Mindset

Building trust

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Most of us try hard to be reliable. If we make a commitment to someone, we do our best to honor it.  We want our friends, loved ones, and co-workers to know that they can count on us.

As a result, we end up doing things we may not really feel like doing–simply because we’ve told someone else that we will.

The last thing we feel like doing at the end of a workday is stopping by a neighbor’s house to feed the cats and clean the litter box. But we’ve promised to look in on Fluffy while he’s away. So we do.

Sometimes this works to our advantage. We’ve promised to meet a buddy at the gym for an early morning workout. When the alarm rings at 6am, we just want to roll over and go back to sleep.  But we’re not about to be a no show. We honor our commitments.

Sometimes, of course, we can’t keep our promises. But for the most part, we make it a priority.

Except when those commitments are to ourselves.

We break the promises we make to ourselves all the time.  We vow to take a break from social media. We commit to a new diet or exercise plan. We resolve to meditate every morning.

And then we just don’t do it.

We think it doesn’t matter because we’re not letting anyone else down.  But it DOES matter. We are teaching ourselves that we don’t take our own goals very seriously. That we can’t be trusted to come through for ourselves.

Pretty soon, we don’t even take our commitments to ourselves very seriously. We make all kinds of reckless, half-baked promises. Because we know we’re all talk and no action.

What if you were to decide to take the commitments you make to yourself as seriously as the commitments you make to others?  To show up for yourself, no matter what?

How would that affect how you feel about yourself? How might that affect which goals you commit to? How might it affect your ability to reach them?

What if honoring your commitments to yourself meant you had to make fewer (or different) commitments to others?

If you’ve repeatedly broken your promises to yourself, it may take some time to rebuild trust in your own integrity. It starts by making a commitment…and keeping it. And then repeating, over and over. Until you start to believe that a promise that you make to yourself is just as important as a promise you make to anyone else.

What promise to yourself can you make and keep this week?

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?

Move your body when you can this holiday season

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Time is tight during the holidays, and that may mean that you really do not have time to do your regular exercise minute routine.

Usually, I walk 15 minutes to the gym, do 40 minutes of throwing around something fun and heavy, and then walk 15 minutes home again. That is 70 minutes that I definitely will not have while I am prepping for holiday festivities and trying to maintain my status of “super cool uncle.”

But that does not mean I will throw in the towel and skip my movement practice altogether. I will simply do what I can with the time I have.

Here are a few things I plan to do and that you can also try.

  1. Turn errands and chores into exercise. This can be as easy to do as walking to the store with a couple of bags and a backpack to pick up the holiday meal ingredients or last-minute presents. Or it can be more involved, like adding some extra challenges to shovelling the walk. Personally, I like to alternate which hand I use on the shovel and also challenge myself to see how far I can throw the snow.
  2. Do some short movement breaks throughout the day when you have a few minutes. Burpees, jumping jacks, squat jumps and other full-body movements are great activities to pepper in when you don’t have much time but want to get your heart rate up. The key is to choose multi-joint and full-body movements to maximize the impact these short bursts of movement will have. If nothing else, get up 7 minutes early and do the Scientific 7-Minute Workout before you even say good morning to anyone.
  3. Turn outdoor fun into fitness. There are many great outdoor activities available to us at this time of year—and many of them can be turned into a real workout with a slight variation. For example: sledding. Sure you could watch the young ones go up and down the hill while you take pictures on your phone, but how about taking it to the next level by joining in and running up the hill each time instead of doing the traditional trudge. For bonus points, invite some kids to add some weight to your toboggan by giving them a ride up the hill. Use your imagination and make it fun!

When time is tight, focus on doing what you can, when you can, with as much of your body as you can. That is much MUCH better than doing nothing and crossing your fingers while waiting for Jan 1 to roll around.

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?

Menopause and the Middle-Age Spread

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In the Weighless Program, we have members spanning a wide range of demographics. One well-represented group is perimenopausal and menopausal women. As a result, a common question that pops up is whether or not the “middle-age spread” is inevitable.

As we tell our members, just because something is common, doesn’t mean it is inevitable.

