Translator: Tina Huynh
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven What inspires you? How inspired are you by the thoughts you think, the words you use, the feelings you feel, and the core values
and beliefs you live by? It's not so black and white, and there are many missing
pieces of the puzzle. The more information we have on diet, exercise and weight loss, the higher the rates
of body dissatisfaction and life dissatisfaction we have than ever before in history. I'm going to leave you
with two things by the end of this talk. One, how greater self-love
will inspire your life. And two, how to cultivate more of it. One of the first and most basic
fundamental needs that we have as humans is a connection through love, a bond. I remember, like it was yesterday, feeling so much love
and adoration for my mom, who in my eyes was the most
beautiful thing I had ever seen. She was a mix between
a super model and Superwoman, and she could do no wrong. I used to love watching her get dressed,
watching her get ready for going out, dressing in beautiful outfits. I would always compliment her. "Mom, that dress is so beautiful on you!
Where are you going? Let's take a picture. Oh, I love that. That looks so good!" And in return, I would receive, "This? Oh God no. I look so fat today.
No pictures. Oh God no." Like a slap in the face. I felt wrong. I was wrong while I was extending love
that she couldn't accept at that time because of a block of her own. When will it be that we stop
justifying, people pleasing, looking outside ourselves
for validation about our worth that we know comes from within? Maybe if we felt that true depth of worth
and love for ourselves, we wouldn't constantly be comparing
to everyone else, looking at others and feeling that if they succeed,
that means I must fail. If they're good, I must be bad. This natural scarcity and this feeling
of competition with all those around us. When will it end? I know it's possible for us
to look in the mirror and see true beauty, see love, with kindness, compassion, empathy, and true magnanimous love. Magnanimous is deeper
than unconditional love. It goes to the depths
that include compassion and kindness - true depth. Diets don't work. Love does. Negative emotions
cause nervous system chaos, while positive emotions
bring the nervous system into alignment. We make better choices
for our lives and for our health when we come from
a positive emotional space. And we feel it right here. Did you know we have on average
70,000 thoughts in a single day? And did you know
that 98% of those thoughts are repeats from yesterday. And that about 80% of them are negative towards ourselves or somebody else. How do you think all that negativity
is making you feel? Love. It's one of those first things we feel, but while we go through these experiences
in life that shut us down a little, I want to get closer to you
so I compliment you, I'm in awe of you. And yet little bit by little bit
we get closed down, we get shut down. I feel very fortunate
to have had an experience like I did. Upon being born, I was removed
from my parents shortly after, and they were told
that I had a heart defect. I was not alright, I had to be taken away
to be put in the incubator, and true fear came over them,
as it would any parent. What I didn't realize at the time
and only now looking back at it was that all the attention - all the love, healing, the worry, the positive vibes that were
sent to me growing up, in all my many visits to the hospital, checking up on me,
making sure I was still okay - unbeknownst to me,
this actually strengthened my heart. Did you know positive emotions actually strengthen
the integrity of our heart, our arteries? We can literally harden
our own arteries of our heart through negative emotion. It's quite fascinating. Gratitude. We've learned
a little bit about this today, and we know it is that secret ingredient. I feel very grateful that my mortality
was shown to me from a very young age. You have a problem.
Let's make sure you are always okay. I wasn't sure there was always
going to be a next day. So I lived in gratitude. And I knew the feeling when my mom didn't like my compliments
or didn't receive them, that I didn't want to do that to others. These were two really great
lessons in my life. Interestingly enough though, it wasn't until the biggest life lesson,
of pregnancy and postpartum, came to teach me something
that I had not yet learned. The true depth of self-love. Day after day, thousands
of babies are being born, and moms are feeling the pressure. Feeling the pressure
of needing to lose weight, of looking a certain way, of doing certain things
to make sure they measured up. But we don't really want to lose weight
in that time of our lives. We don't want to focus on things that we should be superficially
obsessed about. We want to focus on the love,
connection and bonding with our babies. But I, too, fell prey
to our weight-obsessed culture, and I was worried after I had gained
over 50 pounds in my pregnancy, worrying that, "What would people think of me
if I was a trainer and I was overweight?" I had all these preconceived notions
of things I had to do. What I needed to do to keep up. What I made sure that I should do
so that I could tell others to do this. And you know what I did? I gave myself a really, really,
really horrible injury. I injured my back to the point
where I ended up in the hospital twice in a single week. My babies were just
one and three at the time. I was not able to lift them. I was not able to bathe them. I was not able to care for them in the way that me, as a young new mom,
would have loved to. This brought up in me
more than I ever could have bargained for. I didn't even realize
how much I often justified, "Well, sure, I'll eat this, because then I can go work out
and I'll work it off." I had all these weird stories and messages that I didn't even realize
