Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN

Stop hitting the pause button

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I just returned home from an 8-day business trip. If you travel for business, you know how that goes: your normal eating and exercise routines are thrown completely under the bus, you don’t have a lot of control over what and when you eat, the food is often richer and more indulgent than your usual fare, and you might be getting less sleep. All your healthy habits feel out of reach.

I used to just mentally hit the “pause button” when trips like this came up and resolve to get back to eating healthy when I returned.

The problem is that something was always coming up to prevent me from sticking to my healthy routines: A vacation. A special event. A huge deadline at work. A hospitalized parent. A friend in need. An unexpected guest. (Or, in this case, a stomach bug that hit the day after I returned.)

The truth is, my healthy habits were “on pause” a lot more than they weren’t. Because life.

I finally realized that the only way to live a healthy life was to figure out how to make healthy choices even when I was out of my normal routine.  Because it turns out that my idealized notion of what a healthy day includes (aka, my “normal routine”) doesn’t actually happen all that often.

So, instead of “hitting the pause button” during my business trip, I continued to make the healthiest choices I could. I realized I didn’t have to eat every time we took a snack break. I didn’t have to sample every dessert. I didn’t have to drink wine with every meal. I stood through presentations in the back of the room instead of sitting all day. I talked some folks into walking back from dinner instead of taking the shuttle van.

My point is, if all the conditions need to be perfect in order to lose weight, we’re not going to make much progress toward our goals.

So, the next time you’re tempted to hit the “pause” button, commit instead to making the best choices you can under the circumstances. Don’t wait for life to get back to normal. It won’t!

When are you most likely to hit the pause button? How could you navigate that situation as someone who weighs less?

What are you saying no to?

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What am I saying No to by saying Yes to this?

I love this question because it allows me to be a little more conscious of the trade-offs I am making.

If I’m just trying to decide whether or not I want dessert, the answer is always going to be Yes.  But if saying Yes to dessert means I’m saying No to weighing less, then I’m forced to consider which is worth more to me.

Similarly, by saying YES to working late. I’m also saying NO to working out.  Which is more important to me today?

By saying YES to a second glass of wine, I am probably saying NO to a sound night’s sleep.  (Alcohol definitely degrades my sleep quality.)   Which do I want more?

By saying YES when my sister calls and asks if I have time to chat, I’m saying NO to catching the news or taking a walk.  Often, that tradeoff is 100% OK with me.

Try this question out for yourself and see what you discover. Even if it doesn’t change your decision, I guarantee it will give you more insight into what you’re choosing and why.

 

 

Staying on track in the evenings

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Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

Do you ever feel like there are two versions of you?

There’s Morning You that’s totally committed to a healthy lifestyle. The you that makes a smoothie for breakfast, packs a salad for lunch, takes the stairs instead of the elevator, fills up your water bottle several times a day (from the furthest possible water cooler), and takes the dog for a longer-than-necessary walk before grilling fish and vegetables dinner.

And then there’s Evening You. The you that starts rummaging through the snack cupboard as soon as the dinner dishes are done. The you that just wants to relax in front of the tube with a bag of pretzels or bowl of ice cream. The you that wants another glass of wine, thank you very much, instead of a stupid cup of herbal tea.

The you that doesn’t care about eating healthy or losing weight. (Morning You can get back to that tomorrow…)

But it’s hard for Morning You to make much progress when Evening You basically undoes every good choice you’ve made in the first part of the day.

Here is a way to get Evening You more on board with the program

The Evening Ritual

You’ve heard of Morning Rituals but an Evening Ritual can be just as powerful.

A morning ritual helps you start the day on the right foot.  It might be a few minutes spent journaling or meditating, exercising, reading, or listening to a motivating podcast.  And that sends you into the day with a lot of positive momentum, making it easier to make good choices.

By the end of the day, that morning clarify and focus may feel very far away. You’re worn down and frazzled by the day’s challenges and motivation starts to slip. But you can refresh your intentions by taking a few moments at the end of the day or beginning of the evening to check back in with yourself and your goals.

Your evening ritual doesn’t have to be long or elaborate. It might be a ten minute session on your yoga mat, a few minutes reading something that inspires you, or even just sitting quietly, closing your eyes, and taking some deep breaths. Acknowledge the day’s successes. Let go of the day’s frustrations. Remind yourself what’s important. You’ll go into the evening feeling much more relaxed and in touch with what you want for yourself and from your evening.

(And tomorrow, Morning You will thank you.)

What sort of evening ritual can you create for yourself?  Where and when will it take place? What will it include? How will it conclude? Feel free to email us your thoughts, we’d love to hear them!

Learn to indulge more extravagantly

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There are so many extra opportunities to indulge at this time of year.  As we’ve been talking about all month, the idea is not to completely avoid all the good things. But at the same time, if we indulge at every opportunity, it’s probably going to undermine our goals/progress.

