Local health and weight-loss strategist Johnny King has dedicated his life to helping women regain control of their weight and, ultimately, their lives. Through a combination of programs including weight-loss boot camps, a nutrition plan, an interactive weight-loss DVD set, and his full-day weight-loss workshops, he believes that anyone can find success in his methods if they’re willing to make the change. For those interested, Johnny’s next weight-loss workshop is January 18 in Wildwood. Find more information here: womensweightlossretreat.com/1-day-weight-loss-workshop
Johnny recently met me at a local Whole Foods grocery store to discuss why his methods have been so successful and how women can turn their lives around with his program.
How did your experience with your mother’s struggle with weight-loss is what ultimately inspired you to become a Peak Health and Weight-Loss Strategist?
I think it stemmed out of seeing how my mom yo-yo dieted my entire life. Having had five children, she struggled to find time to devote to herself, because as beautiful as it is, she put the needs of her children before herself. This is the same for the majority of the women I work with. I could see that she knew how to lose weight, because when she applied herself, she lost the weight. But maintaining it was another challenge.
You focus on the changing role women are playing in life and their rising stress levels because of these changes. Women are living more fast-paced lives, and because of the time crunch they aren’t eating as well.
Yeah, I think you have a perfect storm of sorts. If you look back to even when my mom was my age, say 40 years ago. The food industry has gone from not having a lot of fast food to where everything is a food-like product. Not food, like, say, here at Whole Foods, but most convenience foods are so filled with such processed, chemical–laden stuff that they’ll sit on the shelf maybe longer than we would last on the shelf. So, what do you think happens to your body? It doesn’t know how to metabolize that; it doesn’t know how to process it, so it either hangs on to that, or it hangs on to fat to use as a buffer between the chemicals, the toxins it doesn’t know how to metabolize, and your internal organs. So, your body is actually putting on fat to protect itself.
The other part of that storm is that over the last 40 years women’s rights and privileges, and all the successes they’ve had in terms of equal opportunity (which is more societal, but across the globe too) is just adding more stress to the average, everyday supermom.
Another problem is that it’s so hard to afford to eat healthy. The less expensive food is the processed, last–forever staples. If you go to McDonald’s for example, a McChicken is $1, and a salad is at least $5.
Yeah, and that’s the shame. You watch some of these documentaries, and you see lower-income families who are able to feed their families off of McDonalds and fast food so much more inexpensively than they would for just a bushel of broccoli. You can get a whole head of broccoli or another vegetable for the same amount you would spend to feed two or three children. That’s a problem too, and it has to do with the government and subsidies and all they do to support corporations.
What are some things that you do to help women evaluate their lifestyle and find small ways to change over time to help turn things around?
Well, it’s like I saw with my mom: she knew how to lose weight, but she didn’t do those things, because her reasons for losing weight weren’t compelling enough. A lot of times I find that the women I work with will just say, “Yeah, I’d like to lose some weight,” and I’ll ask, “Well, what type of weight would you like to lose?” and they give me the deer in the headlights look like, “I just want to lose weight.” But you can quickly lose water weight, really fast by just cutting out carbs. That just dehydrates you; that doesn’t work. That just puts the weight right back on because you’re kidding yourself, which is what a lot of magic pill companies trick you into thinking. You can also lose muscle mass really fast as well, or you can lose fat.
A lot of it is trying to help them figure out that weight loss is actually the means to an end. And of course, the end is going to be different for each woman. For my mom is was being healthy to live a longer life and be active with her grandchildren. For someone else it might be so they can go hiking in the Appalachian Mountains. It could be traveling with their husband, it could be doing anything, but that “reason why” usually has more juice, more emotional impact than just, “to lose weight.”
So how do you address that?
