Dare to Begin with Leslie Begin

Someone older and wiser sat across from me once and said something I have never forgotten. "Leslie. As you heal, your kids will heal." In this episode I unpack what that means and why it changed everything for me as a mom. Your health comeback is not selfish. It is not taking from your kids. It is one of the most generous things you can do FOR them. Because people do what you do. Not what you say....

My husband Trey used to listen in on my coaching calls in the early years. And after hearing me troubleshoot with client after client — asking questions, trying to figure out why results had stalled — he finally said... "Leslie. Always start with water. It is always the water." And he was right. Almost every single time. In this episode I share the surprising science behind why not drinking enough...

I am in a week full of social engagements and I am excited about every single one of them. But I am also reminding myself of the habits I mastered the first time I lost weight and kept it off for a long time. Because social situations used to be where my health goals went to die. Here is the honest truth. I used to go to baby showers, bridal showers, weddings, and parties completely focused on the...

You do not have to eat the cake just because your grandma made it and her feelings might be hurt if you don't. And honestly... your feelings could be hurt if she guilts you into eating it. In this episode I share two real stories from my very first week of prioritizing my health. A tea party with friends where I called ahead, told my friend my goals, and offered to bring food that fit my plan. And...

You have to brainwash yourself. On purpose. In the best possible way. The toddler committee in my head has been running the show for a long time. And as I have been making changes on this comeback there have been moments where I found myself standing in the pantry or almost grabbing something off the counter that had nothing to do with my goals. And I realized in those moments that willpower alone...

Before we dive in — this episode is for the average person navigating a health comeback. If you have a history with disordered eating, this one is best processed with a professional who knows your specific story. You deserve that kind of personalized support. For everyone else... let's talk about hunger. Hunger is a sliding scale. And most of us in America have never experienced the low end of it....

Too many choices are secretly sabotaging your health journey more than any food choice ever could. I took one of our international students to the grocery store recently and she stopped dead in the middle of the cereal aisle. Completely overwhelmed. She turned her head slowly from one end to the other and said... "How do you choose?" And I looked at that aisle through her eyes for the first time i...

When temptation hits... don't stand there and negotiate with it. Flee. In this episode I share one of the most practical and underrated tools in my entire health comeback arsenal — physically moving your body away from the thing that is pulling at you. The Bible says flee from temptation. Not resist it from across the room. Not white knuckle your way through it standing in front of the open refrig...

I forget to eat. Not as a strategy. Not on purpose. I just get going and the next thing I know it is three o'clock in the afternoon and I have had nothing but coffee and good intentions. And then dinner hits and I am eating fast, standing up, not tasting anything, wondering why I feel terrible afterward. In this episode I am talking about mindful eating — and I promise it is not as complicated as...

Some nights when I think I am hungry... I am not hungry. My brain is just short circuited. It has been going all day. It is tired and depleted and it is sending me to the pantry when what it actually needs is a pillow. The late night kitchen raid is not always a craving. Sometimes it is just exhaustion wearing a snack costume. In this mini episode I share why closing the kitchen early is not a wil...

I had six babies in twelve years. I was throwing dirty diapers out the door under the carport. The laundry was never folded. The chickens were eating my mustard greens. My dad had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease. And somewhere in the middle of all of that... I desperately wanted to write my own comeback story in my health. And I had every excuse in the world not to. In this episode I g...

After hearing "wow you have your hands full" approximately one thousand nine hundred and fifty six times walking into the grocery store with my six daughters... I started to believe it. That is how lies work. They do not start as lies. They start as a passing comment, a hard moment, a number on a scale, a voice from the past. And the longer you hear them the more they feel like facts. In this epis...

It's a tale as old as time. God gave Adam and Eve permission to eat from every single tree in the garden... except one. And instead of feasting on the thousands of trees surrounding them, they fixated on the one thing they couldn't have. The enemy of their lives, their purpose, and their calling came to do exactly what he always does — steal, kill, and destroy — and his strategy was simple. Get th...

Perfectionism is not a personality trait to be proud of. It is keeping you stuck, preventing you from moving forward, and quietly costing the people around you too. In this episode I get honest about how perfection mentality works against your health goals, your mindset, and your relationships, and how switching to a progress mindset changed absolutely everything for me. Including something I had...

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would spend hours on our boogie boards in the ocean, riding waves and laughing and completely lost in it. And then one of us would look up... and way down the beach, further than made any sense, we could see our moms waving us back. The undertow had been pulling us the whole time. Quietly. Without us feeling a thing. That is the drift. And it is exactly what Mich...

You were not meant to do life, or your comeback, alone. In this episode, I share why real accountability isn't about punishment or shame, it's about ownership and choice... plus a story about a client who blamed her husband's ice cream habit for her own struggle (and the moment she realized it wasn't actually about the ice cream). I'll walk you through the different forms accountability can take:...

I always think about ideas for months, sometimes years, before I actually launch them. So if you've been waiting for the "perfect" time to pick a plan... I want to tell you something. There isn't one. Not the beginning of summer, not after the holidays, not when life calms down. In this episode, I walk you through the two things you have to do before picking any health plan: be realistic about you...

You call yourself an "all or nothing" girl. You try to change everything at once... and when it fails, you tell yourself you just need more grace. But sometimes "grace upon grace" looks like a large pour of wine and cutting brownie pieces off the pan until a quarter of it is gone. Let's talk about your Cornerstone Habit... The one habit that, once it's in place, makes every other habit easier or e...

You are not lazy. You are not undisciplined. You are exhausted from switching lanes every time a new reel tells you something different. In this episode, Leslie unpacks the real reason most of us stay stuck before we even begin... the overwhelming, contradicting flood of health information available to us 24 hours a day. One video says spinach will heal you. The next says it's full of phytates and...

I love a comeback story... Legally Blonde, the Mighty Ducks, and my personal favorite, the 80's classic Girls Just Want to Have Fun. In this first episode of my Everyday Comeback series, I'm sharing why I'm building my own comeback story in real time, and why every comeback is written one day at a time, not in one giant leap. Drawing from my own experience in codependency recovery and the wisdom o...

Welcome to Dare to Begin — Show Trailer Confronted with truth and hugged at the same time. If you're overwhelmed, a little overcome, and quietly stuck somewhere — in your health, your finances, your faith, your marriage, or just your story — this is the podcast for you. I'm Leslie Begin, and in this short trailer I'll introduce you to the show: who it's for, what you can expect from every episode,...