Kim Basler: A Burnout Story
Her Bags Were Packed focuses on helping women release emotional baggage and the many ways that travel can help us on that journey. Last spring, we hosted a series on burnout, sharing stories and resources on coping with burn events and the effects of burnout. Today, I am so excited today to share this conversation with Kim Basler about her burnout story. Kim is a freedom and mindset coach with a background in fitness who knows all too well about what it means to become burnt out.
Kim, can you tell us a bit of your background and story?
Yes! First of all, thanks for having me. I'm excited about the conversation and hope to have my story help your readers. I got into the fitness industry at a young age, joining a gym when I was 14 and teaching by 16. For a long time, even then, it was all about trying to get my body smaller and to fit into the size that society was telling me I needed to fit into.
Being in that industry can be fun and really rewarding, but you also see people pushing their bodies beyond their physical and mental limits, like instructors teaching multiple classes a day. We get up on that stage and smile, but we are really depleting our bodies a lot on some level, giving our all to every class because we want to see our members succeed.
At one point, I had 70 instructors working under me, and I wanted to support them all, so I would show up to as many of their classes as I could so they would know that I was there for them. I would get up at the crack of dawn and drive for an hour to get to a 6 a.m. class, just to be there to support an instructor, and then work until midnight and do it all over again the next day. I wanted to do it all, and I thought I could do it all.
And that whole time, I was a mother and a wife, trying to do all of these things, and my body just did not want to do it anymore. That was so difficult for me because I am someone who works hard and wants to work hard. But my body was saying "no more" to the point where I couldn't even sleep anymore. I pushed and pushed myself, chasing all of these things and trying to achieve more than I could. My cortisol and stress hormones went through the roof, making it, so my body literally didn't know how to sleep anymore.
And, you know, I'm sitting here smiling about it now, but it was messy. Just imagine trying to do all of those things and doing it on four or five hours of sleep. It doesn't work.
I imagine that part of it had to do with the fact that you were the boss. You were in charge, and you wanted to lead by example. You didn't want your team to think that you weren't capable or that you didn't have it together because if you don't have it together, how are they supposed to have it together?
Totally. And I think that we're all doing that to some extent. We're all walking around with these masks of confidence on our faces trying to pretend that everything's okay when maybe it's not. It's exhausting.
And the better you are at the facade, the harder it gets because then people expect more of you.
Absolutely. And the more you take on, the more people will ask you to take on because they know you will figure out a way to get it done.
But there isn't an endless supply in ourselves. We've got to fill ourselves back up because when we deplete ourselves, we become exhausted. We become burnt out. Not only are we tired at that point, but we become resentful, and then we're snappy. And unless you tell somebody that you're not okay, they aren't going to know, and the cycle will continue.
At the time, you were also struggling with food and body weight, right?
Yes, I struggled with an eating disorder in the earlier stages of that career. I did all different intense diets to lose weight. When you do that, you get celebrated and praised for it, for how you look. And then you think that that's what you have to maintain because that's how people know your body to be. And it's exhausting.
I didn't know how to be able to let people know that I wasn't okay. I honestly believed I had to just figure this out on my own. It's almost like we're afraid of uncertainty because people have gotten to know us to be a certain way. So, I just kept going. I didn't want to let people down; I wanted people to know that they could count on me.
My body was not doing well. Not only could I not sleep, but I started getting hives that I later found out were stressed-induced. I was also having chest pains. I was not in a good place mentally or physically. And it affected my relationship with my husband, who was feeling ignored as I was pushing myself so hard in my career.
Looking back, I had all of these warning signs telling me that I was going too hard. I wasn't focused on the things I needed to be focused on, and it got me into a mess that I couldn't get out of on my own.
I think not knowing how to get yourself out of those messes causes people to not make the changes they need to make because we don't know how to make the necessary changes. We don't even know where to start.
What happened next with you? When and how did you come to make those changes?
