Megan Gall, tell me about your vision.
My vision is to inspire and
spark people to make a change in their
lifestyles towards greater health.
Not in a way that
means that they're going to be
following someone's cookie cutter program.
Taking roles that don't truly
spark anything in that person.
Taking someone else's goals and making them their own.
I want people to find their particular way
to make healthy living a reality for them.
The reason I want to see this is because in my personal journey,
I've yo-yo dieted and I've found my way
to achieve and stay at a healthy lifestyle.
Achieve and stay at a healthy weight since 2018-2019.
That process taught me so much about what I was capable of and what I could actually
accomplish with small changes. Not with a huge change all at once, but with small measured changes
that did not feel overwhelming. That didn't feel like I was going back on who I was as a person.
So that's what I want to bring to the world. I want to make sure people can
be fostered to find that for themselves. To achieve those small steps that feel right to them
that aren't restrictive. To reach either a healthier weight or just a healthier routine for themselves
that allows them to be the best person they can be in all of the roles that they want to
occupy in their lives. I love that. I love that from your story. This comes from your own story
as well of having to overcome certain health challenges. You mentioned that you've lost 100
pounds in your weight loss journey. What's the story behind that if you don't mind?
All along, from late childhood to early adulthood, I really ended up using food
almost accidentally as my main coping strategy. First, it was totally under the radar for me. I
wasn't seeing that I was doing that. It was in using takeout as the main relaxation of the day
after work. Stressful day at work, I didn't want to think anymore. I didn't feel like I had time
earlier in the week or energy earlier in the week to do any kind of proactive thinking about my meals.
So takeout accidentally became the thing that I would look forward to each night as the
fulfillment of the day because I wasn't getting it from work. That rooted back in, as a child,
I didn't have too much in the way of experience with restaurants. That was a very rare thing for
us. It was a bit on a pedestal. When I was more on my own, when I became a younger adult,
it was easy to fall into that now I have the freedom to eat this way that I've always dreamed
of eating. I have the freedom to enjoy this restaurant food every day if I want to. I truly
did. It was really related to exhausting myself by overthinking everything at work, just overthinking
everything related to pleasing colleagues, pleasing bosses, making sure clients and customers had
the best experience that I could possibly give them. All of those things were given a ballooned
importance in my brain and how they perceived me was given a huge importance in my brain.
That left no energy for me to do anything that was proactive and taking care of me as a body,
as a person. I didn't relieve stress proactively. I just let it fester and skyrocket. I didn't
think proactively about what I would eat each day. That meant I was eating
anything along the commute or anything that popped up during work or when I came back,
I was exhausted enough to fall into that well-worn groove of just having a nice big restaurant meal
to bring some fun into the day that felt extremely stressful. Where I started to change was when I
started noticing this not just happening in the evening, but it started to happen in the middle
of the day during a split shift. I was seeing myself use that two hours to go to a fast food
place and just sit there for the whole time and just order enough food to get me around through
that two hours. That was the piece that really told me somewhere deep down, like, I was going to
tell myself, I don't see other people doing this normally in their day. There's a piece here that
I can do better. I don't have to be in this guilty cycle of eating this way and then questioning why
I'm eating this way. That caused me to reach out for help. Really, it was cognitive behavioral
therapists who helped give me so many thought-questioning skills to start making small
changes along the way. That's why I find small changes so refreshing from the whole start in
January diet culture blips that were always put through because it worked so well for me,
not expecting myself to change who I was overnight, just creating small changes over time
in ways that felt authentic to me. I love that. I love your story. I love your authenticity,
how you're going about using what to me feels like virtuous principles for healing and health
and living your best life. You emulate it. I can't wait to have you on the show. This is going to be
such a fun ride. I can relate to a lot of this myself and I know how many people in my life
that I see with anxiety and stress and fighting how to become healthy and completely outside of
the realm of principles and where they go to find that fad or that path towards it.
I have my own view on what healthy means and what it looks like and how I go about it.
I will share one funny story. I was listening to Jim Gaffigan. You know who that is?
Oh yeah. He's great. He inspired my last health kick. He actually inspired it because he says,
he says, I haven't been hungry in like 20 years. I'm like dying of laughter at that. But then all
of a sudden it's like, it wasn't guilt. It was a penetrating thought of, oh, wait, maybe that's not
a healthy thing. And I realized it's like, when my body is hungry, that's my metabolism,
like taking effect. Like it's not a bad thing to be hungry. It's a bad thing to starve,
but it's not a bad thing to have a desire for food. But if I constantly indulge
in that desire every single time, I might possibly feel like it or think I have it
or just have the habit of filling my body. Maybe I can rethink this. And I did. And I ended up going
from 190 down to 160, no, 170 pounds. Yeah, it was fantastic. I'm not there now. I'm back up to 190
or so. But I'm also not unhealthy at 190. And now I'm doing five mile walks again. I mean,
really five to seven mile walks almost on a nightly basis. It's not the best. The best habit.
Like that was, that took me a while to build in, honestly, daily walks. It was a hard switch
because I had a lot, maybe some people can relate to this, but I had a lot of resistance against
feeling like an exercise person. Like I was like, I'm not an exercise person. Yeah. I like doing
sports. I don't do this alone, lifting a piece of metal. Like that doesn't get me excited.
Yeah. Team sports have that camaraderie, but exercise always felt, well, to me, I always
associated it with the girly girl who's, you know, I think they call her the clean girl now, like
clean eating, like healthy. And me being like a staunch feminist was always like, I don't have
to do that to be worthy. I still feel I don't have to do that to be worthy. I just genuinely like it
now. Yeah. And that's so cool. I look forward to having the conversation in its fullest about
vision and where you're going with it, how you're helping people. It's amazing with the path that
you're on. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is
going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people
to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an
excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.