JJ HARDY
ACTOR | LIFE COACH
WEIGHT LOSS
MY LIFE-LONG WEIGHT BATTLE
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Many of you know of the physical challenges I have endured over time. My hope is that my experiences and life lessons will inspire YOU. My experiences - past, present and yet to come, form the basis of assisting all of you in building yourselves up better every day. I sincerely appreciate all of you and seek to take you towards a fitter, stronger, healthier, leaner body; a better self in so many ways.
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My goal is to encourage all of you to exercise in a way that will lead to NO potential risk of injury. It is important to achieve long term success and avoid many of the mistakes that I made over the many years I struggled to get fit and healthy. Let’s begin by helping each and every one of you build basic strength so you’ll be able to support your joints and lower back. The goal is to challenge everyone. The hope is that your workout will eventually become more challenging, and in turn, you’ll become stronger. Challenge yourself, but it must be realistic for you and your own journey. Stay with it and all of you will build strength, burn body fat and speed up your metabolism.
“Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Fall in love with the path of deep healing. Fall in love with becoming the best version of yourself but with patience, with compassion, and respect to your own journey.” -Sylvester McNutt
It has taken me most of my adult life to finally develop a stronger relationship with fitness and a healthy relationship with food. Don’t expect to do this overnight or even short term because I surely didn’t, but believe me, you WILL get there. Have fun! Don’t look at your workout as punishment, but look at exercise as taking great care of yourself. It’s of utmost importance to have a healthy relationship with exercise and nutrition.
“If my mind can conceive it, if my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.” -Muhammad Ali
So, Rule number ONE: Do not to give up on your goals. Let’s build you up and help you move forward in reaching your goals. Forget the past. Just focus on the future. Continually fill your brain with the wonderful REASONS for getting healthier which will strongly move you forward towards accomplishing your goals you set for yourself. NO More Negative Thoughts! Change the way you feel about yourself using positive influences. Start loving yourself! Don’t hate yourself like I tended to do. I can remember many times just looking in the bathroom mirror scolding myself with the thought that I was fat and ugly. Then many times I would break down and cry because I felt hopeless. You must choose to love yourself just as you would choose to love another person. Take that further and extend it to the way you feel about others and the world around you.
“A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.” -Haruki Murakami
“Love yourself unconditionally, just as you love those closest to you despite their faults.” -Les Brown
Another new beginning: Start looking at your relationship to food. What you eat and what make up the calories in your diet and your relationship to food actually dictate how you feel. What motivates you to eat the way that you do needs to be looked at very closely. Many times, I ate because I was stressed, anxious, sad or just bored. There were times I ate things that gave me an attachment to my childhood, and I didn’t care how unhealthy the food was that I was eating. Rarely did I ever eat food with the thought that I need to nourish my body with calories or that I need this amount of macronutrients; (protein, carbohydrates, fats).
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Even though calories are important, and in order for fat loss to occur you must be consuming fewer calories than you burn, they comprise the smallest things to consider in having a healthy diet. I don’t necessarily promote counting calories because it makes things more confusing, more complicated, and it’s a pressure that you don’t necessarily need. What’s important is that we start thinking differently about food and begin looking at our BEHAVIORS and ask the questions why we eat the way that we eat and how do we feel before, during and after we eat. If you just look at the calories you will be doomed to failure just as I was during every diet that I tried throughout my life.
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Bottom Line: It’s not about the calories but the BEHAVIORS that lead to the excess calories and eventually to the weight gain. Also, when you are overweight or very unfit, the idea of losing all that weight is so overwhelming. Take each day and each pound lost one day at a time. Look at the small wins, and you will begin to see these small wins compound over a week, over a month and so on.
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“It is better to take small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backwards.” Proverb
" It’s Not A Diet, It’s A Lifestyle Change"
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“It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” -Lewis Carrol, Alice In Wonderland
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My hope is that people will begin to have the desire to be lean, want to feel healthy, have good energy and a balanced life without the obsession with food that consumed most of my life. Yes, it will be extremely difficult to suddenly start cutting things out of your diet… things that you have loved to enjoy most of your life. Eliminating that favorite garbage food that tastes so good, and replacing it with healthier things that you are unfamiliar with may seem impossible at first. However, with practice and determination, the garbage food in your diet will soon begin to diminish over time. Every time I tried to cut out the garbage food, I was pretty successful in the beginning but soon found myself going back to those types of foods because I couldn’t resist the cravings. I thought I was starting to lose my mind. Doing without the things that have become pleasures and are extremely familiar in your daily life can be genuinely excruciating. Be patient with yourself and I promise that you will transition into a healthier consumer of food over time.
“To change your body, you must first change your mind.” -Unknown
Soon, we will start doing a bit of resistance training. That does not just mean physical exercise. That includes being able to stand in front of a doughnut shop window and laugh at it. Together, we will begin a great pathway towards craving healthier more nutritious whole foods to sustain your daily needs. And as for communication, we will all learn to start listening to the signals of our bodies and eat things that make us feel good in a healthy sort of way. Also, keep in mind that eating healthy is not about cutting back on calories. That singular direction will probably make you feel awful and you will soon want to rebel, going back to the old stupid ways of eating.
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“Nothing is impossible. Even the word itself says, ‘I’m possible.’" -Audrey Hepburn
Finally, do not allow negative emotions to derail you. Bad days happen to all of us and there will be days that we reach for the fridge without the level of self-control that we would wish to maintain. This is normal and you must not beat yourself up over it. Perhaps, if you need to cheat a little then, think about it first, fully realize what you’re doing and why, then move forward if you decide to do so. Don’t allow that cheat meal to become a cheat day -- leading to full failure. I seemed to always fall into the trap of my cheat meals becoming a cheat day. There were days that I would emotionally eat or miss exercise because I was stressed out. These types of days only led to poor food choices over longer periods of time if I didn’t put the work into breaking the cycle.
“Weight loss is not impossible. Weight loss is hard, but hard is not the same as impossible.” -Unknown
I needed to know my triggers and challenges, and you must also. Create barriers for yourself and allow space for awareness to come in. Try not to have junk food in the house. I had an obsession with apple fritters, and if I had them in the house, they wouldn’t last one day. The only way I could get my hands on an apple fritter is driving a few miles to the donut shop. Getting in my car and driving to the donut shop gave me enough time to think about what I was doing so I could change my mind about scarfing down that apple fritter, or apple fritters, since one wasn’t usually enough. If you feel positive about your emotional and mental health, then your body will follow by doing the right thing. Work strongly to understand the emotions that lead to binge eating. One other thing: take your time. The Biggest Mistake I personally made was trying to reduce and cut so much out of my diet far too fast and I just couldn’t deal with it. It felt like I was having a
breakdown.
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Start with finding balance. I’ve found more success with a gradual process of losing a little bit of weight, and gaining a little more strength each week than going on a 12-week crash course. Take it slow because this will be a lifelong process and if you look at it that way you will see great success.
“We will fail when we fail to try.” -Rosa Parks
Read up! It’s Important to learn how things work in your body such as proteins, carbs and fats and how the body needs all these things in order to function properly. The root cause of overeating and poor nutrition is BEHAVIOR and RELATIONSHIP with food. Every day it’s important to continually reflect on the behaviors, the attachments and the emotional aspects one has with food. Most diets have a failure rate of close to 90%. That’s because all of us are looking at it all wrong. We focus too much on food and calories, but we’re not looking at the ROOT CAUSE for our overeating and poor nutrition
