Do something Friday

Put down the wrench.

Set realistic goals for your weight loss.  It won't be easy -- make sure you are in for the long haul.

If you need help, send me an email and we can work together.

Do something Friday

Tax Day.

So...you got 'em done, right?  Funny how the motivation of going to jail -- or just having a deadline you can't wiggle out of -- makes a difference.

Even if you have particularly complicated taxes or aren't very organized about your tax information, you spent the time getting stuff ready, right?  And maybe there are those of you who will be at the post office at 11:59p tonight -- but you'll get it in on time.

Priorities.  It's all about priorities.  You got it done because you had to.  When your weight control has the same importance behind it, you will get the same results.  It might take you right up to the deadline -- but you'll get there.

Good ideas must die ???

Tuesday morning (bright and early, I might add) found me on the road with my boss.  However we ended up there, the subject lighted on the idea that new ideas/concepts (even plants for that matter) won't grow unless there is space created for them.  If your garden is choke full of flowers, there isn't any space for new varieties to bloom.

If your business is choke full of good ideas you are working on, you can't just keep adding new projects to the mix because there aren't enough resources available to cultivate them.

Yesterday, I asked you "what makes your heart sing?"  -- you don't have infinite resources to keep adding personal and professional projects on your plate -- at some point, something has got to give.

I was looking for inspiration for today's post and GapingVoid had the cartoon above as it's Biz Card of the Day.  The message was right on target with the conversation I had this morning.  And in line with some of what we talked about yesterday. 

Sometimes, you have to give things up.  Period.  Now...don't be sad.  Don't get mopey.  You don't have to give up anything you don't want to -- remember, I don't want you feeling deprived!  But sometimes even good ideas need to be let go of so you can give the great ones a chance to develop.

For example:  Let's say you think it's a good idea to eat more vegetables and fruits than you currently do.  THAT is your weight loss plan.  It is a solidly good idea.  You can ask anyone -- everyone will agree with you -- eating more vegetables and fruits is a good idea.  But what if you don't like veggies and fruit???

Are you ready to let this good idea go and create some space for a great one to emerge?  What if you stopped forcing yourself to eat a salad at every meal and work on eating your potato chips out of a small bowl when you sit in front of the TV in the evening?

Or...

If you made a commitment to put all of the cookies you eat on a plate and sit down at the table with no distractions (no reading your favorite magazine while munching!) and eat as many as you can focus on.

Maybe one of these would be the GREAT idea that helps you achieve your weight success.  There's only so much time and attention you can pay to your eating -- you need to find the GREAT ideas!  The good ideas will only get you so far....

Why are you doing what you are doing?

Okay -- maybe today is your first opportunity to read this blog. Or perhaps you have been with me since the beginning. I just looked and I have 8 blog posts filed under the keyword "goals". Here is the question for the day. I expect you to be able to answer it! If you want to take a minute and write the answer as a comment, I would love that -- both because I would love to hear your "voice" and also because if you are able to type out your answer, you have really given it some thought and are not just letting the answer be a vague feeling of unease. The question is this:

Why are you doing what you are doing? --Why are you trying to lose weight? Why are you trying to adopt a more mindful eating pattern?

If you can write out an answer to those questions, when you start to get cranky because you are not seeing progress fast enough -- you can remind yourself of the reasons you started out on this mindful journey.

For example: Why am I (Kristi) trying to adopt a more mindful eating pattern?

Okay -- for those of you who know me, you know I am not trying to lose weight -- I am happy where I am at BUT...I do not want to gain weight -- that sneaky few pounds per year that make things creep up over time. Why?

Because it is always easier to lose fewer pounds than more pounds.

I need to stay at a healthy weight because I only have half the cartilage in my knee as I should and I can't add any more wear and tear on my knees than I have to.

I want to maintain a healthy weight because, to a certain degree, my job depends on it. It is very hard to preach activity and mindful eating if I am many pounds over weight.

And most immediate and personally important to me: I like to be active. I like trying new physical skills. I have just taken up golf and suck at it. Additional weight is only going to make learning this new game harder. And I want to learn to kite surf. And I still haven't completely ruled out lacrosse (even though I should -- with the knees and all).

And I love, love, love good food!! I don't want to have to cut out fat -- I don't want some kind of butter-alternative -- I want butter. And real, fat sour cream and rissotto, and pasta, and pizza, and I don't want to give up cookies. I don't like to read labels and let them tell me whether I should eat the contents or not! I want to eat all of the things I love. Mindfulness is the only way I can do that. I can only eat small amounts of what I love because they are so calorie dense. I don't want to have to measure my food portions -- it steals joy from my process of eating. For me, mindfulness is a way to be free of the fear of food!

