New Years Mindset for Resolution Results

If you are like most people, regular exercise and healthy eating is more of a chore than a welcome part of your day. It feels like work, and most likely you find reasons not to follow through on your intention to exercise or prepare a healthy meal, or you find yourself doing yo-yo dieting or yo-yo exercising.

Instead of becoming frustrated, feeling guilty or giving up on fitness when you fail to stay on track, you can change your mindset about what it really takes to have a healthy lifestyle. You can break the rules without any guilt and create a better way to get and stay healthy and fit that keeps you motivated. With a change in perspective, you’ll develop a positive attitude and discover it is actually quite easy to make healthier choices and stick with your fitness routines. Here’s how to do that.

3 steps to Change Your Mindset
Become conscious when you make choices that don’t honor your body or yourself. For example, be aware when you overeat or eat food that doesn’t feel good to you physically. Notice when you choose not to exercise or exercise to the point of overdoing it. A great way to get started with this is to observe for one week all the times you start to feel full. This is eye-opening for most people.

When you do this, do not judge yourself, just notice with interest that it is happening and become curious about why that might be. If you judge yourself, you will see things as good or bad, all or nothing, black or white, and you won’t be able to see what is really driving your behavior.

Consider what is driving your choices and what you can learn from them. Assume you have a good reason worth understanding. Then you can be open to what the issue is, what good reason you have for doing what you did, and what strategies you can put into place that will help you reach your goals.

Most of the time, we sabotage our good intentions because we think we have limited or very rigidly defined options. This comes from dieting and fitness programs that specify what is and is not allowed and expect full compliance. Few people can do these well or stick with them, and the good news is there are many ways to get fit and healthy that are more realistic and enjoyable.

If you find you didn’t go to the gym, take a moment to consider why that is. Perhaps you don’t like going to the gym. If so, what else would you enjoy that gets your heart rate up and moving? What sounds like fun, would be motivating to be a part of, or you’ve done in the past and enjoyed? Perhaps you weren’t prepared to go to your class. What would help you be more prepared? Maybe you need a partner. How can you find one?

If you overate, why might that be? Maybe you didn’t get enough to eat earlier and you were so ravenous that you overate. If that happens frequently, how can you get a snack between meals or eat enough during the day. Perhaps you felt out of control because it was a food you think you shouldn’t have, creating a feeling of deprivation. If so, allow yourself to have that food in moderation, so it doesn’t have power over you. Maybe you kept eating, hoping to be satisfied or feel better, only to feel worse. In that case, find a way to eat what you enjoy in a healthier way so you are satisfied. You will eat much less naturally.

Choose foods or fitness activities that feel good to you physically. And start off easy so you can have success from week to week. If you set a goal you know you can reach because it is realistic, and then you reach it, you will be encouraged and self-motivated to do even more. One small step leads to more steps, and you won’t be fighting it but pushing yourself because it will feel so good. The goal isn’t perfection; it is to increase how good you feel physically and about yourself.

For healthy eating: Find ways to eat what you enjoy in a healthier way, and do this in stages. You don’t have to change everything in a day. You can start with breakfast or start with dinner, and begin using healthier ingredients when preparing foods you already enjoy. For example, make pizza with whole grain crust, low sodium tomato sauce, lower-saturated fat cheese, turkey sausage, and more vegetables. Choose healthier things that make the pizza taste yummy to you.

For regular exercise: Choose activities that get you active and be open to all the possible ways you can do that, from dancing to power yoga, Wii Sport to tennis, or kick boxing to aqua aerobics. There is so much to choose from when you open your mind to more than what you find in a gym.

When you change your mindset from Being Good and trying to measure up to doing what Feels Good to you and your body, you can finally succeed at having a fit and healthy lifestyle you can live with on your own terms. And you’ll be amazed to discover you will naturally choose healthier options because they feel better, and you’ll become motivated to do more than you ever thought possible when you set yourself up for success week to week.

Biggest Losers Face Home Reality Without Keys to Success

Rudy, Danny, Liz and Amada are the final four contestants, and their last challenge was going home for 60 days and preparing to run a 26 mile marathon. One of them will be voted off this coming week.

What they realized in going home was how much they had changed – and not just physically. At home they came face to face with some of the issues that led to their obesity in the first place. While at the ranch, they focused on physical changes and discovering how much they had let themselves go. Back home, they were seeing that it isn’t just the physical that has to change in order to really succeed. They have to address the underlying subconscious mental and emotional issues that drove their unhealthy behaviors and overeating in the first place.

