452. Those Annoying Health and Fitness People

Welcome to episode 452, Those Annoying Health and Fitness People. Do you ever find yourself judging people who appear to be physically fit, thin, healthy or strong even though that’s what you want for yourself? It’s not just you. This is so common. It makes no sense and yet it makes perfect sense. Today we’re diving into why we do this and how to override your default brain to become more empowered around your health goals and more of the non-judgmental person it feels so much better to be.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today.

Okay, everybody. Welcome to today’s podcast. Today we have a Q&A session. I’m going to answer a question that one of you left on the podcast hotline. If you have a question you want to leave the number is 1888 hi Jody M. That’s Jody with a Y and M as in Moore, 1888 hi Jody M. Let me go ahead and play this question and then we’re going to dive right in. I’ve got all kinds of fun things I want to share with you today.

Hi Jody, this is my question. I was listening to your money haters podcast and actually the whole time I was thinking about how I have judgment toward people that are healthy and fit. And even though that’s what I want, I find myself self-sabotaging because I think I do have some negative thoughts about people that are in shape, maybe they’re not relatable, stuck up or something. Even though I know that those thoughts aren’t really true, I still have those thoughts.

So I would love for you to talk about that on a podcast sometime and just how to kind of reframe those thoughts. And if you think that would directly affect results as far as getting healthier and stronger and being okay with feeling better and looking better and if that’s what you want. So anyways, that’s my question. Thank you.

Okay, thank you so much for sending in this question. First of all, if you missed the money haters episode and you want to go back and listen to it after this, it’s episode 447, just a few episodes back. What I love so much is how this woman identified that as she’s listening to me talk about our judgment that we have over people with money and how that’s impacting our money, maybe she doesn’t have that issue. But she’s like, “I think I’m doing that with people who are healthy and people who are fit.”

And that’s why coaching works so well for me because I like to listen to other people get coached on different topics. There’s an application oftentimes, even if I don’t have the same circumstance. And in fact it’s much easier for me to apply what I want to, to change my own behaviors, my own mindset, my own models, if you will, when I’m hearing someone else than when it’s me. Because when it’s me, I’m kind of nervous. I’m in the spotlight. I’m emotional. I’m in the thick of it.

So that secondhand application is where I’ve gotten the most traction actually out of my coaching. But that said, here’s where I want to begin. I am really fired up about this topic of food and bodies right now. I notice that I go through cycles of getting really excited about it, and then other times where I don’t want to think about it or talk about it at all. And of course, it correlates to whether or not I am being successful in the way that I want to in my life around food and health.

And what often excites me is when I find new tools and resources and new ways to think about it, that empower me. And when I feel I’m getting closer to truly embodying these concepts, I’m just becoming a person who lives a healthy lifestyle rather than having to think about it and get lots of help through coaching. And apply and use a lot of my prefrontal cortex to make that happen. That is the phases of it, though often. For things that are challenging for us, we have to put a lot of intentional focus on it until it becomes a more natural part of who we are.

So at any rate, I just have some new tools and resources I’ve discovered that add on really nicely to the things I’ve learned in the past and the work and progress that I’ve made in the past. I don’t honestly view the work I’ve done around food as failures. I really don’t. Every time I learn something new about myself, about my body, about food in general, and then as I add on, it becomes more and more of who I am.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Make Peace with Food, a four week challenge with me, Jody Moore. When I think about the percentage of my thoughts in my lifetime that have been about food or my body, it makes me cringe. What a waste. Can you relate? Did you know you don’t have to live this way for the rest of your life? It’s true. Or maybe you have health goals you haven’t been able to achieve and maintain, but you know you still have a lot of food and body drama preventing you from eating and living the way you need in order to achieve them.

Whatever your goals are, I want to invite you to join me for Make Peace with Food. You’ll learn things like the way you think about food either gives food more or less power in your life. How to decide whether or not you’re using food as fuel or joy or both and monitor yourself. How to choose what you want from food and then follow your own plan. How to navigate cravings and urges. What to do when you fall off the wagon. What to do when you’ve been really good and you feel like you need a reward. How to be patient and be in it for the long game.

And of course I’ll be giving you all my favorite thoughts about food. This is our next deep dive workshop in The Lab, so Lab members will be able to participate already. But if you’re not in The Lab, you can join for just $29. Yeah, for 29 bucks, you’ll get multiple video lessons from me each of the four weeks and live Zoom calls weekly where you can bring your questions and get coaching. If you’ve been looking for something new to motivate you to make peace with food, consider this your sign. It’s time. Head to jodymoore.com/food to join today. That’s jodymoore.com/food.