So -- when you decide you don't care about being mindful of how you eat ("I don't WANT to think about this right now!" or "I am too tired" or "It is just too much work to pay attention to this!"), what opportunities are you potentially giving up (or making more difficult) by your actions? When you can spell that out to yourself, then you can decide if the extra 3 bites of store-bought, day-old and stale brownie that tastes like the cardboard it was packaged in is really worth it. If it is -- just make sure to taste, enjoy, and appreciate every waxy bite!

A Vision for your Life

You have heard me talk about goals. It is really important to have goals -- a destination -- little steps you can achieve and tick off the list as you go. Yesterday, I told you it was my goal to get the E-course ready for the offering by the first of the year. That is a goal. Goals give you a sense of accomplishment -- a sense of making progress.

But what about your vision for your life? Do you have one? A vision for your life is deeper than just a goal or even a series of goals. If you could create any kind of life you would like, what would it be?

Finishing a marathon is a goal. You would probably have a goal time you want to finish under.

Moving to a big city, where you could walk to work, run along the linear trails, meet up with your runner friends for a coffee at your favorite coffee house after your training run would be the start of a vision.

Goals are good -- If I choose not to uproot my family and move them to a big city to fulfill my vision right now, goals will help me get started creating parts of the vision that are currently available to me.

If I can picture what I want my life to look like in my mind's eye, I have a greater likelihood of creating that vision.

If your vision for your life is to no longer worry about what you should eat. To eat, enjoy and then move on with no guilt about that piece of cheesecake or bowl of pasta alfredo made with real, full-fat cream. To feel comfortable with who you are and what size you are because your size fits your lifestyle to a T. How would that change the other parts of your life?

Where are you going? It is important to know that before you decide how you are going to get there.

Go Slowly

Short-term behavior change is pretty easy. Let's say you want to start the Flat Belly Diet. You are motivated. You bought the book. You bought the journal. You bought everything on the shopping list for the first week. You're off and running. The first week -- no problem because you have a plan.

Second week -- things get a little more challenging. Food choices are kind of limited. Not as much structure to the plan -- you are having to make more decisions -- what's with that? You bought the book -- you bought the journal -- but the motivation is starting to wane.

Third week -- eek gad! Let's not even go there -- since most of you know this goes already.

Diets work in the short term. As I told the group at Flowserve yesterday -- diets work because somehow they get you to cut down the amount you are eating.
Portion size, points, cutting out a food group or macro nutrient -- all of this restricts your calorie intake in one way or another. If you are following their plan, you will lose weight.

But back to the title of the post. Where is the inherent flaw in diets?

They ask you to make a ton of changes to your lifestyle all at once.

Have you seen a diet commercial that doesn't have fine print that talks about the results being tied to following a "sensible eating plan" combined with exercise? That, for most people, is asking them to rework their whole lifestyle. Can you find an extra 8 hours a week to be at the gym AND grocery shop every week with a list provided by the diet? That kind of change is unsustainable in the long haul. It is too much.

We can put our lives on hold for a diet in the short term but eventually life barges back in and needs attention.

After my talk yesterday, one of the woman commented that I didn't talk about exercise at all. True. I know how hard they sell exercise in the US. And there are good reasons to exercise. You CAN eat more if you are exercising. BUT...

If you are currently trying to lose weight and are not exercising -- don't try to make it happen all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day and you didn't get to where you are since yesterday.

Go slowly. Go sensibly. Weight loss (or just weight, for that matter) should NOT encompass your whole life's energies. How are you going to have time to do all of the things that make your heart sing, if your weight loss is taking up all your brain space.

Pick a starting point that seems sensible to you. If you need help finding a place to start get help -- ask a friend, email me, figure it out. Work on that starting point -- get good at it.

Once you have successfully integrated the starting point into your life, you can find another small change and work on it's successful integration. You shouldn't have to drop the first behavior to add the second.

Slowly, you will see your weight heading in the direction you have been waiting for. This won't get you on the commercials promising "DRAMATIC WEIGHT LOSS IN SIX WEEK!" but you will lose weight without having to sacrifice every spare minute of your life.

And more importantly -- you will be able to maintain your weight loss for more than 3weeks!

