64. Embracing Weight Neutrality and Sustainable Wellness with Stephanie Lueras

Embark on a transformative journey with Stephanie Lueres, an inspiration in the ever-evolving world of the body positivity movement. Stephanie share her personal odyssey - a remarkable 200-pound weight loss that reshaped not just her body but her entire life. In our conversation, Stephanie and I navigate the waters of wellness, discovering how a series of small, consistent lifestyle changes can ripple out into a vast sea of health benefits.

Stephanie's tale isn't solely about the physical triumphs; it's a profound exploration of the mental, emotional, and spiritual growth that comes from nurturing every facet of our being.

Our conversation is a reflection on the beauty of starting where you are and trusting the wisdom of your body, as we wade through the concepts, and differences, of weight neutrality and body positivity. It's an affirmation that with respect and care, your health will find its natural balance, free from the grasp of stringent diets and societal pressures.

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Stephanies Website, click HERE

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Hi, stephanie. I'm so glad you're here with me today to talk to my audience about weight and body image and body positivity. Let me tell the audience a little bit about you first. Stephanie Lueres is a body positive personal trainer and fitness nutrition specialist who works with groups and individuals that feel stuck with traditional diets yet want to build consistency and feel successful in moving toward their goals and how they want to feel in their body.

Speaker 1: 1:14

After coming to a point in her own life where she was quote sick and tired of being sick and tired, stephanie knew she needed some changes. Small actions and goal setting helped Stephanie lose over 200 pounds through balanced nutrition and movement, without the use of restrictive dieting, commercial weight loss plans or supplements. In turn, she gained a love of endurance, sports, running marathons and is currently training for an Ironman distance race. She uses the same holistic goal setting model in working with clients and groups and individually to empower people to break down the everyday barriers that exist so they can achieve what they are working towards for their best personal wellness. Stephanie specializes in beginner and adaptive fitness, aiding those of all sizes, age conditions, illnesses and abilities. Did I get all that right?

Speaker 2: 2:16

Sounds pretty good to me.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Great, so let's start with your story. First, I want to hear and talk to you about what it means to also be body positive, but I know that losing 200 pounds is a huge feat and takes a certain kind of a mindset, so why don't we just start with you sharing about your story?

Speaker 2: 2:40

Okay, Well, I'm a person that has always been overweight. I've been. You name the diet. I have probably tried it at least once. I'm really great at losing weight, but I'm even better at gaining it back, and when I reached my mid 30s, I'm like I'm tired. I'm tired of this. There has to be something out there other than dieting. That is what I thought in my mind was going to make me happy, and so I'm like I just I'm done.

Speaker 2: 3:20

But I didn't know what was next, and so I just started thinking about how I felt at that present time, and pretty much everything was miserable. It wasn't just my size and my physical ability in my physical health, but it was also my mental health, and my spiritual health just across the board had become very stagnant, and so I started looking around at, well, what's something that feels doable, and literally the first thing I did was start to drink water, cultivate this habit of drinking water, and it wasn't, like you know, running out and getting one of these crazy like gallon jugs and all these water challenges and things we see. I had an eight ounce cup and a kitchen timer, and whenever that obnoxious old school kitchen timer went off in my office, I had to get up, take that water glass to the water cooler, which it was at like the other end of the building, and fill it up. So it was just cultivating this habit of being aware of how much I'm drinking, how often am I drinking. And then that started to feel pretty good. I'm like, okay, I got the hang of this, what can I do next? And so then it was well, let's focus on give me what. What are we eating? I was pretty much going through the drive-thru at least once, if not twice, a day to feed my husband and myself, which is not only horribly expensive, it's it's not the most varied diet out there. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to cook at home. Doesn't matter what I cook at home, but I'm going to cook. And then, as I started doing that, it was well, let's experiment with this or that, or try these different things and really introduce this balanced diet full of all types of foods.

Speaker 2: 5:36

Even just falling into those habits, I naturally started to lose weight. I probably lost I don't know 40, 50 pounds before I even decided, okay, maybe let's do some physical movement now. But at that time I was at a size where mobility was difficult and had I kept gaining weight, I probably would have lost my mobility. So, my mind, the only thing that I could do was walk. And so I walked to the end of the street back, thought I was going to die. But I kept doing it to the end of the street and that became around the block, around the neighborhood, further and further.

Speaker 2: 6:24

And as I built up that stamina and endurance, one day I'm like, you know, I wonder if I can run Now, I think sick and gym class. This was not a thought that would ever come naturally to me. But in just again that first step of running you know, going to like a stop sign, like 50 yards down the road something in me clicked and I'm like this is something that I think I'm going to like, I'm going to enjoy. And so I really cultivated this habit of running, which then morphed into five k's, 10 k's, half marathons, marathons, and then jumping over into triathlon for a new challenge, because I really enjoy those long endurance workouts. You know, don't tell me to go run a mile because I don't get settled in my head and in my movements in just that little amount of time. Send me out for a few hours at a time and I'm solving the problems of the world, because it just that's that calm place for me.

