474. How I transformed my relationship with exercise

0:05 Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Speig and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Thank you for tuning in.

0:32 for another episode, what is going to be a slightly more personal episode than my usual discussions on this podcast. I also want to give a little bit of a heads up early on, a bit of a trigger warning. We're going to be talking about diet, weight loss, exercise, and all those kinds of things. So if that's not something that you want to listen to somebody talk about, it's not intense, but if you're just like, I don't want to hear about that, maybe the one for you to skip. But like I said, more personal episode today.

1:05 I want to talk about my relationship to exercise and how that has changed drastically and exponentially over the past three years ago. Three years ago, I was somebody who would barely get 5,000 steps a day. And now I have a full six day gym split. I Sounds like bragging, but I can run half marathons pretty casually. And on the weekends, my idea of fun is now doing these insane hikes. And I truly do believe that so much of my life because of this has completely flipped. And I do feel like in the past three years, my lifestyle and what I do just in my day-to-day life has changed because of I have changed my core relationship to exercise. And I've done it in a way that has had nothing to do with looks, nothing to do

2:08 with physical attractiveness, nothing to really even do with discipline, if I'm going to be completely honest. The entire source of this transformation has been enjoyment and looking after my body. And I feel like there is perhaps something that maybe you guys could learn from it. Maybe not, but maybe you're just interested in hearing somebody else's journey. I worked really hard to find this balance and I feel like I've done it in a way that previously I wouldn't have been able to, but also in a way that is so different to how we are currently being taught or shown to treat our bodies, which is to be the tiniest version of ourselves, regardless of health, So if you need a little bit of a palate cleanser for

2:55 somebody who has truly changed their relationship with exercise in a positive direction, in a consistent direction, and in a way that didn't happen overnight, didn't happen without any kind of external drugs, substances, anything like that, keep listening. We're going to talk about it. Without further ado, let's get into it. Okay, so I have my phone here. I've taken some notes. So I'm sorry if you keep seeing me kind of look down at it. I went through the data. I feel like every episode we need to have some kind of data source. And today's data source was pictures of myself, diary entries, Apple data, and just like general health data as well. Just to kind of give you a picture of like how this has happened

3:42 and how slow some of the progress has been. I want to kind of start with a bit of a history of like my relationship with exercise. So my family has always been incredibly fit and healthy. When we were kids, we would literally go to, on our weekends, this program that was called Fit Families. That was my parents' idea of fun. And it would be like us and like three other families and we would do like a two-hour like personal training session for like parents and kids. And so that was like the environment I grew up in.

4:17 I always was like physically active, always doing things, always like running around. In high school though, things really changed. And I think for a lot of people when you're 15 and 16, the only reason you exercise is because you want to lose weight. And that means that you do the kind of exercise that is just incredibly unenjoyable.

4:38 And it just completely injures your ability to to just like actually get pleasure from moving your body. I'm talking like cardio at the gym. I had like a gym membership when I was 16. Like I, I guess like some people do, I wasn't like an athlete or anything. And like, this was like an adult gym. Like people paid like pickleball, like squash in like the, in the basement.

5:02 And I was just like little 16 year old and I would jump on the treadmill and go for so like for ages. And then I would eat like a freaking pint of like Halo Top because I was so hungry and like just nothing about it was healthy. No, no criticism to Halo Top. Tastes great. But that was kind of like how I saw it. And it was never something that I actually wanted to do. Like going to the gym was never something where I was like, yeah, I'm going to do that. It was like, I have to use every single ounce of willpower in my body to do this because The only reason I'm doing this is for something that I desperately want, but also don't enjoy, which is to be skinny and which is to be small.

5:46 Then I went to uni and I didn't exercise for like, probably let's be real, like the first two years at uni, I was just like drinking and having fun and like kind of just studying my little butt off. And just, I feel like I was in such this, like such intense, like social circle that I was like, I can't even pull myself away for like an hour to go and take care of myself because the FOMO and the intensity of it all was just so much. And not only can I not pull myself away from my friends, but my studies. So kind of took a low priority. At the end of uni though, I will say I had, I was like starting to exercise a little bit more and then just completely fell off when I graduated and I moved to Sydney. I would like my main form

6:30 of exercise, I can distinctly remember this was me and my housemates shared a gym membership and we would go to the gym and we would lift weights for probably 10 minutes. And then we would go in the sauna and we were like, that's, that counts because like our heart rate is getting up. And then I would like walk to work. That was what I would do. I cannot really remember ever working out for longer than 20 minutes.