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Yesterday, I was browsing the bookstore -- a real one, not an online one -- not looking for anything in particular -- which is one way I love to spend a overcast day. I could spend hours picking up a book (obviously, one with an eye catching cover) reading the inside flap and putting it back down.

One that caught my eye was A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. The excerpt from the flap talked about how much of his life he doesn't remember. All of the activities done on autopilot. The mindlessness of it (my interpretation).

After I got home, I googled the book and found Don's blog with part of chapter 25 at the top of the page. Below is part of that excerpt (an excerpt of an excerpt, if you will):

"It’s like this when you live a story. The first part happens fast. You throw yourself into the narrative and you’re caught in the water, the shore is pushing back behind you and the trees are getting smaller. The other shore is inches away and you can feel the resolution coming, the feeling of getting out of you’re boat and walking the distant shore, looking back to see where you came from. The first part of a story happens fast, and you think the thing is going to be over soon. But it isn’t going to be over soon. The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. It’s as though the thing is teaching you the story is not about the ending but about the story itself, about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. The shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes used to move you but they don’t anymore....

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought and they can’t see the distant shore anymore and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their wife, on their husband, they go looking for an easier story....

The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person."

It is just another voice out there that puts forth the idea that life is in the journey. In weight loss terms, it is not about the end point of hitting your goal weight -- it is about the small changes you make to your life.

If the extra weight you are carrying around today makes life more difficult for you (mentally, emotionally, physically), it seems to me you would want to make sure you NEVER get into that position again! Take your time. Learn about yourself. You got to where you are for reasons.

If you eat emotionally -- there is a reason (or more likely reasons) for it. WHY do you do what you do? That coping strategy has worked in the past -- what has changed that it is not working for you now? Any halfway decent friend will tell you it is very hard to give up one coping mechanism if you don't have some other coping mechanism to replace it -- right then -- not AFTER the weight has come off. That is why diets work for the time that they work -- you are given a new set up coping mechanisms.

But ultimately, you go back to your old ways of coping (because you didn't learn anything that serves you long term -- you weren't even looking for something to serve you long term. You just wanted the weight off -- and there it went (with much hard work and decision making on your part). But when your "off" the diet, then what???

Back to the excerpt -- if you have a reasonable amount of weight to lose -- it might feel like you start off strong and you can see the progress you make (as you are paddling away from shore, so to speak) but when you get in the middle of the channel of your weight loss, it becomes harder and harder to keep paddling. The shore (your goal weight) doesn't feel like it is coming any closer -- it will take forever to get there --

It is at this point, I will ask you to keep in mind:

What are you options?

To quit paddling? To stop trying to lose weight? To settle for being dissatisfied because you don't think you can do it?

YOU CAN! But like all things worth having -- it comes one paddle stroke at a time. One eating decision at a time. Finding the small positives everyday (yeh! I passed up that tray of cookies, not because I told myself I couldn't have them, but because I noticed that they didn't even look that good!!!) and celebrating them. That is how you will get to where you are going -- one paddle stroke at a time.

Falling off the Wagon

One of the things about creating the habit of mindful eating is sometimes we "fall off the wagon". Weight you have lost creeps back on and all of the sudden you realize you weigh 3 or 4 pounds more than you did when you were so pleased with yourself. Time to jump back on the wagon!

Time to pick up your food journal and commit to 2 or 3 weeks of writing down everything that goes into your mouth.

Remember -- mindful eating is a practice. You never achieve mindful eating perfection -- but that is is not the goal anyway!. The real goal is, when you leave your practice and notice the scale starting to move upward, make the conscious decision to reawaken your sensations of hunger and fullness -- you know what they feel like and you know what they mean -- and start using them again.

Weight management is not about achieving perfection. It is about noticing the small changes and knowing that you are in charge of changing your behavior to stay in your healthy range so that you can take those 3 or 4 pounds off and not stress about it.

It will take too long....

The last couple days, as I have been going about my regular business, in the back of my brain, thoughts from the Excuses Begone are still percolating around. What came to the fore today is the thought that Mindful Eating, as a weight loss tool, will take too long.

The other day, I wrote a post about Magic Beans -- those quick fixes -- emphasis on the quick -- we all want to be the weight we want to be and we want to get there yesterday!

Last week, I had a conversation with a client, who had decided he couldn't put the energy into learning to eat mindfully while he was overweight. He decided he wanted to lose the weight in the fashion he was successful in the past. Once the weight was off, he would learn the mindful skills to keep it off.

But what about those of us who don't start to get the weight off because it is going to take too long??