Speaker 2: 7:38

But alongside those physical habits came looking at the rest of my wellness, that mental and emotional wellness, and that spiritual wellness, because in improving one area it was how am I going to bring up those other areas? So it was looking at things like am I dealing with my relationship with food, the reason why I continue dieting in the first place, and I also have PTSD, and so really looking at, how does that show up in my daily life? How do I cope with that? And then just that spiritual health. You know, where am I connected in this world? What do I believe and how does that? How is that shown in all that? I do so through this process. I didn't necessarily focus on the weight at all. The weight takes care of itself when we're engaged in the habits that help us to feel good and to feel how we want to feel.

Speaker 1: 8:50

Wow, I mean, that's a big, you know, that's a lot, I mean, and you know, just, I think, number one, starting with small steps, right, Always a great idea. And you just started with an eight ounce glass of water, yeah, fantastic. But you then transitioned to looking at your food and doing less drive-thrus and take out to then your physical and then running 5Ks and then going even longer to your mental and emotional, to your spiritual. That takes a lot of dedication. I'm just curious did you have support? Was your husband supportive? Was he in on it with you? How did you, how did you get this, this incredible mindset shift?

Speaker 2: 9:45

You know, one of my favorite words is accountability. Accountability comes from a lot of different places. My husband is incredible. He is my biggest cheerleader. He will support me in any crazy idea I come to him with. But just the nature of knowing him in our relationship, I would never have the expectation that he was going to do something alongside me, Because we both have different approaches to things, and so for me it was a decision. Well, if it means I'm cooking two different meals or two different parts of meals, that's the way it was for a little while, Until he started to see the different things that I was eating and he's like, oh well, I'm just going to make that for me too, and so even that modeling, he was able to make some own changes for himself.

Speaker 2: 10:43

But that accountability piece, we can't depend on our support in just one area, and I look at it as a whole team effort. I have an incredible physician that I can come to with any questions, any concerns, and we're going to work it out or bring in the people that I need to support me in that. The other thing is on that physical side. I have a sports dietitian that specializes in mindful eating and intuitive eating, which is something that's very important to me. I have a coach that understands what it's like to train in a larger body and some of the different dynamics that raises that a typical athlete wouldn't necessarily face. I have those spiritual mentors. I have my church. Community Therapy is a beautiful thing. I have a great therapist and also, even in that, just those other support groups and places where you find people that are going through the same things that you do. That's all those places that keep me focused on what I want and am I moving to get there?

Speaker 1: 12:16

Yeah, well, so thanks for sharing that that you have different almost accountability partners, in a way you know, from all different areas, and I think that is so important. And then having community, that you're not doing things alone. But I also think that you have to be accountable to yourself, too, right, and that that's where the mindset comes in, that you feel like I can do this rather than I can't, and so it sounds like you just have incredible you know your own accountability to yourself. I think that's we have to have compassion and kindness right and forgiveness right, First and foremost for ourselves.

Speaker 2: 13:01

I think that accountability to yourself comes back to my favorite question in the world how do you want to feel? Because it's never that I need to. I have to, I should. All of this, this pressure that we put on ourselves, Well, who tells me that I need to do this? Who's telling me I have to do this? But when you look at it through the lens of how do I want to feel, it makes it really easy to stay the course in something that you know is going to make the difference in changing something or maintaining something that that's working for you.

Speaker 1: 13:48

Yeah, excellent question, and it's one that I ask myself daily and just to the people that I also work with. Right, how do you want to feel? And I imagine that, after being on and off countless diets, I mean, that's not how you want to feel, right, that's frustration and struggle and a lot of emotion. So you did a fantastic job of really pivoting and looking at and then looking at all the different areas of your life. So it sounds like then you had this amazing positive experience and did this transition into what you do now.

Speaker 2: 14:35

It did Because as I changed, as I grew and basically became more whole, I realized that the environment that I was in, the career that I was working with this organization, was pretty toxic and very damaging not only to my physical health but to my mental and emotional health. And it was a hard decision, but it was something that I knew it was time to go. And my husband and I worked together and he was having some similar thoughts from some things that he was experiencing as well, and so we really sat back and we said, okay, well, if we're not going to do this, what are we going to do? And my husband, he entered into the workforce and isn't a job that he loves and I couldn't be happier. But for me it was how do I take what I'm doing and continue to serve people?

Speaker 2: 15:53

And as I've gone through my journey I mean this is like six, seven years now that people would always say to me you have to tell me what you're doing, you have to show me what you're doing. But I couldn't, within the parameters of the previous position I had. So I started to look at well, what would that look like? How could I serve people in showing them what I've done and what potentially could work for them, and even through the process of what I've done for myself.

