I'm processing all that's happened this week with a heavy heart. Keep standing against racism where you are with what you have to offer, remembering to pour into yourself as aftercare. As always, rest well and raise hell- encourage others to do the same. 🤟

Welcome back, First name / Babes!

 

When I say taking care of yourself, what comes to mind for you?

Maybe eating well, getting some exercise in, and eliminating stress? Or even getting some alone time to binge our favorite show for an afternoon without judgment? Possibly just having more shits to give and less brain fog throughout the week? 

 

While food and exercise aren't the fix-all for self-esteem, productivity, or even fitness, they aren’t to be neglected, either. There are very real benefits to nutritious foods and moving your body regularly, but aren’t benefitted when they’re met with perfectionism and inaccurate depictions of ‘healthy.’ My solution is to treat food and exercise like a couple of pieces to a bigger picture. 

 

You can’t eat or not-eat your way to happiness, just like you can exercise yourself into a better or worse person. It’s relatively easy to jump to conclusions when you’re feeling most desperate for solutions. But like I do with clients, I aim to show you there are many more benefits to slowing down and thinking things through rather than squirming uncontrollably or reacting frantically when you're uncomfortable or craving change. 

 

This might sound like a new-age message of ‘efficiency’ but it’s not- you have to go to greater depths than that. It’s a proposition to make use of change in a way that allows you to meet yourself with grace, make space for thought-provoking compassion, and move forward with actions that not only clean up today’s mess, but doesn't create messes for tomorrow in the process. 

 

Things won’t always go well or give you instant gratification, and will always require tweaking along the way, but it’s more beneficial to you to adjust and tweak than to burn yourself from both ends every-time you feel a sweeping inspiration to make a change. 

 

When you grasp for whatever you can get the fastest, you begin committing to things you think are helping you move away from the problem, but end up being catalysts to the problem- aka pouring fuel on the fire.

 

You have multiple needs that span across ‘categories’ of life, if you will. Some of those are daily needs, some weekly, others more spread out over months, years, and lifetimes. And many of those needs will change as your desires do. But when you try to quench all that need with a flood of solutions all at once- aka, what I like to call “Makeover-Mondays” where you try to do a life change in a day- you miss the opportunity for being intentional with your expectations, intentions, and priorities in life. 

 

How many times have you overwhelmed your ability to make something last because you bit off more than you could chew all at once? 
 

A common example of this in food and exercise-isms, experiences, and applications:

When people seek weight loss, so they immediately stop eating carbs, fats, or whatever nutrient they’ve recently labeled as ‘bad’, skip meals-aka fasting- jumping into advanced exercise regimens, etc. However…. This ultimately leads to:

 

Then there’s other people who go the opposite way and begin tracking every calorie, eating 6-times a day, and become food- and exercise-focused to the point of undue stress mentally that leads to inconsistent outcomes at best, and a personal investment into dysfunctional lifestyles like orthorexia, or an unhealthy focus on eating healthy, at worst:

(I have lots of accumulated research that go into our weekly newsletter topics, so never hesitate to reach out if you're interested and want more to read!) 

 

Both approaches elude to using 0-100 approaches as a sign of commitment and identify suffering through unmet desires as a function of discipline when in reality, you’re human just like everyone else- but also- these all or nothing approaches have a documented history of producing outcomes that lead to burnout, fast results with detrimental outcomes, and deteriorate your personal perception of ability, or self-esteem. 

 

 

Many of you are running straight into the problems you’re trying to avoid by grasping at low hanging fruit instead of setting your sights on the long haul- or because you aren’t keeping your sights set on your own path and keep glancing at other people’s trajectories. I want you to keep your intensity and ambition but focus it into intentional action instead of haphazard directions. 

 

This feels overwhelming when you don’t yet have it, but it’s less stressful and aggravating on a daily basis than the effort spent when over-exerting yourself on effort-wasting approaches that lose steam before anything worth the fight gets a chance to stick. If you want to stop losing steam on the things that matter most to you, then you’re going to have to learn two very important skills: 1. managing your expectations (requires education, growth, development) and 2. managing your self talk (requires compassion, reflection, and planning.) 

 

Reflection being one of the most important yet underrated aspects of building consistency of eating habits, movement practices, exercise routines, a sense of belonging, and intimacy with yourself. 

 

It’s normal for you to feel bad about your body, food choices, and exercise frequency from time to time but it’s not good for you and it's not something you want to normalize in your daily life. 

 

 

It’s important to interrogate yourself on what you feel influenced to care about and what purpose lays behind those intentions for you. Like with food for example, if someone would tell you that health is an overall outcome that’s more determined by your overall environment, support systems, and personal choices, then you’d probably stop labeling things like pasta as bad or unhealthy and kale or its kind as good or healthy. 

 

 

Start by analyzing what success looks like for you, then defining it into expectations. If the word ‘success’ is too burdened with outside influences for you right now, then think of this as what’s at the root of all you DO want. (Try brainstorming what you don’t want first if that helps get the brain juices flowing!) 

 

 

When you tell yourself that you're going to start 500 things on Monday, your brain floods you with energy to get that task done- you may have experienced this as anxiety or nerves, when the body is flooded with the stimulation required for tackling the objective you're fixated on. When you tell your brain one thing- “we're committing to a life change on Monday” - but the 64% of uncontrollable factors called life pop up, then your brain is going to freak out on you a bit. Point being, the expectations didn't meet the situation, but you insist on changing the expectations so your brain has no option other than stress with constant reminders that you're not living up to the unrealistic standard you set for yourself. 

 

 

There’s a lot of confusion surrounding food and exercise so it’ll take some figuring out, but you really are allowed to do what works for you! You don’t need to continue ‘shoulding’ yourself into everything.

