ļ»æHey, hey ladies. We did it. We're finally here. The Lady Sculpt Lifestyle podcast has launched. And this is episode number one. I am so excited to be here with you guys. I want you to know that this has been a journey for me. The tech, those of you who know me. You know, the tech is not my friend. The transition to listening to myself on audio versus video or in person that I've done before. So I'm super excited to be here in your ears. Thank you for listening.
Before we get started with today's episode, I need to send a few shout-outs. There are a couple of people, and businesses that have helped me get here without their support, this podcast would not have happened. The first is Sam Laliberte. She is the owner of Freedom Lifestyle Podcast. And you can find her at whatsyourfree.com. She ran a podcast mastermind this summer and without her and that group of people encouraging me and supporting me through all the tech, we would not be here today. So big shout out to Sam and my cohort in the podcast mastermind.
Second, I wanna send a shout-out to fiverr.com. Fiverr is a company that teamed up with Sam to sponsor her podcast mastermind. So they gave us each a credit to the fiverr.com website. Have you guys been over to Fiverr? There is someone there that does everything. You can literally contract out the smallest of jobs. And find somebody that knows how to do it beautifully. That lovely intro you just heard was Nicole. Who's a voice actress over at Fiverr that was able to do my jingle for such an affordable, reasonable price. If you are an entrepreneur or in the fitness industry as an entrepreneur, any kind of entrepreneur. I highly highly recommend that if you haven't been over Fiverr or you go check it out, I will definitely be going back there. So shout out to fiverr.com. All right. You guys.
So episode number one. I wanted to tell you a little bit about my journey through fitness and how I discovered the idea of a sculpted lifestyle. This podcast is about everything I've learned along my journey over the last 25 years in the fitness industry about creating a sustainable long-term body and lifestyle that you love and are confident in. This podcast is about creating a lifestyle that supports your goals and helps you obtain the body that you want. And creates a little bit of wiggle room, so you can have a cupcake now or then come on you all. Right. Okay.
Let's start back with me. Let's start back. When I was 14, I was chubby. I had a very hard, heavy, sweet tooth. And I was a pretty active kid. I was involved in sports, but I remember at 14, I was getting into a little bit of trouble and my mom took me down to the rec center. And signed me up for the fitness facility. I don't remember if I asked her to do that or if it was her idea. And with the membership came a free personal training session. I think that's pretty common most gyms do that. I remember enjoying the movement. I remember learning how to use different machines and move my body in different ways. I looked forward to going to the gym.
Let's move ahead a year. It was when I was 15. When I was 15, I got sent away. But my mom didn't want to put up with me anymore. I was getting into all kinds of trouble and she sent me to Arizona to live with my uncle and I played volleyball in the U S and they take their sports really seriously down there. So part of my schooling was to do a sports conditioning class and part of the sports conditioning class was a weight training class. So in this weight training class, they taught us how to use all of the machines. They taught us why weight training was important. Why strength training was important. And I remember my teacher in Arizona telling us that we could change the shape of our bodies with weight training. I was an insecure 15-year-old at the time I hated my body. I thought it was all wrong. And I remember thinking I can change my body using weight training. Hells yes, I am all in. Sign me up. And I went to town in that class. I spent extra time in the gym. I lifted all of the weights. I remember how good it felt to move my muscles. And how good it felt to increase my weights and how strong I felt week to week as I'd see my weights increase that class solidified my love for fitness so hard. I didn't even know how to explain it when I left Arizona, I spent a couple of years just kind of wandering. Not wondering, I wasn't wondering about going to school. I was living somewhere, but I didn't really take my fitness journey to the next level. I felt comfortable and confident in the gym, which I think was a huge motivator for me when I wasn't feeling confident in life. I found a gym and I knew what I was doing, in there. And that was a beautiful thing.
When I was 17. So a few years later, I got a job at a local gym at the front desk. I was super excited. It was a gym that I really liked and had some competitive athletes that worked out there. Some competition bodybuilder athletes that worked out there. And I remember the manager there telling me that if I got my personal training certifications, I could work there as a trainer. And I had a scholarship that I hadn't used yet. Here's a little fun fact about Lylas Leona, you all. I got a scholarship for bowling.
