Recently, I received an email from a client who had a story to share: while at her chiropractor’s office, he asked her ‘what is your goal with all this? (meaning weightlifting/power lifting and this lifestyle).’ She had to think, then said, “my goal is to be a really healthy and fit 60-yr old.” I don’t think he expected that answer.

Often others think what we do is purely about “looking good” but this is way down the ladder for us Warrior Women. For us, it’s about stepping into our Power, living in health and wholeness. It’s about continual improvement, personal fulfilment, overcoming adversity, and walking through life in control and with confidence. Oh yeah, and we love the feel of good food in our veins and a dumbell in our hands!

See, we LOVE to eat well and to train, because it makes us feel good and function well. Oh yeah, and we look pretty good too. And anyone that says this isn’t important is hiding the fact because they are in fear of being reprimanded for being ‘conceited’, ‘vain’ or ‘obsessed with training’ (I personally love that one!).

Ladies, train away. Eat well. Nourish your spirit and your soul. Do what feeds you inside and out. Walk in your Power. Love the journey. Enjoy every step of it.

And the next time someone asks you “Why do you do all this fitness stuff, anyway?”, turn it around and ask them: “Why don’t you do any fitness stuff, anyway”?

🙂 – Karen

Our 10-Week Best Shape Challenge is half full! Grab your seat…and join us!

When we take on a new eating venture, it sometimes seem overwhelming. And no where is this more evident than with every new batch of 10-Week Best Shape Challengers. It happens around Week 4 of the program (like clockwork!).

“I’m running out of food ideas! Tell me what to eat!” 

“Can you send us menu plans to make it easy for us?”

“Are we eating Paleo / clean eating / Mediterranean or what?”

And especially, “What do you mean we shouldn’t eat sandwiches? Then what do we eat?”

I always say ‘there is life after sandwiches’, metaphorically speaking (it could be anything inserted here, that is our ‘traditionally accepted’ foods like pasta, meat and potatoes, burgers and fries….).

See, our North American culture eats a certain way, which has become the accepted way. But many of us learned to break free of that years ago and eat another way. Today, I eat whole foods, close to the earth, with yes, the occasional glass of wine or treat thrown in. (Why not? I earned it, and eating too clean in my view is counter-productive to good health! Really! The body needs a certain amount of sway factor to stay healthy in body and spirit!).

See, when you first learn to adopt a different way of eating (or training or living),  it’s tough because your community that you live in, your ‘tribe’, all eat the same way, likely, and now you are stepping outside the boundaries of tradition (how dare you!), and you will be met with resistance. Much of that resistance often comes from your own brain, too. that’s because it’s  new territory. But we keep pushing through. We experiment.

In our Warrior Woman World of weight training and healthy eating, we don’t eat sandwiches, because we have learned to eat differently, outside convention, on the periphery. Do I miss sandwiches, or big plates of pasta, or mashed potatoes and gravy, or nachos, or salty fries? Actually no, because I am in a new eating place now, and I shudder to think about putting that stuff in my body, how it will make me feel, and how it will erase all my efforts in the gym. I have grown away from conventional eating patterns, accepted ways. Just because something is ruled by the majority, or is the ‘traditional’ way certainly doesn’t make it right (or better).

Keep plugging at this thing called healthy eating. Keep experimenting. Step outside convention. You really can eat chicken and broccoli for breakfast, and eggs and sautéed veggies for dinner. You really can just eat snacks for dinner. And in time, you will move from your world of sandwiches and fast food and burgers to our way, the Warrior Woman Way, where we eat and train more intuitively, we tread outside the lines. And frankly, we like it out here. No, we love it out here!

See, in our ‘tribe’, we’ve come to look at a sandwich and think, “That’s weird. I would never think to eat a sandwich!”. But at one time I sure did. I was brought up on them, like the rest of the world. But you can break free! And there is a whole community out there of freedom eaters! It’s simply about wearing a different pair of glasses in which you view the world, your eating, and your lifestyle as a whole.

If I had to ‘label’ how me and my clients eat, it would be a bit of everything, really. We eat with our intuition and honouring our body’s individual DNA structure. We eat Paleo, kind of….Mediterranean, ok, sure…clean eating…in a sense, low carb…in a way….ketosis…on some days…. (Do we really have to label how we eat? Do we have to define ourselves as a Paleo / Vegan  / Med gal / Zone aficionada / Low carb-er… (?)) 

So throw out convention, and labels, along with that sandwich. There’s freedom – and good eats – outside the box! Promise!

karen

Summer’s almost finished…the days are getting shorter and ads for back to school are hitting the air waves…

Seems every summer goes speeding by faster than the last, and I’m reminded to get my butt in gear! This is truly my busiest time…September kick-off. Which means throngs of women all returning from vacation, and from the relaxed schedules of summer, the more-than-plenty food and drink and often with that little bit of extra jiggle sitting on various bodyparts.

And that’s what summer is all about: refocus and a re-commitment. It also means the kick off of my fall 10-Week Best Shape of Your Life Challenge (my busiest program, for sure!), and my monthly Healthy Living Program women return to the Fall Session of the HLP. And of course, I have now started doing in-gym group training for women at my newly constructed Studio 8 (there’s still room!) and a new McCoy Fitness Web Site being launched. LOL! Vacation…what vacation!