Speaker 2: 16:33

I got my certifications, I got the personal training, the nutrition, all of these other things. I just keep stacking them up because I'm like a super nerd, but these are the things that I wanted to understand, what all these other people were teaching me about my body. So, taking that, putting it into a coaching framework now of walking alongside others in, what is it that you need? How do you want to feel? How do we find that? Because it's different for everyone. I have zero expectation that someone is going to go out and become a runner or become a cyclist or do these other things, but for them, it might just be getting their body moving, looking at how they can be serving food for their families in a different way. There are so many different avenues to look at.

Speaker 1: 17:31

We're starting with just drinking a glass of water.

Speaker 1: 17:35

So tiny stuff like that. Yeah, so it sounds like you meet people where they're at that and everyone's individual. I think that's also a really great point to drive home that we're all individuals. Being on a diet means you're following someone else's rules and everyone has to follow the same plan, but it sounds like your approach is totally individual, which is how I believe it should be as well. So I know that you do not endorse a specific diet or because you've been there, done that. But talk to me about body positivity. I was curious about that just for my audience. Is body positivity a? I mean, it's not a diet, but is it a way of life? Is it a philosophy?

Speaker 2: 18:31

So body positivity has really taken on this buzzword persona and crossed over into diet culture and beauty culture and all of these other things that send us down that rabbit hole of I'm not enough, I need to do XYZ to be acceptable. Instead of looking at things with that term body positivity, I'm really starting to make the shift more toward weight neutrality and body acceptance, because we are not going to implement lasting change, we are not going to be very clear and honest with ourselves if we can't accept what is in the present moment. We can mourn our college body, we can. It's okay to look back at different points in life and think, wow, I want to get back to that. But do you really want to go back and be 21 again? I sure don't.

Speaker 2: 19:54

But it's becoming very present in the here and now, and it might not be all sunshine and roses when you realize what things look like right now, but it's that great springboard too. Well, what's possible? What can I look at? What can I change? How do I want to feel? It's not dictated by a number on the scale. It's not dictated by a particular way of dress or a status symbol. It truly comes back to that place of being comfortable in your own skin and are you able to do the things you want to do? And if you can't, then how do we make that happen? So it's really almost stepping back from the fairy tale and looking at what is right now so that I can be who I want to be.

Speaker 1: 21:05

I just want to get clear. Are you saying body positivity has gotten a little skewed, like it started out? Because I remember this too, this concept of body positivity, and I think what I heard you saying was that then it filters into the diet industry and the beauty industry and it's on social media, and really what is underneath it, I think, is what you're saying, is that I'm not enough, I still need to be something different, and so then you're off shooting into weight neutrality and just body acceptance.

Speaker 2: 21:46

In my definition of body positivity, without everything that we see on social media today. That body positivity is that body acceptance. It is fully living life in the here and now. You know, yeah, we may be working on to change some things, there may be some desires to look at some different things in our lives, but that pause button hasn't been hit, that we're not living life right now.

Speaker 1: 22:22

Right. So, and being accepting yourself where you are right now, I think, is incredibly important for it, because we can't go back to our 21-year-old self, where I have clients sometimes who just say I wish I just want to be how I looked when I was 30. But now you're almost 60 and you're just not going to be. Your body's different, your body, you know there's different changes going on and so we have to accept ourselves right where we are right now. No matter what our weight is at our energy, our physical, it can always shift, but starting with acceptance is an incredibly important first step.

Speaker 2: 23:13

Our bodies are pretty darn smart. If we're doing what our body truly needs, if we are engaging in those habits that serve our body in the best way, the weight figures itself out. Our body transforms into what it wants to be. We don't have to be the ones to have that rigid control over it.

Speaker 1: 23:40

Right, exactly, I totally agree with that. If someone was coming to you they're the very beginning stages, like you were back in the day what's the best advice you would give them? I mean, would you start with something very small, like start with water, because I know it's like I think, when you described all your things, that's a lot to the food, the spirituality, the physical. What would be a good starting point? I have imagined you're going to say I mean, it's very individual and wherever someone wants to start, it is very individual but at the same time it's also something that is similar across the board.

Speaker 2: 24:36

It's always starting with a place that isn't going to disrupt someone's lifestyle, Because we think about things like diets, like New Year's resolutions, like all these things where we institute this framework onto our lives and it might work for a little while, we can stick to it, we can hold this plan and white-knuckle it for a little while, but ultimately it doesn't last in the long term because we've taken something that has some great elements but it doesn't fit our life, and that happens for a lot of reasons Our schedule, our finances, our responsibilities, our family, children, whatever that looks like. So that starting point, whatever it is, and that's really determined by what someone wants to achieve is what is it that fits in life today? Exercises the easiest example For somebody that's not exercising. It is absolutely unrealistic to expect that person is going to add in 45 or 60-minute workouts for five days a week Completely not something that's going to happen.

