What If You Could've Had A Healthy Relationship With Exercise From A Young Age? Future Generations Can! (Outweigh)

She shared more of her story, her back story, last Saturday, so if you miss that you can go listen to it. But she's the founder and creator of my fit city world and she has a certified personal trainer and she's very passionate about not only helping her clients and their goals and mostly clients and recovery. She shared last week that the universe just sort of handed her that and

as someone in recovery, it makes sense for her. But today we're going to talk about how to inspire and motivate our kids to lead balanced and healthy relationships with exercise from a young age. And I don't think I had any guidance amory when it came to exercise when I was a kid. I just started going to the

gym somehow and running a lot. Remember running around my neighborhood holding a CD pack like I would have to put the CD have the full headphones and if I would run or, you know, trip, it would skip the CD. So but I would go for miles and miles in my neighborhood. I don't even know really why and how that started, but I remember it got a little out of control and when I was in high school was when my eating disorder picked up and running was definitely

something that I used parallel to my food issues. So how do we help motivate our kids to want to move their bodies but not trigger them or mess them up in any way? Yeah, I was seeing to a podcast he did recently and it's you're talking about kids and went to be in tune if they have issues that come up. I think the opposite spectrum that I come from is how do we even motivate our kids to move in the first place? In the eating disorder recovery world we get definitely a tunnel vision to just

the extreme of restriction and doing too much. What I tend to see that we also need to be a conversation is that there's a lot of kids who are not doing enough and how do we find that balance of kids who are not doing enough and kids are doing too much and merge it altogether? And it started off with my experience growing up and I just did the regular, actual quickly activities. I was a dancer, I was a swimmer. When I thought of working out, it wasn't necessarily the act of like take an hour day

and move your body this way. It was just like

you just were active as a kid. And then when I didn't have those activities as a part of my life that I had to go to after high school, when I went to college and didn't do any of that, that's when I really started to get out of shape and and I've done a lot of reflecting and now I actually go around with the titans to elementary middle schools all around Middle Tennessee and we talk about exercise and we talked about eating healthy and what I'm finding

is a lot of kids actually don't understand what even means to even just move your body in a healthy way period, what it means that it's okay like dancing for twenty minutes, especially in the world of tiktok videos.

That's exercise, that's moving your body and as parents, and I can speak to what I've done with my kid, and she's my oldest, is just three and I set this pattern of exercises as having dance parties in the garage together and doing it activities that we can do together, because I know there's going to come a point when you have teenagers and they don't want to do anything

with you. But I want her from an early age and I've I've recommended this to a lot of my clients and I've talked a lot of other parents about the more you can do with your child from an early age, the better it sets. Now there's the circumstances of you, as an adult, maybe don't even move your body that much and you're like hey, let's just go and walks together. It's all about the togetherness factor or, if you don't do it together, is about them seeing

you do it yourself. So the patterns you set yourself, which leads into making sure adults have the healthy patterns themselves, which is a whole another conversation. But I know my dad, I think, swam laps growing up, but my mom did not work out. It was just not a not a thing that they did. And so for me, when I got around to developing good, healthy habits with working out, I didn't know what that looks like because all I knew was the extreme of working out in the gym

two hours a day, that eating restrictive. I didn't know what a healthy, balanced work out looks like, and that looks like just moving your body in whatever way motivates you on a daily basis, but having a you know, having your kids see you do it, because actions do

speak louder than words. Always, always, always. We're talking about kids right now, but anybody listening could apply this to their life, whether you're a parent or just an adult and you have no kids and you're still listening to this right now, because this information really can be applied to anybody. It's like, maybe for you it is fifteen

minutes of dancing or riding a bike. Like I used to think with my son, if he wanted to go ride ride his bike and he wanted me to come with him, that I had to complete some other workout before, at a different point in the day for myself, and then I could enjoy an activity with him, whether it's he was riding his bike and I walked the dog alongside him, or I get on my bike, which riding a bike is not my preferred thing, but it's something he really enjoys doing and loves when I do it

with him. And so I tell this story is a story of hope and encouragement that, once you let go of the shackles of your workout, has to be X Y Z. Now I enjoy bike rides with my son and I kind of check that box as well. I moved my body today too, and I did it with him and it was a win win, because we got quality time. He moved, I moved, and then I didn't have any other stress in my brain of Oh but I just took this hour to ride bikes with him and now I got to find an hour to do

something else for myself. That falls into my box of workouts, which was way more intense. Do you feel like if you would have loved riding a bike, that would have classified it into your check box, or was it more, I mean, maybe my thing with riding bikes, as I when I was pretty unhealthy, uh, with movement, I did things like triathlons. With triathlons are not bad. Maybe you

enjoyed them. I did not. I did them with the intent of I'm going to sign up for a triathlon and I'm gonna be training so much that I am going to lose so much weight and it's going to be amazing. And the problem is I never did because I was also training so much that I was always so hungry and I had zero control around food, so I ate way too much, and so I never ended

up losing any weight doing a tryathlon. I was probably because, I mean, it doesn't matter, I don't care the size of my body, but for me, the way my body was built, like the triathlons were putting size on me because of the different exercises I was doing and how it was building me up. And so then it was like, Dang it, this is counterintuitive to what I was doing. And so then I think I gave it all up.

