My Trip to Spain

I am leaving on a trip very soon. I will be hiking a portion of the Camino de Santiago with a dear friend. Much of the trip will be outside of my comfort zone. The uncertainty of how it will all play out is not something I’m accustomed to as I’ve gravitated to more controlled travel/situations the older I’ve gotten. There will be several variables present on this adventure. The biggest ones being: weather and our physical bodies. That being said, there are a couple things that I can control which I’ve been focusing on for the past few weeks. The first of these is the weight of my pack. Since we will be carrying our backpacks with everything we need for an average of 10-15 miles a day, the weight matters. Every. single. ounce. matters. I’ve resorted to weighing my toiletries on my kitchen scale to cut any unnecessary ounces. You know it’s gotten serious when you bust out the kitchen scale. 🙂

Since my focus has been on cutting the weight that I’ll be carrying on the trip, (and if you are curious it’s currently at 15 pounds), it’s made me think about the metaphorical backpack we carry around day to day. The items in it are: our thoughts, our emotions, our habits and actions, our results, our decisions regarding how we spend our time and with whom we spend our time. It really had me question which items in my metaphorical backpack are necessary. Which items will I look back on, if I’m blessed to live until I’m older and fully gray, and be grateful I kept them? Which items will I see as unnecessary? Which items will have added to my life and to the lives of those around me?

I don’t believe we are meant to carry much in these metaphorical packs. And what we choose to carry will ultimately determine how our lives unfold. I would invite you to examine what you are carrying that you would benefit to release? What are you carrying that doesn’t belong to you?

The second thing I can control regarding my trip are the metaphorical glasses I choose to wear before, during and long after my trip has past. What do I want to believe about the trip and the experience ahead of time? What perspective do I want to let go of that doesn’t serve me?

I’m choosing to believe that the trip will be rigged in my favor, just as I consciously choose to believe that life is rigged in my favor day to day. I’m choosing to believe that love is what matters and to ask myself, “what would love do?” before I make my decisions on my trip, just as I aim to everyday at home. I’m choosing to believe that God knows what’s best for my trip and because of that I can surrender to whatever happens being his will.

You see, just like the two things I have control over on my trip, the weight (what I carry) and the glasses that I choose to wear, we each have control of these every day of our lives.

I urge you to ask yourself on the regular, alongside of me: when you look back on your life and all of your experiences, what will truly matter? What would serve you to let go of? What do you want to go to the grave believing to be true?

The answers to these questions are our North Star. Let’s follow our North Star all the way home.

Advertisement

Becoming a Party of 5 and Anxiety

We got a puppy. And for the first week after getting Nakoa, I felt a whole lot of shame and anxiety. I’ll probably write another blog regarding the shame that I felt, but I was recently blown away by a talk that I heard regarding anxiety which made sense out of what I had been feeling. 

This talk was given by Dr. Becky Kennedy (drbeckyatgoodinside on Instagram) and can be found within the Self Healers’ Circle (the.holistic.psychologist on Instagram), both of which I highly recommend following. 

Dr. Becky compared anxiety to an addition equation which looks like this: uncertainty + underestimation of coping skills=anxiety. She went on to explain that most of us focus on controlling uncertainty in our lives and because of that focus the energy that is placed into believing we can handle the situation is diminished which creates even more anxiety. 

After her explanation, a light bulb went on in my head, as I hope it’s going to in yours as well. By trying to control the puppy and the uncertainty of the new transition in our house I was creating even more anxiety. All that I really needed to do to lessen my anxiety was to place focus on how many times I’ve been able to handle changes in my life up to that point and believe I could handle this one as well.

Initially, I was trying to micromanage all of the things: the people and how they interacted with the dog and everything the dog did. Can I tell you how useless trying to micromanage these things was? Not only could I not control the puppy, but in trying to micromanage everything I became a really fun (NOT) person to be around. 

What I wasn’t doing was looking at all of my successes in handling change and transitions up to that point in my life. I have managed to navigate every. single. one. 

So, if you are experiencing anxiety in your life right now I invite you to ask yourself what you are focusing on. Are you focusing on trying to control the uncertainty and micromanaging all of the things outside of your control? Or are you focusing on looking back on all of the times that you have successfully handled uncertainty and how you can absolutely handle this situation as well?

And, I’m not saying don’t place boundaries around or have a plan in place if possible for uncertain times. What I am saying, however, is what if you turn up the volume on believing that you can get through this uncertain time like you have all of the others up until this point?

This, my friends, has been a game-changer paradigm shift for me. I believe it can be for you as well if you let it. 

