we all have problems and the way that we solve them is largely determined by the role models
we've had in life typically our first role models are our parents our teachers and our friends and
they might have been excellent role models maybe they're really good at solving problems
but what happens when the thing that we need to solve wasn't an issue for the people in our lives
and now we need to take things a step further like maybe my parents
they knew exactly what they wanted to be in their career but i'm struggling or maybe all of my
friends are at a healthy weight but i'm struggling how do we solve problems that we haven't had
the example from our friends or family or
teachers to solve i never thought i would say this but i was pretty lucky to have strict parents
not only were they strict with me but they were strict with themselves my parents came
to Canada and they were determined to have their children have a better life than they had had
and they put themselves in the position where they struggled the Canadian culture was different than
their Bajan culture the French language was different than their Bajan English and for
sure they weren't looking forward to the minus 20 degrees Celsius that they had to live every winter
compared to the lovely 20 plus that they would get in the winter in the in Barbados but they pushed
through they worked really hard and they raised not only their own three children but many of my
cousins that live with us along the way i have to say my parents were the first example that i had
of hustle culture because they just did it they worked and the only possible answer was success
failure was not an option well if you think about it it made sense my parents role models with their
parents who lived in Barbados and who had a more difficult life so my parents were taught
work first i do remember very very clearly my mom saying to me multiple times
you're not in school to have fun and make friends you're in school to get good grades
schoolwork is the priority and when i would tell her about my friends meeting up here
or going there or doing these things it was like yeah and you're gonna study and i can't say that
my dad was any different the focus was you are going to get a good job and not have to struggle
i don't disagree with my parents but what i couldn't figure out in my young brain is
why couldn't i do both i was doing well in school why couldn't i go and have fun
so in high school i loved my art classes and my parents thought they were a waste of time and that
i should have been taking sciences during those periods but i feel like that was my one rebellion
and i would keep taking these art classes but by the time i got to siege up and you know i was a
good kid so i did listen to my parents and i did try to understand where they were coming from and
i really did get to the point where i thought okay i'm going to do the right thing and be
a good student and get the good job and live the good life that my parents want me to live
so in seizure i stopped taking art and i feel like that's where my life really started to get hard
because when i stopped taking art it was now all just school and work and hard work and there
was no fun at school anymore because i was in a program that was different than all my friends and
all the work was difficult the teachers expected us to just hear them talk and learn it
which meant that i had to do a lot of work on my own to understand it it was difficult i was
in sciences school stopped being fun and powering through stopped working for me i was studying so
much and i really didn't have a lot of free time because i was trying to get acceptable grades
so that i couldn't even see the few friends that i made in cj in my new classes or the ones i had
from before who were more free because they were in a different program and so with the little
bit of free time that i would have i started to watch some comedies just to kind of lift my mood
and that's where i found my new role models and there were quite a few of them like Eddie Murphy
Steve Martin Bill Murray betty white Mayim Bialik Whoopi Goldberg like these comedians
showed me how to take negative hurtful painful information and turn it around into
entertainment this negative thing becomes this positive educational
funny thing that idea that i could take something that was making me want to cry
and turn it into something that was fueling my improvement my self-improvement being a better
person from it i was really impressed with how comedians can force us to look at even the most
difficult of information and look at it from a perspective of that's wrong
and i can do better and i can laugh along the way while i change it so school was hard and
sometimes you would feel stupid sometimes you'd get your grades back and it would show you that
you're stupid and what was really weird is that no matter what grade you got back you're
expected to show up the next day for class and just keep working and if you failed a class or
a year or you weren't able to be moving into the next level there was no sympathy for you there
was no it was just take it over redo the class so the time energy effort and money that i invested
and failed and they're saying well the answer is do it again more time more energy more money
with no guarantee that i'm going to pass it the next time but in fact my new role models help me
to see that the guarantee comes from me it comes from the fact that i'm not going to give up that
i want this outcome i'm going to make the outcome happen that one of the most transformative things
that ever happened in my head was when i realized that it's not life's job to make it easy for me
it's my job to find the lesson that i'm supposed to learn from this failure it's my job to solve
every problem that comes up in my life because it's my life and i want it to be happy one of the
more recent challenges that i had to truly look at was the fact that my body was in pain but i
wanted my body to feel good so the contradiction was every morning i woke up physical pain ever
increasing in more and more places and by the time that i was 46 i felt like i was living in
the body of an 86 year old it and it was sincerely stopping me from being able to do the simplest of
activities i couldn't walk up the stairs and the big question was how the heck am i supposed to
make lemonade out of this in order to transform a problem into a blessing you need to understand
it and in order to really understand it i would need to study the problem so that's what i did and
that's how i figured out that the problem in my body so all the pain was coming from inflammation
and then with a little more study i found out that inflammation was being caused by the foods that
i was eating and so now i had a direction what i really needed to do was change my diet to solve my
pain so this is where i look to my new mentors to solve this problem one thing that we don't often
think about that comedians do is workshop their jokes which means they write a joke and then they
tell it to a few people whether on stage or in their entourage and see if it's funny and see if
it gets a laugh and then they will take the best jokes put them together to create their show and
i needed to do that i needed to research what was in my diet that was causing my inflammation and
figure out how to minimize it so that i could feel better i did the research found out that sugar
poor quality oil and solanine were the things in my diet that were causing me to have inflammation
and pain turns out the solo 9 was the easy thing to remove from my diet that just means i can't
eat nightshade vegetables and fruits the harder thing was going to be taking out sugar and poor
quality oils sugars in every every vegetable and every fruit and poor quality oils is in
every restaurant or processed food i gotta be honest when i learned that i was pretty defeated
i wasn't sure what i was gonna do but then i realized no it just means i need to workshop
this a bit more and when i work shopped it so i did more research and that's how i
found the low carb world specifically keto and carnivore what i did was i looked at how keto
could help me to get my sugar intake low enough that i would stop damaging the internals of my
body because according to what i read a keto diet means that you don't eat anything more
than 20 grams of carbs which means that you're eating the amount of energy from carbs that your
body actually could manage and therefore you would heal which is what i wanted to do i wanted to heal
my body i wanted to live pain-free and i did it i healed my body so eating healthy allowed me to
get rid of the unnecessary inflammation that was happening in my body which then allowed me to go
back to doing all of my activities and because my body got healthy i actually lost 70 pounds
that i needed to lose although i wasn't actually trying to lose what is this telling us that
horrible pain that i was living not only did i solve it but now i'm sharing this information with
you wellness workers to let you know that you can solve it too i made the lemonade i'm not special
you can do exactly what i did but i know most of you won't why because your mentors focus you on
being like everybody else your mentors focus you on fitting in right you have to have
the big house 2.5 children the dog the car in the driveway were focused on the wrong things
one of the best things that my mom taught me early on in my life was not to follow others i still
remember her telling me over and over again as a kid if one of your friends jumped off a bridge
would you jump off the bridge too and that helps me to this day i don't eat like most people i know
i eat to allow my body to thrive and the truth is wellness warrior if you want to lose weight
then you need to understand why your body is gaining weight in the first place click on
this video right here and we're going to tackle that roadblock together i'll see you over there