6:59 And you know what? Great for her because that was all I really wanted to do at the time. And then it just got, I don't want to say worse because I understand that that's some people's baseline. And I don't think that like, if you do 20 minutes of exercise a day for some people that it's high intensity, like that's amazing. For me though, it wasn't. And it just kind of went further downhill to a point where probably in like 2024, 2025, I genuinely, I don't know what was happening. I genuinely thought that I was a physically active person. I thought that I exercised, I thought that I was like taking care of myself and I wasn't.

7:38 I didn't get any incidental exercise because this was when I started doing the podcast full time and I was obsessive about it and I just worked on it all the time and I wouldn't really like go, I didn't have an office. I was all by myself in my house, in my little share house bedroom. So I wasn't getting any incidental exercise. I had kind of fallen out of love with exercise because it was either a chore or something that I did as kind of punishment. And I had no energy. I really had no energy. As I said, I was doing 5,000 steps a day on average. I looked at my data today and it was like 11,000 these days or something like that. And that was like on average. So there were days when I was really doing,

8:18 I was not moving at all. And this was kind of like a trigger for me to reevaluate exercise from a new perspective. I believed I was actually exercising because I would go to the gym like once every month. And that was enough to kind of like make me to continue the belief that like I was doing something.

8:43 And then I had my health scare, which I've spoken about on the podcast before, but I got diagnosed with this thing where I have too much fluid in my brain and it was very serious and it was very urgent. And then a who cares about what my body looks like? Like my cardiovascular fitness and like my everyday fitness is not where I want it to be. And then the second trigger, which is a little bit vulnerable. And like, I kind of hesitated about whether I would include this or not, but I think I just need to be honest was I got this hate comment and I, at the time, I don't know what it was. I was getting a lot of these, like just, I was just getting a lot of hate comments in general. I don't know how, but this, and I kind of forgot most

9:33 of them, but this one really stuck with me where this guy was like, why would I listen to somebody who can't run five kilometers about health and about psychology? And I was so mad about that comment. And I was like, I can run five kilometers. I can do that. Like, what is he talking about? And I tried and I couldn't.

9:59 And this was the thing that flipped a switch. I don't think that you need to run five kilometers to be fit and healthy because some people just don't like running. But what it really came down to was this identity, this identity belief that I had that I am an active person. I am a healthy person. I am somebody who fundamentally really wants to take care of myself. For me, I always saw health as, is my body able to do what I want it to do? And in that moment, I wanted to run five kilometers to prove this guy wrong, which sounds strange, but I was like, this is my marker for the fact that I'm healthy. And I wasn't able to do it. And that made me really reevaluate how I saw myself versus how I actually was. Like

10:55 I said, was like, do I include this? Because I don't want anybody to get the belief that leaving hate comments or bullying somebody into changing is actually effective. This was only a trigger for me because I had a belief about myself that pre-existed this man saying that. And that belief was that this was something I was capable of.

11:21 It wasn't. And that felt wrong to me, not because I thought that meant any less. It just because of like, that was something that mattered to me. And so that's when I really started this whole journey of being like, we need a new approach to this because it can't just be feast or famine with exercise. And I started running.

