Hello and welcome my Slice of Life blog, actually done on Tuesday (Labor Day threw me off)!

I’ve made it no secret that I really enjoy the Washed Up Walkons podcast. They talk football in a way that I could see myself and my friends talking back in the day, and that brings me joy. They’ve got some tremendous episodes on mental health, both speaking very honestly about their own, but also bringing on guests to talk about their own mental health journey as well. It’s not something that men talk about, and to hear these Hawkeye athletes talking about themselves is food for the soul.

Part of mental health is just that internal monologue that you have going on each day. They had a guest, Frank Garza (if you are an Iowa basketball fan, he’s Luka Garza’s dad), who’s done tons of research into the brain, how powerful it can be, and how we can tap into that power. He gave kind of a master class on the brain, and one of the things that stuck with me is that we are concisious, on average, of about 10% of our thoughts on any given day. We have 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day, so we are conscious of around 5,000 – 7000 of those in our brain. The rest are in our sub-conscious. If we are consciously working on positive thoughts that we are aware of, the sub-conscious will drift that way, creating a loop of positive talk. On the flip side, if we are giving ourselves negative self-talk, our sub-conscious will drift negative, creating a loop of things that will keep us down.

The reason I bring all this up, is one of the Walk On hosts, Tyler Kluver, has created his own podcast. “Snapped” is where he talks more about his own fitness journey, along with nutrition, hydration, and mindset.

The reason I bring him is is because he recently did a podcast called “Mastering Self-Talk Within Health and Fitness” and it just brought a lot of things into focus for me.

  1. I know I treat myself horribly and my self talk is just as bad. I’ve made it no secret I’ve gained a lot of weight back from my low last August. I know I’m looking at myself in the mirror, making terrible comments, and that goes directly my subconscious brain, and yuck. A toxic mixture of fat and grumpy!
  2. Sometimes, we need to b*tch ourselves out. No, you aren’t be negative, but you are giving yourself a stern (ok, angry) talking to you about getting to the gym, getting your walk in, staying out of the teacher workroom when donuts show up. Those kinds of things are few and far between, but they need to said to get ourselves going again.
  3. And finally, setting those goals is a must for that positive feedback. My goal is always 199 pounds, period. I’ve a LONG way off, but trying to regain some of the positive stuff that helped me lose the weight to begin with.

Check out the podcast! I highly recommend it, especially if you are suffering from negative self-talk. I’ve save it because I need that constant reminder that while we need a kick in the butt, sometimes, we need something else. And check out the podcast with Frank Garza. He’s a wealth of information AND a heck of a man too! 🙂