While this episode was going on, a former Biggest Loser winner, Ryan Benson, failed to return to the reunion show held last week. He had regained most of his weight back and admitted to extreme fasting and dehydration during the show in order to win. And just a couple of weeks earlier, Daniel Wright, who has done the show twice, went home. Daniel now admits he struggles with binge eating and kept that hidden during the show. Most likely it was even worse when he got home, having been severely deprived for the past 10 weeks. Overeating or bingeing after extreme dieting and deprivation is normal, and no doubt many other contestants have found themselves over-indulging once back home. This may explain why half of the Biggest Loser contestants have regained most or all of their weight loss.

Programs, like the Biggest Loser, are failing to address the underlying drivers of obesity that each of their contestants will deal with after the program ends. This is a disservice to those who put their trust in the trainers and dieticians, as well as to those watching the programs. It simply isn’t a matter of extreme diet, exercise and weight loss to be a success and maintain weight loss. If it were, obesity would have been solved long ago.

What drives our behavior are subconscious thoughts, beliefs and feelings, and when it comes to food and exercise these are complicated and unique to each person. Binge eating, for example, can be driven by a subconscious rebellion against food restrictions, an unmet need that is soothed by food, a means of keeping unresolved emotions repressed, or a reaction to not getting enough food and being compelled to make up for that deprivation. The triggers for dysfunctional eating can come from nearly anything, and without understanding how to be aware of them, how to resolve them and strategies to limit them, they will continue.

Rudy, Danny, Liz and Amanda all hope to go home the next Biggest Loser winner, yet they also share a concern about their ability to maintain their weight loss when the show ends. They have every reason to be concerned, because they haven’t been given the tools and experiences they really need to change their relationship with food and fitness from the inside out.

8 Strategies for Regular Exercising

Exercise. For most people that word conjures up unpleasant thoughts and feelings because of past experiences when they struggled with exercise or got hurt, or what they believe it takes to meet the minimum requirement of exercise to lose weight that doesn’t seem realistic for their current lifestyle. For others, it reminds them of a time when they loved being active and having the benefits associated with being fit and healthy. What does the word exercise bring up for you?

It is easy to assume that when you don’t exercise regularly, you are somehow lazy, bad, undisciplined or a couch potato. These are judgments that don’t reflect the real reasons for not exercising. The real reasons are likely tied to one of eight different obstacles, that once understood can be addressed with strategies.

These obstacles are: low motivation, low priority planning, too much too soon, compliance perfectionism, inflexible beliefs, emotional rebellion, derailment resistance and extreme associations.

To create a regular exercise routine in your life, pay attention to what feels best to you, what motivates you and what is really getting in the way of being consistent. We are all different, and our reasons for not exercising are all valid. Respect that you have a good reason and try to understand what you really need to do to get moving and to develop a consistent exercise lifestyle.

Read a longer version of this post for details about the 8 obstacles

Is Your Wallet Making You Overeat?

Does it make you uncomfortable to throw out food these days, compelling you to eat it instead? Did you grow up hearing that kids are starving in Africa, to always clean your plate or that throwing out food is no different than wasting money? Many of us did and it hits home during an economic recession, but that doesn’t mean those beliefs warrant eating food that you don’t need or don’t want. Instead it may be time to reconsider the benefits of wasting food rather than eating it.

If you stop and think about it, whether you finish eating something or you don’t, will not save you money and having a clean plate as an adult is really a habit and doesn’t serve any real purpose. To address these beliefs requires a change in thinking and some techniques to change your habits.

While wasting food is not ideal, it is better to look at your options than to carry a black and white belief about waste. The next time you find yourself with more food than you need or want, consider what your beliefs are, if you think they make sense, and what would be better. You have the power to challenge and change your beliefs around food if you stop and look at them. This week take the opportunity to see what your beliefs about wasting food are costing you.
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Giving Yourself Satisfaction

Have you ever noticed that when you aren’t satisfied by the food you are eating, you eat even more in an attempt to get satisfaction?