When I was 13, that's how much of an athlete I was. I had a huge handicap, and I ended up doing pretty good. In a tournament and won a scholarship to the school. So I used it to pay for my personal training certifications. I got certified through a college in BC. Started my personal training career and. I haven't really looked back. I always assumed that I would go back to school and, you know, get a real job one day. As if personal training isn't a real job, but I thought that I would, you know, end up going back for geology or science of some sort, because that tends to be what I'm most interested in mathematics. My love for fitness has just evolved into a love for the science of nutrition. Which has now evolved into a love of the science of our brains and neuro-nutrition and how our brains are connected to nutrition and exercise. It's just kind of a waterfall into a lifelong career.
So in my twenties, I found the world of bodybuilding. I knew it had existed, but I kind of always believed that it wasn't for me. I didn't have the right body. It wasn't a possibility for me until my twenties. In my twenties, I moved to Manitoba which actually I moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Manitoba. So a little bit more, facts on me. I lived in Vegas for a couple of years in my early twenties, and then moved straight to Shilo, Manitoba, which is a little tiny town in Manitoba that doesn't have a lot to do. And bodybuilding is really big there. I think it's because there isn't a lot to do, in the winters are cold and the summers are super buggy and super hot. So people just spend a lot of time inside in the gym lifting weights, there are a lot of bodybuilding competitions there. I started working as a personal trainer at a gym and the owner was a competitive bodybuilder, he encouraged me to give it a try.
So my first competition was in 2007. I don't even, how old was I then? 25. I did figure, I placed sixth. I had no idea what I was doing. I had a great time. I loved the process of competing. The stage part was pretty nerve-wracking that first time, but the process of getting ready to compete, having that set routine and the priorities of me, in my life was the first time I'd ever had that kind of self-discipline and had prioritized myself ahead of everybody else, which is a really cool feeling. So I competed that first time, play six went on and competed the next year, placed third.
And then in 2009, I switched over to fitness, which is the category that has gymnastics in it because if you really want to know the truth, they get a minute and a half on stage by themselves. And I'm a little bit of a, I like to be the center of attention. I like to have my own space and do my own thing. And I liked the idea of having the stage to myself for 90 seconds. So without any kind of dance background or gymnastics background, I decided that I was going to compete in fitness. I had a blast. The fitness girls are a family and shout out to coach Carrie from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who is an amazing role model and someone I still admire and look up to. She created such a family of female athletes supporting other female athletes there that I haven't found matched anywhere else that I've gotten. Anyway, competed in fitness. Loved, loved, loved it. Fell in love with the sport instantly with the idea of competing and shortly after that, probably within a couple of years, I'd say I was competing around three or four years before I started taking on training competitions for athletes. Bikini came out in 2013 and there were a lot of newer athletes on the scene that wanted to do bikini. And bikini, the body is a little bit smaller than figure or fitness. So it was easy for me to start working with athletes who wanted to compete. And started playing with other bodies. Anyway, I won't get into that. We will get into that in another podcast. I promise. But keep it kind of on topic for today, I'm going to try and keep these podcasts pretty short. I'm going to try and keep them down to 20 minute episodes, just so that it's easy to put me in your ears for a bit while you're out on a walk.
So twenties, I competed. So it was very much on-season, off-season bulking leaning out. I was sponsored by optimum nutrition for six years, which was a tremendous experience where he was such a big supplement company and had their support. It really felt like I had solidified myself as an athlete that you know, could be sponsored.That was a lot of fun for me in my thirties, we moved my husband and I, my current, my current husband, my only husband moved to Whistler BC. We moved back to my home province of BC. And I took a break back from fitness. I decided to not resign with optimum. I decided to pull back from competing for a bit, pull back from coaching for a bit. I just needed a break from the whole industry. It had gotten to a place where I wasn't feeling as aligned with what I was seeing happening in the fitness world. To be clear on that, what I mean is personally, I prefer to be a very natural athlete. I tend to coach my athletes in a very natural sense, and it was just getting harder and harder to compete as a natural athlete, and what I was seeing on social media, wasn't really aligned with the athlete in me. The fitness influencer asked era had kind of hit. And now that I'm back in online fitness, I consider myself a fitness educator more than an influencer. I'm just, I'm not the kind of person too, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it well, but I just didn't feel aligned with the way that the market was moving in. I felt like I had to be, to be part of that. So I stepped back, and I actually studied wine for a couple of years up in Whistler, BC, I worked at the keg and, I took a break actually, while I was on that break, I discovered my current coach, Brooke Castillo. Who's actually a life and business coach. She's not a fitness coach at all. I learned about my mind and, you know, of all the things I've learned in my 30-plus years, the learning that I've done over the last three years in life coaching, in mind management and thought generation and feeling generation and creating purposeful lives has been such a game changer, you guys, when I realized I learned, okay, so like, how do I explain this? About three years ago, I learned that my thoughts created my feelings. Did you guys know that? Did you know that your thoughts create your feelings? I had no idea. I was very much under the impression that other people are responsible for how I felt all of the time. So if I wasn't happy, it was, you know, my husband's fault. If I didn't feel included, it was because other people didn't make me feel included. You know, all of these things. Anywho.
