In this episode I chat with Kristen Koeller who is an ACE Certified health coach, a group fitness instructor, and a personal trainer. We sit down to talk about the highs and lows of life  and the value of approaching these times with a growth mindset that allows us to move through the peaks and valleys with curiosity and be open to what we can learn from both.

Episode Transcript

Welcome, everyone. I am here with Kristin Keller. Kristin is an ACE certified health coach, group fitness instructor, and personal trainer.

She has struggled with her own self-esteem, food, and body image issues for most of her life. She’s passionate about using her own experiences and her education to help others free themselves from restrictive diet culture and heal their own relationship with food, movement, mind, and body. Welcome, Kristin.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Kristin, we have an interesting topic today and I think this is something that is important, especially in the age now of social media and highlight reels, and we’re going to be talking about peaks and valleys, highs and lows, cycles in life where you have times for growth, times for expansion, times to retreat, and times to reflect.

So just kind of working through and being transparent about what it looks like to be okay with kind of riding these seasons and never going to be the never ending high and the low is a failure, right? So this is just cyclical and how we can kind of learn to adjust and go with it through life. Kristin, you are a health coach and you’re a personal trainer and you are a group fitness instructor. So you have a lot of experience helping people identify and achieve health and wellness goals.

But what I’d like to do is talk about how you got to this point where you are a health coach, a trainer, a group fitness instructor, and why this particular area is important to you. 

Yeah, absolutely. I think my whole career path is kind of in line with what we’re talking about today with the peaks and the valleys.So going way back to the beginning and how I ended up in the work that I do growing up, just like a lot of us, I struggled with my body image. I struggle with my relationship with food constantly, just being really self-critical, always being really self-conscious. And that kind of held me back from doing a lot of things throughout my life because I didn’t want any attention on me

.And it was always just like constant secret striving to change myself and kind of be what I thought other people wanted to be to me or what other people would accept me as. And that was all the way up until my early 20s. When I went to college, I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

You know, you always heard like, oh, you’ll figure it out once you get there. So I was in my last year of college and I still had not figured anything out after changing my major about 10 times. I finally was like, I’m just going to finish this psychology degree.

And if I decide I want to do something else, then I will come back and figure it out then. Otherwise, I’m going to be here forever. 

My last semester of school, I took a class called the Psychology of Living Well.And that was the one class that really changed everything for me. It was really all about the psychology of happiness. And our biggest project for that class, we had to make our own.The only requirement for that project was it had to be something in line with improving your quality of life. So with it being my last semester in college, and like I mentioned, I kind of let my self-consciousness hold me back from doing a lot of things my whole life. My last semester of college, my project was just to go do all the things I had been missing out on for the rest of my, you know, three and a half years in college.

So I was trying different things. And one thing led to another. I decided I was going to run a 5K.And that really spiraled into finally achieving the weight loss that I had always been striving for in the past, which I thought was great at the time. I felt great. I finally did this thing that everyone praises.

Everyone compliments you. I always had an interest in like how to eat well and live well and move well. But it wasn’t really in the healthiest context.It was the context that I knew that we see a lot with diet and weight loss culture. I was really into going to the gym. I was trying different things.I graduated from college and decided to go use my psychology degree working in the Department of Social Services. 

But really, I remember one time I tweeted, like, what do I have to do to just spend all day in the gym, right? I had to kind of turned into one of those gym rats. Eventually, long story short, I went and got a job at the gym.That’s how you spend all day at the gym. You go work at the gym, right? As I started working at the gym, I was working on my personal training certification. So I was like, I don’t know what I want to do with my life.

But I guess I’ll just help other people that know what they want to do with their life be healthier while they do it, which turns out that that is an actual career. But at the same time, I started experiencing the side effects, I guess, of rapid weight loss and the weight loss that we tend to see in our diet and weight loss culture. Your survival instincts start kicking in when you’re not eating enough to keep up with how much energy you’re putting out.

And I started struggling with overeating, binge eating, just kind of losing control around food, which then just really plummeted my image of myself that I had built up so high. All of a sudden, it was like, I have no self control or no willpower. 

Why can’t I do this anymore? And I didn’t understand that.I started honing in more on nutrition at that point. I’m going to work on cleaning up my food, right? So I did that for a while. And I’m still just really struggling with just the up and down and like being quote unquote on track and then being off track and kind of the yo yo dieting.

And I just did not understand it. And it really sent me into a depression again, because I just did not understand what was wrong with me. I felt like something was wrong with me. This had been happening for on and off for a few years.

 Eventually, my depression had gotten so bad to the point. Like I went to therapy a few times.I tried that my depression eventually got to the point where I decided to go to the doctor and try some medication. And I think that was, you know, like the little bit of the push I needed to get my mindset in a better direction. And I started implementing more self care tools.

And I know self care is kind of the trendy thing right now, but I’m not talking like wine and a bubble bath type of thing. Like changing the way I talk to myself, working on affirmations, doing meditation and yoga, practicing gratitude and journaling. And that is when like the light bulb kind of went off for me that you can exercise, you can eat “super healthy”. But if your mindset isn’t in the right place, it’s not going to work. 

So that’s how I eventually came into health coaching. You know, I got my person training certification. I’ve never actually done personal training a day in my life. Just didn’t resonate with me with where I was. You know, as I grew through that, I was managing our juice bar at the gym for a while, trying to just get deeper into the nutrition side of things. And then eventually, you know, I came to this revelation that it’s more than diet and exercise. And that’s where health coaching came in. You know, it’s such a more holistic approach to incorporating your stress management, getting good sleep, getting good rest and recovery. And then also changing the way we look at food and exercise. I don’t really like to use the word exercise anymore. I like movement because it changes your mindset around it, right? 

A lot of times you think about exercise and it’s like this grueling, unenjoyable thing. And as a health coach, I focus on helping people find movement that they enjoy and to work on their relationship with food. So it’s not in that that diet and weight loss driven perspective. Being able to enjoy your food, enjoy your movement, find you find balance in it all.

So that’s why, you know, health coaching really, really spoke to me and clicked with me more so than, you know, going into personal training and focusing just on the exercise or going I at one point was actually enrolled to go back to college for nutrition and dietetics. 

And then I, you know, I just have that light bulb. It’s like it’s not one or the other, just these two things.There’s so much more to it when you get that that mindset piece to it. That’s more. That’s the foundation that we can then build those other healthy habits on top of.That’s a great story and so common. We live in a world like that. You said you did the 5k, your body got smaller.People praised that. 

We live in a society that glorifies the shrinking down of people, of women in particular. It’s nice to get that recognition .It feels good when we’re getting that, that positive feedback, right? So you mentioned when you were working at the gym, you were on track, you were off track, right? Because you were restricting and then you were feeling out of control, trying and your body was doing what bodies do after restriction, trying to keep you alive. And it made you feel out of control. 

So you had that, that moment where you’re like, I mean, they’re on or I’m off