figure stuff out here. And then a week later it's up three more and I'm like, okay. Um, does it stop? Is this going to stop? Does it just kind of stop?

Like, how is this going to work? I was kind of beginning to pay. And then another week had gone by about three weeks, had gone by, and my weight, it just shut up 10 pounds. And that was scary because once again, I'm trying to figure out what is, what in the world is going on with my body.

At this point because I hadn't changed my diet or anything, but now all of a sudden it's just bam, bam, bam coming on. And that was scary to me. I worked with the doctors, we got medication just right. Things were balanced in a good range and the weight stopped coming on. But here I am up in a matter of weeks, you know, 10 pounds, usually 10 pounds is like matter of years, they say on average in American puts on, two pounds every year.

So it's like usually a gradual process. But for me, that was very scary. And then. How it went on, it just went straight to me, belly my belly and arms, just bam, 10 pounds. And that was all of a sudden, it's like, oh my pants don't fit. I have, when I, but in my pants, I have these large love handles that three weeks ago.

I didn't have this problem. And now all of a sudden they're there. And so on top of just, I don't know if you've ever personally. Your body just not working well, but it had this effect on me emotionally, too. And I just felt broken and I just was like, I've got to get healthy. I've got to focus on health.

I didn't know where to start. Oh my gosh. Have you ever been like Googled how to. Wait, or how do I get healthy? There's like a million different approaches and everybody else's wrong, but them, and it is so hard to try to navigate through all this information. I graduated.

My degree is in public relations in Spanish. So I speak Spanish. I wanted to relate to the public in Espanol. That's what I got my degree in. I had just graduated. My body is broken. I have no understanding of nutrition or fitness. Like literally my understanding of health, fitness nutrition at this point are well, I was raised in a family of runners and I have seven sisters all because remember I'm the only one from my parents.

So my body I'm five, eight, and, Mo all of my sisters are like 5, 4, 5, 5, like they are short and they have very different structures than me. Very different body types. And they're all. They're athletic and awesome. And I played basketball and volleyball through high school and a little into college. I was athletic, but just a totally different build than them. I never looked fit. So my experience in, if I want to look a certain way, I do what my sisters do and they weren't. And when they run, they lose some weight and they just look fit. And man, that was not me. So that's, I learned that the hard way that no, if genetically, you don't have muscle, it doesn't matter how much weight you lose.

You're not going to look fit. You will just look skinny. And at this point, remember how all the way it had gone to my belly. So I just really looked and felt skinny, fat. My very limited knowledge of health, nutrition, fitness was we'll just run, do classes, do bouncy, bouncy. , and then you can look like, you know, your sisters and then do like smoothies and green drinks.

Shove all the spinach in a protein shake and try your best to make it taste as good as possible. This was my limited knowledge. So I really focused on, okay, I'm gonna restrict food. I'm just going to try to like drink these smoothies and stuff. As best I can try to gag down this quote, unquote, healthy food at the same time I'm being told.

Well, because of your Hashimoto's, you can't have dairy. You can't have gluten. You have to be on this special diet to control my house. She knows. So manmade few choices. I can just like, not enjoying life. Like I am feeling skinny, fat, I'm feeling broken. I have no clue where to even start.

So I start like with what runner's world is telling me to do, I decide, you know what, I'm going to run a marathon, you know, in a marathon that will help me. It will, it will be a goal. I'll run a marathon and then I'll look fit. Then my in like my little Lindsey brain, I had this image. I'll get healthy miraculously.

My infertility will go away. My Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism will be more controlled. and really looking back on it. I was just desperate for something in my life to control because I felt like I had no control. I felt like I truly was at the influence of all of these outside influence.

And I had no control over my life. It was incredibly frustrating. And I was working through some depression at the time too, because I just, nothing was working,

so I start running and doing light green. And eating like my fiber protein bars.

And I do remember, losing some weight, but I still looked skinny fat. Like I just wasn't looking fit. I wasn't looking healthy. I remember crossing the marathon and I am not a gifted runner by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm pretty sure they were like cleaning up the marathon by the time I crossed.

But I remember crossing and I was just T. Just crying. I felt like I had just accomplished in this amazing feed. And I was just hoping that this could be the beginning of my health journey and I could be a stronger person side note. When we were first married, I grabbed a gallon of milk to pour and Alex said he watched me.

And he goes, can you not pour the milk one handed? And I tried to, and I couldn't that's how weak I was. Okay. And he was N I still remember to this day, him saying, I don't know if that's that's right. Like, I feel like somebody should be able to pour a glass of. With one hand. That was very concerning to him.

And he told me, I think you should lift weights. And I'm like, no, I don't want to look like a man. I'm dead serious guys. I don't want to look like a man. When I was an athlete, like I would lift weights and my traps would get really big. And he's like, I don't know if that's true.