I liked Wayne Dyer's answer to that statement:

An entertaining psychiatrist named Dr. Murray Banks does just that with the following little exchange between himself and a woman who has decided not to return to school because she’d be too old when she finished.

“How old would you be in five years if you got that degree by starting now?” he asks her.
“Forty-nine,” she replies.
“And how old will you be in five years if you don’t go back to school?”
“Forty-nine,” she answers, with the bewildered confusion of becoming conscious of making an excuse for not elevating her life.

However long it took you to create any self-defeating habit, you did it all one day, one moment at a time. There’s absolutely no proof that anything will take a long time, since even the idea of “a long time” is an illusion—there is only now.

Make this awareness a part of your consciousness. The Tao Te Ching reinforces this in perhaps the most famous line in that masterful work:

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Elevate or move on in your life, not by thinking big and in long time periods, but with consciousness focused on the present moment.

Excuses Begone

Okay -- I tried and tried to get away from this subject this morning -- but everything in the Universe is pointing me in this direction. So...here we go...

Yesterday, I watched the Wayne Dyer special on PBS entitled "Excuses Begone". It was really interesting. He said a lot of things but essentially it came down to the only thing that is holding me back from doing anything, are the excuses I make for myself not doing those things.

One of the action oriented activities he gave the viewers was:

A. to realize that if the tape in your head says you can't lose weight, to ask yourself if you are absolutely 100% sure this is true. Is it? NO! I bet your are not 100% convinced this isn't possible or why would you be reading this blog??

Okay -- so it is not 100% impossible to lose weight -- are you 100% certain you will lose weight? Probably not that, either.

So...if you are equally not sure about either outcome, why do you spend sooooo much time and energy dwelling on the negative outcome when the positive outcome is equally as viable AND it will make you feel better???

(Changing your perspective)


B. Visualize yourself at your perfect weight. Create a picture in your head of how you would look if you were at your perfect weight. When you get that picture in your head, pay attention to how you feel. Are you excited? Relived? Feel free? Whatever it is -- feel how it would feel to live at that weight. Then, every night, right before you go to sleep, repeat this exercise with special emphasis on feeling what you feel living at that weight.

It will help you to seek out those same good feeling during the day while you are making your eating decisions. You will eat less and feel good about the choices you make. Not as punishment but as nurturing choices for yourself. You will move yourself in the direction of your vision.

Almost everything I have read in the last two days has talked about creating a vision for yourself. I will leave you with the last quote that was sent to me today.

"Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." --Goethe

Labor Day

"Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer. The holiday is often regarded as a day of rest and parades. "

Ahhhh...the end of summer -- the start of school for those kids here in Michigan.

Starting a new phase, starting a new school year. Perfect time to take a few minutes and figure out your SMART goal.

Last Friday, I linked you to a page that examined what a SMART goal was. Did you read it? Did you think about it? And finally, did you set down and write it out -- on paper -- and put it somewhere you can be reminded of what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it --- EVERYDAY???

If the goal is to keep an food journal 5 out of every 7 days, have you put the journal somewhere you see it? Is it on your desk at work to remind you to write in it directly after lunch?

If your goal is to eat to a level 8 five out of 7 nights at dinner -- do you have something sitting on your table or kitchen counter to remind you this is what you are working to accomplish?

Today is the day to set the stage for your success. But you have to know what success is going to look like first. Take the time TODAY to sit down and get to the heart of why you want to lose weight and create a goal to get you where you want to go.

Change

So this is what I have learned about change:

Most of the time it is a challenge.

Sometimes (even if it is good change) it is scary.

And it never happens as fast as I want it to.

Anything you pick to change in your life is going to require extra energy from you. And there is always that small (and sometimes naggingly loud voice) that says the change will not be successful.

Does that mean I shouldn't attempt a change that is meaningful to me?

No way!

But we do need to recognize that the fear of failure when embarking on a weight loss program is so common, I cannot think of a single one of my clients that hasn't expressed fear at the thought of not being able to lose weight. I have lots of clients get frustrated from time to time that the process they are embarking on is taking longer than they want it to and requiring more brain space than they're used to expending.

This is why having a SMART goal is so very helpful. It gives you a measuring stick to see your progress. Even though you might not have hit your target weight yet, if you are trending that direction, that indicates progress. If you are hitting your weekly goals (drink 8 glasses of water per day / cut morning soda intake in half / etc) these will help you mark your progress and quiet the negative voices in your head.

Don't know what a SMART goal is?? We can talk about that one on Monday :)