Christiane [00:00:01]:
Welcome back to the Happy, Healthy Hustle podcast. We're here today with a very special guest and I'm going to let her introduce herself, but I can already share with you, this is going to be an amazing episode. You better stay tuned. There will be lots of tips and tricks, so why don't we get started? Sarah, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome. And I'm so glad we are connecting today. Please introduce yourself.

Sarah Thomas [00:00:25]:
Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. So let me give you a little bit of a sneak peek into who I am and what I do. My name is Sarah Thomas. I am a wellness professional, fitness instructor, personal trainer, nutrition coach and specialist, and a menopause specialist. I'm also the creator of Burn Fat and feast. Burn fat and feast is a comprehensive wellness lifestyle for women, women especially going through perimenopause and menopause. We empowered our women who are across the country in our online membership to create mental strength to help them lose the weight, increase their metabolism, balance out their hormones, and truly just finally stop that yo yo dieting to live a full, healthy, happy life.

Christiane [00:01:17]:
That totally fits in with the theme of the happy, healthy hustle right here. Amazing. And I love. Really, Sarah, we have a lot of things in common. Always focus on finding commonalities with others. And you can already tell by our bubbly demeanor, this is definitely going to be a good one. So let's start with a superpower. Sarah, what would you say is your superpower?

Sarah Thomas [00:01:38]:
Okay, so this is a tough question. I have to say what my superpower is. I think we all struggle with, what's that? What's our, what's the thing that we're really good at, especially as entrepreneurs feel like we're always looking at what we can do better with, right? So when you asked me this question, I thought, okay, what is my superpower? I really think my superpower is helping people with their limiting beliefs and overcoming their limiting beliefs. It's one of the things that I do every single day, but honestly, I do it without even really thinking about it. And I think that's why it was so hard for me to come up with what that superpower was, because, yes, we talk about all the things, wellness and in our community and. But when I look at myself as a whole across my life, I come across that every single day with women of, you know, oh, I can't do this, or I struggle with this. I find that I have a really good ability to help them come out of that, to talk better about themselves and overcome the limiting beliefs that they have really been believing their whole life about why they can't do something or be something or better at something or whatever the case is.

Christiane [00:02:51]:
Oh, this is amazing. And very empowering at the same time, too. And sometimes when we have superpowers, they even tied in with something that we struggled with ourselves. Is that the case this time?

Sarah Thomas [00:03:03]:
For sure. For sure. Yeah, it definitely ties into my challenge. You know, I, as a kid, was very overweight. I was an obese child. And through my teenage years, I actually kind of, I say, flipped the switch and had an eating disorder and was anorexic. And through those years, I had so many limiting beliefs that, unfortunately were told to me as a kid around people that I loved and who said they cared about me the most would just tell me that I couldn't do this. And I was a big kid, so I would never be x, y, and z, and I would need to just go work for someone, and I couldn't do my own thing.

Sarah Thomas [00:03:42]:
And so a lot of those beliefs, I was told as a child, and as I got older, you know, they start to root themselves in you as you get older, of, okay, well, maybe that is true. And what you hear over and over and over again, you believe as your truth, you believe as your reality. And so I definitely believe that for many, many years. And I really struggled with not only just the weight part, but I struggled with believing that I could do something different and be something different and that I did not necessarily have to follow the path that was chosen for me by family members, that I could actually take that detour and I could create my own. You know, I could. I could reach through the weeds and create that own path for myself to be someone that nobody really believed I could be. All the way from, you know, my wellness journey to, I was the first woman in my family to go to college, which was told, like, you should not go to college because nobody's ever done that in the family. And, you know, I shouldn't be the first one to do it.

Sarah Thomas [00:04:49]:
And so by, by just kind of walking through it, I think that helped me create that confidence at an early age. But those limiting beliefs, I always say they are like weeds in a garden. They're. They're rooted. They're deeply rooted. And so we work on them. We have to pull the weeds out, but they come back. And so for me, it's been a constant struggle and just journey, in general, of pulling the weeds and replanting what I want, coming back and working on it again, through self talk, I use daily mantras, practice showing up like the person that I want to be and creating that consistency.

Christiane [00:05:30]:
That's super amazing that you're sharing this with the audience because we look at you now, and that's probably also the struggle with social media. And we look at somebody like, oh, my gosh, here she is, so fit and successful, and she has three children. And they picture perfect life right there, running a business, this empowering female. Yet at the same time, you're looking back and it's like how you got there is really not an easy path, and that's where somebody else might be. So sometimes you turn around and look behind you like, no, no, I've been there. I've been there. It wasn't always here. And while it looks like right now, my life is, like, totally shiny and amazing, as you mentioned, you're still struggling with the same limiting beliefs that somebody has that will get or wants to get to the point where you are right now, this empowerment that you're giving them.

Christiane [00:06:25]:
So thanks for sharing that. And I also really embrace that you're kind of tying in what you're doing right now with where you were. Because frequently, when we are entrepreneurs, we're helping others, and by helping others, we're helping ourselves.

Sarah Thomas [00:06:42]:
Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's what I was going to mention is that that's part of my journey. That's part of how I have gone from where I was to where I am today and how I keep pulling those weeds, so to speak, is that I do it every day and I help women achieve what they want to achieve every day by letting go of those limiting beliefs. And by doing that, I'm constantly working on myself and directly by helping them do it. And so that's kind of the beauty of what I get to do every day. But regardless of that, it's.