Maybe you are settling for food you think you should have, instead of what you really want. Or maybe you think you want a food because it is supposed to be good or once was, so you eat it expecting a certain experience. I see this happen a lot with my clients who overeat out of a desire to feel good only to end up feeling disappointed, full and wishing they hadn’t eaten so much. They don’t even recognize this pattern because it is subconscious and they aren’t paying enough attention to how they feel physically or emotionally.

Satisfaction is a genuine need that a part of you (often your inner child) craves and will do anything to get. Instead of resisting this desire to enjoy certain foods, give yourself permission to have the food and fully appreciate it without any guilt. If you are afraid of overdoing it, which is a valid concern at first, be strategic as to how much of your favorite food you can access at one time. If what you really want is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, see if you can get just one Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bar in your favorite flavor. If you love a certain type of cookie or candy, find a way to get or create packages of just a couple at a time.

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Breaking the Deprivation Cycle

You know you shouldn’t have that piece of cake, the Girl Scout cookies or the candy that is calling your name, but you just can’t help yourself. You just have to have some. The next thing you know, you’ve eaten more than you wanted and now you are feeling a bit full and guilty. Once again you just couldn’t seem to stay in control around food. Has this happened to you recently – like over the holidays?

Feeling out of control around food can happen to the best of us, and right now it is happening to a great many people who have tried so hard to stick to their New Year’s resolutions and are giving in to their forbidden foods. Succumbing to what isn’t on a diet is inevitable. The more you try to force yourself to resist something you want and believe you shouldn’t have, the more you rebel against that restriction. Have you ever noticed that when you are deprived of something, you want it all the more?

It is when you are depriving yourself that you are emotionally compelled to make up for being deprived. This is true whether you think you should be deprived of ever having the food again, will surely be deprived because of an upcoming diet, have just been deprived having stopped a diet, or were deprived in your past. Many people are overeating foods they were once unable to have, even as far back as fifty years ago. An older man in one of my audiences wanted to know what he could do about overeating desserts every night. It turns out he grew up in the depression when sugar was rationed and he seldom got desserts. He is still compelled to make up for having been deprived of the desserts he wanted as a kid.

This week pay attention to the foods you are trying to restrict and notice how this affects your behavior. Then try giving yourself permission to have that food in moderation and see if you really want all that much of it.

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Getting that Good Feeling

Have you ever read fitness or weight loss success stories in a magazine and noticed that what each person is most thrilled about is how great they feel? They are happy to lose the weight of course, yet they discover it isn’t how much they lost that makes them feel so good. What is most exciting is having energy, being able to do more things, gaining self-confidence, and feeling more alive and free.

You forget how much it matters to feel good when you take it for granted or it slowly slips away. It is when you get it back again that you realize it is the key to having a good life and to happiness. When you feel good again, you feel invincible and invigorated. You want to stretch yourself to do more and fully participate in what has meaning to you.

Small changes in your lifestyle are all it takes to start feeling energized, replenished and motivated. These can be getting a bit more sleep, getting outside for fresh air, finding 5-10 minutes to yourself, being active with family or friends, eating breakfast, eating when you get hungry and stopping when you start feeling full, having fresh flowers, or replacing some TV time with a more engaging activity. You may have your own ideas to add to this list. Any one of these can have a positive impact on how you feel, and none of them take much time or preparation.

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Confidence in Your Ideal Size

Have you seen the Jenny Craig commercials on TV or their ads in magazines recently? Queen Latifah is quoted as saying she’s “size active” and encourages people to take the first step to their ideal size. Valerie Bertinelli says she found her ideal size and is “size surfer girl” now that she’s in shape enough to surf. This new campaign by Jenny Craig is helping women to focus on feeling good in their healthier bodies and about themselves, no matter their size or weight. Finally!

Their focus isn’t to help women get down to a size 2, but to discover what is healthy and realistic for them. Jenny Craig’s former spokesperson, Kirstie Alley, got to a size (I think it was a 10) that was comfortable for her to maintain and feel good about. She was happy with that. It worked for her, and what we are hearing is that Queen Latifah, Valerie, and role models such as Oprah are content to be fit at a healthy size they can live with.

So why do so many of us strive to be under a size 8 or ideally a size 0? Perhaps it is because we are reminded constantly by the media’s attention on celebrities that anything larger isn’t desirable, beautiful or sexy. Sadly, even the celebrities that look like they have perfect size 0 bodies confess they are unhappy with something about their features. That isn’t good news for the rest of us. Or is it?

