First Steps toward a Healthy Lifestyle – New You 2010 Contest

Contestants and Groups Selected
This week, four groups began the two-year journey together that will change their lifestyles. I received nearly 100 applications for participation in the contest, and of those I narrowed the applicants down to 40 and then talked with each of them at length last week. Each of them was ready, motivated and committed to making healthy lifestyle changes to reclaim their health, fitness and wellbeing. They all recognized that rapid weight loss and dieting was no longer the answer, and they wanted to finally take good care of themselves.

It was challenging to pick just eight for the contest, so I decided to create three more groups of eight to experience the same two-year program in order to support at least thirty-two of them.

Read more to learn who became contestants.

Getting Started
In our first sessions together, the group participants talked about what led them to apply for a spot in the contest. They shared the struggles they’ve had to exercise regularly, make healthy food choices and make themselves more of a priority. These struggles and the associated frustration, disappointment and pain they created are what motivated them to finally take action. Being inspired to change because of what is no longer tolerable, from a wake-up call or an opportunity to be in a life-changing contest, is often the motivating catalyst that puts people into action, yet that motivator has a short fuse and can disappear as quickly as it appears. The catalyst can get you to make a change, but it won’t keep you motivated to stick with that change or to make long-term changes. For that you need to create long-term motivators based on what it is you will be able to do, feel or experience as a result of the healthy lifestyle changes. These positive outcomes are what keep you motivated to stay on track.

Read more to learn how they selected their motivators and their first week's goals.

See What Contestants Have to Say
I’ve asked the contestants to comment on their experience each week here on this blog. In that way, you will get a birds-eye view of what they are discovering for themselves, which will help you in following the contest and participating on your own. You are also free to comment on your own experience.

Have a healthy and active week.

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.

Making the Hard Choice for Bariatric Surgery

A friend of mine is planning to get bariatric surgery, and I support her in making this decision. That may surprise you, but I do believe for some people this is the right decision.

Her goal isn’t primarily to lose weight, but to regain her health and be able to have an easier time being active. This is not an easy decision for anyone to make, and it’s taken her several years of thought. While some would argue that she should have gotten healthy through eating better and exercise, I know from working with her that she tried this to the best of her ability.

For some people, regaining energy, feeling better and losing weight (even if initially done with an extreme solution) is what it takes to embrace a healthy lifestyle of regular activity and healthier meals. It still isn’t easy to change old habits and beliefs, but when you feel better about yourself you want to do more for yourself, and you are inspired to feel good for the long-term. I am confident that she will succeed at maintaining a healthier relationship with food and increasing her level of fitness, because of the work we’ve done together.

Others aren’t so fortunate. Many who get this surgery see it as the solution and don’t realize that they still have to make changes in the way they feel and think about food and fitness. It is not uncommon to regain the weight and require another surgery. More programs are needed to support people before and after surgery on HOW to change lifestyle behaviors and address the subconscious drives of behavior, so they can more easily adopt new habits and strategies when they are most motivated – just after surgery.

Envisioning Wellbeing for Yourself

Have you ever thought about what wellbeing or wellness means to you? If you could envision yourself at your personal best and experience your life in a way that feels really good, what would that include or what would that look like?

I recently was asked this question, and it did make me stop and think. It’s funny because I focus on living and feeling my personal best to walk my talk in my business, but this takes it a step further. I realized it was more than about my health, fitness and self care. It is also about what I want to experience from life. I want to be delighted in every moment. For me this means feeling my personal best, being fully present in the moment, receiving the best life has to offer with gratitude, giving my gifts to others in the world, and cherishing the time I have with friends, families, colleagues and my pets. These things are what I envision my wellbeing to be. What about you?

Creating a vision of what you want in your life becomes something to aim for. It isn’t wishful thinking beyond what you can have. You can decide which part of this picture is important enough to work towards now. Start by setting three and six months goals to reach milestones that will eventually get you there. You can even get started by setting specific weekly goals to reach these interim targets. Creating a vision of what you want in your life, milestone goals and weekly goals is the same process used by wellness, life, dream and career coaches to assist clients in moving towards a better life. You can do this for yourself.

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Get Pumped Back Up to Reach Your Goals

New Year’s is a time that rekindles the excitement of a fresh start. It offers a chance for a clean slate, new beginnings and the belief that a better year lies ahead. With it comes a burst of motivation to make changes in your lifestyle, which is the much needed catalyst for taking action and following through on your goals.

Now, four weeks later, that feeling of enthusiasm has probably gone flat. The holidays are a distant memory and the day-to-day realities have pushed most (if not all) of your goals under the rug. If you are like most, this experience is repeated every January until you give up on the idea of resolutions altogether, believing they don’t work and that maybe it doesn’t really matter if you make any changes after all. Am I close?

If so, you’ve missed an opportunity to take advantage of your desire to change and make use of that short lived catalyst to get you into action. Those moments don’t come around all that often, so they do matter. It could be months, another year or even many years before you feel inspired to make that major change again. Statistically most people give up on their resolve to meet their goals within two weeks, and this is borne out by gym use every January – peaking the first week and trailing back off by the end of the month.

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Top 4 Resolutions That Jazz You

Every year the top four resolutions are basically the same. Exercise, eat better, stop a bad habit and work harder at something, and none of these even sound appealing. They all sound like a lot of forced effort with a heavy dose of being deprived, and that is what they are in this context.

They would be much more enticing if they were in context to things that feel exciting and uplifting. Wouldn't it be more motivating to change these to: Get fit in order to fully enjoy an active vacation of a lifetime, eat foods that taste great and make me feel better, get to bed earlier to feel energized and upbeat each morning, or clean up my office to feel on top of things all day long. These are based on what you want to experience in your life, not what you think you should do.

What top 4 end results are motivating enough to change your lifestyle habits?

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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What is a Healthy Lifestyle?

Have you ever noticed that your idea of having a healthy lifestyle isn’t often the same as someone else’s? It can mean very different things to different people, and that is healthy in itself. It can also be confusing.

The most obvious description of a healthy lifestyle is eating healthy foods and being aerobically active as a way of life. But seldom will two people make the same food choices and do the same activities. Ginny, for example eats raw foods and runs most days of the week. Margaret loves pasta and grilled food, and she has found that whole wheat pasta and lean meats are a healthy way of eating her favorite things. Her activities are kayaking, hiking, Tai Chi and gardening. Robert is an avid swimmer, dancer and hiker, and he eats a lot of complex carbohydrates. All of them are living healthy lifestyles, but they aren’t at all similar.

So how do you know if you are choosing healthy foods and activities? There are several ways of knowing.

• One way to start is be informed about the basics of healthy nutrition and aerobic activity and understand that these are guidelines, not rigid rules.
• Another way is to pay attention to what your body is feeling and do what feels best to you.
• A third way is to ask a professional you trust for advice and who listens when you say something doesn’t feel right.

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