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Full Episode Transcription:
Oh my gosh, you guys, I started a podcast. I'm so excited about this, this has been on my heart for so long, and I'm just honored and overjoyed that you are here with me, if we haven't met yet, my name is Tara, and I hope very soon I can be your favorite host, your coach, and your friend, as I lead you on a journey of wellness and health, and yes, even weight loss and all the things that come with it, a quick little background. For me, I am a mom of two teen boys, a wife, a friend, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and my background is as a trained and licensed marriage and family therapist, turned nutrition coach and fitness instructor, and this passion I have for health and wellness and... Yes, weight loss comes from my own experiences in struggling with health issues, I'll talk to you about that in a sec, and struggling with mindset issues as well, and just my own journey, but it really comes from looking around and seeing so many women struggling... Honestly, I think needlessly, struggling with bad information, we are fed constantly from so many sources, from this guru and that into influencer, and even the news gives us so much bad health information that I want to be a source for you of good, solid information information that is real that a science-based that you can actually use and implement in your own life...
That is so, so important to me. I don't just wanna be a source of information, I wanna be a source of transformation, and I also look around and I see so many women struggling with this self-image problem and trust me, I have the same struggle, so I hope this podcast for you is a place of inspiration, a place of transformation, a place of information, a place where there's just no nonsense, I'm just gonna tell it to you straight. I'm gonna give you a lot of love, but sometimes I'm gonna slap you with that love that is intentional, because sometimes we need to be woken up. And I hope that I can do that for you. So I wanna tell you a little bit about how I got here and how we came to be in this place together. There's a great book by John Leary called on fire, if you haven't read it, it's an amazing story. But in that story, he talks about the inflection points of his life, and these are points throughout his life where something happened or he made a decision and it changed everything, and you don't always know that it's an inflection point in the moment.
Sometimes you look back and you think, Well, that choice really changed the trajectory of my life for me, or while that thing happened to me... And nothing was ever the same after that. Those are the inflection points. So as I talk to you about what my inflection points are and how I got here, I want you to think about what your inflection points are and how you got where you are, because the only way that we can move forward is if we understand how we got where we are. And how we change that. So I want you to first think about your own inflection points, and then also as you listen, think about how any of my experiences might resonate with you as well, so I'm not gonna start at the beginning, I'm gonna start the first thing that involves us together and that is becoming a therapist. I was always very interested actually in sports medicine, and that's what I wanted to do, and I instead decided that I hated chemistry, so I changed majors in, became a therapist, and I was a therapist for many years, I was licensed therapists, I worked a lot with kids and their families, and the best part of being a therapist was seeing the light bulb go on, having people understand like, Whoa, I got myself stuck here and I can get myself out of it, and that was so important for me to see other people go through, but important for me to understand about myself, that I got myself here and I can get myself out of here if I want to, and that idea of the power of the mind is something that is so intriguing to me, and the interplay between mind and body, I feel like there are so many coaches, therapists, counselors who talk about, let's go back to your child and let's explore where this came from, and that blah, blah, blah, all the therapy things, but they never talk about the body and how the body is actually influencing the mind and how those two things work together.
And then there's tons of coaches, right, who will talk about counting calories in this diet and counter-macros and blah, blah, blah, but they're never talking so much about the mind and the influence, like, Great, I can count my calories, but I'm still emotional eating. What is this and how do I fix both of these things? And so that's sort of what I want to be, is that person that's in the middle that can help you address both that interplay of both things, not just your mind and not just your body, and not just either of those two, but also your relationships and how... You are moving through the world. You are one whole person, and if I'm gonna help the whole person, I need to understand the whole person, I can't just pick the little parts... Right, so that sort of became this life-long mission for me is helping myself and other people understand their mind and how to be in control, finally be in control. The next inflection point for me was becoming a mom, and you don't have to be a mom to understand this idea, but the idea that you give up everything for something else, and I did it willingly, I chose, and I am so blessed that I was able to be a stay-at-home mom full-time, it's what I always wanted, and I have zero regrets about that, and I feel so very lucky that I got to do it.