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The Perfectionist Trap

How often have you resolved to have a healthier lifestyle by eating better, exercising more, getting enough sleep, taking a multivitamin or reducing your stress, and you start a routine to do one of these things? Yet for one reason or another you stop doing it. You may not even be sure why. Life got in the way.

Do you give up fairly easily because you didn’t do everything right as planned, you missed a few days or you couldn’t do what you set out to do for a whole week? Do you assume you failed because you didn’t do it all perfectly? Who says you failed. Where does that belief come from? Beliefs, if they don’t make sense for you, are things you can change. You can give yourself permission to do what you can, to learn from what gets in the way, and to do what is more realistic for you.

Life always gets in the way, and it is virtually impossible to always eat well and avoid wanting to indulge now and then. It is equally difficult to always fit in your exercising or always get in the full amount of activity planned. The best thing to do when things interfere with your best laid plans is to roll with the flow and make decisions that most honor your needs, knowing you don’t always have full control. When you do that, you can let go of those events or challenging days without judgment and focus on today and setting new goals for the upcoming week.

What matters isn’t about being exact, perfect and doing things just so. It is about setting an intention, doing the best you can, not judging yourself but observing with interest what happened and why, then learning what works better and renewing your intentions based on new insights.

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Are You Exercise Resistant?

I get a lot of phone calls for help with exercise, and what most people want is a way to be more motivated to stick with their routine. That seems simple enough, but there is a lot more to being motivated than creating motivational tactics and getting someone to hold you accountable. Maybe the problem isn’t really motivation at all. Maybe it is exercise resistance.

The first step is to acknowledge and validate any feelings or beliefs you carry about exercise. Then knowing how these create resistance, you can make different choices or create new beliefs that respect your emotional needs and your physical health. In many ways exercise resistance is similar to emotional eating, in that unconscious feelings and thoughts are driving your behaviors and leaving you to feel out of control.

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Make Intentions, Not Resolutions

On New Years millions of people will make resolutions for 2008, driven by things they think they should improve about themselves. Not by what they really want in their life. As a result, most resolutions will be broken within weeks if not days. This is because they won’t be fueled by a passion for something wanted badly enough to make lasting behavioral changes.

Change is hard and you need to really be motivated to get through the days when you are fighting against yourself. If you want the end goal badly enough you will persevere and “just do it”. But if you are doing it to please someone else or because you “should”, you won’t have the drive in you to stick with it until it becomes easier and a part of you and your lifestyle.

A friend of mine, Denise, pointed out to me that there is a difference between making a resolution and an intention, where a resolution suggests we have to overcome what is wrong in our life and an intention is aligning ourselves to our hearts and spirit. While the dictionary doesn’t make much of a distinction between them, I think her view offers a great way to approach the New Year. Instead of making resolutions, think about what you really want in your life and what your values are. What does your heart tell you that you need more of? What are you tolerating that you want to change so that you are happier? What is your body trying to tell you that would make you feel better?

An intention is a clear vision of where you want to go or what you want to achieve. You may want to feel physically freer and better by losing weight, and may even know how much you would like to lose. As important as determining how much you want to lose, you want to know why you want this and what you will get from losing the weight. It might be to feel physically better in a specific way, to feel more sexually appealing to improve a relationship, to have the energy and stamina to do what you love most, or to reduce your risk of a particular illness. Identifying what you really want to accomplish and why strengthens your intention, and it helps you stay clear on why it matters to make a significant change in your lifestyle.

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Don't Try to Rely on Willpower

Willpower is mind over matter, self-discipline and a resolution to control yourself. You probably know by now that willpower doesn’t really help you gain control over your eating or unhealthy lifestyle habits.

But are you blaming yourself for a lack of willpower instead of recognizing that willpower isn’t the right answer in the first place? Are you looking at someone else and judging them for their lack of willpower? People do it all the time, and it doesn’t help anyone. In fact it has the opposite effect. The more you, or someone else, exerts their will to force you to be better, the more you will resent it and ultimately resist it and do the opposite of what was intended. I’ll bet you can think of numerous occasions where this was true.

At a time when there is increasing pressure from employers, doctors and others to force people to lose weight and get healthy, there is an underlying belief that the problem with people who aren’t in shape is simply a lack of willpower. While anyone can will themselves to comply for a period of time, once they stop they will revert back to their old ways or even take on worse habits for an equal or longer period of time.

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