11:39 I'm going to take a little break here because I feel like this is a how I actually grew and made myself enjoy it. We're going to take a short break. Then we're going to come back. So when I was like, okay, I actually can't do what my, what I want my body to do. I was like, we need to find a way to health, like to do this in a way that is not going to burn me out. And so I had a couple of rules for myself. And this is where like the transformation of part of this story and this exercise and this like episode really comes to be the thing that I really wanted to do was that I well what I didn't want to do was any kind of exercise that I didn't enjoy and so I was very strict with myself I'm only going

12:31 to exercise at the beginning when I really feel like I want to exercise which sounds like it would like would like kind of undermine my progress, but I was like, only when I'm genuinely excited about running or about going to Pilates or about lifting weights, will I do that. And if I was not enjoying exercising and I was not enjoying working out, I did let myself quit just at the beginning. And when I say I let myself quit, I mean that there was a time, this didn't happen all the time, because often what you will find is that if you say, I'm only going to exercise when I enjoy it, you actually kind of trick your brain into enjoying it. And then you really start to trust your own analysis and judgment of the situation. And you

13:21 really start to be like, okay, well, if I really am not enjoying this, I'm not making excuses. I'm really just not having fun. And sorry, the story I was getting to as I literally walked out of this Pilates class in the middle of it, because I was like, I'm having such a terrible time. And I feel so...

13:40 sore and nauseous and just like unhappy that I at no stage in this process of reclaiming exercise for myself want to have an experience like that associated with moving my body. For me, there was no point in being like, just push through this because I understood the conditioning of this so well, which was that if we create a learned association between an activity and and a certain feeling or a certain outcome, that is the basis of whether you are going to perform that activity. So if I only exercise when I felt like I was, that I had to because I'd been bad or I'd eaten bad things or I was lazy, the trigger is all negative.

14:28 And so my feeling whilst I'm exercising is also going to be negative. And the feeling afterwards, even if I get the endorphins and endocannabinoids and all that nice feeling rushing through me is still always going to be, I did this for the wrong reasons and I didn't do enough. So in the beginning, it was almost like a form of intuitive eating. It was intuitive exercising. I only exercise when I wanted to and I quit when I didn't.

14:54 And this first part, I only exercise when I wanted to also meant that like, if I had even the smallest sensation of like, I could really go for like a gym sesh or like I could really go for a walk. I could really go for a run. I just had to do it. Like immediately I was like, well, my promise to myself was that I'd only exercise when I really wanted to. So off we go. The other thing I did not do was any kind of exercise that I was performing purely for its intensity and purely for the fact that it could burn calories. That was also intentional. That like, Changing my physical physique was not the object as it had been in the past. What I really wanted to do was build muscle, cardiovascular health,

15:45 and I really wanted to get more energy. The avenue to that could not be through endless, endless cardio because you get injured, you're exhausted, and you end up just feeling so hungry all the time. Your body feels so depleted that any actual... I don't know, effect you have on your like caloric intake by exercising, you basically just end up feeling, you just end up overcompensating for it later.

16:13 So when it came to the running, I always get these questions of like, how did you learn to enjoy running? And it was to do it incremental and to never do it with intensity. I ran so slow that I was almost walking. I would start running and I would be like, we're going to walk And then we're going to go up a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more to the point where I'm sure there were some people running past me, like at my local park, it was like, she is still basically walking, but that was fine. I didn't want to really overexert myself. I wanted it to feel completely comfortable.

16:48 And by doing that, I built this like base level of mileage that like has meant that now I've improved and improved and improved so, so much. And also I just got into a flow state with it. I would do these like runs where I'd be like, yeah, I'm just going to run until I feel tired. But because I was going so slow, it would take like an hour for that to happen because let's be real, I was basically walking. And that was the intention. I was like, what's going to make me feel good in my body and make me feel good about myself? So I also focused on types of exercise that I knew I would see improvements in If you are somebody like me who is very, I wouldn't say achievement minded, but I would say progress minded where we really like to see output

17:44 for our input. We really respond positively to environmental reinforcement. So whether that's like validation from somebody else or yeah, again, seeing that improvement in our own performance, this is like a very critical thing. I feel like any exercise, this is probably typically, you will see improvement, but for things like going on the rowing machine at the gym or going on the elliptical, those weren't things that I was really focused on doing because I couldn't incrementally see an improvement.

18:19 So what I really focused on was running and I really focused on weightlifting because there is a difference between running for 30 minutes and being able to run for 35 minutes. And That's very noticeable or being able to lift 10 kilos and being able to lift 12 kilos and being able to lift 15 kilos. And what I knew I needed was early reinforcement that I was doing something beneficial for my body. And I knew that because my intention was not to make this a visual thing as I had done in the past and to make this all about physique, that there needed to be some other kind of change. I wasn't going to weigh myself.

