Abby Grubbs on Confidence, Mindset, and Finding Freedom With Food
Mindset · From Student of the Game
Abby Grubbs on Confidence, Mindset, and Finding Freedom With Food
Brad Noll's very first guest on Student of the Game is someone he has looked up to for years: his younger sister, Abby Grubbs. Abby is a Hall of Fame college basketball player who now runs her own business as an anti-diet health coach, helping women rebuild trust with food and their bodies.
The conversation is warm, funny, and honest. Abby gives Brad a hard time about blocking her shots in the driveway, and Brad jokes that his first guest is airing the family's dirty laundry. Underneath the laughs is a serious lesson about the fundamental that carried Abby through every season of her life: mindset.
Growing Up in a Sports-Minded Family
Their father was a basketball coach, and the family was at a practice or a game nearly every night. Abby loved it. She says people sometimes assume a life full of sports is one-dimensional, but it taught her discipline, hard work, and how to show up. "If practice starts at four and you're there at 3:30, you're late," she says.
Coaching also meant moving. Between eighth grade and her freshman year, the family moved from Michigan to Indiana when their dad took a job at IPFW. Abby was heartbroken to leave her friends, and she had a goal of making varsity as a freshman. That summer, playing up against older girls in an Indiana league, she tore her ACL.
She had surgery, pushed herself in a smart way, and made varsity as a freshman anyway. Brad points out how big that is in Indiana, where basketball is practically a religion. Abby went on to be the area's player of the year as a senior, score more than 2,000 points in college at Bethel, have her number 10 jersey retired, and earn a place in the Hall of Fame. She did it at five-foot-one, through four knee surgeries, without missing a game.
“I have just had to realize that my thoughts, my negative thoughts are not facts.”
Abby Grubbs
Negative Thoughts Are Not Facts
Here is the surprise: Abby says she has always struggled with self-confidence. People laughed when she said she played basketball because she was built more like a gymnast. Making varsity was the first time she thought, "I need to give myself a little bit more credit."
Brad asks the question every business owner can relate to. If you are in a nine-to-five job or starting a small business, what is your knee surgery? How many times could you have made excuses? "Oh, every day," Abby says. Her answer was learning that negative thoughts are not facts, and retraining her brain to believe she can do hard things. Most people give up on their goals, she says, because they quit too soon, and they quit too soon because they lack confidence in themselves.
Her main tool is positive affirmations. She admits they can feel cheesy and that she does not believe in herself every single day. But reading them daily helps her catch a negative spiral and reframe it faster. Brad connects it to a saying his team uses: what you focus on expands.
When Healthy Became Unhealthy
Brad believes that out of your pain comes your purpose, and Abby's purpose grew out of her own health journey. After having her two boys, she wanted to lose some baby weight. Cutting portions turned into studying every ingredient, which turned into overexercising and avoiding restaurants and social events. She later learned it had a name: orthorexia, an unhealthy obsession with being healthy.
The compliments kept coming, so she kept going, until her body could not keep up. What changed things was support. Abby hired a health coach who took a holistic approach and asked about her relationships, her joy, and her spirituality, not just food and exercise. She also found a group of women going through the same thing who encouraged each other. As an adult, she says, it was harder than any knee surgery because it was so hard to talk about.
One idea that made a big difference was balancing what she calls masculine and feminine energy, being in control and meeting deadlines on one hand, going with the flow on the other. She realized she had become too disciplined. She also teaches that stress is stress. "Your body doesn't know where it's coming from, but it reacts to it," she says. Brad adds a point he heard at a real estate conference: self-awareness is a key ingredient of success.
How Abby Coaches Women Today
Through her business, Salad and Sweets, Abby works with women who have dieted for years without lasting change. Her approach starts in a place many people do not expect:
- Start with mindset, affirmations, and body image before talking about food or exercise.
- Take food off the pedestal. Labeling foods as good or bad gives them power.
- Use food as information. Ask how a food makes you feel physically and mentally, because every body is different.
- Learn the basics, like reading a nutrition label and understanding ingredients.
- Work toward intuitive eating, following your body's internal cues instead of external rules.
- Expect change to take time. Her one-on-one coaching usually runs about six months.
"I am not your quick fix girl," Abby says. A 90-day diet leaves the question of what you do on day 91. Brad laughs that his family's old Clean Plate Club is under review, and Abby notes that kids naturally leave the last bites of a cookie when they are full. When all foods fit, many of her clients find they do not even want the ice cream as much once they know they can have it.
What Does Winning Look Like?
For Abby, winning is a life full of joy, freedom, and confidence: not getting stressed easily, being free from counting calories and obsessing over exercise, and feeling just as confident eating a chocolate chip cookie as an apple. That is what she wants for her clients, too, for a lifetime and not just a season.
Asked who she most wants to meet, she says people who struggle with confidence and have dieted their whole lives, so their story does not have to be their kids' story. Then, when Brad asks her to send some virtual flowers, she sends them to him. Years ago at Christmas, Brad asked each family member for a word of the year. Abby chose freedom, and she says she feels free today. She also shares that she worked for the Noll Team right out of college, a story saved for another season.
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Developing a Strong Mindset with Athlete and Business Owner Abby Grubbs, on Student of the Game.
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