 Hi gang. Welcome back to my channel if you've been here before. If this is the first time we're checking out my channel, thank you so much. Welcome. The videos on this channel can help heal more than 90% of any health, wellness, and body image challenge. What else you need to know? So please take the time to check out the other videos on this channel. Please share them. There's so much widely unknown info here that can really help anybody. And it's free. So bonus, without further ado, the most requested video over the entire past that I have had this channel. I want to know. Tell me. I'm ready. I want to know my fitness journey. How did I lose weight? How did I lose acne? Lose water retention? Fix my cellulite? Fix IBS? Get rid of eczema and psoriasis? Fix my anxiety and panic disorder? How did I clear all of that? Well, let's go. So those things I mentioned were what I grew up with. Horrible PMS, eczema, psoriasis, acne, irritable bowel syndrome, lots of digestive problems in general, a lot of bloating, a lot of gas, and anxiety and panic to top it all off. I had inflammatory issues. One thing I find people aren't generally aware of is that any kind of bulging in between the pubic bone and the belly button, so more so below the belly button, is inflammation 99.9% of the time. I was full of cellulite. Couldn't lose weight. I was never seriously overweight, but I had extra weight that I just wasn't able to lose. I was always just squishy and full of water retention. So what happened? Well, I honestly, as silly as it might sound, I never considered that I might be able to have a bikini body or be acne-free. You know, I was looking at these girls in magazines thinking, well, that's just not me, and that's cool. You know, body positivity, I loved myself, thought I did, didn't. We're gonna get to that. But anyway, I just thought the body that we have is the body that we have. I didn't understand about diet or anything. So then I started dating a lovely guy who told me that I could have the body of my dreams. He was into bodybuilding. I really wanted a bikini body. I remember, this was around the time when Dukes of Hazard with Jessica Simpson came out, and I remember looking at a magazine thinking, man, that would be my ultimate dream. So he says to me, that's okay. It's easy. It's just mad. Burn more calories than you put in, and you'll lose weight. Okay. What? Is this the holy grail? That secret was very true. But here's what happened. I didn't understand at this time about nutrition and all of that. And so for me, it was like, okay, I'm gonna go to the gym in the mornings, and I'm gonna... I tracked all of my food. And in the day before apps, there was no such thing as apps back then. So what did I do? I had to really focus and add up on paper or in the notes section on my old school Nokia or whatever phone I had. Every calorie in everything I consumed. I made sure that I didn't eat more than 1200 calories max in a day. Is butter a carb? And that I was burning way more than that. Yeah, I lost a lot of weight. I lost a lot of fat. My skin issues got worse. My acne got worse. My panic and anxiety was off the charts. It was horrible. But in the meantime, I was now going to school for holistic health and nutrition. And so I was learning about nutrition and how to nourish the body. I was learning that it was Hitler, who was the pioneer in figuring out calories. How many calories did a person need to just barely survive? Which is horrifying, I realize. But turns out 1200 calories is starvation mode for a woman. An average woman's body takes anywhere between 1400 and 2000 calories a day to maintain life, to maintain things like walking to the car, carrying groceries. You burn calories when you sleep. You really need to be eating enough calories. So I was eating less than what my body was using to just keep me alive. So never mind nourishing myself, never mind putting on proper muscle. Oh my goodness. I was so emaciated at one point. I remember my mom telling me that I looked like a bobblehead. My head was just too big for my body. And because I was generally unhappy, I was getting more stressed. I was, you know, more depressed, more anxious. I drank a lot. And I even remember before I knew about food, I'd be like, oh, liquid calories. I'm just going to pee it out, whatever. But no. So all of that weight rebounded. I was never too much overweight, like I said, but I was a sweet little chunk. And I thought, what the hell? But now I have learned way more. And so skipping over a bunch of stuff, I did end up with an eating disorder in the end. It got so bad I would cancel plans that involved food. I would make sure I was eating, you know, just enough. I was making sure I was eating all negative calorie foods, like veggies and greens and fruits. Your body takes more calories to process those than what they contain in them. So not only was I only eating 1200 calories, I was counting all of those foods as those calories when they're invisible to the body. It just big mistake, big, huge. I have posted a link below to the video about my eating disorder experience. I'm not going to get into that. The video is there. If you want to check it out, please go ahead. I'm very transparent about it. Side note, if you're having a bad relationship with food, please get professional help. Game changer, life changer, success maker. Anyway, so then, etch a sketch. Let's just start over. You know, I have gone to post-secondary school for holistic health for eight years. I had a lot of health info under my belt. I decided to do it properly. I put on some sweet muscle. I lost a bunch of fat. I never wanted to be one of those really low fat percentage kind of people. I don't mind having a healthy amount of fat on my body. It really does make my mind happier. But anyway, how did I do it? I started focusing on the content of what was in my food, not the calories. And I don't track calories in macros now. I maintain a totally healthy weight. If I want to see my ads, I just avoid some extra carbs. I avoid anything that creates water retention. Boom, they're there. I enjoy myself. I have whole cheat days, cheat meals. It doesn't matter. As long as you're maintaining a healthy lifestyle to an 80-20% ratio, so 80% of the time, you're nourishing yourself optimally and you're being healthy 20% of the time, you can do whatever you damn well, please. And your body's not really going to notice the effects of that as long as it's