Looking back. I was like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking? This is so comical. Okay. I was that girl guys. Why do I preach so much against all the bouncy, bouncy all of the fake health fats? Because I was that girl. Okay. I'm sure some. There is a picture or video of Lindsay on a Bosu ball trying to squat. Like I'm I have done it all.

I am here to tell you I have done it all. I know what works. I know what doesn't. So anyways, that's that really is how weak I was. So I ran this marathon. I thought, Hey, this is the beginning of me creating a healthy lifestyle. And then all of a sudden, a few weeks later I was. And I started feeling the shooting pain and then the next day my leg went numb and I like any other runner was like, no, I love running.

I'm just going to run through the pain. So that's how hardcore I am. And I couldn't run through the pain anymore. It got so bad that I actually couldn't sleep at night. Any pole on my toes from the sheets. It would cause shooting pain in my low back. So I'm just like, oh my gosh, you have got to be kidding me.

Like another thing out of my control happening to me, I'm trying my best to be healthy. I finally found something I found running that I felt was helping me physically and emotionally, and mentally, and. And so I paid so much money. I went to this guy in Utah, that was a sports specialist and he was supposed to be the best working with all these athletes.

And I paid so much money to work with him on my low back. And we did it all. We did acupuncture, we did, chiropractics. We did machines that would like stretch my low back. They found that I had three bulging discs in my low back that were really. And, I didn't want to steroid shot. I felt like that was like whacking at the dying leaves when really it was the roots of the tree that need to be tended.

And so that was my, I'm not saying that that's for everybody. I'm just saying that that was my personal opinion was no, there's something wrong that needs to be fixed. I don't want to just something masking the pain. And I remember one point the doctor just saying, after seven or eight months, I felt like things were getting worse, not better.

And, I remember him saying just , you need to stop running and cause I kept trying, kept trying over and over again, it was the only thing I have and it was so frustrating. And I still remember, this is almost comical because I'm not a runner. Now I'm a lifter. But, when he told me you can't run any more lens, like we've got to get this figured out.

And I just sat there crying and I was like, I can't have.

My body is just shutting down on me. I killed run. The one thing that I had, you're killing me here. I have to be able to run these, like you can't. It was so unbelievably frustrating. So I decided, okay, this isn't working all of these hours. Once twice a week, sometimes in your office, this isn't working.

So I was speaking to another doctor who is like, I actually think the best thing for you is to stop all low body activity. cause at this point it's still hurt to walk even he's like, I just think that you need to stop. Well, my infertility story was going on right now, too. We had finally been able to adopt, and that was such an incredible miracle for us.

We had gone through a total of, years and years on medication. We had done seven artificial inseminations. , I had gone through three failed in VITROS and. I just remember praying one day and I told God, I'm like, you cannot ask me to do for them vitro. the process is extremely emotionally and physically tiring because you are shooting all of these hormones in your body.

It can make you like, feel like you're crazy. And my husband was such a trooper throughout that whole experience, just really, by my side, hurting with me throughout that whole experience. And, it was just exhausting. And on top of that, we don't believe in getting into debt. So we pay cash for everything and it was like $50,000 gone.

Just trying so hard to start this family. I told heavenly father, I cannot do a fourth. You cannot ask me to do a fourth. It is so emotionally taxing. And, so my issue is it's something with my air quality. They don't know if it's genetic, at one point they didn't know if it was genetic.

I had no signs of a endometrial. But finally, he's like, I think we need to do surgery and see, see what's going on in there. So when I woke up, he told me that was one of the worst cases of endometriosis I've ever seen. And so he's like we cleaned everything up. We'll try to do a retrieval again. And a lot of times endometriosis will, it will affect it.

All the scarring will affect the. So we did it again after that, and that was our third in vitro and it didn't have any influence on the eight quality. So he told me at that point, lenses will be the last time I use your eggs and we considered an egg donor, but decided not to go down that route. , so we turned towards adoption and, , that year it happened really fast for us that year, Christmas day, we brought Elsie my oldest.

She was born two days before Christmas. She had two days in the hospital with her birth mother and then Christmas day, we brought her home and we have an open adoption. And, , it has been a blessing for LC and for our whole family to know her birth family, they are an incredible.

So a month after we get LC, we get a phone. From, well, I had actually been at the time I was being invited to go around Utah and speak to different churches and congregations. And I would talk about, infertility and I would talk about adoption.