Stay Hungry

When was the last time you felt hungry? Bored? Uncomfortable at all? Chances are if you are like most Americans you can’t remember the last time you felt truly hungry ,genuinely bored or uncomfortable for any length of time in which you didn’t try to eliminate it by way of grabbing a snack, checking your social media account or purchasing something on Amazon.

Now, in no way am I saying any of these things are wrong. I find myself in the same situation from time to time without even realizing it. We live in a time of instant gratification, one where we can escape most any discomfort with a click of a button.

None of these choices are “wrong.” However, they all come with a price. Besides the obvious consequence of weight gain from eating to avoid hunger and not being present because we spend so much time on social media, there is a greater price to not allowing ourselves to become hungry, bored or uncomfortable.

The price is not figuring out what we are truly hungry for. When we don’t allow ourselves to get hungry we never develop a true hunger. And without true hunger, we don’t even appreciate the meal.

Most of us, myself included at times, hop from one hit of instant gratification to another without giving it much thought. This is what is normal in our culture. And by operating in this manner we stay status quo, we don’t really dig into what would truly fulfill our souls. We don’t take the time to question why we are feeling unsatisfied and unfulfilled most of the time. This process just numbs out desire for a short period of time until we feel empty once more. Rinse and repeat.

I invite you to join me in slowly subtracting these quick hits of dopamine. If we slowly take away these quick fixes and we allow for some discomfort we will hear what our souls truly desire. And I would bet a million dollars that it is not a cookie, a purchase on Amazon or the next series on Netflix.

This Is Your Weight Loss Answer

I

If we want to be successful in ANY endeavor it all comes down to one thing. And if we don’t have this one thing we will self-sabotage without fail EVERY SINGLE TIME.

What’s this one thing you ask? It is a rock-solid relationship with yourself. I’m sure you may have heard this before, but you probably haven’t heard it put this way. 

I like to think about the relationship with ourselves as the foundation of any goal we have. And because I specialize in weight loss, let’s talk about that goal. When we have a foundation of a solid relationship with ourselves, just like a solid foundation for a house, we can lose weight and keep it off. On the other hand, if we have a weak foundation, just like a house would, our goal will inevitably fall apart. 

I like to think about the relationship with ourselves this way: picture a 5-year-old version of yourself running a marathon, that marathon being life. Feel free to picture yourself as your 5-year-old version inner child or as your truest self. The truest self is the part of you that holds all of your hopes and dreams and knows your deepest fears and regrets. Now picture yourself as the fan who shows up for that inner child/truest self. The dynamic between you as the fan and your inner child/truest self defines the relationship with yourself. 

For a couple of minutes, I want you to close your eyes and look back on the past few days. If you were observing yourself as the fan (as an on-looker) having a conversation with the 5-year-old version of yourself/truest self what would that conversation sound like? How would you report back regarding the dynamic of that relationship? 

If we are honest with ourselves, many of us have a semi-abusive relationship with ourselves. And if we actually observed this dynamic in real life we would want to put an end to it. 

The default conversation at times sounds like, “you need to be better, you need to shape up, you’re just not good enough and you will never be. Your track record is awful and you might as well just quit.” This is typically followed by feeling awful and eating to numb the awful feelings and escape our own creation. This is when self-sabotage happens. This is when we convince ourselves that it won’t matter, we can start again on Monday or that we deserve a treat. 

In the race analogy, this looks like showing up for our inner child by way of throwing rotten tomatoes at them and booing or completely running away from them and telling them they aren’t good enough. Meanwhile, we are constantly wondering why we want to throw in the towel in this race (weight loss journey). Who wouldn’t want to quit if their one consistent fan was treating them this way? 

But if we take a minute to ask ourselves how we would treat a 5-year-old if we were taking care of her, we would be unwilling to treat them in this manner. The majority of us would be kind and compassionate to them. We would want to feed them nutritiously and give them what they need to thrive. We would never, in our right mind, want them to feel bad or ashamed. 

So, if you are currently looking for the right food program or wondering why you keep failing at your weight loss attempts, look no more. Once you build a rock-solid relationship with yourself everything else will fall into place. Once you shift the dynamic with yourself to be one of love, encouragement, guidance, and compassion, you LITERALLY will be able to achieve ANY goal. 

And this is what I help my clients to do. Together, we identify where we aren’t being kind to ourselves. We build trust with ourselves and an incredible relationship that prevents self-sabotage from happening. 

The relationship we have with ourselves is the only ‘home’ that we have here on earth, just as the quote from Jon Kabit-Zinn says, “Wherever you go there you are.”. Let’s make your home an amazing place to come back to each and every day. 

