25. April 2009 by Patricia.

I don’t recommend having rules around eating for weight management.

Let’s say that you want to fit into that great dress you bought for a wedding that is a teeny bit too tight right now. You cut back to eating at most just 1200 calories per day to lose weight. You are doing great for a few days keeping to your 1200 calorie rule.  On day four, you and your family go on a long hike and you find that by early evening you have exhausted your 1200 calorie intake and feel extremely hungry. Three scenarios might occur:

1.       You scold yourself and refuse to eat even one calorie over your limit. You say to yourself, “I am on a diet!” and you go to bed ravenously hungry.

2.       You “give in” to your hunger and eat far more than your 1200 calorie limit. Next you feel like a failure and say, “I trashed my diet today. May as well eat up. I can always start dieting again tomorrow.”

3.       Given your long hike, you realize that 1200 calories simply wasn’t enough food to meet your energy needs and increased activity. You choose healthy foods and eat till you are satisfied but not full.

Which scenario have you experienced?

Imposing “mind” rules on your body is counterproductive because it sends the wrong message: We cannot make friends with our body and learn how much and when to feed it, when we don’t listen to the signals it sends us. 

For me, the only way to develop a positive relationship with food and my body is to listen to the signals it sends and not try to override those signals with rigid prescriptions.

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18. April 2009 by Patricia.

Late one afternoon at the gym I heard two women conversing loudly in another section of the changing room. One expressed how much she resented coming to the gym and this was her first time in three weeks. Once she left work all she wanted to do was go home, flip on the television and relax after dinner. She mentioned she needed to lose weight gained during the holidays so she made herself workout, but it was all she could do not to go straight home.

I really felt for this lady. She hated coming to the gym but she hated her weight gain even more. This is not a recipe for success. As the two women were about to leave, she said, “I’m not excited about coming to the gym, but I love how I feel after exercising.” Bingo!

What I have found in helping clients who don’t relish exercising is this: If you don’t necessarily like working out, but love how you feel when you do, focus on that great “after workout” feeling, and allow it to propel you to a healthier, happier you.  

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11. April 2009 by Patricia.

You have probably heard a story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody confronting a problem. It ended up with Everybody blaming Somebody, and Nobody doing what Anyone could have.

This inspirational piece spoke to me. I had been looking for a way to go beyond my typical ways of supporting the environment. In cycling along our hike and bike path I was saddened by plastic bags caught on trees and empty soda cans and water bottles littering the trail. I remember thinking, “Why aren’t people taking more care of our environment?  Somebody really should do something about this.”

And then it hit me! I am Somebody! I made a commitment to pick up at least one piece of rubbish each time I go out on my bike. Instead of simply worrying about litter on the trail, I now notice how many other people are picking up plastic bags and soda cans! http://www.newparadigmcoaching.com/

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4. April 2009 by Patricia.

Still Trying to Lose Weight?

I was thinking the other day about all the attempts I made in my pre-teens, twenties and early thirties to lose weight and why I kept trying – over and over again. Why, I wondered, didn’t I just give up?

I remember thinking, this time it’s going to work! This time I’ll have the willpower. This time I have the right kind of support. This time will be different. It never was. That, of course, is a function of diets not working in the long-term, but what I want to get to is this – why did I keep trying? What was it that propelled me to keep trying?

I could answer that question by saying that it was a strong desire to be thin. That I wanted to look good in size 8 clothes; that I wanted to feel good in a bathing suit; or that I was tired of being breathless when I had to run to catch a bus. All those answers are true. But the real answer is this: I knew I wasn’t the authentic, deep down, real me. I knew, although there were good reasons for it, that my extra weight was a way to hide and protect myself from life itself.

I believed that if I didn’t address the issues that my extra weight brought up for me then I would never live an authentic life. So I kept trying one diet after another until I figured out that diets don’t, indeed, work for a life-time and to lose weight and keep it off I would need to find a different solution, one that required me to engage with my body, my mind, my spirit and my emotions to reveal the whole of me. http://www.newparadigmcoaching.com/

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