18:57 I wasn't going to measure myself. I needed things that were going to show incremental improvement so that I had motivation to keep going. So that is also another really, really important thing. And then at the six month mark, so the first six months I was like, we are doing this through the principles of enjoyment and the principles of minor improvement. I set a goal for myself and I'm just going to say my goal was incredibly lofty and ambitious and probably a little bit unsafe, which was I'm enjoying this running thing so much. I'm going to run a half marathon. I was like, that seems like a fantastic idea. I have literally, I signed up for my first half marathon and I'd never run 10 kilometers.

19:42 And this is what I always try and impress on people. Not that I am like, I don't know. Let me rephrase that. I always try and impress on people. You, if you do not think you are a runner, I was definitely not a runner. And if I could do it, you can. And I know that sounds like such a platitude and it's so cliche and But I'm seriously telling you, I was like, I really was not good at it.

20:10 And I really did not have the physique for it. I really didn't have, like, I went to a school, we didn't do athletics and we didn't do anything like that. So I had no real like practice other than fit families back in 2008. So I was like, I'm going to do a half marathon. And I gave myself, I can't remember now. I'm not going to lie. It was not a long time to prepare. I think it was like three or four months. Don't quote me on that.

20:37 I can't really remember. But my whole thing was, I just need to be able to see what I'm capable of. So I am just going to finish. And I did. And I did finish. I ran my first half marathon, the longest distance I'd never run more than, like, I will say this. I had not run more than 18 kilometers before I attempted. the 21 and a half kilometers or whatever it is. So I ran my furthest distance ever on a 30 degree day in Sydney on a route that had no trees and no shade. And I genuinely remember crossing the finish line. And the first thing I see is somebody throwing up. And I was like, I feel bad for that person, but I feel pretty amazing that I did that. Other thing about this half marathon is sorry, this has nothing to do with the

21:26 purpose of this episode, just a little tidbit. They had it finish uphill. So you had to run uphill for 300 meters or so after you'd finished running 21 kilometers and it was like 30 degrees. So I felt amazing after that. And then I think the capturing on the momentum of that because a lot of any fundamental behavioral change is momentum and capturing on that. I was like, okay, as soon as I finish this, I need to sign up for a couple more because I know how easy it is for me to, yes, adore, love, enjoy progress, but feel like, great, I've achieved this goal. I can move to the next thing. And I was like, the next thing has to be exercise related because this is the whole point. And the I want to live a

22:22 long time. I want to be able to do what I've always told myself my body could do. So I carried on that momentum and I was like, I'm going to sign up for this and this and this. And that really allowed me to like continue progressing as well. I will say I, after my half marathon, went back to that principle of like, if I'm not enjoying it, don't do it, don't do it. And so I didn't run for a couple of months because I was like this, me and this thing have such a good relationship right now.

22:51 I don't want to overwhelm it. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to, what's that line from like sex in the city? Like, I don't want to be like emotionally slutty. Like I don't want to bombard this, this tenuous relationship with exercise that I've got going on. Okay. I want to move on to some other things I did to really create a sustainable and powerful relationship with exercise.

23:13 And this does come back to physique and body structure and, and body formation and what I was adamant that I wouldn't do was allow any kind of fitness content on my algorithm that contained a body that did not look like my body. Now this might sound a little bit controversial and it's not to say that I was looking at these people and being like, ugh, or judging them or by any means thinking that they didn't look freaking amazing.

23:48 That was the issue. Like I thought they looked really, really good, but I'm like five, eight and I am a broad shouldered person. And I knew that having a really slim petite person showing me how to do bicep curls and my bicep curls probably not looking the same because my body shape was different, wasn't going to be helpful.

24:13 And I also knew that a lot of the fitness influencer content, it's just unrealistic. That's the whole principle of an algorithm and the whole principle of what makes anything, any kind of content do well. It's novel and it's something you haven't seen before. And it's something that is initially grabby. And so often that means insanely beautiful and stunning people that you aren't seeing every day and that are just these like insanely, and they are talented, dedicated outliers.