I recently interviewed Dr. Tamsin Lewis on the Get-Fit Guy podcast (player below).  Dr. Tam is both an Ironman athlete and a Medical Doctor as well as a middle-aged woman herself. So she understands the body both medically and athletically.

When I asked Dr. Tam if this middle-age spread is indeed inevitable, she replied: “I don’t think anything in life is inevitable, is it? Apart from death and taxes. Menopausal weight gain is certainly common, but that doesn’t mean it is inevitable or even normal.”

“Theoretically, [during menopause], your body does become more prone to storing weight around the middle.” and that is why she advises the patients that she works with to make some changes to their diet, how they exercise, and perhaps even look into hormonal supplementation.

In the Weighless Program, we question common assumptions and dissect “conventional wisdom.”  We also encourage our members to experiment with changes in exercise and diet to learn how our bodies respond rather than accept a one-size-fits-all solution–or throw our hands in the air in defeat.

Ageing happens, there is no doubt – but that doesn’t mean we have to go down without a fight!

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.

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

Self-care and self-kindness

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Researchers writing about mindful eating in Frontiers in Psychology interviewed a number of overweight people about their attitudes towards self-care and self-kindness. The results were fascinating.

The subjects were very uncomfortable talking about ways that they were kind to themselves.  They seemed to equate self-kindness with self-indulgence, which they saw as a negative trait.

They were a bit more comfortable with the term “self-care” but here again, there was an interesting divide.

They talked about things like getting out in nature or taking a bath or setting aside time to read or visit with a friend. As long as it didn’t involve food, they were comfortable identifying these activities as self-care.

But they were unwilling to see choosing healthy foods or exercising as a way of exercising self-care. They saw these things as something they “should” be doing.  Therefore, doing them didn’t count as self-care or something they were doing to be kind to themselves. 

Isn’t that interesting?

If we can come to see making healthy food and movement choices as a way of showing ourselves kindness, instead of a duty that we may or may not be fulfilling, maybe the notion of self-kindness wouldn’t feel so self-indulgent and dangerous. 

This kind of effort feels easy

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One of our members just had a big A-ha moment I have to share with you.

She was reflecting on the fact that making Weighless choices requires some effort.  Awareness takes effort. Planning takes effort. Making decisions takes effort.

(Fortunately, we have an entire curriculum of tools designed to help you build and strengthen these skills and practices.)

But, she realized, the Weighless approach does NOT require a lot of willpower.

“The effort I’m investing in weighing less feels EASY because there’s desire and passion behind it. Using willpower, on the other hand, feels torturous and lasts shorter periods.”

That’s why relying on willpower never gets you very far…or at least not for very long. And why the sort of shifts experienced in the Weighless Program are so long-lasting (and far-reaching).

As another of our members recently shared:

For me, the difference in this program from other “diets“ is that this is the first time I’m truly focused on myself and my habits rather than the food. It’s not about saying goodbye to things I really like but learning how to incorporate them in an overall healthier way that leads to satisfaction…and a Weighless life.

How about you? Can you sense the crucial difference between the willpower required to lose weight and the kind of effort that it takes to become someone who weighs less?

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Freedom to Choose Vs. Rules to Obey

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One of the things that makes our approach different is that we don’t tell you what to do. We don’t give you a list of foods you’re not allowed to have. We don’t give you a meal plan or a workout routine We don’t tell you how many points or calories you’re allowed to have, or how many steps you have to register before you’re allowed to go to bed.

Instead, we teach you how to align your choices with your goals. How to observe your experience–and your results–and adjust accordingly.

It’s enormously freeing. But for people who are used to diets and programs based on rules and restrictions, this can be unfamiliar…and uncomfortable.

“Too much freedom makes me feel out of control,” one of our newer members just said.

Can you relate? We THINK we just want someone to tell us what to do. To set rules and limits for us to obey. Which works…until it doesn’t.

We confuse having someone else making all the decisions with being “in control.” Having the freedom to decide what we (really) want feels too scary…at first.

But hear this:  When you have no freedom, you are not in control.  Taking control means taking responsibility. But it also offers true freedom.

Does the idea of having practices instead of rules feel scary or exciting to you?