And, and I, I had a woman come up to me afterwards and she said, will you ever do a fourth? And remember what I had told God? No. So I told her the same thing I said, no. And as I'm saying, no, Overwhelming feeling comes over me. You will, and you will do it now. And I went home and just cried to Alex, I walked in, I still can picture him sitting on the couch. I walk in, he's holding our newborn baby and I look at him and I say, , Alex were to do another. And he looks at me. He goes, what? I mean, like I said, we just dropped 50,000 on all these failed and Beatrice, we had dropped 15,000 on adopting Elsie and he looks at me and he looks down at LC and then he looks back at me and he goes, how if I said, I don't know, but I know we're supposed to.

And he just looked at me. He goes, okay, then we'll do it. I kid you not a week later, we get a phone call from a nurse that I had worked with in Dr. Folk's office at Utah fertility. And I had worked closely with her and she called me up and she goes, Lindsay, can you come in and talk to Dr. Full?

we went in and he said, I've been chosen to do some research on a quality and try a new drug. And, in order to qualify for this trial and for this free in vitro, you needed three or more failed and features and you qualified. And he, I really still remember him looking down at LCC in this new board.

And he looks at me, he goes, do you want to do it? And we both were just like, yes, of course. So we tried this new drug. I still actually don't even know the name of the drug because it was. What is it called? A double-blinded anyways. So we didn't know whether we were on placebo or on the drug we had to be because never had, I had quality eggs to even freeze any of ours.

And that force in vitro, we put into and we got, , Hazel, and then we had four frozen and. A few years later, we took two out link was frozen and he was sorry. He was our fresh link, was our frozen. And we put two in me and we got link and we still have two frozen. And at the end of this year, we think that we're going to use those last two frozen.

so I had Hazel and during that time, I just took a total break from running.

And, , after Hazel was born, my back was a little bit better. I definitely felt it during pregnancy. , which is actually one of the reasons why I just took the whole pregnancy off and didn't try to run or anything like that because I felt it a lot in my low back. . That was really painful with Hazel. So I didn't do any running. And then, I had Hazel and I had put 40 pounds on in this pregnancy. Well, everybody told me, it's okay, Lindsay, like it'll just drop right off.

It'll drop right off. . Well, it didn't fall off. And, I could hide it because at the time the style was , really baggy shirts. And I put all of my weight around my stomach. So I literally looked like I had this huge tire around my stomach when I had my shirt off.

So it really was that skinny fat. And, , at the time Alex put a ton of weight on and he decided, he was decided I'm going to start doing bodybuilding competitions because he always loved. And so he started getting back into weightlifting.

He started doing bodybuilding competitions and he started really leaning down and he was doing something called tracking macros. So for the first time I start really studying and learning about macros and about nutrition. And this gave me a far better, nutrition education than my previous, just.

Protein spinach shakes and eat your protein bars. This started giving me more of a bigger idea of nutrition and I just started diving into it, so I started dieting and I started dropping body fat without, but I still couldn't work out. I tried running again and it hurt my back again.

Alex was like, you need to start lifting weights and. Once again, little Lindsay's like, no, but I don't want to look like a man. And so he finally convinced me, can I just tell you how hard it was to enter the weight room?

I couldn't go into a big gym, like Vasa I was far too self-conscious I felt. , I just wanted to hide in the back on some elliptical or something. I did not want to go into the weight section I tried and I just felt so self-conscious and I felt so stupid. And so I, found a little rec center and I would go early in the morning when there was nobody there.

And then I started printing off just free workouts on. Bodybuilding.com. And I would go in with my little workout and I could only lift upper body, any lower body work with weights would hurt. And so I started dropping weight, which ended up helping my low back, dropping that weight. And I started doing a ton of upper body work.

Well, pretty soon the weight cut came off and I started being able to do some lower body, but only by. I would do some squats or split squats, but only body weight. And then pretty soon I can include weight, but only in machines where it's like stable and safe. And I knew I wasn't going to hurt my back.

And so that's really what started strengthening my body. My upper body was getting a ton of work done because it could, and my lower body. So I'm starting to see a lot more muscle development, but can I just say it was really hard going into the weight section? I was so self-conscious, I would come home and tell Alex I don't look like I belong.

I just want, I wish I could just go back to my treadmill. That was my safe comfort zone, but my body wasn't changing in my company. And Alex knew from experience that I needed weights, probably because he watched his wife, trying to pour a gallon of milk and could barely even do that.

I still remember starting out with preacher curls and only doing, three pounds and working. So. To move up to five pounds. And that was a big deal for me. That was huge that I could go from three pounds on a preacher. When I say genetically, I had no muscle and no strength, I'm not overselling that point.

I don't think I can, I think just me not being able to pour a gallon of milk or doing three pound preacher, I wasn't trying to just stick with pink dumbbells here. That was literally my first. When I first started out. So to go from a girl, barely being able to curl three pounds on a preacher bench, to

Years later, dead lifting 225 pounds. The day before I gave birth to my son, I cannot emphasize how proud I am of my hard work over the. That I was not given this amazing fit, healthy body. I was pushed into fitness because I felt like my body was so broken and I was so frustrated, but there was one thing I didn't want to be.