Instead of trying to indulge less, learn to indulge more extravagantly.

Remember to tune into your entire sensory experience, not just the chewing and swallowing! Call to mind all of the pleasant memories that the sight of a special treat evokes for you. Remember times that you’ve enjoyed this treat in the past. Where were you? Who were you with?  Take a moment to enjoy the smell.  Let your mouth water a bit! Now, notice the way the aroma and texture contribute to your experience of the flavor.  Tune into the pleasure you get as that first bite hits your stomach.

Notice how your sensory experience is richest right before and during your first bites, and how it starts to fade as you continue to eat. When it’s no longer feeling special, stop. And then, take a moment to fully savor the experience you’ve just had. Instead of rushing through what feels like a guilty pleasure, claim it! Let it expand in time, space, and perception.  The more present you are with that experience, the more vivid, pleasurable, and satisfying the memory of it will be.

This holiday, I hope you will take the opportunity to have at least one peak treat experience. See how much more pleasure you can get when you choose your treats carefully and enjoy them fully.  And let this be your new holiday motto:

Only the good stuff. Just enough. Extravagantly enjoyed.

Staying motivated through the holidays

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It’s not just you. MOST of us end up eating more sugar, drinking more alcohol, missing more workouts, and eating fewer vegetables at this time of year. We THINK the problem is that we’ve lost our motivation. But I don’t think we stop wanting to weigh less just because it’s the holidays.

It’s just that our usual routines get thrown into the blender.  Travel, extra obligations, and disruptions in our schedule eat into our usual exercise times. Meal planning and grocery shopping fall by the wayside. And there are so many more opportunities to indulge.

If we fall short of our usual standard, we feel like we’ve failed, which drains our ambition even further and it quickly turns into an ugly downward spiral.

The solution is to redefine what success looks like at this time of year. Think about what you really need and what feels possible. What do you want to remember most when it’s all over? What are you most looking forward to? What could you skip without really missing it? How do you want to feel on New Year’s Day?

Holiday success might mean:

  • getting to the gym once a week without fail instead of your usual three times–and sneaking in more 20 minute walks
  • doing a short yoga video at home on Saturday morning instead of your usual 75 minute class at the studio.
  • keeping it to 5 drinks a week instead of your usual 2
  • allowing yourself a little extra sugar but only for treats that are truly worthy
  • relaxing your no-eating-after-8 rule but NOT your no-eating-in-front-of-the-TV rule
  • not gaining weight between now and New Year’s.

Having a clear holiday ambition and a realistic plan for how you’re going to make it happen fuels success, which fuels motivation.

What’s your ambition for this holiday season? How will you define success?

How not to backslide during the holidays

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Aaaand, here we are. As much as we may (or may not!) look forward to them, the holidays can wreak havoc on your healthy lifestyle. Parties and get-togethers every weekend. Tempting treats are everywhere we look. Schedules go into the blender.  (Workout? What workout?)

[Click here for your Healthy Holiday Tip sheet]

We tell ourselves that we will clean up our act on January 1st– but that can lead us to indulge even more recklessly.

The truth is that, over-indulging doesn’t actually enhance your enjoyment of the festivities.  Because the fifth Christmas cookie or third cup of eggnog doesn’t taste anywhere near as good as the first.

Plus, the anxiety about what it’s going to take to undo the damage come January 1st is never that far below the surface.

What if this year were different?

Wouldn’t it be nice to start 2020 off already feeling good instead of playing catch-up?  This year, instead of the usual New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, why not make a New Year’s Pre-Solution. We’re not talking about spending December on a diet or avoiding everything that makes this time of year special.

We’re talking about enjoying the holidays mindfully and to the fullest—and ringing in the New Year with no regrets.

Click here for your Holiday Tip sheet, with 8 completely do-able actions you can take to set yourself up for success in the weeks ahead.

Here’s to a healthy and happy holiday season!

Letting go of scale drama

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After enjoying a delicious meal or indulging in a treat, do you immediately feel dread over what the scale will say the next day?

If you get on the scale and see that you’ve gained two or three pounds overnight, does this throw you into an emotional tailspin?

It’s time to lose the scale drama!

Your weight today is not punishment (or reward) for what you ate yesterday! I don’t care how badly you fell off the wagon, you did not gain five pounds of fat overnight. For that matter, your one-day celery juice fast did not cause you to lose five pounds of fat.  That’s simply not how it works.

Virtually all of the day-to-day variation in your body weight reflects transient changes in the amount of water and (ahem) waste in your body. It can take up to two weeks for changes in your diet and exercise to actually translate into fat loss–or gain.

In fact, an uptick in today’s weight could actually reflect the fact that you ate more vegetables or legumes yesterday. Both of these foods weigh a lot more per calorie than, say, butter and jelly beans. But obviously, eating vegetables and legumes is  a lot more likely to help you weigh less over the long run.