However, it changed a lot of things about me. You know, when you become a mom, you put yourself on the back burner a lot, right, you place your second place now and everyone else's first place, and so many of us moms, in fact, I know very few who didn't fall into this trap, this trap of putting ourselves last... And I did that for a really long time. I didn't even realize I was doing it until much later, and understanding that that's what I was doing has now helped me not to do that anymore, and even if you don't have kids, you can relate to putting yourself behind your career or putting yourself behind caretaking for someone else, that idea of putting ourselves last, it's not... Okay, woman, I'm just gonna tell you straight up, it's not, okay, we can't do it. It's not healthy for us, and we are not gonna live a long healthy life if we put ourselves last, and so that is something that I feel so very passionate about helping myself and helping you guys understand the importance of putting yourself first and that it's not selfish to do that, it's actually the best thing you could do for yourself.
Gosh, we're gonna talk a lot about that in coming episodes. The third inflection point for me was being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, so at the time my kids were two and four, and my health was failing... It was an absolute disaster. I was so sick, my hair was falling out, I was losing weight, my eyebrows were falling out, all kinds of weird things were happening in my body, I wasn't sleeping at night, and then I was just an absolute zombie during the day. My brain just didn't work, I couldn't remember things. It was just really bad. It was really, really bad for a while, and as a mom, I'm tough, I'm trying to power through, and finally my husband's like, God, just go to the doctor. So I went to the doctor, she diagnoses me with an automate disorder, it's called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. It's actually very common. In fact, I have read that most women with low thyroid, something like 80% of women with low thyroid actually have the autoimmune version, and it's important to know the difference because the treatment is a little bit different for it too.
So I get this diagnosis and I absolutely feel terrible. And my doctor says, Well, we're not gonna do anything yet. We're just gonna wait and see. And I was furious, I was so angry. I was absolutely appalled that here I am just struggling and she says she's not gonna do anything to help me, and that was the moment that I took my health into my own hands, and things in my life have never been the same sense. That was a major inflection point for me because I realized that it is up to me, it is up to me to make myself healthy, it is up to me to educate myself about my body, in my mind and how it works, it is up to me to educate myself about this disorder and how it's affecting me when you have an autoimmune disorder, probably a lot of you listening to you, it's this constant moving target, you kinda get it under control and then something else changes in your life or you get really stressed out or you have a kid or this different things happen and you kinda gotta rework everything, it's this ongoing moving target, and being able to understand my body has helped me navigate that so much better, so the idea that I am my own best advocate, I am the one in charge of keeping me well, it was a hard one to shoulder for a little while, but man, in the end, it's so freeing, and that's what I want for you guys too, I want you to understand that it's you...
It's on you, you have the power. Please don't think of it as, Oh my gosh. That seems like too much. It's amazing, you are so powerful to create your life and your health and your well is, and you can do it, just have to understand how... You just have to get a little more educated. And that is why I'm here, that's why we're together, because I want you to start this health journey and then never end it, there is no point where you reach like, Oh, I'm healthy. Everything's wonderful and I never have to think about this again. That doesn't exist, it... Health is a journey, it's this constant for the rest of your life choice, choice of wellness, you have to keep choosing it over and over and over again, and that's beautiful, and that's amazing, and the fact that you have that choice every day... Boy, we're so lucky. The next inflection point for me was this sort of understanding of nutrition, and so I already was a therapist, I already am starting to understand my disorder and what that means, but I always was like this really feeling of Health just always sort of eluded me, I could never just get there.
