 Next question is from that guy T How would you advise someone with body dysmorphia and a long history of dieting to repair a broken relationship with food? man You know first off I want to say if you're a trainer and we were all trainers I we all have a lot of experience working with this kind of stuff But I would always if this was a bad situation. I would always Recommend that they also work with an expert in this in this type of field like eating disorder expert So I've worked with clients who both worked with a counselor or a therapist and then also trained with me Now the way that I would help them as a trainer one of the most successful strategies I ever found That helped people with body dysmorphia was to take their focus off of how their body looked and get them to focus on Performance and it's not a permanent solution because you could also go, you know You could also get you know a little pathological, which is performance But if you take someone that all they care about is how they look and they obsess about it And I could shift their focus and get them to care more about how strong I am My mobility how much stamina and endurance I have it gets their mind off of the how they look All the time and it's actually was quite successful. I've had several clients that you know I've done that with alongside working with a therapist and it was tremendous. I think that's that I think that's a must I think you have to have I mean even with all of our experience with clients like this, which I have to I would want a nutritionist a therapist and then me right and then all I'm focused on is programming I'm focused on programming and keeping your mind focused on increasing weights strength strength strength strength That's all worth talking about not about what your body looks like I don't even want to dive into your calories up or down I'd rather your nutritionist talk to you about feeding your body getting it what it needs and speaking to you about that your Therapist working through your your body dysmorphia and then me focusing you on your strength training I know that sounds crazy because I'm sure not everybody can afford all three of those But the reality is that you know, this is a Multifaceted type of situation that I don't want to think that I have the expertise to handle it all on my own Even if I have experience dealing with it and I think are all of our experiences will have led us to you know This person the worst thing you could do is talk about aesthetics and looking a certain way or trying to change that or the scale and And honestly, even if you don't have dysmorphia, right? Even if you're not somebody who's got this extreme case This is a strategy that we use with almost everybody anyway Yeah, because even even somebody who is not on this far into the spectrum that falls somewhere just you know They're concerned about their weight or they want to do this Like it's a good strategy for trainers to get away from the scale and get away from the way they look all the time I think there's enough of that with social media and magazines and television Telling us that we need to look a certain way that most people that come in I I tried and steer away from that way no matter what it's a psychological relief And I I definitely was big on this in the initial bit is really trying to focus in on how well your body's Functioning how well you feel how well the joints move, you know, what kind of strength gains we're getting you know week after week In and really like the the whole aesthetic side of it was something I would address, you know as it You know as it came up on checkpoints, but for the most part like I just find it such a better strategy to get people to Really get excited about You know actually being able to move better being able to be stronger. It's more empowering Than to to really just kind of look at yourself and being like I because it's so temporary like You're never gonna be like super happy that at that second It's always when you're looking back at like how happy you were how good you looked at that moment Yeah, and I think it's also important to communicate that the the standard The standard way of doing business or working with clients can actually be quite negative For people with body dysmorphia. So what do I mean by that? Well, typically what trainers do is we take circumference measurements We look at the scale we'll do body fat percentage tests the verbiage that we use Shape and sculpt your body, you know, where would you like to build? Where would you like to lose? What part of your body do you want to focus on? That kind of talk is terrible toxic for somebody who has body dysmorphia issues I'm also gonna say this statement which I think is true a lot of trainers Suffer from mild forms of body dysmorphia. It's probably why you got into fitness in the first place I know it was for me. So I'm speaking from personal experience So the thing that you want to be you know more than what you want to do. It's really about what you want to avoid I would not talk about What parts of your body you want to focus on in terms of looks I would not do body fat test I would not look at the scale or do circumference and use those metrics To gauge a client success all I would focus on all I would focus on was performance in the gym How strong you are how you feel and I would also create a light environment, you know Like I said, I've worked with several clients where I would work with their therapist And this is something that I think if you're a trainer can make you extremely valuable Get the names and numbers of the other practitioners that your client is working with and work with them You could be very very effective if you do that and so a lot of times I talk to the therapist and I'd say hey Here's what I'm doing What do you think and then usually the therapist would agree sometimes they'd say something like hey If you could keep the conversation kind of light in the workout because stress tends to trigger so-and-so And of course, this is all that with the permission of the client and then that's what I do I would work them out and we wouldn't even talk about performance We would just work out and have good conversation and just create an environment where the person could connect to their body with no outside pressure or focus and really start to learn how to Feel their body differently because I think when you have body dysmorphia your connection to your body Obviously is is not Healthy it's not accurate, but exercise itself is it can be a very healthy way to connect to your body You can feel your body moving you can feel muscles get sore you can feel things stretching And so if you don't layer it with a bunch of here's what's happening with your body Here's what we're doing and we're just in there and this kind of comfortable like let's just do this together type of thing They start to actually develop better Associations and connections to their body one of the people that I worked with Years ago who I'm talking about became a personal trainer They had such a positive experience were able to solve This issue with themselves that they quit their job and went into fitness because it was that you know positively impactful But again remember if you're a trainer Focus on what you know stay in your lane And work with the other practitioners who are experts on this particular subject