24:50 I knew that that was going to be discouraging to me and that the thing I needed to be obsessed with was like my own results and seeing how my own body was growing muscle, my own body was changing. So the mute and the restrict and the not interested button on Instagram was my best friend I will just say that and I felt kind of bad because there were some people who I was like I just can't see your content and I was like but I know you're a really nice person and you actually seem really really lovely but I just was so focused on being like where this is like we are all all in serious about this the moment that comparison enters this conversation, it's going to be all over. The moment that any kind of restrictive dieting comparison or excessive exercise or any

25:55 level of self-punishment enters this, I have kind of already lost in a sense because the relationship between me and exercise is so tenuous, like it's going to be fundamentally about something that I don't want it to be about. Okay, I'm going to take one more break here and then I've got two final things that I did and where I'm kind of at now with this whole kind of journey that I've been on. So stay with us. Okay, so two of the final things I did to transform my relationship with exercise was I did not or tried not to exercise with other people. Obviously loved a little run with my friends, but was never going to actively do a run club. Like we ran in the same park at the same time, but not together. And I

26:53 think this again comes back to knowing how you like to exercise and knowing how you've typically exercised in the past that like didn't work for you. I would, I know I'm a gym classes when I was at ANU at my university. If you're an ANU student, I like wonder if any of you are listening, but ANU gym is forever and always like my favorite gym. Cause they would do these when I was at uni and I was like in my little minor exercise period back then, I would do these spin classes there. And it was genuinely, I think like $ 8 at the time. And these, this was like pre COVID though. So I don't know how much it is now, And I would do these like pump classes as well. And it was just so good. However, I could take it pretty far and I could get

27:47 very competitive and I could end up just kind of crashing and burning with it because I was like, I can't go to this class unless I am 100% at my best because me and Susan on the bike next to me have an ongoing conflict. We have an ongoing competition. And I don't think I can beat her today. So I didn't want any kind of competitiveness. So I didn't exercise with other people. And also I fundamentally was like, I need to examine my diet and I need to stop drinking as much. And this was, I think, where things really like changed. There was just a different appreciation for my body when I stopped drinking to the level I was. And it's not to say that I was drinking like to the extremes. But I think every time

28:38 I drank, I was like the next day I didn't really want to do anything and I didn't feel great and I didn't really want to exercise and I didn't really want to get out there. And I was really falling in love with exercise. So I was like, this can't get in the way. So what I would do is I would be like, I can drink, but I can only drink three days a week, which to some might feel excessive. But like a lot of my social life in Sydney was like, let's go to the pub and like, let's get drinks after work. And like, Let's get beers like and have a picnic. So I think that also really changed things. And I also got kind of like, what is it called? Not like an intolerance test, but I basically like got some information about my digestive

29:26 system and like what foods were good for me and what were bad for me in terms of my own kind of like gut microbiome and chemical makeup. Hesitated to include this because I don't think you really need it. But I was finding that like, I was eating food and then I would exercise and I would, I was like this, everybody says to like eat carbs before you exercise.

29:45 And I was like, I actually feel like I'm going to throw up and I genuinely feel so sick. So I just got a bit more information about that. All of this is to say, I feel like 2023 me to 2026 me as I said at the beginning, is a completely different person. I exercise six days a week now. I feel like I'm kind of annoying my friends with how much I want to talk about my gym gains.

30:13 I never thought I would be somebody who would actively track protein, which I do minimally. But I think the critical key part of this and why I was able to finally fix this relationship was that I did not ask myself to change overnight. And I did not ask myself to do anything that I didn't want to do.

30:43 That to a lot of people who are very focused on willpower and discipline and perhaps doing like the 75 hard challenge or any of those kinds of protocols might sound completely counterintuitive. But what I was not lacking was discipline. What I was lacking was a genuine like appreciation and gratitude for my body and for my ability to move.