I'm like, okay, forget swimming, forget running, forget biking, and so maybe that was where my why I don't like to ride bikes, but now I do, but it took me going through the recovery journey to get there. And then, you know, I think my daughter is probably the more difficult one to get moving. I mean my son does Jiu Jitsu, he's playing football, he loves to ride his bike. My daughter would sit inside and watch anime all day

every day. I have to make deals to get her to go to the park to just be with the trees, just to breathe in the fresh air. And I mean it's funny shot like that. It will be on our schedule. She'll be like, how about on Saturday in two weeks, and there we all these things and I'll beca okay, it's our park date. But I do need to think of things for her specifically, because I am worried about just her, but I mean it's what we need. She needs to move. She can't just do school and then

sit around. And I would say all this to her face, by the way. I'm not saying anything like behind her back. I find, too, that a lot of my middle schoolers and high schoolers that I work with who are very more screen heavy, and I'm somebody who's like, I'm not anti screen when it comes to wanting to watch stuff, but there's actually a lot of fun programs that exist that you can watch them do any kind of like

dancing or stretching or just basic movements. I have one client who she loves watching movies and so I was like, okay, if you she likes the act of just sitting down staring at a screen so she doesn't have to think about anything else. That's what it roots from. So I was like, okay, well, we're gonna just watch this video together, and it was a movement video and it was just like a basic stretching kind of on the meditative site.

So I'm like, I don't have to take you out of your environment, we're gonna sit here in your room and we're gonna do this together, and that's kind of how I introduced her to just movement. And it didn't look like all right, now I'm gonna pull you away from your safe space, whether it be your room, whether it be your family room, and go somewhere else. They slowly eased her into we're gonna do movement outside of your room, but we're not going to do it right now,

and it is. It is a struggle, I know with you can't necessarily ideas you instill kids from the younger age. I was like that myself. You can't necessarily say they're going to be there for their entire life, but they're going to think back at some point of your life. But like I remember when my mom went on walks with me, I remember when my mom went bike riding with me, I remember that my mom went to work out. Like they're gonna remember these things no matter what. They're

going to stick in their head. I have a lot of clients who they have one parent who worked out, one parent who did it, and that was the Dnni m growing up, and so they don't know what that healthy in between balance looks like and it looks like just moving your body with a family. So that doesn't even feel like exercise. It doesn't even feel like a chore. It's like we're just going to do this as a family.

And I know the family dynamic, the family unit, looks different for everybody, whatever that looks like, but it's like, just do it, even if they hate it, just do it because they're gonna remember it years down the road as they're trying to develop healthy habits as an adult or healthy habits if they have their own family. What have? Your kids are going to remember these things and it's already it proves that they will over time, even though they might hate it in the moment. What advice do

you have? If you have clients that are you're working with song, it's like, Oh, you know, I'm starting to already see some disordered exercise behavior developing in my child. How can I help her or him scale it back without getting them angry? I'm probably speaking about teenagers and specifically because you know they like to do everything the opposite of what the parents say. So how can you just help sort of guide them, like Hey, you don't,

you don't have to go run four miles again today? Yeah, well, especially too, because when the more you push it, the more they sometimes tend to hide it, to the hide and they'll start to do workouts, you know, where you can't see it, or they'll start to run in areas, you know, where you just don't know what's going on.

The healthiest thing is they even mentioned that you do know this, something is up and they're gonna push back, but deep down inside they do know, yes, I am developing these patterns, but approaching it in a way that is coming from a place of not accusing them of anything. It's just like, oh, Hey, I I see you're going on this. You know, two hour run what is it about this two hour run that makes you happy to do it? Just kind of talk to them more about

the route, the emotional causes about it. They're not going to understand the psychology that you're trying to go about them from a psychology route with it, and I'm not a psychologist psychiatrist by any standards, but by my physical health standard, trying to approach it about what is it that they've liked about this? And you know there's gonna be the five times in a row where they say, Oh, I don't know, I just like it, but they're gonna

eventually start to open up to you. I have found in my experience the more you come at them from an inquisitive standpoint of why are you doing this, like I maybe want to do this with you. What is it about where you going? And first break into their shell that way. So once you're in their comfort zone of that, start to be like well, I have found that doing the you know, running for thirty minutes is

healthier on your body than two hours. To start to kind of drop little notes in there about what is healthier and why it might be healthier for their body, but then also at the same time have active conversations with people, like if they are an activity, if say they are in sports and they're doing this stuff outside of the sports spectrum, start to talk to their coaches behind the scenes, start to talk to teachers they may have, start to talk to their doctor about this and you

can have other people tune in on it so it doesn't have the whole weight of this issue, doesn't have to be on your shoulders and you don't have to feel like you're going behind their back because at the end of the day they're still under eighteen, they're still your you know, your legal responsibility to take care of them.

But if you can approach it from a more loving emotional standpoint, but then have the people on the outside kind of look in with those more, I guess in tune to is this getting to be more obsessive behavior, so that there's a force working with you and it's not all on your shoulders, that's going to be a world's different. I love that and I love that you

said being inquisitive. Curiosity is everything with my kids and yeah, they might seem annoyed at times, but the fact that you're asking questions, it will pay off in the long runness.

So curiosity is huge and it just leads to more conversation and something that in some of my work with my kids, I have found, and I know this has worked for other people, to sometimes having conversations in the car where they don't have to make eye contact with you because you're driving more than likely, and it allows for more conversation. So maybe, if you do have to

have a chat about something, by doing it in the car. Yeah, thank you, a Marie, for talking about the workout exercise side of things when it comes to kids, and next Saturday we're gonna talk about helping our kids lead a more balanced lifestyle when it comes to their relationship with food and how to inspire and motivate that. So, a Marie, in the meantime, where can they find you on instagram? Go instagram is fit city Pearl. So it's fit city,

last word Pearl. Awesome. Thank you so much. We'll see you next week. Thank you,