Recognizing Stress for What It Is

Everywhere you turn right now, there seems to be bad news with potentially scary consequences. The natural reaction is to feel anxiety, a sense of helplessness, and some anger. Do you feel this way? If so, you are likely dealing with a fair amount of stress and you may not fully realize the extent or impact of it. On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is extreme stress, where would you say your stress level is right now?

You may not really know how to answer that, but your body might. Stress starts off as a psychological response to situations you perceive as overwhelming, threatening, unpleasant or beyond your control; and for many people the financial crisis is all of those things. Your perception of and response to this crisis is determining the extent it is taking a toll on you mentally and emotionally. The greater your fear and anger coupled with the feeling you can’t do anything about it, the worse you feel emotionally.

You have a choice as to how you see and respond to external factors in your life. It is when you don’t believe you have choices and feel at a loss that you are most stressed and at risk for physical symptoms. If that is your situation right now, there is something you can do for yourself that will help.

You can take better care of yourself physically by getting enough sleep, increasing your activity, eating healthy foods and doing some stress reduction techniques such as paying attention to your breath. You can also focus on how blessed you really are with gratitude and look for evidence that good things are happening despite all the bad news.

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Becoming Free of Fear by Looking at it Differently

Earlier this week I was listening to a teleclass on becoming free of fear, hosted by Francine Allaire who runs the online Daring Community (thedaring.com). The site is for women who dare to live a passionate, empowered life. Her guest expert on facing fears, Lisa Fredette, said a couple of things that resonated with me.

I’m not ashamed to say I have fears, particularly after hearing that everyone does – even those who are most admired for seeming fearless. Lisa pointed out fear is a gatekeeper of our comfort zone, and when we step outside of the zone we get uncomfortable. Immediately I could picture my zone and what did and didn’t make me comfortable.

It is so easy to believe I’m the only one who has fears, since this isn’t something people discuss, and I am the only one who struggles with them. Lisa helped me see that I can choose to be uncomfortable, get in touch with the underlying beliefs and feelings, and move past the fear. If I look at my life, I can see this has worked before. I just didn’t recognize the process.

She has identified common triggers and processes for working through fear, and she has an affordable 4 week tele-workshop starting this coming Monday the 19th in the evening. If you want to know more about it, go to: http://thedaring.com/dare-to-soar/events-virtual. You’ll see her program listed under my own upcoming tele-program on Emotional Eating.

It is by facing the fear, we can be our best selves.

In Control of Your Appetite

Do you ever wonder why you can’t seem to stop eating or what it will take to get control over your appetite? If you’ve tried appetite suppressants, you already know that isn’t the answer.

There is an answer that does work. It is doing the opposite of suppressing your appetite. I know that may not be the answer you were expecting, but it is true. The more you try to suppress your desire and need for food, the more you will overeat or feel out of control around food. Right now, as summer approaches, there are lots of advertisements for products to help you avoid feeling hungry so you can eat less and slim down. Nice idea, but that only leads to pigging out when you finally do eat. What ever calories you thought you were saving earlier in the day are fully spent later on.

You are much better off eating when you get hungry and then stopping when you are satisfied, just before you get full. I call it conscious eating. Others call it mindful eating, and this week Melinda Beck of the Wall Street Journal wrote about it in her Health Journal column and on line forum. She was amazed that by being more aware of her hunger and the experience of eating she was more easily satisfied with less food.

It sounds simple to eat when you are hungry, but if you’ve been ignoring your hunger for a period of time it can be tougher than it sounds. What can be challenging is to recognize when you do get hungry. It can also be hard to know when you get full if you haven’t been paying attention to that either.

Stop and consider how hungry or full you are right now. Do you know? Just what does it feel like when you get hungry? Do you know when you overeat and get full?

This week pay attention to your hunger levels and let them guide you to eat just the right amount of food your body needs. If you eat when you are hungry and stop before getting full, you won’t need to count calories or points. You will be eating in alignment with your metabolic requirements and feeling in control of your appetite.

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What's Up with Weight Watchers?

I’ve been intrigued by the new Weight Watchers advertisements. Have you seen them? They now say that diets are bad and it is better to enjoy eating and to change our relationship with food. I couldn’t agree more.

They have adopted a new tag line, Stop Dieting, Start Living which comes right out off the website of Dr. Michelle May, author of Am I Hungry?, who espouses the same non-dieting, intuitive eating and healthy living concepts that I write and talk about. It is great to hear that Weight Watchers, the icon of dieting, now agrees and publicly promotes a change in thinking.

In one ad headline the company boldly states “Diets are Mean” and the subtext says “Weight Watchers isn’t a diet.” In another ad they say, “Diets take away the things we love, then make us hate ourselves for loving them. Weight Watchers teaches you to replace deprivation with moderation, so you can finally learn how to lose weight and keep it off. And then love yourself like crazy for it.” They are absolutely right, but do they back up what they are saying?