So let’s get our butts in gear and start shedding and toning! Let’s get our eating back on board, and get our focus and spirit back in line! Who cares if you wavered this summer, or weren’t perfect, or added a bit too much wine / food / weight / time off….whatever! We are works in progress, and every fall we pick ourselves up and get back on that Healthy Living bandwagon, right? That’s what Warrior Women do!

Welcome back all! September is just around the corner….

Coach Karen

PS – There is still room in my 10-Week Challenge, so come join us! Or, if you prefer an in-person approach, I’m teaching in my Studio 8, with room for a few more! Lots of options for you!

As a trainer, a big part of my work is building the body’s musculature. But in my experience, the most often overlooked muscle that defines our success is our BRAIN!

I’ll say it again: health and wellness is an inside job, because long before we’re sidelined with injury, or a tree falls on our car and we can’t get to the gym, or we’re abducted by aliens, we often end up giving up on our fitness goals. Why? Because our underlying beliefs determine our success.

So in my programs, we look at beliefs and what they mean. In my 10-Week Best Shape Challenge, we take a few weeks to look at our beliefs and how they come to define us. And one of the biggest roadblocks is in learning to let go of outdated beliefs, because here’s the catch: we are supposed to update our Belief Map (as I call it). We no longer believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, right?

So we dig deeper…what unconscious beliefs are at work within you? Perhaps you were told you don’t deserve success, or you will always be heavy, or you don’t have the strength to make lasting change. Were these your beliefs or hand-me-downs? Is it time to give them back? And ask yourself this: are you wanting and willing to give them back? (Don’t laugh, a lot of people unconsciously don’t want to, because it means owning their life and taking responsibility for it in full, a scary proposition indeed. But there is freedom on the other side….and success!).

Come join us in my Fall 10-Week Challenge and see where it takes you. We will have a Coaching Call on this, and other, very important topics, to try to unravel the ties that bind you, and help you move toward physical, nutritional and spiritual health and wellness.

And you thought this was just another usual training program, eh?

Coach Karen

Spots are filling for my 10-Week Best Shape Challenge! Come join us! I’m with you every step of the way as we traverse through weight workouts, cardio rules, proper (and I mean proper!) eating and nutrition NOT based on Internet myths, and spiritual wellness as well, naturally! Because we can’t get healthy unless it comes from the inside out. You ready to commit?

“Thank you Karen for your guidance and support. I loved the Challenge, and it set me on my healthy path! Keep up the amazing work! Women everywhere need to get on this program! Yes, I lost the weight, but more important, I got ME back!” – Jennifer Turn, Alberta

I heard a scary statistic this morning. By 2020 experts say the number one disability will become depression.

Depression. By the time you hit forty years old, you have likely had a bout with it. That’s what the stats say too. 

I had my time battling depression, and its sister, anxiety, for years. Being brought up in a chaotic household, and overcoming by becoming an over achiever set the tone. Then, with a desire to please, low self-esteem and learned helplessness, I dipped in and out of depression for years. And then I suffered through years of debilitating panic attacks (sometimes 20 a day) as I struggled to work through childhood issues and coping mechanisms that no longer served me, rather, they were  strangling my spirit.

When my son was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, the clouds returned, and stayed for 8 long, dark years. I struggled to get through each day. I cried myself to sleep, night after night. I couldn’t relate to anyone, or to the outside world. I was a prisoner in my own mind, helpless and drowning.

It took a long time to turn it around, but slowly I came to dismantle the destructive thought patterns and beliefs that once had served me so well as a child (in order to survive) but that were now crippling me. I came to understand that when you say, “that’s just the way I am,” indeed there is much hidden deep in our subconscious that simply needs to see the light in order to create the necessary shifts. But becoming objective about your patterns is indeed work.

And I found my path to healing was based in healing my physical body. I re-connected with weight training, because it helped be to connect with my power. Because when we are depressed, we are powerless, lost. Am I here to tell you that weight training or any kind of exercise will miraculously lift your spirits back into the light? No, that would be irresponsible of me. But it did give me a toe hold back into reality. There, in the gym, I could start to feel the connections again between my lost self and the self that had always been there, somewhere. This, along with proper eating and biofeedback work, slowly helped to part the dark clouds, and the sun began to shine bits of rays at a time. I could feel my spirit return. I had been there all along, behind the veil. Now the veil was parting.

If you are struggling with your own clouds, know that there are millions of us out there, all struggling to stay afloat, to fight back the clouds. My biggest lesson was in learning to let go, to accept, and to know that ‘this too shall pass’. It was about dismantling the old, and staying open to the new.

Today, in all that I do and all my programs, we touch on the mental and spiritual aspects of things, simply because we cannot NOT touch on them. We are not just flesh and blood, to the contrary, we are a complicated mix of spirit and physical, all colliding to help us to bring our individual gifts and our purpose to life…if only we could see through the clouds. Sometimes we simply need validation that those clouds are real, and that it’s ok to have cloudy days, and to know that we are not alone in our journeys. Many of us have walked the path, and we can help. I believe that’s why we are here on this planet, to use our special gifts to help others. It’s as simple as that really.

Karen

PS: My Fall session of the 10-Week Best Shape of Your Life Challenge starts soon. Grab your spot. We’d love to have you join us!