EPISODE 4 WITH HEALTH & FITNESS EDUCATOR JOELLE SAMANTHA
Guest: Nail the basics with Joelle Samantha
In this episode I had the pleasure of bringing on my dear friend Joelle Samantha. She is the owner of Level Ten which is an evidence based training, education, and nutrition coaching company. In this episode we talk about the toxic environment of diet culture and how to nail down a basic but healthy routine. During this self-love journey we are really prioritizing not only our mental health, but also our physical health and nutrition so that we can best support our bodies. This is a top priority and Joelle is the perfect guest to help us dive into this topic.
In the first part of the episode, Stephanie and Joelle talk about how the mental and physical connection is a really important synergy for one’s overall well-being. Joelle emphasizes how as someone who's worked in the health and fitness industry for the last decade or so, there is still a massive gap between mental health and physical health. This is truly a missing piece in a lot of people’s journeys. Joelle identified this missing piece and made sure that this was a component in her company’s business map. This makes her company unique as it provides a full base for people starting their health journey.
In addition, Stephanie and Joel emphasize about how extremely toxic and detrimental diet culture is. It’s everywhere and it seems like people can’t escape it. To create a sustainable health journey foundation you need to create habits that can be maintained. Diet culture is not something that can be maintained. In most cases, it causes people to spiral and sometimes even set them back lower than where they started. Because you've restricted yourself in a way that is not developing a habit that is healthy and sustainable, it’s not going to be effective or sustainable at all. When people are so immersed in restriction, they're chronically in this state of restriction. They do it for a little bit, then they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can't live like this’. This cycle just continues to repeat where we're restricting until we can't take it any more. Then we're over indulging until we feel awful, and then we're restarting that restriction process again. And so how do we break that cycle again?
Optimal health should be like a long term goal. We're not looking for Abs, we're looking to establish better healthy boundaries around physical health, mental health and nutrition. The best piece of advice Joelle gives is to start slow. Meet yourself where you're at. Give yourself a little bit of grace and really like sit down and look at your schedule and say ‘Okay, What is realistic?’.
HOMEWORK
How can you enhance your plate with a protein or a color (fruit or vegetable)?
Take a 5 minute walk challenge.
Listen to the foods you like that are nutritious.
Try new fun workouts, yoga, pilates, kickboxing etc…Try ClassPass for example and try new things! Start with once a week.