Speaker 2: 25:57

But we can probably find 30 minutes a couple times a week, 15 minutes even more frequently through the week and starting in that very small place where it's easy to start to pencil into the calendar, it starts that momentum of consistency that you're doing it over and over. It has a cumulative effect. The more you do it, the better you feel, the more willing you are to open up that space, to make more time for it. So it's really starting to introduce things into daily life in a gentle way that doesn't throw everything else off to the side. And then you get frustrated because you can't keep it all together.

Speaker 1: 26:48

Yeah. So I mean starting with those really again, those small steps. But I know that I have some clients, many clients they come to first to see me that say, their biggest goal and I know you come from that weight neutral standpoint their biggest goal is I want to lose weight and I want to lose a lot of it, and so can you do that for me in 30 days. And so sometimes trying to convince people that it's like those small steps doesn't feel like enough, it's like too slow going. They want their fast results because they're used to being on diets that can give you fast results. But you know you go off the diet and you're back to where you were.

Speaker 2: 27:36

Yeah, and I'd be lying if I didn't say the number one request of people walking into my office was I want to lose weight, okay, okay. More often than not, when we have a deeper conversation, it's not about the weight, it's not about the scale. And my favorite question is why? Why do you wanna lose weight? Keep asking it several times. I forget the gentleman that talks about the seven why's, and we keep getting deeper and deeper. But a lot of times somebody will walk in the door and say I wanna lose weight, but then we start to unpack that a little bit and I wanna be able to keep up with my kids or my grandkids.

Speaker 2: 28:33

I have aches and pains. I wanna manage a chronic condition. Probably one of the biggest things I hear, not just from older ages but across the board, is I wanna be able to get up if I fall. And I never realized that was such a big fear with so many people. So when we really step back from what was that first reason and start to look at okay, why are we really here, then we start to see that starting point.

Speaker 2: 29:11

Well, if somebody is afraid of falling, wants to be able to get up, build that strength there's a lot of things we can do that in a lot of different areas. That's going to build those habits. That's gonna build that strength and confidence. The weight is gonna take care of itself. The other thing, too, is weight doesn't exist in a vacuum. I mean, the scale simply is a measure of our gravity, and so we have to look at what is your measure of success besides that number, and so it's looking at other benchmarks.

Speaker 2: 29:53

Is it a body composition change? Is it these clothes are fitting a little bit better or I'm not huffing and puffing running up the stairs? Things like that. What can we celebrate for even those people that still are like I need to lose weight and I need to lose it quick. Fine, I'll tell you how to do it, but then, when it fails, we're gonna try it my way. So you start to see how people think things through a little bit differently when it starts to get hard and they're like okay, well, maybe there is something different.

Speaker 1: 30:36

Right, yeah, no, I like that measuring success and it doesn't mean the number on the scale. I mean, there's so many other ways to measure success, but in our society, unfortunately, the number on the scale means so much. But it sounds like, with your way of looking at things and the way that you coach people, this is such a great first step that people need to know their why. Why are they doing this? And I don't want to fall. I'm fearing falling. I wanna be able to get on the ground and play with my grandkids.

Speaker 1: 31:15

I mean, yeah, these are the things I talk to about my clients as well and that means not just going on a diet to lose weight. That means there's so many other things that surround that. So I think you're doing such great work because this is the direction I think that body image and making peace with food and weight and everything needs to go. We are just. I know we contend with the multi-billion dollar diet industry, but hopefully we're making small steps in other directions. So I really appreciate your story, stephanie. I think this has been fantastic and sounds like you're just doing amazing work. How do people get in touch with you and how do you work with people?

Speaker 2: 32:13

So I work with people virtually as well as in person here in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, but I work across all the time zones. That's usually not an issue, but I'm out there. If you wanna find me, you can. All the social media networks, my business, Heart and Soul, Fitness and Wellness Soul is S-O-L-E. My website, heartandsoulfitcom, and all of my inboxes are open. Those messengers are open. Shoot me a question and let's have a conversation. I always have a free consultation for people that, even if they haven't figured out yet what they're looking for, let's have a conversation, because if it's not something that is in my lane, I have a referral network of people that I know that I trust that we're gonna get you what you need to for whatever it is. If it's wellness, if it's some other area of support that you need, we're gonna get you there Fantastic.

Speaker 1: 33:35

Well, I'll make it even easier. I'll put all your links in the show notes too, so people can just quickly find you that way as well. So, stephanie, thank you so much. I appreciate you being here and talking about a really important topic. Thank you, have a great day you too.