I want to begin by talking about just judgment in general. So I often find myself reminding my clients that other people’s judgments of them don’t mean anything about them. They mean something about the person doing the judging. And this goes for both positive and negative judgment. If somebody is criticizing you or leaving negative comments on your social media or has a hard time with you for some reason. That doesn’t tell us much about you. It tells us a lot about them.

What does it tell us? Well, that’s hard to say. What we know, though, is that it means something about their experience, about their current emotions, about where they’re operating from etc. It means something about them. Now, if that’s true, if other people’s judgment of you and of me means something about those other people, not about me and you, then it’s also true that our judgment of other people means something about us. It doesn’t mean anything about them.

Now, normally we don’t like to think of it this way because when we say other people judging you means something about them. I think there’s this kind of quiet, unspoken assumption that it must mean something negative about them. If somebody is criticizing you, especially if they’re doing it in a way that we would say is inappropriate or cruel or mean, then what does it mean about them? Maybe that they’re not a good person, that they’re not a nice person, whatever. We tend to have these negative assumptions about them.

I want to suggest that we step back and clean that up because it doesn’t necessarily mean something negative about them. It may mean that they’re in a lot of fear. It may mean that they have some trauma. It can mean all kinds of things that we wouldn’t necessarily call negative traits, maybe just challenges that they’re dealing with. And the same is true for you and I, my friends, you don’t have to feel bad. Don’t immediately feel bad when you’re like, “My judgment of them is about me.”

Then the next automated response from a lot of you is, “And I shouldn’t be doing it. What’s the matter with me?” I don’t want you to do that. I want you to just be curious. I want you to not push it away. It’s easy, well, it’s not easy, but sometimes what we try to do is push it away. We’re like, “I need to stop judging them.” And what we end up doing often is just redirecting our focus to something else, which is better than staying in judgment. But we miss out then on the opportunity to discover something about ourselves.

So again, that’s why I love this question so much, because if you just approach it from, this is interesting, I have a lot of judgment of these people who seem to be healthy and fit and I want to be healthy and fit. I wonder why. That’s fascinating. What’s going on in my head? What is my brain trying to do? What’s happening in there?

Now, I want to give you some things to consider that might be happening in there and maybe you strongly identify with one of these, maybe you identify with all of them. And you’ll find that many of them overlap in certain ways. But here’s where I want to start. It may be that you have a shame blame trap happening. I call it a shame blame trap because we literally are stuck in a trap bouncing back and forth between shame and blame, and it’s hard to get out of. I’m going to tell you how though, in just a minute.

So if you see somebody who’s really healthy and fit and you use that to judge yourself and feel bad about your body or your health then that’s going to generate shame if you make it mean that there’s something wrong with you for not being closer to your health goals. And that shame will feel terrible. And so many of us naturally jump right out of shame, instantaneously even sometimes, into blame. In other words, I’m not wrong, they must be wrong, they must be.

And then we just make up a bunch of stuff or maybe we have proof for it, maybe we don’t. It doesn’t matter. All we’re trying to do is get out of shame by now blaming them, just like this caller said, they must not be fun. They must not be relatable. They must be selfish. They must spend all their time at the gym and all they focus on is their body and their food. What a waste of a life. So we move right into judgment because we’re trying to get out of the shame.

Now, if you just try to dismiss the judgment of them, you may be tempted to go right back into shame again. So how do we get out of this trap? We start noticing that nobody is wrong and nobody is right. Nobody is good and noble and somebody else, weak and wrong. That’s just not a thing. What we are is different. This person has certain behaviors and thoughts and routines around food and bodies and exercise. And I have certain behaviors and thoughts and routines around food and body and exercise and it’s okay.

It’s great and amazing for them that they’re where they are and it’s great for me to be right where I am on my journey, even if I want to change it, even if I want to progress. Nobody is any better than anyone else. That person who is super lean and fit and healthy is not a better person than me. Just like when I achieve the goals I want to, I will not be a better person than I am right now. I will just be in a different place with regards to this topic, that’s it. You stop making good guys and bad guys. That’s how you get out of a shame blame trap, different, but not better.

The other thing it might be triggering for you is doubt. When we see someone else succeeding and we don’t believe it’s possible for us to succeed in the way that they have and we want to succeed in that way. Then often that’s going to feel terrible. This is similar to shame blame. We move into the judgment to escape the doubt. But instead of just judging ourselves as less than, we might be also judging ourselves as incapable of, and we still really want it.

So there’s a couple ways out of this. The first one is to do exactly what we did with the shame blame trap and remove the judgment. Don’t elevate anyone and don’t lower anyone because that’s just not true. But the other thing you can do is use other people’s success. There’s actually two more things. You can use other people’s success as evidence of what’s possible. And I will say, when it comes to health and fitness this is why I’m kind of juries out about before and after photos.