not a binge. A binge is very unhealthy for your hormonal balance and all of that. So just try not to binge, but allow yourself a cookie if you want one. Allow yourself a whole plate of pasta. Don't mind if I do. Unless, of course, you have an issue like celiac disease or whatever, don't be too strict because you might not be that happy. So I moved to BC. I opened up a holistic health clinic in a yoga studio there and I was 100% healthy for a lot of that time. I realized I wasn't too happy with that either. I wanted more of a balance. Balance is key. So I maintained a balance. Balance good. Everything good. What I did and do now is I focus on fruits and vegetables and meats. The carbs that I like to ingest are wheat and gluten-free oatmeal, rice, quinoa, anything that's clean, whole grain, and gluten-free. I am not celiac, but I do notice gluten does increase my anxiety. It makes me bloated. It packs on the water retention. Anytime I want to drop weight and water retention real fast, all I do is cut out gluten and dairy. You'd be amazed at the results. Try it out yourself. Just try for three weeks. In this day and age, it is beyond easy to avoid gluten and dairy. It's beyond easy. The substitutes out there that you can eat in place of those are amazing. I remember when I started that diet, it was like cardboard if you didn't want to eat gluten. Now it's fine. There are also recipe hacks you can use for anything literally. That became a huge hobby of mine. I started hacking recipes. If you want to see more videos on recipes that I do hack so that they're optimally healthy, but they feel like complete treats, please comment below and I'd be happy to hack anything. I haven't been stumped yet that I can recall so far. You're getting your wishes. Maybe that's a challenge for you. And I started noticing that really what was going on with me on the outside was coming from the mind. And I know it seems so obvious for that to be the case, but you really need to look at the why behind why you want to lose weight. Because for me, it had a grounding on how other people saw me. I was so concerned with what other people thought and trying to be cool and trying to be attractive to people. And so I wasn't doing it for the right reasons. You need to be doing this for you, whether you want to be healthy or lose weight. Make sure you're doing it for you. These days when I get a client coming to me saying my husband or my wife is making me do this, I will not treat them because it will not work. It's going to cause a lot of stress. They're going to rebound and everyone is unhappier for it. So please, please, please take a minute to focus on the why behind why you want to lose weight. What is it about a six pack abs that you want so badly? And a lot of the times it does boil down to how other people are seeing you, but why about that even? I'm the eternal three-year-old with myself. I want to know why everything. Once I got clear on that, I started doing a lot more internal examination into my mind and just seeing what did make me happy. What didn't make me happy. We don't have a stable sense of what we're worth. And secondly, we don't have a secure hold on our own values or judgments. I was busting my ass working out. Was it something I enjoyed? No. Having come to know ourselves like this, we will be a little less hungry for praise. We will have learned the vital art of both knowing and befriending who we really are. So I started finding ways to work out or move my body that felt really good to me. Switch it up, do some dancing if that's what you like. I like heavy weight lifting. I like high intensity intervals every now and then, not all the time, but just do what feels good to you in the moment and try to stay away from doing anything because you feel like you have to. Oh, I know I could be there, but I didn't really have death penciled in on my schedule today, so think I'm gonna pass. I was so hard on myself feeling like I had to this, that, and the other thing. Pretty sure wall balls and bear crawls ain't how I'm going out. You don't. Tell you one thing, I'd rather catch my pinky toe on a bed frame than a big, hot day at a crossfit. I ain't doing it. You're doing this for you and hopefully to make yourself feel healthy and feel happy. So really, yeah, not having enough education at the beginning. I just went completely skinny, completely obesity, no muscle. I was an awesome version of skinny fat, bobblehead, whatchamacallit, rebound, gain a lot of weight, but at that time, getting my education built up, figuring out the why's in my mind behind what I wanted and then implementing those into my lifestyle. I focused on breathing. Those are what need to be balanced 80-20 to reach your goals. If you have any questions or you want to know anything else about me, there is also an about me video posted below. Any other questions you have, please do comment them below and I'd be happy to answer anything. I'm really open. I also do Q&A videos, so if you have general questions that you want to ask for a Q&A video, please do comment them below and I would be happy to answer them for you. I have been specializing in healthy weight loss now for many years. I have a 100% success rate and I can help you do it right in a way where it won't rebound. You'll be happier. You'll succeed and like me, you'll be able to take huge rest periods and indulge in anything that you want and still maintain your goals effortlessly or as effortlessly as possible for you in your chosen lifestyle. What more could you want? What more could you want? What more could you want? If you thought this video was helpful, informative or entertaining at all, please give it a thumbs up down there for me as that really helps me know what kind of content you like, what kind of content to keep producing. If you would like notifications of each time I post a new video, please hit that little bell notification icon down there and you will be notified each time I upload. Please, please subscribe to this channel. Subscribing really is where the support does come from. Like I say, the videos on this channel can help anyone overcome more than 90% of any health, wellness and body image challenge. Please do share the wealth, share the videos, subscribe and until next time, have super amounts of fun in your life and have super amounts of fun in your health and weight loss journey because it can and it's got to be a good time. I'll see you next time. Bye.