Adopt an Empowering Anti-Diet Mindset with Jennipher Walters

Jonathan: Hey everybody, Jonathan Bailor back with another bonus Smarter Science of Slim show. Very, very excited about today’s show because we’re bringing back a friend of the show, and they’re here for some exciting reasons. Because they’ve for a long time had this really awesome website, which I know you’re already familiar with and of course give much love to on the show. But they have taken all that digital learning that they have done with literally hundreds of thousands of people online at this point and taken it all and condensed it all into a brilliant book called The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet: 10-Minute Fixes To Get The Body You Want and a Life You’ll Love, which is super exciting.

I am very excited to welcome one of the founders of the popular health and fitness site Fit Bottomed Girls, Jennipher Walters, back to the show. What’s up, Jennipher?

Jennipher: I am doing fantastic. Thanks for having me. I love talking with you.

Jonathan: Well, thank you, Jennipher. I love working with you as well, and when I saw the title of your upcoming book, which is going to be released, it looks like this May, called The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet: 10-Minute Fixes To Get The Body You Want and a Life You’ll Love – anything that says “anti-diet” as opposed to just telling people to starve themselves and spend their lives on human hamster wheels, I will support. Tell me a little bit about the motivation behind this book.

Jennipher: Yeah, so we’ve been doing fitbottomedgirls.com for five and a half years now. We have a really strong mission, and it was started from a really strong mission that people, especially women, are more than just the number on the scale. A lot of us judge our self-worth on how much we weigh, or what we look like, so we wanted to break free of all of that mental baggage and get people to stop dieting and just start living and embracing a healthy lifestyle. Through all of our posts and reviews and all that we do on the website, we got to the point where we were saying, “Gosh, we want to give people a plan or a guideline or something that’s more in depth that puts all of our experience into words – into a guide.”

So we created The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet, which is basically a manifesto to our mission and how to be a fit bottomed girl inside and out. A lot of it is a lot of interior work in addition to choosing the right foods and moving your body and that sort of stuff. It’s basically the ten principles on how to be a fit bottomed girl. All about experience.

Jonathan: I love it, I love it. I want to dig into – can’t give away the farm certainly on the show, but I want to dig into some of those ten principles. But before we get there, Jennipher, can you tell me a little bit about – Fit Bottomed Girls, that’s a – bottomed. I want to know a little bit more about the “bottomed” in the title of the book as well as the title of your website. What inspired that?

Jennipher: Yeah, well, first let me say that we think fit bottoms come in all shapes and sizes. It’s not about the size of your rear. It’s about what you do with it, like how you move it, how healthy it is. We have a lot of people who say, “But I don’t have a fit bottom.” I say, “If you’re moving it, if it – rock it, girl.” Originally the idea came from – we were trying to find something, a name for a fitness-inspired site or brand, that would be fun and encouraging and kind of make you giggle a little bit.

Not taking it so seriously, not being so hard core and being really encouraging. Literally, I was sitting at a baseball game with my husband and we were kicking around ideas and because – well, this is five years ago when the Kansas City Royals were terrible so there was nothing to do at the game except for apparently talk about my upcoming business. Kicking around ideas and I’m a big Queen fan and so is my business partner Erin Whitehead, and so I’m sitting there and I say, “Oh my god, what if we did a play on fat bottomed girls and we did fit bottomed girls instead?”

It was one of those moments we said, “Yeah, that’s it. That just feels right.” You know and you just know, you’re like, that’s it.

Jonathan: Jennipher, I love it and this is going to get a bit geeky, but you know we’re both fans of strong people and specifically strong women. We don’t want to starve ourselves. We don’t want to shrink down. We want to be strong. The largest muscle in our body, the area we can actually do the most with, is our bottom, and it’s completely under our control. I had no bottom, none. I looked like Kermit the frog. But then I spent some time doing some smarter exercise, and I think I am a fit bottomed guy now.

Jennipher: I would consider you to be a fit bottomed dude. We call you fit bottomed dudes, our male readers. But yeah, the butt is the biggest part and a lot of women and men are, “oh, I don’t have a butt or my butt’s too big or my butt doesn’t look right.” It’s kind of like flipping all of that to be, “Oh no, it’s fit. Move it. Do it. Love it.”