It would be my honor to chat more with you and get you started on the only path that works to lose weight once and for all. Sign up for a discovery session here: 

The Key to Thriving as a Mom

We’ve been under the weather in my house. Times like these seem to highlight my weaknesses as a mom. It’s during these times that I am reminded of how I wish I could show up as a mom and the incongruence of not showing up how I’d like. And can I tell you how crappy I feel if I focus on these things? I feel awful. Defeated. I feel like escaping into something that will give me a quick fix of dopamine whether it may be a chocolate peanut butter indulgence or more screen time than I normally allow in my day. 

Let me tell you how I wish I could continuously show up for my family. I would love to show up positive and encouraging, to show up like a superhero. My mind often goes to the movie, “Life is Beautiful ” and thinks how wonderful it might be if I could show up for my kids the way the father did in that movie. If you haven’t watched it he more or less makes pretend that the concentration camp that they are in is a game, trying to create fun for his child so that the son didn’t realize the horrible situation in which they were living. It’s a must watch if you haven’t seen it.

Now let me tell you how I show up at times for my kids. I worry, especially when they are sick. And this sometimes transfers into trying to control them, being overbearing, telling them to wash their hands and stay away from each other multiple times a day. And at times I go into martyr mode. Telling my family that I have done so much between all of the cooking, cleaning, etc. These are the times I am the grumpy mom. But, you see, the story doesn’t end there.

I, also, always take responsibility if I’m grumpy. I provide what they need while trying to let the ones who are well take responsibility and do what they are able to do. I am constantly trying to be aware and show up better. And the bottom line is that they know that I love them. 

My point in sharing this blog is that we oftentimes focus on where we fall short in our momma roles. Or we will compare ourselves with other mom’s highlight reels and in doing this we will never measure up. You see, every momma has an imperfect side because they are human. If they show up in lovely ways for their family, we can put money on them also showing up in some unbecoming ways. We just don’t see those unbecoming ways on social media or on the screens and because of this we often sell ourselves short as not good enough mothers. 

So, my encouragement today as your “life coach” is to allow your mind to point out where you may fall short, but don’t stop there. Direct it to what you are doing well and find just as many ways you are a successful mom as the ways you fall short. 

The more I have been able to accept my weaknesses as a mom and focus on my strengths at the same time, the more I’ve been able to improve how I show up. Because the bottom line is that we are amazing momma’s and sometimes we are not so amazing momma’s. And sometimes that’s in the same day and sometimes that is in the same hour. And that, my dear momma’s, is totally ok. 

Got Weight Loss?

If we want to achieve our weight loss goals we must MAKE EATING BORING. Don’t allow yourself to do any other activity while eating. Most of us are on our phones, watching TV or engaging in some other activity while we’re eating. 

While this may seem innocent, it creates extra dopamine that we marry to our eating experience. If we were to take away our distractions and focus on the food that we are eating it becomes a pretty boring activity. Especially if it’s a food that is nutrient dense and low in sugar and other addictive properties.  

Eating was not designed to be a luxurious, euphoric, pleasure driven experience. Sure, food is meant to satiate us and provide sustenance so that we can function optimally, but it wasn’t designed to give us an immense amount of pleasure. 

Unfortunately, the food industry has capitalized by increasing our dopamine levels with the addition of more and more sugar to foods. Pair that with the dopamine we get from checking social media, shopping online or watching Netflix and it becomes a high dopamine producing, addictive experience.

Want to lose weight?  Divorce eating from all other activity. When we take all other activity away and solely focus on eating we can tune into our body.  We can start to pay attention to how the food tastes, notice our hunger and if we truly want to eat everything that is on our plate.  Let’s make eating a very boring activity.   My guess is that once we master this, the weight will start to fall off.  

THE SECRET TO WEIGHT LOSS SUCCESS

How many times have you told yourself or another person, “I need to think about it” or “let’s see how I feel?” If you are anything like me, it’s been a lot if you’ve been alive for at least 20 years. These are the words that doom every potential goal we have ever set out to achieve. These phrases seem so innocent, as though we are honoring ourselves and the world by going inside and consulting with our inner selves before going ahead and doing something. But, let me tell you right now, they are our one way ticket to staying comfortable, safe, and sabotaging anything we really want to achieve.

I’m going to do an exercise with you to prove my point. Go ahead and think about the elements in life that you’ve made work and at which you’ve been successful. If you can’t think of any I will give you a few examples: raising kids, your marriage, or your career. If you’ve been successful at any of these, and we will define success as: your kids still being alive and well, a marriage as having remained faithful and come home when you say you’ll be home without engaging in an affair. And for your career: having kept a job for a period of time that you had desired and continued to keep the jobs that you have intended to keep.

