“What do you really want?”

That was the question Marc’s therapist asked him on a beautiful, sunny Atlanta day when, inside, he felt like there was “one cloud raining on just me.” Mark’s answer was simple and heartbreaking: “I just want to be normal.”

In this deeply honest conversation on LOA Today, host Walt and co-host Jodie Lynn talk with Marc - certified personal trainer, nutritionist, strength and conditioning coach, mental health advocate, and podcast host about what happens when therapy feels like it’s failing you, but you refuse to fail yourself.

Mark describes walking into therapy feeling broken and abnormal. His therapist gently pushed back: “There’s nothing abnormal about you, this is your normal. Normal is relative.”

Those words eventually became the seed for his podcast, Relatively Normal, a platform where Marc speaks with therapists, psychologists, and everyday people about postpartum struggles, imposter syndrome, and the crushing loneliness of mental health challenges. His mission: “I just want to make sure people don’t feel isolated and alone.”

Walt relates to his own story - starting LOA Today after a total business “crash and burn” in 2008 and admitting that, at first, he didn’t even think about listeners: “I was doing the podcast because I needed the help. When the first listener email came in, my reaction was, ‘Oh shit, what have I been saying?’”

Marc shares a powerful turning point: he had lost weight, checked all the “life boxes” - marriage, house, better body and still felt empty. He called his therapist on the verge of tears: “I feel like I’ve checked all the boxes. Why am I not happy?”

The therapist’s answer cut to the core: “Did you think losing all the weight would make you feel better mentally?

You have to be intentional with both.”

Marc realized he’d been treating physical health as a cure-all for mental pain. That’s when he decided to treat fitness like therapy, even hiring a trainer as his “therapist for physical health.” He stopped using workouts to escape stress and started leaning into his stress at the gym, coming back with “three or four different resolution strategies” after a hard session.

Today, Marc’s niche is training young people. Before every session, he asks: “Zero to ten - where are you mentally right now?”

If a teenager says they’re at a three or four, he adapts the session. For an eight or nine, he pushes harder. Why? Because: “No one ever asks them where they are mentally.”

He refuses to be the harsh coach parents sometimes request: “I don’t want them to hate coming to work with me. My job is sometimes to motivate, sometimes to inspire, and to help them find things in themselves they wouldn’t find without me.”

Jodie Lynn beautifully ties the conversation together, pointing out how much of our identity gets trapped in roles - athlete, worker, partner, and how Marc is giving kids permission to ask: Do I actually love this? Or am I just good at it?

Marc tells his own daughters, “The first time you tell me, ‘I don’t love this anymore,’ we’re done after the season. I won’t force your childhood to be full of things you hate.”

Ultimately, this conversation is a reminder that:

• Normal is relative.
• Happy is relative.
• And you’re allowed to rewrite both.

You don’t have to choose between therapy and training, between mental health and physical health, between passion and discipline. You can choose all of it, and you can choose yourself.

LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/marc-paisant

Marc Paisant's Website: https://www.marcpaisant.com/

Follow the LOA Today podcast: https://www.loatoday.net/follow

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