In the Weighless Program, we encourage people to hop on the scale every day.  (In one recent study, those who weighed themselves every single day lost more than TWICE as much weight as those weighing themselves four or five times a week.)

But we also advise them to ignore what they see there. Well, not entirely. We ignore the daily weights and focus instead on whether our weight (we use a 7-day moving average) is trending up, down, or staying the same. That’s really all that matters.

Here’s what to do when nothing is working

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“I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked. ”

We hear this all the time from people who want to work with us.  But when we really peel back the layers, it turns out that they haven’t tried anything at all. Not really.

Here’s how it usually goes down:

You buy into a new idea–eating clean or intermittent fasting or intuitive eating. Whatever it is, it’s the solution you’ve been looking for.

You read the book, buy the workbook, do the exercises. You make a plan and schedule it all in. And that’s where the effort peaks.

Maybe you stick to the plan for a day or 3.  And then, you start to hit some resistance. You get impatient. It’s hard and it’s not working yet. So you conclude that it’s not for you and start looking for the next thing.

When we continually jump from thing to thing, and don’t stick with anything long enough to get results, we get nowhere. We say we’ve tried everything and nothing works. But in reality, we’ve tried nothing.

The only way to get results that last is to permanently change your behavior. And true behavior change takes sustained effort.  Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be extreme or excruciating effort. Just sustained.

And it’s not a matter of picking the best or most effective diet or workout, either.

Take 100 steps on any path and you’ll be much closer to your destination than taking the first 10 steps on 10 different paths.

So, the next time you commit to a positive change or action, no matter how small, commit to staying the course. Give yourself time to actually create and reinforce that new habit pattern. (They say creating a habit takes 21 days but it depends on the habit. You know it’s a habit when you no longer have to decide whether or not to do it. )

Give that new behavior time to bear fruit before deciding that something else will work better.

“Something else” won’t work better.  The thing you stick with is going to be the thing that works or, at the very least, leads you to the thing that works.

The hidden cost of an unmet goal

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How long have you been wanting to lose some weight? To feel good about your body? To have a less fraught relationship with food?

A lot of people I know have been struggling with these issues for much of their adult lives. They’ve cycled through periods of concerted action and long stretches of inertia.  A new program or commitment works for a while and they make some progress.  Maybe they even briefly reach their goal, whether that’s a certain number on the scale or sticking with a regimen for a given period of time.

But somehow, it doesn’t last. Something throws them off their routine. Old habits reassert themselves. And eventually, the success or progress slips away. Until they realize that they are back where they started, with the same unmet goal.

It’s exhausting to carry around a goal that we never get any closer to. To have a problem that we can’t solve–or that won’t stay solved. To make the same resolution over and over again.

It’s demoralizing.   And it costs us in other ways as well.

Too often, we end up putting other goals on hold. Maybe you’d love to update your wardrobe, or switch jobs, or book a bucket list vacation.  But you defer taking action on any of those dreams. Because it seems like everything would be more possible, would make more sense, if you weren’t so exhausted and demoralized by this unsolved problem.

We created the Weighless program to help people solve their unsolvable problem, to help them finally reach that perpetually unmet goal.  We do this by showing them how to harness and control their Attention, Intention, and Action (you MUST leverage all three) to change their mind, their body, and their life. Not only does this help them weigh less without dieting, this method often helps them solve other problems and achieve other goals.

If you’re on our mailing list, you’ll be notified when enrollment for the next year-long program opens. (If you’re not, you can sign up here.)

But in the meantime, even if you’re not 100% happy with your body or your relationship with food right now, stop deferring your other dreams.

Buy a new outfit that makes you feel like a million bucks.  Submit that resume. Put down a deposit on that dream vacation.  For one thing, you deserve to realize your dreams. What's more, pursuing a worthy goal often has the somewhat magical effect of making progress on other fronts more possible.

What have you got to lose?

The #1 thing holding you back?

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Last week, I took a poll, asking people what was keeping them from making progress toward their goal.  The #1 thing people said was holding them back?

Lack of motivation.

Well, at least it wasn’t lack of will power. I think we’ve FINALLY started to come to grips with the fact that more willpower is not the answer.

But we still think that motivation is. If we were just motivated enough, change would happen. This is magical thinking.

Motivation isn’t like a motor on your bike that lets you zoom up hills without even pedaling. It’s more like the lower gear on your bike that makes the pedals a bit easier to push when you hit that hill. But pedaling is still required.

Being motivated doesn’t spare you the need to take action. It just makes taking (consistent) action a little easier.

How to Motivate Yourself

Stop waiting or wishing for more motivation.  This is something you have to create (and recreate) for yourself. In this three part video series, I walk you through the steps:

Motivation: Knowing what you want and why

What will it take to get what you want?

Being willing to do what it takes