When you motivate a woman from a place of just losing weight, a lot of times they’re doing it just because they think they should. Like, “I have to lose weight because it would be better for my health, I’d like to look sexier and feel better about myself. I should got to the gym and I shouldn’t eat that.” I like to say that often times they end up going in this perpetual circle where all they end up doing is just shooting all over themselves, when they really need to find out what is, for them, a “must.” So that they “must” lose weight, they “must” change their life. It is a lifestyle change and usually when it’s for our kids or our family or for other people, we tend to do more for others than we do for ourselves.
That is the beautiful thing about the feminine, about women in general though. A lot of times they’re in the position they’re in, because they put the needs of other people before their own. So you have to turn the tables so they can realize that they’re actually doing this for other people. It’s been really cool to see all of the women that I’ve worked with over the years, especially with St. Louis as it continues to grow, end up being inspirations for other women. It’s like a pebble in a lake and you just see it ripple out. It’s a really cool supportive community that’s starting to grow as they’re helping each other.
You have a couple of different ways that you reach women. You have a boot camp, the “Seven Steps to Weight-Loss” program, as well as your retreat workshops. I imagine that those target different types of people. How does that balance out?
I would say that it’s actually the same type of person, but from different sides of things. There are certain women who come in to my boot camp and they just want to lose weight. They’re at a point of desperation, they’ve hit an emotional threshold, and they say, “This must change now. Help me get out of pain.” Primarily what they’ve done to gain the weight and eating in the first place, whether it’s food, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, whatever the negative vice is, all it is typically, is a tool that they use to change their emotional state from feeling pained or overwhelmed, to pleasure. They go from feelings of uncertainty, to feeling certain that they can shut it all out for at least five minutes while they enjoy their cake or their soda. In that same way, women will come to my boot camps because they just want to lose weight, they just want to get done.
What about the DVDs?
The women who use to my “Seven Steps to Weight-Loss” are those that have been through it enough to realize they can do the exercise programs and they can do the nutrition, but it does amount to much because they know it all starts with their thoughts. So, it’s the psychology and the emotional management.
And that’s part of the workshops?
Not really. The weight-loss workshop (for instance I have one on January 18) is a full day workshop where we’re going to focus on all three pillars of weight-loss: exercise, nutrition, but really the emotional mastery. It’s like a three-legged stool, where without any one it falls over and they’re of equal value in that sense, but really about 80 percent of it is psychology and the other 20 percent is diet and exercise. The society that we live in only focuses on the how: the diet and exercise.
So that’s the problem: society only focuses on weight-loss in the masculine. We all have masculine and feminine qualities, but masculine is like, “I’m going to get this stuff done. I put my blinders on and I can’t multi-task, I’m just going to get that achievement. We put weight-loss on our “to do list” as though someday we can just check it off and then it’s done. As though your health is ever “done.”
The problem is that women tend to be in the masculine, trying to get weight-loss “done” when that’s not where you start. You have to start with the feminine, thinking about, “Why is it that I want weight-loss in the first place? What type of weight-loss do I want? What am I actually working towards? What is this all for? Without my health, what type of quality of life do I have?”
You figure out the reasons that you want it, and then you figure out the how, which is the masculine. Now that we figured this out, now we can go take action. Instead of “fire, aim, ready,” it’s “ready, aim, fire.”
As someone who has tried my share of diets, I’ve had family and friends suggest I don’t eat things or that I might consider taking up running, but it’s really not helpful. What can people do to emotionally support loved ones who are struggling with weight-loss?
Honestly, it’s vulnerable communication, because weight-gain, for the majority of Americans who are more than 30 pounds overweight, really isn’t a physical metabolic problem, it’s an emotional metabolic problem. Their emotional fitness isn’t where it needs to be, so they need to get fit emotionally in how they learn to deal with their stresses in their decisions day-to-day. In working with someone, I’ve found that a lot of times it’s literally having a non-judgmental, unconditional loving conversation of “Why are you struggling?”