I had come to realize that with every social event, every family gathering, I had become so depleted. I lacked joy, and I knew that I wasn't okay, but I wasn't willing to face that feeling. When I was around people that were happy and laughing with each other, I didn't feel what they were feeling. I was just kind of numb to those emotions. I had a hard time being around that, so I would make every excuse not to be there.
By Thanksgiving of 2016, I knew I needed to make a change. The whole family was at my mother's house, and with each hour that passed, I was more and more numb. Everyone was doing the gratitude thing, talking about what they were thankful for, and I was just faking it as I always did. I don't even remember what the turning point was. It was like a higher power just took over because I suddenly surrendered and broke into tears right there at the door. I think someone may have asked how I was doing or if I was okay, and then the floodgates opened, and I knew I needed help.
I knew that if I didn't act right away, I was going to keep pushing. I had really dark thoughts and feelings in my head about my life, and those really scared me. When you get to that point, your brain tells you that there is a specific solution to it all, and when you start to get those thoughts, it's beyond scary.
And ultimately, that's where I broke down into tears, and I don't even remember what happened after that. All I know is the next day, I called my doctor, I got a leave of absence from my job, and it got harder before it got easier. I hid from everyone; I dropped off social media. Nobody knew. I left the gym, and I didn't go in to do any exercise on my own. I was just gone. I remember being full of shame because my whole identity had been built in that space, and I didn't know how I would ever be anything else. I didn't know of anything else to be, and I felt like a failure.
I took a 30-day leave of absence and went to a therapist regularly. I joked with him that I needed to replenish his Kleenex because I just cried and cried and cried. But honestly, I had so much stuff in me that needed to be let out.
I tried to go back to work under different conditions, which were denied to me. Honestly, I am so grateful that those conditions were denied to me, though, because I needed to pull away. That's where the real work began, and now, thankfully, I'm a very different person than I was four years ago. I still have a strong work ethic, but I am more aware of my boundaries. And so, even though I know that I love what I do, I know that I'm going to only be able to do what I do and the same level of passion that I have for it, for as long as I am taking care of myself.
I have to take care of me. One of my non-negotiables now is sleep. It's just something that I will not sacrifice any more. I love my sleep, and now it's like I'm making up for all the years that I didn't get that right.
How did you work through that recovery? What helped you to shift to honor yourself and your needs?
There was a lot of fear, but I had to lean into trust. And I became so grateful that I have such a supportive husband. I went to a workshop on reprioritizing my life, and I was able to identify feelings that I had. I had to let myself cry. I'm a crier; I still enjoy a good cry.
I had to allow myself to feel what I was afraid of. I was afraid of not being good enough and not being the person people wanted to be around. These things were part of my dialogue from my childhood.
I know now that trying to get and maintain the perfect body was just an outward way that I was trying to make up for my loss inside. I was trying to make up for what I wasn't inside. I wasn't funny enough; I wasn't pretty enough; I wasn't smart enough. But at least, I thought, I can try and keep my body at the size that society says it should be and be admired for that.
And once I identified all of that, I could slowly start to heal and recharge and focus on my sleep. That was actually really uncomfortable for me because trying to sleep more made me feel lazy. I felt a lack of purpose. I had been on that hamster wheel for so very long that I didn't know what to do next.
But I had to recognize that this was my time to do the hard work. This was my time to sit in my sadness, in my fear, in my loneliness, and in my shame -- in all of those emotions and let them be. And let myself express them.
I journaled a lot. I stuck with my therapist. I did a ton of reading on self-acceptance and on perfectionism; all of these pieces of me needed some guidance and some support. And then, as I slowly started to feel a little bit stronger, I made my way onto social media. And there I found the Institute for Eating out of Colorado, which I had never heard of before, but again it was like a higher power just put it there on my screen. So, through 2017 I studied through the Institute and made it through one day at a time.