If Weight Watchers wanted to really help people stop dieting and start living, they would eliminate the weigh ins and the plans all together. Instead they would teach people to listen to their hunger signals for portion control, learn how it feels when they eat different types of foods in order to discover that healthier foods feels better, and encourage self acceptance at any size.

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Overtraining Isn't All It is Cracked Up to Be

I had to laugh at myself this week, because I did just what I tell others not to do. I got caught up in what some expert fitness trainers are now promoting for greater fitness and physique results. Actually it isn’t all that new, but it sounded better and more enticing to me this time around.

The recommendations were essentially to over train by doing one of two things. One is intense cardio intervals where the bulk of the time is spent above the anaerobic threshold (85-95% of your heart rate max) with very short recovery times. This is the opposite of interval training where you have longer recovery times after high exertion.

And the other is to replace aerobic cardio with endurance strength training, where your heart rate stays above 85% of your max the entire time, because of the 48 hour metabolic boost. Normally when you do strength training your heart rate is above that threshold, and that is fine because you take time to rest between sets. With endurance training you don’t generally take rest stops unless you are getting winded. The more you do this type of training the more accustomed you get to it and your heart rate will come down and fluctuate in and out of the aerobic zone (between 50-85% of your max heart rate).

I’ve been doing endurance training for a while, but the idea of replacing my aerobic cardio with this was a novel idea to me. So I decided to try a combination of this with the anaerobic intervals. I am fit enough to try this, but you might have to wonder about my mental state. While high exertion interval training will accelerate your metabolism, it can also have the opposite effect and drop it like a stone. You have to eat enough to support a rising metabolism or it will go the other way. I knew all this, and I knew that it wasn’t as easy as the expert fitness trainers like to make it all sound.

What I got was fatter around my waist and a short lived migraine about an hour after my sessions. As one of my colleagues reminded me when I told her, I should have known better. I did this once before by mistake and got the same results. Fortunately the results will be gone as fast as they came. The better thing is to do a little of this mixed in with more moderate cardio the rest of the week, or not do it at all and stick to strengthening and aerobic fitness.

So now I will get back to walking my talk and striving for a mix of intensities and doing things in moderation.

Haunted by Food You Didn’t Get to Eat

You’ve probably heard of emotional eating, which happens when you turn to food as a coping mechanism for emotional support. Although at the time, you may think you just need or crave something to eat. That is the catch 22 of emotional eating. You aren’t eating to relieve the emotions you are consciously aware of. You are eating to suppress the feelings you are unconsciously pushing away. You may know you aren’t happy before you dig into your favorite comfort foods, but you may not really know the depths of your unhappiness or the associated unmet needs.

For some people part of their unhappiness and unmet needs can be traced back to an experience with food, where they were denied something they needed or wanted. This experience can be fairly recent or date back to your childhood – even if it was fifty or sixty years ago. In fact the further back it goes for you the more powerful the emotions around it can be, because it has been festering and kept suppressed for such a long time. That deprivation becomes something you are unconsciously trying to make up for, and coupled with this unmet need is the one thing that is keeping you from ever feeling satiated and resolved – the shadow of the enforcer that is silently judging you again and again when you succumb to doing what you were told you shouldn’t do. Is this happening with you?

Are you compelled to eat comfort or forbidden foods, unable to stop eating even when you are full, doubling up on portions, or losing control around certain foods or situations involving food. If so, take an interest in why that might be, without judging yourself for it. The judgment won’t allow you to dig a little deeper to uncover what is unconsciously driving your behavior. It may just be a past deprivation, one that you grew up with or a more recent experience from dieting.

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Let Your Body Help You Get Well

I was talking with one of my clients, Kristen, a couple of weeks ago about her relentless cravings for sugar and salt and how slowly she was losing weight. She wanted some new eating strategies.

Initially she thought her problem might be tied to PMS, because it was worse at the same point in her cycle each month. Yet the more we talked, we began to focus on hypoglycemia as another factor. She knew she had low blood sugar readings, because she was regularly tested for diabetes and told she was low, but fine. She also found she felt much better after exercise, which she does a lot of, and would feel faint if she didn’t eat every few hours.

I wondered if the hypoglycemia (as in very low glucose) readings were actually the result of her blood sugars being too high beforehand and the body’s response to secrete so much insulin that it was driving her blood sugar count down too low. I suggested she get a glucose meter and see what was really going on.

She did some research and tracked her body and found that she is hyper sensitive to simple and excess carbohydrates, which is called Reactive Hypoglycemia – the first stage of becoming type 2 diabetic. As a result she has too much insulin in her blood stream throughout the day, causing her to feel fatigued and preventing her from losing weight. To solve this she is being more conscious of balancing her carbs, proteins and fats when she eats and of the types and amounts of carbs that work best for her. She is now feeling great and losing weight.

What Kristen learned is that her body was trying to tell her something, but she wasn’t looking in an obvious place because her doctor didn’t see any problems.

If you think your blood sugars are off, do your own experiment. You don’t need a prescription to get a blood glucose meter, track your symptoms or see how your body feels when you try eating different combinations of carbohydrates, proteins and fats during the day.

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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