I want you to think about whichever example you’ve chosen and ask yourself how many times you have told your kids “I need to think about it” or “I’ll see how I feel” when it comes to feeding them or picking them up from school. How many times have you asked these questions to yourself regarding marriage? How about your work life?

I have no doubt that your mind has told you an innumerable amount of times that it didn’t feel like prepping a meal for your kids or going to pick them up. We may have felt a desire not to be faithful in our marriages and perhaps not to come home when we said we would. And without a shadow of a doubt we could all agree on the fact that there have been many times when we didn’t feel like showing up to work.

However, ultimately when the “I don’t feel like it” thoughts appeared or the feelings of dread came up we dismissed them. We may have been in a mood for a spell, but we didn’t entertain them to the point of letting them make our decision. We have decided in advance that no matter what we will nurture or show up for our children, our marriages, and our jobs, even when we don’t “feel like it.”

Yet, when we have a weight loss goal and chose the protocol we are going to implement to lose the weight most of us show up differently. We may at first take the approach that I’m doing this no matter what and odds are likely that we see some results initially. But then we start consulting how we think or feel when it comes to following the food plan. And, guess what happens from there? We start obeying our thoughts and our feelings and we sabotage ourselves.

My advice? Treat this endeavor like you do your kids, your marriage, and your job. Plan what you will eat in advance each day. Follow it to the tee. WHEN the thoughts of not feeling like following it come up (and they will), notice them and remind yourself of your commitment as you do your other endeavors at which you’ve been successful.

The worst idea if you want to succeed at anything in life is to consult with your thoughts and feelings. Let me save you the time and energy and tell you what your mind will tell you about following whatever food protocol you’ve chosen. It’s ALWAYS going to tell you that it would rather your favorite foods than the protocol you’ve chosen and you can start again on Monday (or some variation of that). It’s NEVER going to feel like following it if you’ve at all struggled with your weight or have had a love affair with food.

If you master this, you will undoubtedly reach your weight goal and have no problem with maintenance. I will address the question everyone is anxious to know, “what should I eat to lose weight?” in a future blog.

I used to struggle with my weight and never thought I’d be free of the struggle. I promised myself if I figured this out I would share it with the world. Your “right size body” and free from weight/food struggle self is awaiting you. Please allow me the honor of meeting with you in a complimentary discovery session by clicking this link: https://calendly.com/bestversion76/60min.

What is Your Reason For Not Losing the Weight?

Over the past 22 years I have heard just about every reason and used many of them myself for not seeing the weight loss results I felt I should have.  We like to blame the weight loss programs that we try, our nutritionists, trainer, or weight loss coach.  We like to assign our weight loss sabotage to our kids for stressing us out or to our husbands for eating our designated meals.  

We tell ourselves that it’s not the right time and it hasn’t worked so far so, why bother?

All of these reasons and the million that I didn’t mention only do one thing.  They prevent us from achieving our weight loss goals.  

There are two reasons we don’t succeed in losing weight and keep it off. 

The first reason is because we keep quitting on our weight loss efforts when something doesn’t work the way we think it “should have.”  Instead of focusing on figuring out what will work, we blame it on some, or all, of things I stated above.  Until we commit to figuring out what works best to achieve our weight loss in a sustainable, enjoyable way, we will fail at achieving in our weight loss. This may mean trying a bunch of different strategies, but most of us give up after trying one or two strategies, only to go back to comforting ourselves with all of the foods we told ourselves we’re “off limits” in the previous weight loss attempt.

The second reason we don’t succeed is because we keep blaming ourselves in a way that ends in self sabotage instead of taking full responsibility in a powerful, proactive manner.  I’m going to get really candid with you!  There is a multi-billion dollar food industry that wants us all to be addicted to consuming their products.  If we don’t acknowledge the environment we are living in and how it may affect us we won’t be able to set ourselves up for success. 

I’ve seen so many of my clients and myself get frustrated because we struggle to free ourselves from being “hooked” on certain foods/drinks.  It’s completely normal to live in our society and feel “hooked” on food and drink when these foods and drinks are created to cause addiction.

Ultimately, we each need to play an active role in figuring out what works to lose the weight and keep it off as there is no single weight loss journey that applies to everyone.  That, and realize that we do live in a world that encourages us to eat all of the things to feel better while being trim and fit. We live in a world that is more concerned with profiting off our yoyo dieting more than it would if it were to encourage us to lose the weight once and for all. 

YOU can absolutely achieve your weight loss and wellness goals.  You have not failed one bit.  We live in a broken system that gains more from our feeling like we have failed than they would if we had succeeded. 

