 Now, I'm gonna get pretty vulnerable here in this video and share things with you guys that I haven't really shared with you before. So please be a little, I know it's the internet, but please be kind in the comments. Any type of trigger that is making you feel bad is a good thing. And in this video, I'm going to tell you exactly why. So today, I went to my family doctor for just like a annual checkup. And everything was fine, we did some blood work, whatever, did the whole height and weight thing. I left the doctor's office and I had a printout of everything that happened during the appointment. And I went directly to the gym. I get to the gym, I'm sitting in the parking lot, and I decided to take this piece of paper out and look over it. And during the appointment, my doctor's asking me about have I changed my diet? What are things that I'm doing differently? Am I still working out consistently? Am I eating a lot of red meat? All of these questions, am I more stressed than I used to be? I didn't really think much of it until I'm sitting in the gym parking lot and I look over this paper and I see which it seemed like it screamed so loudly to me, overweight. Now, a lot of you don't know my history with body dysmorphia and my very toxic and unhealthy relationship with food and my body. Now, this is something that I've struggled with for about 10 years. What happened when I read this word, just a word, right? It brought me back to the first time when someone told me that I was too heavy and that was when I was with my first modeling agency when I was 18 years old. She told me that I'd gained a lot of weight. She wasn't gonna put me in the bikini competition that I was supposed to be in. She may be stand up and she's like, look at you, look at your face, look at your hips, all this stuff, right? On the positive side of that, it led me to my health and fitness journey. And what I didn't realize was that for about 10 years I didn't even realize any of this until a year ago of how bad my body image is, was and how unhealthy my relationship with food is. I read this word, you know, overweight on the paper. It shocked me. It shocked me because I would say I eat healthier than 95% of the people I know. I've been consistently working out in the gym six to seven days a week for the last decade of my life. I'm actually coming up on 11 years. I tend to think of myself as a very healthy and fit person. Now, can I train harder? Yes. Can I eat healthier? Yes. But I've worked so hard to create this balance in my life between how I used to be when I wouldn't eat grapes. I wouldn't eat peanut butter. I wouldn't eat carbs. I was at the gym two times a day. Like it was too much. It was an unhealthy way of living. To binge eating, eating a ton of sugar, going out and drinking more often than I normally do. And it's been this pendulum back and forth for years. And I feel that over the past year or two I have found a very healthy balance and it's taken me so much introspection and so much work to get there. That seeing this word on this piece of paper shattered me. It released things in me that I didn't know were still in me. I walk into the gym. It's like replaying over and over again in my mind. And then I'm remembering, oh, she was asking me all these questions. That's baby, why? I go into the gym bathroom and I cry. And I go through my workout half there, half in my head about all this. How could I have let this happen? How am I overweight? I'm looking at myself in the mirror which is the picture that I have on the thumbnail there. And I'm like, I have abs. They might not be crazy defined, but they're there. You know, I eat some candy every once in a while and I don't beat myself up about it. For 10 years, every single time I ate or drank something there was this crazy battle in my head of what kind of calories are these? Should I eat those? Should I not? Well, I'm treating myself, but do you deserve to treat yourself? And this would go on every single time I consumed something. Okay, no one around me would know. My friends didn't know. My significant others didn't know. My friends, my family, whoever. No one knew that this inner dialogue would happen to me. And it's ironic because I just realized yesterday that I had gone out the night before with my roommates and I ate two tacos. It hit me that I didn't have that inner dialogue for the first time. And I was so proud of myself. Like, wow, I've really gotten to a healthier, more sustainable place with my eating habits and with my mental health regarding my food consumption and body image. And then today this happened. And I started spiraling. I was brought back to the time when I was 18 years old in my modeling agency's office. I was brought back to always striving to have the perfect 10 when I was a competitive gymnast before that. I just thought I had come so far and it just shot me backwards so hard. And then I realized, and you guys know me and I talk about this a lot on my channel. How can we look at these things that we perceive to be negative that happen to us as a positive? So I asked myself that, you know, I practice what I preach, okay? It's not always easy. And I spiraled for a good hour and a half, two hours before I asked myself this question. And it was, how is this a good thing? Immediately the answer came out. Hey, Sarah, you've done a wonderful job but you still have work to do. There are still things in you that you need to heal around this situation. Because I've said this before, if someone says something to you and you believe it to be true, it will trigger you because there's a part of you that believes it and agrees with what they're saying for the most part. If someone says something to you and it doesn't bother you, it's because you're so detached and you don't believe it that you're able to just be unbothered because you're just like, yeah, whatever. So I realized the fact that I started spiraling and the fact that I got so upset about this one word, about this one word on a piece of paper, even though I know I'm at a healthy weight and a healthy fat percentage and that I have a good relationship, a better relationship with food than I used to, it still took me for a ride. And so it led me to the understanding and the knowledge that there was still something in me that I needed to work on. There was still something in me that I needed to heal. And so I wanted to share this story with you guys because we tend to look at these undesirable emotions or triggers as really bad things. Like we don't wanna feel bad. We don't wanna feel depressed or sad or angry or resentful or fill in the blank, right? But what we can do is allow those emotions to literally guide us to what in us that still needs healing, that still needs to be addressed, that still needs to be worked on. We accumulate a lot over our lifetime, right? Like it's what we signed up for. We chose to be here. We wanted to be here to have all of these experiences. You guys know that my biggest thing that I preach on my channel is happiness and fulfillment. And so sometimes when we feel these less desirable emotions, we think that we're not on that path. But what we do is we can use those things for ammo to get us even further along on our happiness path. So if this didn't happen to me today, I wouldn't have known that I still believed those things about myself, that I still didn't love my body fully. And I thought I did. So I want you to look at the circumstances in your life or things that people say or bring that awareness in when you are feeling unhappy for whatever reason and look through it and use it as a tool. What is it trying to show you? What is it trying to teach you about yourself? How can you use this emotion to love yourself more? When we are able to start looking at everything in our life as a positive or something to learn from, it allows us to stop being so hard on ourselves and it allows us to enjoy life more fully because we know that whatever is coming our way, whatever comes our way, whatever we've experienced in the past, we can use for our ultimate good. It's not easy to face our triggers, right? And to face these negative emotions. I had a really tough time today, but we can do it. You can do it. And if you need help working through some of these things, I do offer one-on-one coaching. You can either email me directly or you can click the link in my description below and we can kind of talk things over and see if I can help you with whatever issue that you're facing. I'll always be honest. If I don't feel that I can help you transform in the area that you desire, I'm going to tell you that straight up. Now, if you have any questions about your own emotions that maybe I can help you with otherwise, feel free to drop it in the comments below. I'm always going to respond and see how I can help you. That's why I'm here. I wasn't sure if I wanted to share this story. It's very vulnerable for me. I don't talk about this stuff. I don't even think most of my friends know how deep this is in me. But I thought that even if my story could help one person then it's worth sharing, okay? Because we've all been through stuff. If you found some value in this video, it would really help me out if you would like and subscribe. And that way, I can see you next week because I post a video like this every week. I love you so much and don't forget, be limitlessly yourself.