It’s never a simple, “Well just stop eating food.” If it were that simple, then everyone would easily do it. Food has become their crappy solution for dealing with their stresses, but it’s very seductive. Unlike drugs, alcohol, gambling or sex, there’s less of a stigma. We all have to eat, so we can easily justify it. “I’m just going to eat. What’s just one bite?” How many times have we all thought that, when the accumulative effect of one bite is a hundred pounds overweight?
In supporting someone, it would be recognizing that maybe that conversation is, let’s say, maybe a little above your pay grade. Just from a standpoint of, “let’s get someone involved who really knows what we’re talking about,” which is why I feel like I’ve been able to have such a huge impact. After my mom’s passing, and dealing with the pain of why I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and why she didn’t do what she knew she needed to do. It wasn’t until years later, when my father came out that he was gay and that she’d known about it during their marriage, that it all started coming together for me. She was dealing with that elephant in the room? With that pain of knowing that she would never be loved that way that she wanted to be loved, and food just became her coping agent to numb her pain.
When I started putting those things together, I started realizing these things. I mean, that was my mom’s unique story, but we all have our unique stories. It may not be a marriage. It may be the work environment, or something that happened. I’ve worked with women who have been sexually abused when they were little. When there are big things like that, where they’ve not confessed it to anyone and they’re holding on too tight, like my father who was 330 pounds when my mom passed away. Having lived a lie, and not told anyone that he was gay except for my mom for fifty years, and then he comes out and he loses 120 pounds. Now, I’m helping him and he’s down 140 pounds. A lot of it is getting to the root of the pain.
The idea is getting someone involved who knows uniquely and strategically how to get there. Sometimes you can have these conversations where, say we’re brother and sister and I love you, but I don’t know how to help you. So I get frustrated, or you give up, or you get upset, and I’d rather avoid that upset. So no one talks about it, and it’s the elephant in the room. Meanwhile, your loved-one is struggling. That’s why I call myself a “peak health and wellness strategist.” I’m not just a trainer or a nutritionist. That’s the part that’s really easy, to be honest, but only once you figure out the strategy to lose weight.
So then, why do you think do your programs have the success that you’ve had?
I have unique options for different people. The boot camp is unique for women who hate the gym, for all the things that the gym brings. They can’t hang on to doing a DVD for more that a few days, so they need accountability. The boot camp is very unique in how it provides unconditional love.
Then, my nutrition program sets them up with a very simple program of how they eat every couple of hours. But there’s no points system to remember and there’s no calories to think about, it’s just foolproof. They do it, and I have a client now, I can show you the email in my phone, in her first month she’s lost 20 pounds, which is awesome.
She’s doing the boot camp and the nutrition plan?
She’s not even doing the boot camp. She’s only doing the nutrition.
That’s incredible.
You can’t out exercise a bad diet, but you can definitely out nutrition no exercise. Does that make sense? A lot of people think they don’t have to change their nutrition if they just start working out, which doesn’t work. However, you could not even exercise, just change your diet and lose a ton of weight.
But it has to be a maintained nutrition change, not just a short-term diet, right?
For sure. That’s how my team of coaches and I support women in the change. There’s a transition period of six weeks where we get you back into whole foods and setting up a strategy that fits your unique schedule. A lot of times women will think, “I did it before, ten years ago, but now I have two kids, and this new job, and I’m always running, and I can’t think.” So we try to figure out what works now. You can’t try to mimic what worked ten years ago when your life was completely different.
So that’s the boot camp and the nutrition, but what about the “Seven Steps to Weight-Loss?”
“Seven Steps to Weight-Loss is just the emotional coaching. That’s seven different half-hour video modules that I lead you through. It’s just like you and I sitting here now, but I’m on the screen and you have about a 110-page workbook. So, it’s not just static staring at the screen. It’s as if you’re at one of my retreats. I work you through the modules, and I’ll say, “Okay stop the video and answer questions number one, and take as long as you need, and then come back and press play.” It’s that kind of interactive and static relationship. And it’s been really cool the results I’ve had with women through that. Once you find distinction and clarity, you can think for example, “That’s why I do that! I just eat because I’m bored? I eat to find variety.” So I have them list what other ways they find variety that isn’t disempowering like having a snack drawer in their cubicle. When they come up with a lot of different options, then they’re empowered. They don’t feel like they have no options.