I've learned since then that other people are not responsible for my feelings. I will also be doing podcasts on this subject down the road for sure. For me, that was a game changer, being able to completely take responsibility for how I felt all of the time and realized that my thoughts created those feelings and that I could change my thoughts and that my thoughts weren't true all of the time. Sometimes what my brain told me was terrible and not honest at all. So I've really learned to start watching my brain. When I started studying this work, I realized how important this element was to the fitness and nutrition industry. And it made me really excited to jump back into the world of fitness and nutrition in a totally different way. I realized after learning the life coaching part, that I could come back into the online platform as me, as exactly what I wanted it to look like. It didn't have to look like anyone else's way. It could be the lightless. This way it could be as a fitness educator, it could be different. And that was super exciting to me. I also realized that the mindset piece is why so many people, so many women specifically fail in this goal, in this aspect of their life. Why so many of us yo-yo diet, by so many of us set a goal to never achieve it while for me, it was so hard in my off-season to maintain a physique that I was super proud of. And why when I didn't have a six-pack, I felt terrible about myself. The life coaching component of it, the mindset component explained all of this. And so now that I have that mindset component, I almost feel like it's my bound duty to share it with the world, especially with women who want to achieve what I'm calling a sculpted life or a sculpted lifestyle.
So now that I'm 39, let's just put it out into the world. I'm one year away from being 40. And I'm on this new venture where I've created this new, online business lylasleona.com. We're moving it into ladysculpt.com. And I have been teaching a lot of the mindset components of life coaching, as well as everything I know about nutrition and all of the fitness things online now for a couple of years. However, I'm a big believer that a lot of this content, a lot of the foundational content of nutrition and fitness, especially the mindset stuff., should be free. It should be out there for anybody who wants it, especially all you ladies out there who are struggling with your body image and your weight, your life in general. I want to give you support a place where you can go to learn and someone in your friend circle that has done it and has a life that you can maybe look up to and might motivate you to, do a little bit more, or try a little bit harder, or to believe that you can have it to. Believe that it is possible for you. So I'm not perfect. I am human. I have a human brain. I have cravings. I still have a sweet tooth. But I choose on purpose to have a life that is consciously purposeful in terms of what I eat and when I work out. And making sure that I'm looking at my mind a lot of the time, because our brains are sneaky little fuckers. I am sorry about the F-bomb, but they are, and they need to be put in check from time to time otherwise, when they are left to their own devices, they will point out everything that is scary and everything that is fearful and all of the ways you will fail all of the time you guys. On this podcast, in the Lady Sculpt Lifestyle Podcast, I plan to go so deep into all of these subjects, mindset, muscle nutrition. So I call it the three M's mindset, macro nutrition, and muscle development. Those are the trifecta of training that I use. And we're going to go so deep into all of those topics in so many different ways over the lifetime of this podcast, you guys are in for a treat.
So I don't want to take up any more of your time today. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you learned something about Lylas Leona today. And I'm on a journey with you guys to find and discover a sculpted lifestyle that I can maintain all of the time. I want to be able to see my abs and feel good in a bikini and have my birthday cake and date nights and a glass of wine from time to time. And I don't want to feel guilty about any of it, that is my goal. I'm still working on it, still haven't got it perfected yet, but I've learned so many tools and I am so close to feeling. I don't want to say that I've arrived. I don't think you've ever in life. I think it's constantly learning, growing experience. But I definitely know that I have tools that can be of assistance to anyone who is on the path to creating their own sculpted lifestyle.
So please feel free to come back and join me. I'll see you again next week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Bye for now.