I didn't want to be a victim. And so I I focused on controlling. The little bit that I could control. And I kept my expectations low. I wasn't expecting so three month amazing transformation at this point, I was just grateful that I was getting a little strength that my thyroid wasn't off, that I wasn't just putting on 5, 8, 10 pounds in a few weeks.

I really was focusing on small victories over to. I was so grateful when I could go from only doing body weight, squats to, I could now pick up five pounds in both hands and do a squat. I was so focused on just healing my body. And as time went on, it was incredible how my body started changing.

And then another thing started changing. The food culture in my home started changing and slowly bit by bit. I was eating more whole foods. I was focusing on, 80%, whole foods, 20% fun foods. So after a year of just incremental steps, I had dropped. That 40 pounds, but I was, I was pretty skinny still.

Well, I should say about nine months and I was still pretty skinny though. And, , I still couldn't see a six pack at this point. I hadn't developed a lot of the muscle, but at least the body fat was coming off and I was falling in love with the process at the gym when the girls would go down for their.

I know I'm supposed to nap when the kids go down, but I would just study like lifting and , nutrition. And then pretty soon I started noticing that I could slowly start building up more and more weight on my lower body, but I started noticing a few things. I started noticing that when I squat, it doesn't look like the books or when I did that.

No matter what I did my body would not look like what it did in the books. And that really pushed me into a lot of the more in depth study that I've done on the anatomy and biomechanics. And then that led me into, why do some people gain muscle faster than others?

How come I'm a hard muscle gainer? What's really going on. How can I. Make this faster, or what can I do to help? Because I'm not just this three month transformation person, I'm still working on being my healthiest fittest version. And anyway, so I really started diving into the nuances , and realizing how individual this process.

After a year or so, I started an Instagram account and started just sharing the little things that I was learning and little things that I knew. And I was really falling in love with weights. And I started really seeing my body change and my strength go up.

And then pretty soon people would ask me, can you coach me? And I'm like, no, I'm not. And I was getting all of these certifications because I was so fascinated by nutrition. I was fascinated by, exercise and program design and biomechanics that I'm getting all it, it was kind of funny. I'm getting all of these certifications and people are like, well, coach me.

And I'm like, no, I'm not a coach. It actually was about three years into this process that I was like, you know, I'm going to start coaching. I'm going to start taking on clients. And it was so fulfilling to take on clients that were also struggling as I had struggled and to help educate them about the process.

It was such a beautiful thing. I've worked with hundreds of women during this time and I'm excited to continue. Last week I got a email from one of my clients and I started crying.

It was one of those. That you just cherish and in it, she talked about how,, how grateful she was that this journey of hers didn't just change her physique, but it empowered her and it changed her life. And it made her realize that she. Was more than she had been let herself become that she had power from within.

And she talks a lot about this. Isn't me talking about my physique lens. This is me discovering that I am a powerful person she's like you have changed my life and it makes me want to change. Other people's lives. I want to help other people discover the power that's within them.

And I thought to myself, this really is why I do what I do it. Yes. I help people change their physique. Yes. I help them lose weight. Yes. I help them build muscle, but ultimately I feel. If you have not become a better, stronger person inside, that's where the real change comes from.

And so to watch somebody else experienced that and then want to go out and serve and lift and empower other people. That's what this process is really about for me a desire to help empower people through fitness, through this medium that I love.

But if, if I don't help people change and discover who they really are and the power that's within them, I feel like I failed because that's what this journey ultimately has been. It has been a journey of, I was given some pretty hard cards where things were just stacked against me, and I could have chosen to be a victim and live in my past and live in the world of Kant and live in this world.

Nope. I, my thyroid doesn't work and my genetics are such, and my back is like this and I could've chosen to focus on all of the cans and I am so grateful. That instead I decided no today I'm going to focus on the little that I can control. I'm going to control the hut and I'm going to do my best with that.

And I'm going to be grateful for any good that happens because of it. I'm not going to try to force some , crazy three month transformation. I'm going to change my insight and strengthen my outside and whatever comes great. I will be grateful.

I really hope that me going through my own journey can help you somehow in yours. I hope you can focus on the things that you can control. I hope that you were doing this because you love yourself and you want to strengthen your.

Inside and out. I hope that you're doing this because you want to be healthy and you want to show up in your best, highest self for yourself and for others.

Thank you so much for joining me today on the lifting Lindsey podcast. If you have any questions, you can reach me at lifting Lindsay on Instagram, or you can also visit my website, lifting lindsay.com for more information on my coaching and my training app.