So the question is, “Where do you start?”
I say that people need to get very clear with what their “why” is. Figure out what their purpose for weight-loss is, because once again, it’s not the end, it’s a means to an end. Then I’d say once you can figure out your why, you can structure a vision, because like the good book says, “Without a vision, the people perish.” So, you need a vision. I see the people that succeed at weight-loss and those that fail, and the sole difference is that the people who fail tend to focus solely all of the things they have to do. Like the “to-do list,” it’s the masculine again. It overwhelms them, and they give up, when they really only have one day to work with: Today. Just think about it that way. We project fear into the future, and we make it to be so big and so great that we experience that fear of the future today, and we want to give up.
For people that are successful, they focus on who they have to become, or who they have to be. It’s a “being-ness.” So it’s a “human-being,” versus a “human-doing.” So they figure out their vision, because the vision is what’s going to get them locked into thinking, “I have to be giving, selfless, caring…” in the sense that they have to take time for themselves. A lot people think they’re giving and caring, but they need to realize they’re actually giving an immense amount by taking some time for themselves first thing in the morning. If they wait until the end of the night when they’re exhausted and they’ve given to everyone else, there’s nothing left. Most people will go home, plop down in front of the TV, eat, and just check out because they’re just so exhausted. They don’t want to go to bed yet and start it all over again. They need some time to unwind. They’d be surprised to find if they just started working out and eating some things that I’d recommend, their energy changes, their body changes, and their mentality changes.
So that’s a long answer to your question. It’s a couple steps, but you’re really starting off, first and foremost, with, “What are you really after?” It’s not just weight-loss. Go deeper than that. Don’t cop out on yourself on that. What is it?
And that’s what your help comes in?
Yes. That’s why my weight-loss workshops and all of my different things are influential and impactful, because someone might read this and say, “Yeah, I’m going to do that,” but they won’t do it. We all have great intentions, but 98 percent of the time, we don’t follow through on things. But when you sign yourself up for a one-day workshop, in mid-January let’s say, it improves your probability of being committed and following through. You think, “Okay, this is going to be a new year,” not just because you decide it’s a New Year’s resolution, but because you think, “Okay, I’m here working with Johnny and his team, and they’ve got proven results. I’m not trying to figure it out myself or recreate the wheel. This is the way to do it, and he’s going to help me do it.” That’s the process: Figuring out your reason why, then your vision of what it would look like, and then doing it.
That’s a very helpful, is there anything else you’d like to add before we talk about food specifically?
I think another good recommendation would be just not trying to do everything at once. People want massive results immediately. We have a tendency to overestimate what we can achieve in a month, and underestimate what we can do in a year. So a woman will come in and say, “I need to lose 15 pounds in a month before my high school reunion.” It’s possible, but it’s a big-time commitment, and they’re not fully cognizant of what kind of commitment that is. If they just focus on losing one to two pounds a week, which is very doable, rather than 15 to 20 pounds in a month, which is a lot more than that, in 12 months they could be down 52 to 104 pounds, which is a complete dramatic shift.
The women who have been most successful have focused on it being a process over the “get thin quick” scheme. It’s taken some time to put the weight on, so it’s going to take some time to take it back off. It’s literally taking it in baby steps. For a lot of the women who come in to my 21-day slim-down challenge at one of my boot camp locations around town, some of them lose 15 pounds in 21 days. Other women see no change in weight, maybe they lose a couple inches, but just getting their but out of bed at 4:45 a. m., and put themselves first is probably more of a gain than the woman who lost the weight. It’s a huge change in lifestyle, they think about having to get up earlier, so they go to bed earlier, and they get their partner on board, and it’s a great change. So, taking baby steps takes maturity.