31:08 And I think what's critical and what we talk about on this podcast all the time in my more psychological educated episodes is that you cannot fundamentally change your behavior from a place of hate or from a place of shame. All of this research that we have shows that that is an incredibly finite fuel source for behavioral motivation. And so even though I knew it was gonna take a lot longer and it's taken like three years, I knew that like ultimately the time was gonna pass anyways. And I would rather start once than start 50 times. And the easiest way to start once is to never ever count any like slip ups or any like periods of pause or rest or giving up as like a failure and that you are going back to zero. That is

32:10 perhaps the most important thing. If you have decided like, I am going to change my relationship to exercise and that starts now, this is the start line. The start line does not start again. Once you have made the decision, like you have crossed the threshold, Even if you fall off the bandwagon, even if your relationship with exercise gets worse, like that is still part of the journey. You have still crossed the initial threshold. And I think what really tricked me in the past was being like, I'm going to get fit and healthy on Monday. I'm going to get fit and healthy starting August. I'm going to get fit and healthy starting 2022. And I just continuously offered myself all these ways of like purifying or like cleansing

32:58 myself of like past mistakes, not realizing like, okay, the mistakes of this or mistakes in quotation marks, like the kind of moments that weren't like amazing or weren't my very best are equally important to the journey as the moments that are really, really good. And what I found is that I was looking back for this episode at like my Strava data, right? And looking back at some of the runs that I was doing three two three years ago and remembering like I every single run I went on even if it was genuinely 200 meters I still included because I knew that at some point in the future where I am now and evolving into now I was going to want those data points to see how far I'd come so even like the failures will

33:49 offer a future version of you a really sincere and amazing gift which is like this failure and where I am now is evidence of perseverance and is evidence that I can keep going with whatever roadblock I'm facing. So that is my kind of transformation, my transformation experience. And I just hope that like, you can kind of learn something from it. I feel like I get the content on Instagram that's like 75 hard, how to do it this way, how to meal prep this, how to do this, how to do this, how to do this. And I've done it before and it just always failed. And so I see people have amazing success with that. My brain works differently. I was never going to be motivated by that for long. And I feel like somebody who's had

34:42 a religious experience is like, everybody in the world needs to know, why don't you just do this from a place of love? But Um, like, you know, we've thought about that before. You're not saying anything new, but I really just feel like in this day and age, everything is telling you and everything is giving you ways to like shortcut that experience. And I feel like fundamentally change and feel like, yeah, my God, it's like a religious experience, but I feel like my entire relationship to this has changed.

35:09 And I don't think I could have achieved that. Um, but if I just wanted to get smaller and if I just wanted to lose weight and if I just wanted to do it, in a certain period of time. And if I only wanted to do it without any missteps. So that is what I hope you take away from this episode and what I hope you can apply to your own life. Thank you for listening. Again, a bit different from what I usually do. And I kind of feel a bit self-conscious like talking about this. I'm sure there's going to be some people being like your relationship with exercise change. You don't look any different, but thanks for that. That was like my own inner critic being so nasty. I was like getting ahead. Like nobody's even

35:51 said that yet. But no, like I do feel like very different on the inside and I just feel so much better. So here's me preaching it from the rooftop. If you've made it this far and you're listening on Spotify, leave a comment down below. Where are you at in your exercise journey? What do you think is like the best thing that you have learnt recently from loving exercise again, what's your favorite exercise that you feel like everybody should try?

36:17 Oh my God. I also have to say the thing that I discovered I really loved was, um, heated, like pilates, heated, like sculpt classes. I should have included this. I really also like, I, I actually enjoy exercise where I finish and I feel like, oh my God, like I really like soften and like, I feel like I've like been to battle And so that's another one that I really enjoyed.

36:42 If you've tried one of those, you know what I'm talking about. It's like, it's insane. So tell me what your favorite exercise is. Leave a comment below. Make sure you can watch this episode, many others on Netflix. You can also follow us on Instagram. You can follow us on Substack. There's just so many ways to connect to learn more about the psychology of your 20s. But we're going to be back on, I think like Friday, Monday with a much more formal episode. And one that's a little bit more personal. So thank you for tuning in for this one and for something a little bit different.

37:13 We will talk very, very soon.