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How My Teenage Crush Led To My Body Burnout

Nov 30, 2022
 

Hello, Chris here today. If you’re an avid reader of our blog, you might’ve remembered Filly sharing where her body burnout originated from (and it was waaaaay before she actually got sick). If you missed her blog post, you can read it here. 

The thing is. In our practice, we believe that the deepest root cause of body burnout stems from the beliefs or stories that we create about ourselves - that go right back to our childhood. It might sound “far-fetched”. Maybe you thought that the root cause of health issues is actually external stuff - like the food you put into your mouth, or poor sleep, or mould, or toxins in the environment, or pathogens that overgrow in the gut. While all these definitely contribute to body burnout - they are only “surface-level” root causes. You see, the (dysfunctional/negative) beliefs we hold about ourselves not only lead to behavioural patterns that can literally harm your body (like emotional eating, over-working, staying up late, etc), but these beliefs, which get stuck in our subconscious state, also cause the nervous system to become dysregulated, because you’re constantly feeling unsafe, on-edge, “not enough.”

 

Where My Dysfunctional Belief Came From

As a kid, I was always “skinny”. I remember even back when I was 6 or 7, my Dad would say to me: “We have to get some meat onto those bones!” And he’d take me out to the backyard and do pushups with me. As I grew older, I started showing natural athletic abilities. My Dad always said to me, when training or competing: “Come on son, try harder, be better!” While none of these comments were said in a derogatory way, I started to believe that maybe I wasn’t actually good enough as I am. Maybe I was actually just a skinny, weak boy. And so I decided I had to work harder, be faster, and get stronger, in order to be the best - which actually meant, so I could be respected and loved. 

The crazy thing was, in primary school no one wanted to play sports with me because I was “too good.” My desire to “be the best” actually didn’t win me any friends - it actually excluded me. But still, I had it in my mind, that if I could just try harder, be stronger, be faster, be better, surely at some point I’d win the respect and admiration I desired.

 

The Hurtful Words Of My Teenage Crush

Things really hit the fan with my ego when I got to high school. I had a crush on a girl - let’s call this girl Chantelle. I was in the library and I overheard Chantelle talking to another girl…about me. My ears pricked up. 

“Have you ever seen Chris with his shirt off?”

Chantelle replied: “Yes, it’s so gross. He’s sooooo skinny. You can see right into his ribcage. Yuck!”

This comment from Chantelle absolutely shattered my heart. Not only did she not have the same feelings as I did toward her. But she thought I was skinny, and so YUCK - even after I had tried so hard to improve my physical body and abilities. Her words cut me hard and validated what I had always secretly believed about myself, ever since a kid when I was doing push-ups with my dad: I am skinny, I am weak, I’m not enough.

 

How This Event Shaped My Life

This experience stuck in my head/body viciously, and from then on all I could think about was how BIG I wanted to be. I began eating lots of food, working out, and trying to pack on muscle and fat. I turned into a BIG guy. Everyone called me BigDog. I got into the sport of Strongman, which meant many, many hours of heavy training every day, and thousands of calories of food (mostly unhealthy), and I just got bigger and bigger.

Suckers Chantelle. I’m not that disgusting skinny guy anymore! If only you could see me now!

I revelled in being the “BigDog.” 

But the thing is. This story I kept playing in my head about needing to be big - the obsession with being big - ended up crushing my health, and even my relationships with my family, and my business. I became so obsessed with being the strongest, the fastest, the best, that I literally wore out my adrenal glands, struggled with fatigue, insomnia, pounding headaches, and acquired chronic musculoskeletal injuries along the way.

It wasn’t until I was able to unpack the stories I was telling myself, and where they actually came from, and recreate a new identity, that I was able to finally “let-go” of the need to be the best, which then enabled my body - and even my life - to rebalance and heal. 

Are You Playing Out Harmful Stories?

The point of my blog today is…Are there stories you’re playing in your head that are destroying your health and your happiness? Are there stories you’re playing in your head that are preventing your ability to heal?

As a burnout recovery coach, it is my passion to pull these stories out, and make you realise these stories are only ever fictional. They are not real. You have the potential to change the course of your behaviour, and ultimately end body burnout and become the healthy, happy, productive person you wish to be!

Have a great day,

Chris Bellette

P.s. To get an understanding of where your current issues lie, head over and take our free Ending Body Burnout Assessment. 

 


Chris Bellette is Co-Founder of Chris & Filly Functional Medicine. He is a Life Coach and an accredited Master of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner. He has existed in high-performance realms of the sporting (think national athlete) & business industries and knows what it takes to get from struggle-city to thriving.  Together with his wife Filipa Bellette, Chris has worked with over 2,000+ busy, burnout clients in the last 10+ years, and specialises in producing healthy, happy Mums & Dads or have the lifestyle they’ve always wanted...or as he calls it, a Power Parent! Chris’s own passion for producing high-performance Power Parents came from his own personal experience of Daddy Burnout, after juggling the demands of business, elite level sport, family, and his own failing health.

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