You know what I mean? It was always this, I feel okay, pretty good I'm functioning, kind of okay, but I feel like there's this another level of health that I could just not ever totally reach, and it's because I didn't have a full understanding of nutrition, I didn't have an understanding of how my body worked, I didn't have an understanding of the interplay of all the magical and amazing ways that my body worked or didn't work, so I needed to get educated, so I took a nutrition coaching course, became a certified nutrition coach, and that education and experience has really helped me have this grasp of how my body is working and getting really in-tuned with that body and understanding that when I'm feeling like this, it's probably because of this and really starting to make connections for myself and then helping you guys make connections too, so that you have an understanding of nutrition and how food works in your body and nutrients work in your body, and that is something that in this podcast, I'm so passionate about sharing with you, not just like the latest hack or the latest diet, some of those things are valuable but the overarching idea of how your body works, that's pretty much the same for all of us, and so I really want you to have an understanding of that so that when you can understand when things are going wrong, why they're going wrong, and what to do about them.
So this idea of understanding, controlling of your mind and then also having this understanding of how your body works, boy, priceless, priceless. And the last inflection point for me is this idea of being stuck, and you don't have to be a mom to understand what it feels like to be stuck. And when I say stuck, I hate that word. Oh guys, I hate that word. Stuck. And I have used it so many times in my life, I have used that word over and over, sometimes I think... Gosh, Teri, you would have just stop saying that stupid word, you probably would have got unstuck a lot faster, but getting unstuck is what I want for all of you, and that's what I wanna help you do through this podcast, that's my mission, among many, is helping you get unstuck. So here I am. My kids are in full-time school. I've been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years. No regrets, I loved it. But the kids go to school and all of a sudden there's this moment where you're like, What now? My entire life for 10 years was wrapped up in these kids and how these kids are kinda doing their own stuff, and what...
Now, who am I beyond dishwasher and laundry lady and chauffeur and Band-Aid sticker oner, Why am I here? What is my purpose? Who am I here to serve? And how am I here to serve them? I was asking myself so many big questions and I felt stuck, I really did. I felt so stuck because I just didn't know what else is there? If you ever asked yourself that question like, What? There's gotta be something more. Even if you're not a parent, you don't have to be a parent to know that feeling of... In fact, no matter who you are, you will reach a point in your life where you ask that question, Is this all there is? Is this really all there is? There's gotta be something else. I feel like I was made for more than this, but I don't know what that is, and so I hope that through this podcast, you can start asking yourself those questions and helping yourself move forward and knowing that there is more, there's always more... No matter where you're at in life, there is always more, but sometimes we have to slow down a suck and clear out the clutter and really start to ask the right questions, and that's what I wanna help you guys to...
Getting unstuck. And it's not just unstuck in your life in general. I want you to get you unstuck in your weight, you wanna get you unstuck from your health problem, I wanna get you unstuck, your bad mind crap, I wanna get you unstuck from any place in your life that you are stuck in... That's why I am here. I'm the unstuck lady, and I want you to know too, that this is a journey that I am always on. I am walking this journey alongside you, and I am here with you holding your hand, sometimes probably dragging you, sometimes probably kicking you in the ass, but always here with you, moving you forward, propelling you into the person that you were born and destined to be. I believe so strongly that you have this amazing inner badass that is dying to come out, that the world needs to come out, we need you to live fully expressed and fully yourself and come out of that shell and say no to fear and feel healthy and have the energy to really propel yourself forward in life and then serve so many people through just being you, that's all, you just have to be fully you, so I wanna see us all move forward into being fully us, and that is to me what no nonsense.
Wellness is, it's cut in the crap, it's cut the excuses, it's cut in the BS, it's cutting the shit advice, it's cutting the bad diet plans, it's sticking to what we know is real, it's sticking to who we know is real, and it's finding you fully, fully... You, and that's why we're here, that's why we're on this journey. And I hope you'll stay on this journey with me together, I hope you can adopt that mantra that I have now adopted of progress over perfection, that's where we're at, as long as we're moving forward, as long as we're taking the next step, whatever that is. Let's take it together. Until next time, you guys. Be well.