Jonathan: I love it. I certainly love a good fit bottom, so that is awesome, awesome, awesome. So tell me a little bit about these ten steps. Maybe your favorite three and how we can use those starting today.

Jennipher: Oh my gosh, yeah. We’re editing the book, we’ve gone through the process so many different times. But I feel like every single time I go through and read it there’s a new one I kind of love a little bit more. I would say of the ten, love yourself, and we do love yo self. It’s probably one of my biggest, best principles that I think any sort of health journey has to begin with – or weight loss journey or getting fit journey – has to start with a place of self-love. You can’t hate yourself healthy or hate yourself thin; it’s not a possibility.

What’s the point of being a smaller size if you don’t like yourself? It doesn’t matter, so you might as well like who you are now and then allow that self-love to propel you and motivate you to make better choices and take better care of yourself. That’s one of them.

Jonathan: Jennipher, just real quick before you move on to number two because I couldn’t agree with that one more. It makes me smile from ear to ear because I think so often we’re told by the mainstream to start from a place of inadequacy. All cosmetic companies, many clothing companies, it’s all just saying you’re not good enough, and you need to do all these things to make yourself good enough. It’s the stick approach, whereas the carrot approach, like what you’re talking about, which is if you see yourself as a brilliant, valuable gem, you just naturally will not do things. You wouldn’t throw that beautiful diamond ring into a mud puddle. You just wouldn’t do that because you love yourself so much. Is that on the right track?

Jennipher: Absolutely, and I would say that that piece of it is such a fundamental core of the book and just our mission. That’s where everything starts from. Even the other principles build off of that. We have a principle that’s move your body, doing the activities that you love. Again it’s all back to the things that you love, the things that make you feel good. Then one of the other principles is eat according to your hunger. Listen to your hunger always, which again is trusting yourself, trusting your intuition, loving yourself and showing yourself that love through the choices that you make.

Really you know, you know it, living a healthy life style isn’t just about the exercise and isn’t just about eating the good foods, although clearly that is incredibly uber-important. But it’s also about how do you deal with stress? How do you deal with relationships? Do you have a support system? How are you sleeping at night? We tend to put health and fitness into just the workouts and the diet, but you have to look at everything in a full context. Really, making healthier decisions and taking care of yourself more has ripple effects into all areas of your life, not just the look of your body.

Our main goal is to make you feel better because when you feel better good things happen. I think we all want to look a certain way, but at the end of the day it’s we’re really going for a feeling where we feel good in our own skin and we have the energy, and we are able to do the things we want to do. I think it’s really what we want, not just the beauty cream or the weight loss drug that’s going to help you fit in the skinny jeans.

Jonathan: Jennipher, it reminds me – I was having a conversation with my brother, probably two years ago at this point, and he made a really good thought experiment. We have these deep philosophic conversations, and he said, “Jonathan, if you could wave the magic wand, and you could weigh 30 pounds less but feel terrible and look worse and hate yourself and not be able to function in the world. Or if you could wave a magic wand and your weight didn’t change at all, but you felt dramatically different, you looked dramatically different, and you were able to manifest the unique glory that you were put on this earth to do, which would you choose?” Of course the obvious choice is the second one. If we have a scale in our house, we’re not pursuing that one.

Jennipher: Right, and we’re not thinking of it that way. We don’t think of it as more of a spiritual journey, which it kind of really is.

Jonathan: It absolutely is. Just to get even more metaphysical, right? These things – tell me your thoughts. All this eating, exercise, stress relief, sleep – they are not the end. They are the means so that we can do valuable work. Jennipher, neither you nor I nor any of our listeners were put here, regardless of your spiritual beliefs, to count calories and to walk on a treadmill. That’s not our unique contribution to the earth.

Jennipher: Oh my goodness, yeah. Your mental state should not be taken up by counting, exactly – “okay, breakfast was this many calories, and I weighed this and I burned this many calories, and oh god, I had that slice of pizza last night. So today I have to run an extra mile on the treadmill because I read somewhere that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, you were clearly put on the earth to do more than that, clearly. All of us.

Jonathan: Jennipher, what are some of the tips and tricks – you mentioned using music you love, but are there – on some level we all get this stuff, but it’s nice to have these go-to tools and techniques to remind ourselves of it. Do you have any of those – when you get down or when you feel not motivated or when the media makes you feel inadequate, just do this?