 

If you want to start working out, then you want that- but if you want to work out and find yourself resisting or having difficulty in the follow-through, then you likely need to adjust something about what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, or how you’re doing it. Be flexible! Maybe a workout schedule isn't as realistic as getting in 2-3 ten-minute walks throughout the day- which is clinically shown to be more beneficial than exercise alone and is a totally awesome goal to have! 

 

 

So yes, move your body, eat nutritious foods- but don’t make it your everything and don’t believe the lie that doing so will change your life for the better. There are other aspects of self-care that have very real outcomes on your health, happiness, and quality of life. 

 

Focus on what's within your control- which starts with no longer kicking yourself when you’re down and running into reactive solutions that make matters worse. Rather, take a deep breath and think through what’s happening and what you can invest in that’s going to have the biggest impact on your life across the board- not just physically. 

 

 

The other 85% of factors that impact your healthy lifestyle success aside from food and exercise- from the highest impact to the least: 

Ref: Determinants of Health Visualized 

 

Related to stress management, navigating negative moods, sleep routines, life satisfaction level, brain function- this is where the combined ~15% of food and exercise behaviors live. 

Intimate relationships and feeling like you can express yourself with those closest to you, quality of community support, social status, income level, occupation, culture and traditions, as well as religion, gender identify, education level, race and ethinicty, and experiences of discrimination.

Body structure, including structure of the body skeletally, hip to waist ratios, fat and muscle mass distribution on the body, weight, height, and body functions including: blood pressure, bone density, nutritional status, hormone-status, strength and robustness, and capacity for things like fitness conditioning, probability of recovery from injury, and potential for specific illness, disease, or conditions.

Access, including distance  to medical facilities and quality treatment/overall care, provider availability, insurance coverage and capabilities, the healthcare provider’s cultural competence and language/communication competence, patient engagement and trust, access to immunizations, and health literacy.

Exposure to carcinogens and other toxins like tobacco smoke, quality of surrounding resources including air and water, location and access to nutritious foods, safety and cleanliness of public areas, residence quality, job opportunities, and transportation quality. 

I'd like to blatantly confirm to anyone who needs to hear it clearly that choosing something different for yourself is never as easy as ‘just decide’ and ‘just do it.’ 
 

All our efforts- no matter how micro they seem- are impacted by the world around us and by ourselves and our many shift in perspective and mood on a regular basis. This is why interventions like weighing your food, waking up on Monday to a brand new attitude and exercise routine, and ultimately setting expectations and rules that restrict you from making the decision that best fits the situation is short-sighted. 

 

We are facing egregious oversimplifications of happiness, health, and living with zest with massive over-complications of how to get there. It's not easy, but it doesn't require the grand gestures of commitment we think it does. 

 

When it comes to behavior change, you need to take one step at a time, one day at a time. 

 

Needs differ not only by person, but by situation. However, there’s a foundation that can be laid in response, rather than reaction, to make the flexibility necessary to consistency feel less like a contortionist act and more like a slight ebb and flow through life. If I could paint a picture of it, it’d look like doing what you need to do but grooving through it- little tilt to the left, little tilt to the right- knowing that you’re self correcting in the direction you wish to go. 

 

 

Remember, the problem before you is just ONE shard of your life- it cannot take center stage to the detriment of everything else you’ve got going on without causing a great deal of imbalance, chaos, or harm to yourself and possibly with detriment to the people you impact. 

 

 

Option 1: If what I offer for free helps you, then working together will only do that much more. If you want to sort through your own confusion with food and exercise or start creating your own standards and processes for building consistency in your self-care practices,  then let’s talk about what I offer to help get you there! You’ll need to book a free First Date so we can meet each other first if you’re interested in working with me. Set up a first-date here

 

Option 2: Begin mastering the baselines of self-care if you’re going it on your own. 

👉Improving and interrogating self talk: the foundation of lasting change, no change, and unwanted change. Self talk has a lot to do with how you handle situations- from how you eat when experiencing negative self-perceptions, how effectively you adapt to stressful situations, and the longevity of your efforts when it comes to keeping priorities in focus.

 

👉Support Systems: begin building support systems in your life in the most-impactful areas. Support systems are one of the MOST important pieces of making lasting change, no matter what it is. However, in case it needs to be said, not all support is good support so the quality of support does sort of go hand in hand with the quality of the decision you've made in a lot of ways. I have a table of support structures and examples on how to implement them in the Party Favor section at the bottom! 

 

👉Protective and preventative structures: Once you've made a decision to change something, protect your efforts. This piece has more to do with the planning, or the foreplay of action. Your protective measures are going to look like making sure you're workout location is convenient to get to when committing to a workout routine, reserving time for planning in play, rest, and self-care as a focus before filling in the rest of your schedule, setting alarms if you're someone who forgets to eat and needs the reminder, or that you build 5-20 minutes into your morning, evening, or pre-work routines to prioritize the day ahead of you. 
 

Option 3: Advocate for health is for everyone! Community health makes individual health more accessible, practical, and accurate. Your and everyone else's health is significantly impacted by environment, social support, and policy. I urge you to continue advocating for systemic or ‘holistic’ changes to uphold the integrity and efficacy of medical care- meaning, accessible AND high-quality care- as well as pushing for safe and accessible public spaces, transportation, nutritious food and safe water, as well as supportive and safe communities. 

I recommend subscribing to  ARD's newsletter, which does a great job of educating and providing direct actions you can take to benefit belonging, safety, health, and support in our communities in a variety of ways on a variety of topics. 

 

•If coaching is a good fit, we'll get you started. 

•If not, we'll get you turned around in the RIGHT direction!