Weight loss isn’t complicated when you adopt the things I have discussed in this blog. Let me help you on your weight loss journey to figure out a sustainable and enjoyable plan that you can stick to and feel good about. I can’t wait to meet with you in a complimentary discovery session: https://calendly.com/bestversion76/60min.

Our Biggest Addiction

I have been pretty enthralled with Michael Singer’s teachings for quite some time now. After listening to one of his talks the other day, Ceasing to Build the Falseness of Psyche at https://tou.org/talks/, I was flooded with a slew of questions and experienced a massive shift in perspective.

The main take away from this shift in perspective was that the majority of us have the same addiction. And we allow it to sabotage our lives on a daily basis. But, most of us don’t realize it’s a huge problem. We don’t realize that because of this addiction we don’t truly experience our lives.

What’s the addiction you ask? It’s our mind. We don’t listen to the person talking across from us most of the time. We are more interested in what our minds reaction to what they are saying might be. We don’t experience a sunrise or a sunset letting it completely blow us away, we listen to our mind comparing it to another time when it may have been better.

We are constantly missing our lives because we are engaging with our minds reaction about whether it may be better or worse than the previous times we had a similar experience. This leaves no room to truly experience the present moment.

Many would argue that this is what our minds are meant to do and I won’t deny that. It’s our brains way of scanning for danger and keeping us safe. We would never want to ignore a true threat. However, we get to consciously decide whether or not to engage with the incessant chatter that comes along with each moment.

The questions that came to me after listening to his talk were: What if we regarded our thoughts and feelings just as boring as watching paint dry? What if experiencing the here and now was 100x more captivating and interesting than what our minds had to say?

The first step to breaking up with any addiction is awareness. If you are reading this, I’d put money on you having an addiction to your mind. In the next week, notice how much you are paying attention to your mind’s reaction during your day versus actually experiencing the day without engaging with the nonstop chatter.

As you start being more aware of this, I want to remind you that nothing has gone wrong. Your brain is wired to do these things. That being said, once you see this occurring, you get to decide when you will pay attention and when you will disregard what story your mind is trying to lure you into. On the other side of this process is absolute freedom. Join me in the next blog when I will post a follow up and the next step in this process. You won’t want to miss it.

Want Freedom? Try This!

If you’ve read any of my posts or seen any of my videos before you will have heard me relate to the primitive brain as the part of us that is wired for survival. This is a crucial element to our existence, but creates a huge problem in today’s modern world. It is the voice inside your head that tells you that everything is a problem that needs to be solved. It strives to keep us safe, taking minimal or no risks in or day-to-day lives.

It also makes every circumstance in our lives out to be a threat. Which, if we are in an actual life or death experience is extremely useful. But most of us don’t experience these types of threats day-to-day.

The problem is that because our primitive brain is on alert 24/7 making most everything mean that we have a problem, we are distracted by trying to solve things that don’t need to be solved. The most recent relatable situation was when I developed hives from an allergic reaction after surgery. For a decent chunk of time, I allowed my primitive brain to run the show.

Can you guess what this created? This created more stress, more cortisol, and guess what else it created? MORE HIVES. Instead of knowing that I was not going to die from the hives, my brain set out on a mission to figure out why it happened and to identify the thousand options that might eliminate this “problem.” Honestly, this is what most of us do each day unless we are intentional about managing our minds.

What is the remedy for this you ask? Consciously decide not to engage with your primitive brain or any thought that is not intentional. It helps to identify the facts of the situation and to keep them very neutral in description. For example, in the situation I described above I would have stated that I had small little markings on the trunk of my body. As opposed to itchy raised welts all over my midsection, which is not neutral at all. 

So, anytime that you notice your mind wanting to go into the problem-solving mode, just identify the facts. Facts never cause feelings. It is our narrative about the facts that create every single feeling. After identifying the facts just watch and drop the thoughts without engaging. It helps to use a replacement focus such as a mantra or breathing. 

The reality is that we will never be able to stop our minds from coming up with the 60,000 thoughts every day. However, we can pre-decide how we will handle them. The most important question to ask yourself here is: how would your life benefit from not engaging with all of the thoughts? 

Asked another way: what is the price of engaging in these thoughts that your mind comes up with, mostly geared at keeping you alive, non-stop each day? The answer to these questions will be your motivation to do this practice.

I can tell you from experience that by doing this practice you will be more present, focused, and able to achieve almost anything you desire. But only work on this if you want to free yourself of stress, frustration, anger, and overwhelm. Only do this work if you want to run your mind instead of your mind running you.