were happening in my head. Not being able to exercise, not being able to work up a sweat, and even having pain just breathing allowed me to learn the true essence
of what was necessary. It's the innercise, the inside work,
that was absolutely necessary for me to rehabilitate
from this experience of having babies. From the time that I hurt myself, I learned everything
that I could about the core. I wanted to understand exactly how
I could rehab my own back, and through this,
I learned about pelvic health, I learned about the deep
versus the superficial core, I learned how to rehabilitate it and breathe in a way
that was actually supportive to me. And this after years of training
and teaching mom-and-baby bootcamp to new moms. Now knowing - If I knew then what I knew now, that was the most contraindicated thing
that these moms could have done. I actually put them in front of danger,
as well as myself, without knowing it. This is the lesson I learned. I was able to write a book called
"The Love FitMama Way," knowing that being a fit mama
all starts with love. It's not about all those
superficial external things that you think you need to do,
have to do all the time. It's all about slowing down,
trusting your gut. This is our second brain right here. And after the trauma so many moms
go through, we just shut it down. We want to be in our
heart space feeling love but instead, we're in our heads feeling shame, regret,
"I shouldn't do that," "I didn't go to the gym,"
"I'm horrible, oh my gosh" - it never ends. This does not need to be the way. And I truly feel that we as a collective
can transform the core of motherhood through education
and through inspiration and through giving them
a different alternative. I specifically wanted to target
our weight-obsessed culture. Weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. We judge people over and above
what is necessary. What if instead of weight loss,
we did judgement loss? What about letting go
of all that scarcity that we have, that feeling of unworthiness. That should never up for debate. You are worthy. You began that way. You will end that way. That never needs to change. Trust that. Trust that knowledge. We have such ingrained patterns, neural pathways that we have created, formulated from all those stories
we've told our selves, all those experiences
where we made ourselves the bad guy. Did you know there is no survival adaptive
benefit to being your own worst enemy? None whatsoever. We can give it up. It's going to be uncomfortable, but it will feel good as you lay down
those new neural networks filled with self-love. Chocolate cake. Once a symbol of loving, fun celebration, now a poster-child
for words like guilt, shame, regret, cheating, bad! I want to tell you about a study
done with chocolate cake. They had two groups, and they asked them
how they felt about eating chocolate cake. They divided them
into two groups after that. One group was the guilty group. "I'm guilty, I'm bad,
I ate the chocolate cake." The other group that ate
the chocolate cake did so in celebration and fun. That was their mindset. They didn't put the mindset on them. Those were the two groups
that had those mindsets. What they found when they later tested was that the guilty group
was significantly higher in the stress hormone cortisol, which we all know is a sign
that you are way stressed out, if your cortisol is shooting
through the roof. Now not only is the guilty group feeling negative emotions
and feeling more stressed, but in fact, in the longer term, those guilty folks
had a harder time losing weight and weighed more in the long run. Guilt: also not a positively adaptive ... emotion. There is no cheating, just choosing. Choose the foods you eat. Don't use them, but choose them consciously. But not from your head, where you are thinking,
"Oh shoot, is this part of my diet?" "That person said that's bad."
"Oh no, I'm not eating that this week." Get it out and bring it down, bring it down into the positive
emotions of the heart, remembering a time
when you felt true deep love. This is where the magic is. It starts from the heart. It moves into the core, where you trust that the beliefs
and the values that you live by are worthy. All we want is connection. We want love. We want to feel loved
and connected to people, not because of how we look, but because of who we are on the inside. We want to connect with amazing people,
high-vibe people, living it up, and yet we are down here saying, "Oh no. No, I'm ugly. I have shame.
I have regret. I shouldn't have." Low vibration. Those two are not going to connect. I want to leave you
with three things that I do because I don't recommend things to others
that I first and always don't do myself. The first thing: positive self-talk only. Under no circumstances
do you deserve to be berated for the fact that you missed the gym or you ate a piece of cake
or you did anything. You don't deserve it,
most especially not from yourself. Make a pact. Number two: Remember those 98% of your thoughts
that you repeated from yesterday? Let's ditch them. That leaves you over 68,000 thoughts
that you could instead say the words: thank you, thank you for this day,
thank you for my friend, thank you for my heart beating. You could find 68,000 things in a day that are for sure going to
positively impact your life and inspire you much more
than those negative thoughts. And third: take time every single day to breathe. Breathe into that heart space
and feel the love. Positive emotions will keep
your heart strong. Breathe into your core. Understand how it works. Get deeper than the superficial. There's always more than meets the eye. And lastly, I am going to leave you with this quote, that if you can love the body
and life you have, you will have the body
and life you love. Thank you. (Applause)
