Do something Friday

What if you could make the world a healthier place -- every day -- with very little extra effort?  Would you?

The other day, I got to hear Rob Lillie, of Gazelle fame, speak about making the world a healthier place.  His view (to paraphrase), is that when a customer buys a Gazelle product, they are supporting Girls on the Run, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and lots of other local events  that encourage people to get outside and move more, be more active, and be a positive influence on others.

Like it or not, we are our brothers (and sisters) keepers.  How we live our life is part of the tone of what's acceptable in the lives of our loved ones, friends, neighbors and community at large.

Your eating and activity patterns matter because we are pack animals and take our cues about what is socially acceptable from those around us.

So getting back to the original question -- you do shape your world.  Whether your stuffing yourself on a giant Blizzard or lacing up your shoes for an after-dinner amble around the block, others are watching.  When you choose to make healthy decisions for yourself and your own body, you are adding to social pressure for us all to make healthier behaviors part of our norm. 

You can make your world a healthier place.  What kind of a world are you going to create this weekend?

Aversion to Change

The thing to keep in mind, when you are contemplating a bahavior change, is that your behaviors are part of what makes you you.  To change any one of them will change who you are.

It might be a small change -- like choosing a smaller latte in the mornings.

Or a bigger change -- like my decision that I might enjoy wearing fun colored/patterned socks instead of just plain white ones. :)

If you're not willing to change who you are, you aren't going to be successful changing what you do.

Changes You can Live With

Give it some thought -- how many changes do you really want to make in your life? How many people are in your life telling you to make some changes (besides yourself)?

Has your doctor given you this advice:
"Honey, you need to lose some weight."
"Ms. (or Mr.) X you need to reduce your stress levels."

"Eat healthier."
"Move more"
"Get more sleep"
"Work less" (from your kids)
"Work harder" (from your boss)
"Stand up straight" ... actually, to be honest, I really agree with this one and say it to my people 400 times a day.

But you get my point. There's a lot of change we are being pressured to make. A lot of people in our lives are telling us we need to do things differently.

And we try....to change, to please them, to appease them so they just shut up.

But we have forgotten an important part of the change process.

1. Understand where you are
2. Decide where you want to go
3. Figure out the way to get there (and this is the REALLY important part) in a way that lets all the positive things you do with your life stay in their places.

We let changes overhaul our entire life structure -- and we can't sustain that much change. So we struggle for a while and eventually go back to our old habits (feeling like failures all the way) because we just took on too much all at once.

We are capable of making all those changes -- we just need to do it in a fashion that doesn't undo the rest of our delicately balanced lives.

My clients are all successful people. People successful in business, in health care, in finance. They make lots of decisions everyday for work, create career plans for others, manage to a bottom line. But they take a different approach with themselves. The same amount of professional growth time they give to an associate, they expect to conquer in half the time (or less), when they outline their expectations for their development of weight management skills. --They honestly believe they should know how to do this already, so they are already behind.

NOT SO! Our culture has spent your lifetime teaching you the skills you know to control your weight. Look around -- if you are struggling, so are a great many other people who learned the same lessons from the same culture. You can't redirect a whole life's worth of teaching in just a couple afternoons.

Make a couple changes you can easily live with. Let them become the new normal and then make some more. You will get there -- and just as important, You will be able to stay there!

The "New Normal"

A couple of months ago, I thought I coined this phrase. I thought it was quite clever. Seems now, I must have just heard it somewhere and just picked it up.

New normal is what we are striving for. Clients tend to get frustrated toward the end of their first 6 weeks with me because everything requires so much thought. It was easier when they didn't have to put so much thought into every eating decision. But...I counter... they were putting at least as much energy into feeling bad about their weight or their eating decisions, it was just normal and natural to deal with the negativity -- so it didn't seem like as much work.

The "New Normal" comes when people develop the habit of asking themselves "Am I hungry?" BEFORE they eat. If you are hungry -- then eat. If you are not hungry, then you have the opportunity to decide if this is something you really want or need to eat. With practice this becomes the natural thought process. It becomes just what they do automatically. It becomes normal.

When paying attention to your hunger and fullness levels becomes the "New Normal", it will require a lot less energy and thought than it does now. And you will have developed an effective, life-long tool to manage your weight.