I had a lot of great people around me and had to put up boundaries and pull away from others. But who I am now is a woman who loves herself unconditionally. A woman who can look in the mirror, and go, yep, some days I feel great about my body, other days, not so much, but I can recognize that my work goes so much deeper than what I see in the mirror.
But what I see in the mirror is a really beautiful person. And I want that for all women: to see who they are in the mirror and be able to see all the parts of themselves that they love.
How do you find the balance of wanting to be a healthy person but not obsessing over fitness, diet, and exercise?
The most important thing to know is that health is not based on size. And the second is that we must have compassion for ourselves. And once we have that, we can look into what behaviors we can start or stop that will make us feel better about ourselves.
Rather than having to keep certain routines or restrict yourself to certain foods to lose weight, let's look at the possible reasons why you put on weight in the first place. Maybe I put on some extra pounds because I was lonely, or I was lacking support. Maybe I was fearful of something. Maybe I lost certain resources, like my gym closed down due to a global pandemic.
But we have to remember we're no less of a person if we put on some weight. Some people are just designed with bigger bodies. You don't have to change your body size in order to become healthier. I can look at my nutrition and realize, oh wow, I haven't had water for three days; no wonder I don't feel great. I need water to give my body energy to thrive and to survive, so I'm going to focus on drinking more water.
Or maybe you realize you have been eating a lot of processed foods, and those processed foods make you feel like junk. If you feel gross after eating a certain thing, recognize that. It doesn't mean that you have to follow some type of restrictive plan; sometimes, we just need to go back to the basics and notice that when we eat this, we feel this, or when we eat that, we feel that.
Yeah, I love that. That's really good.
We also need to check our views on exercise. I look at exercise now from what makes me feel good. I still want to be healthy, and I still want to be strong, but I don't have to do it in obsessive ways.
And we need to check our relationships with other people and ourselves. If we can't be there for people, we need to be honest about that. Boundaries are important. And we have to take time to focus on self-care.
That is so helpful.
Tell me what you are doing now. You did the Psychology of Eating course, and then you started your own business as a freedom and mindset coach?
One of the things I learned from going through what I went through was that I am not the only one. There are women and men out there that are struggling and need the support and the tools, and the help that I wish I had.
Now I work with women on their relationship with food. I do a lot of work on emotional eating, stress eating, body image issues, binge eating, etc. And on the other side of it is the mindset of it all. I help women who struggle with burnout and self-care.
I also do weight-loss work, but I don't advertise it, per se, because that's not what I want people coming to me for. If a woman comes to me and her whole life she's used food as a coping mechanism; if she's in a place where she just needs some help, and then weight starts to fall off because she's taking care of herself, I will celebrate that. But if you think your body isn't good enough, and you want some type of crash diet, I'm not your girl. I want life to be easy. I want you to feel easy around food, move your body with joy, then dream. Dream big.
I do group coaching and a lot of one-on-one coaching online, focusing on eating psychology and the feelings and beliefs that stem from our childhood. Most of us have been taught one thing or another about food, and we've carried that with us our whole lives. And our struggles with food is just a symptom, but it's not the problem. I like to get behind that and unpack that.
And I do it compassionately. That's the beauty of coaching: I get to do it on my own terms. I get to form relationships with my clients; I get to be there with them. We cry together sometimes, we laugh together, and it's a really beautiful journey. What I've realized is I love talking about food and supporting those relationships, but what really lights me up is being able to see somebody then step fully into their lives after I get to help them.
Where can people find you?
My website is KimBasler.com, and I'm on Instagram as @kimbasler_foodfreedom. And, of course, Facebook at Kim Basler Food Freedom & Mindset Coach. I'm very active on social media. I love doing my Instagram Reels. If anybody ever has any questions, they are welcome to DM me.
I would be pleased to talk to anybody, and most importantly, let's just celebrate each other. That's what we need to do as women: celebrate each other.
I agree. Kim, thank you so much for taking the time to do this!
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