Jennipher: Yeah, actually within the book we have ten, ten-minute fixes for every single one of the principles. So there’s a hundred different ten-minute fixes that help you embrace that principle, just ten minutes at a time. We have tons of ideas like that because I think that a lot of times people think that making a change is going to take a huge overhaul of your life or huge time commitment and everything. Sure, it can if you want to go down that route, but you really can do itty bitty little things that help you out.

In ten minutes or less – one of the ten-minute fixes that we talk about in terms of making you feel better about the number on the scale is actually ten minutes to literally get rid of the scale. Make a vow to yourself. Write it down on a piece of paper. I’m only going to take the scale out once a week or once a month, and I’m going to weigh myself, and I am going to write an affirmation that this number has nothing to do with my value or my self-worth. It is just a number.

A lot of people can’t stay off the scale. If it’s in the bathroom, it’s just habit. We’re saying take the ten minutes, write out those affirmations, and then take your scale and go put it in a closet or put it under the bed or put it in the garage. Put it somewhere where you have to physically go get it. Then just try to break that habit and give yourself some mental space every morning where that is not the start to your day. It’s just that number.

That’s one of ours. I am trying to think of some other motivational ones we have that really make you feel better about yourself. One of our ten-minute – we have a lot of different ten-minute workouts as well. One of them is pairing movements to affirmations you say either out loud if you are by yourself, or I guess you could say in front of people too, or just in your head. Maybe you’re really self-conscious about your butt so you say as you’re going down in a squat, “I love my butt, it’s so strong, it can do so much.” And you are repeating all these positive things; you are flipping what you’ve seen as negative into more of a positive.

Jonathan: Jennipher, I am a fan, I’m a fan, I’m a fan, I’m a fan. In fact, I’m going to put you on the spot here. I hope you don’t mind. I am going to put you on the spot because I think that first recommendation around putting the scale somewhere else, I’m going to suggest that you and I take that one step further and that we start a movement. That is, to put these scales out of their misery and actually have a bit of a formal ceremony either by yourself or with your friends where you take your scale outside and with some sort of blunt object, as well as a cellphone camera.

I want you to videotape freeing yourself forever from the chains represented by that scale. Think of if you’ve seen the movie Office Space – I want you to do to the scale what they do to the fax machine. Then I want you to upload it to YouTube, and I want you to encourage your friends and family members to do the same thing, and let’s start a movement that frees us from these archaic, irrelevant, degrading measures.

Jennipher: I love it. What’s our hashtag?

Jonathan: We can figure that out off the air.

Jennipher: Okay. I was like, we’ll obviously need a hashtag. I love that. Yes, Office Space-style, free yourself from the scale. I love it.

Jonathan: Brilliant. Well, Jennipher, tell us a bit more about where we can pick up a copy of The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet: 10-Minute Fixes To Get The Body You Want and a Life You’ll Love, as well as how to get information in the meantime.

Jennipher: Yeah, on May sixth it will be everywhere. It will be Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere you can buy a book, it will be there. In the meantime, we are doing – anyone who wants to preorder the book, it is available online. Preorder so that as soon as it comes out on May sixth, it will automatically be on its way to your doorstep or it will be on your Kindle if you’ve ordered an e-book. Then I know in January on fitbottomedgirls.com, we’ll be doing a lot more about the book, and probably giving a little bit of content and sharing some ten-minute fixes. There may be a few other extras if you preorder; let me bribe you with some fun things like recipes and such. More to come on fitbottomedgirls.com. We’re just really excited to have the opportunity to write a book about what we think people will do and that people are interested in it. Love it.

Jonathan: Brilliant, Jennipher. Well, I couldn’t support your mission and endorse it any more heavily, so I have no doubts that this book, The Fit Bottomed Girls Anti-Diet, is going to be an amazing tool for all of our listeners. So again, listeners, check out fitbottomedgirls.com. Our delightful and inspirational guest today was Jennipher Walters and again, Jennipher, thank you so much for joining us.

Jennipher: Thank you so much. I can’t wait to read your book.

Jonathan: Oh well, thank you. I am very excited about it as well. Listeners, as always, thank you for joining us, and please remember: eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. Chat with you soon.

[Audio Ends 16:46]

Jonathan: Wait, wait don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at carriebrown.com.

Jonathan: Don’t forget your 100 percent free eating and exercise quick start program, as well as free fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at bailorgroup.com.