Sarah Thomas [00:07:19]:
It's the work. It's that internal work that we have to continually have the consistency with.

Christiane [00:07:25]:
Now, we are really curious what or who helped you to do that, to pull the weeds consistently or even to get started with the weeds pulling in the first place.

Sarah Thomas [00:07:38]:
Yeah. You know, as a kid, I think it's. I think we oftentimes just do whatever we're told to do because that's a, you know, what society tells us to do. Like, do what you're told, you know, stay the course and follow whatever path has been laid out for you. And so I did that for a long time. But at some point in my college years, I thought gosh, I've already gone to college. I've done that. I've done something different that people said I probably would not be able to do.

Sarah Thomas [00:08:07]:
I'm graduating. What else is there? What if I just started asking the question, what if? What if? What if over and over again? And I created a list of what ifs and when I was in college, what if I could own my own business now? At that time, I didn't start my business for years and years after that, but there was a whole list, you know, what if I own my own business? What if I had a family and moved away, like, all the things, right? And so I started really with that. And as I kind of looked at that list of what ifs, I also knew that there were limiting beliefs that I was holding onto, that I needed help talking through with people. And so I did seek the help from therapists. I am a firm believer, and everyone could use therapy in their life, some sort of counseling to talk through things, even if they're not going through any. Any issues or troubles in their life. It's just a really good outlet to verbalize the things that. That you need to verbalize and find more clarity.

Sarah Thomas [00:09:13]:
Sometimes when we talk through things, we just find the clarity around them. So definitely resorted to seeing a therapist, and I still do on and off see therapists. My husband has been such a great supporter. So as we met earlier in life, we've been married for 20 years now that he was such a supporter of whatever it was I wanted to do and believed in me in all regards. But a lot of it was the internal work that I did and acknowledging that I needed to do the work, because if I didn't, I didn't do the work that no one else around me could help me. And if everyone else was proud of me and everyone else had confidence, but I didn't, what did it matter? Right? Because there was no moving the needle forward. So that internal work was the self talk. Huge.

Sarah Thomas [00:10:05]:
Because how many times a day do you say something negative to yourself or about yourself and turning those negative self talks into positive. We spoke earlier about daily mantras, and you mentioned you're a sticky note girl, and I am such a sticky note girl that I put my daily mantras on sticky notes in my bathroom so I can see them on a regular basis. Still do that because I'm still working on those things. Now. The mantras may change, you know, they may be different. I am statements months and months later, but still seeing those, that continually helps me pull those weeds so to speak. And I show up. I show up like the person that I want to be every day, whether I feel it that day or I don't, I show up.

Sarah Thomas [00:10:49]:
And I know you talk a lot about, like, just take the step. Take the step and do the thing. And that's. That's what I strive to do every day. What's the one thing I can do today so that I can show up today to be the future version of myself that I want to be and do that consistently? I guess the last thing you know that we already mentioned is, is my community of burn, fat and feast members. They hold me accountable all the time. They help me continually pull those weeds as I help them. It's kind of a give and a take.

Christiane [00:11:20]:
There are so many different things that I really appreciated. You talking about the community, the connection, but also this connection with yourself, which is really the name of not only my podcast, but also my company. Hello, happy nest. That we're building this nest within ourselves and that really then builds the happiness that we're seeing, showing up for the work and basically saying to the world, here we are. Hello there. I'm feeling confident and I'm working on myself, and we're also sharing maybe some struggles and failures, because that also makes us you. And it's something that the world also wants to see. They don't want to see all the beautiful things.

Christiane [00:12:02]:
They also want to see the struggles and the failures because that's something that creates that community, because maybe you're both struggling with the same thing. Well, thank you for sharing all of this. How can we get in touch with.

Sarah Thomas [00:12:15]:
You, Sarah, so you can find us. Our website is burnfatandfeast.com. the and is spelled out and you can find us on Instagram. We are burnfat and feast on Instagram. LinkedIn. Same thing. Burn, fat and feast. Facebook.

Sarah Thomas [00:12:30]:
We try to make it super simple for everybody to find us. And on our website and in social media as well, we have a lot of different freebie like, downloads and that sort of thing, too. So if you want to connect with us there. I love Instagram right now because I feel like Instagram stories is a place where you can be a little bit more raw and real. We talk about that and not showing up and being that perfection and allowing people to see that raw, real, maybe unconfident you or what is messy in your life. So if you want to see the messy, join me on Instagram. I talk a lot about the messy in Instagram Stories and would love to connect with you. I, you know, I've got a team, but we also, I'm personally in the DM's and chatting with everybody that follows along.

Sarah Thomas [00:13:17]:
So love to have you follow along with the journey.

Christiane [00:13:21]:
Amazing. Thanks so much for sharing Sarah to the audience. We are wrapping up this episode and I would love to know today in the comments, what is the one surprising fact that you maybe heard or what is maybe one internal thing that you need to work on? Maybe you can put that in the comments today. I would love to hear from you. Reach out, put it in the comments. And of course, we're always looking forward to the next episode. So stay tuned for more happy, healthy and hustle. And I hope all is well.

Sarah Thomas [00:13:50]:
Bye.