I know there’s a lot of debate and controversy about whether or not it’s healthy to be showing before and after photos. And I will say that I agree that it’s sort of objectifying and it puts the physical result onto a pedestal that is just not reality. In the end, the most amazing part of improving your health and fitness is that you’ll feel good in your body, but also that it will require so much growth from you.

It will require that you improve your relationship with yourself. And that you learn how to honor your commitments to yourself. And that you learn things about nutrition. And you learn about your own body and you connect with your own body. So many of those things are way more beneficial than looking better in your jeans. So for that reason, before and after pictures can sort of reinforce that that’s what matters and I don’t like that about it.

But what I do like about before and after photos is that it’s tough to look at somebody who’s really ahead of us, who’s really healthy and fit and feel like that’s possible for us. We tend to look at them and go, “Well, yeah, they could do it, but I can’t.” But when you see a before picture and you see that they were in the same place you are, or maybe they started further behind where you are, and they’ve gotten to where they are. It gives your brain permission to believe that might be possible for you too.

And so for that reason, I do still actually really like before and after photos for myself. If it puts you in a negative space. Not useful. But you see how it can help overcome the doubt part. And then the third way to overcome doubt is to just stop wanting it so badly. You can really work on the amount of desire you have around achieving some kind of a health goal. And I do think it’s healthy to keep it in check.

You could get rid of it all together if you want to, but I don’t even think you have to if you want to keep a part of it.  Don’t let it be so extreme, though, that it’s creating this kind of drama, this kind of jealousy and doubt. They call it unattachment. The Buddhists call it unattached from what you desire. It doesn’t mean you don’t desire it. You’re just not attached to the desire.

The last thing I want to speak to, that may be happening here when you notice yourself judging someone for something like their health condition, even though you have those same goals. Is it might actually be really useful information for you about what you want or don’t want, who you want to be or who you don’t want to be. So for example, this caller said, “I notice myself thinking they must not be funny.” And she’s like, “I know that’s ridiculous but that’s what comes up in my head.”

So that could be useful information for you to take into account, which is, I don’t want to become a super serious person. I want to keep my sense of humor. I want to be able to joke around and have fun. And then you have to remind your brain, I can be that and be healthy. There are plenty of people who are funny, who are also healthy. And that’s just good for me to know that that’s important to me, that matters to me. If you want to keep that part. She said they’re not relatable. So you want to continue to be relatable. Good to know. Did you know you can?

You can change your eating habits and you can improve your health and you can still be relatable if you choose. Again, another one I hear commonly is people say, “They must be really selfish. They must be obsessed with their health or their body. They must spend all their time at the gym. I don’t want to be like that.” Good information. Again, this doesn’t mean that that person is that way necessarily. We’re not going to that extent.

We’re just noticing, it’s really important to me that I remain generous and that I keep a balance in terms of how much I think about or focus on this topic and how important I make it in my life. I want to be balanced in this way. I want to be generous. I want to be giving. Good to know. Did you know, brain, that we can be that and we can be healthy? And this person might actually be really balanced, who knows? But thanks for reminding me how much that matters to me. I like that that matters to me. I want to keep letting that matter to me.

And did you know, brain, that you can be that version of you and you can be healthy? We’re just adding on to all the good parts of us that we want to keep. We don’t have to change ourselves entirely. We don’t have to let go of anything we want to keep. We just need to add on right to achieve some of these goals.

So listen, I have so much more to say about this topic. I’m trying to decide how much more I should say today. But what I think is, when you notice yourself judging other people for being the way that you want to be in the world, there is interesting information to be learned. And you can sit down and journal out what’s happening in your brain. Remember, if you start judging it, judging yourself, telling yourself it’s wrong or bad, you’re going to lose access to that. You’re going to go, “I don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t know.”

Or as you discover it, you’re going to follow it up really quickly with, “I know that’s ridiculous. I know I shouldn’t be thinking that.” Don’t do any of that. That’s what has you losing access to this valuable information. Just let it be there and understand it and bring it up before you decide to do anything about it. Sometimes just letting it be there is enough, and then it kind of goes away on its own, but sometimes it requires a little bit more coaching, a little bit more work. But definitely use your own judgments as useful information about what you want to work on.

Alright, you guys, that’s what I’ve got for you today. If you’re going to join me for Make Peace with Food, like I said, I’ve got a lot more, I’m excited to teach you about this topic. And I want to hear what’s going on in your head. So I’ll see you there. Otherwise, thanks for joining me today on the podcast, take care.

If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.