In my last post, I proposed that consider physical activity similarly to a “life partner”. Many of us want to form life partnerships because we believe that they have the potential to ENHANCE our lives through support, love, physical pleasure, companionship, positive feelings, etc. Partnering with the right person creates a synergistic alliance that can make all aspects of our life more meaningful and enjoyable.
Physical activity has the potential to be an incredible life-enhancing partner and ally IF WE LET IT. That means following other people’s prescriptions or recommendations about how we SHOULD exercise isn’t the ideal way to be physically active. Would you choose to marry someone because others told you this was the type of person you SHOULD spend your life with? I didn’t think so.
The way you make physical activity your ally is to:
• Determine how physical movement can enhance your day. Do you want to feel more energy, be more relaxed, multitask moving with being social?
• Identify types of physical movement is most appealing FOR YOU to do. Is walking outside in nice weather relaxing? Do you like to listen to funk or salsa music when you move?
• Select an ideal time to try this movement with this “ally” mindset. Is it first thing in the morning, a break during the workday or on the weekend?
• Throw out rules duration of your movement! Imposing a rule related to how long you need to exercise to make it worth it just doesn’t work for most in today’s very busy world. Instead of imposing some time structure, ask yourself “How long do I want to move for TODAY or TOMORROW?” In fact, when initially forming this new ally relationship with movement, it’s better to start small, and try only 5-15 minutes.
• Evaluate how it went. Did this feel good to do? Did you feel nurtured and positive moving in the ways you created? Don’t feel discouraged if your first attempt didn’t feel amazing. Sometimes, it takes trying different things, tweaking amount of time, etc. before we click with it.
You’ll discover when YOU mold physical activity to fit your needs and wants, instead of the other way around, it will become your ally for life.
This post is the first of two about why we should consider physical activity as a life partner instead of someone just to date for a few months.
The expression “for better or for worse” reflects the tremendous commitment people make when they enter into a marriage. They forecast the years we aim to spend with the partner we select for the rest of our lives. Most of us decide to form life partnerships because we believe they will nurture and enhance our quality of life in some or many ways.
Despite the fact that many marriages don’t last through all of the ups and downs, the intention to keep this life-long commitment is meaningful and puts life partnerships in a special and unique category. I’d like to suggest that making a life-long commitment is also something we might think about applying to the realm of physical activity. (In fact, regardless of how great your actual life partnership is, if you are or were in one, the reality is that we can’t count on others to enhance our lives for a variety of reasons. That leaves us with ourselves and the choices we make regarding how we are going to care for our bodies and the quality of our daily lives.)
Over the years, I’ve learned that the core element of whether a woman stays active throughout her adult life is her RELATIONSHIP with physical activity.
If pressure or stress undergirds this relationship there will be anxiety and/or DREAD associated with the very idea of exercising. If being physically active makes her feel incompetent or like she is failing, she’ll develop a disdain for doing it. In contrast, if moving her body gives a woman an opportunity to nurture herself in some meaningful way, she will feel connected both to being physically active and to her body. In this scenario, physical activity feels like and actually becomes a key life partner; one that cultivates a sense of well-being as well as helps us to fulfill our dreams and life ambitions.
Person A. Sharon’s relationship with physical activity is based on self-respect and comes out of a commitment to cultivate a life that is joyful, energetic, healthy and fulfilling. She experiences a desire to move her body.
Person B. Nancy’s relationship with physical activity is based on trying to conform to a “gold standard” for body size, weight, and/or type of exercise. Sarah dreads the very idea of moving her body.
Unfortunately, most women in midlife have formed a relationship with being physically active that reflects Nancy’s experience. As you can imagine, Nancy is much LESS likely than Sharon to stay physically active throughout her lifetime.
Many women have LEARNED to have a negative and unproductive relationship with a behavior that should be as natural and desirable as wanting to sleep. But the key word is learned.
Our relationship with physical activity reflects our socialization and past experiences. We have learned to perceive and approach physical activity mainly as a tool to repair our bodies instead of an ally for enhancing our quality of life.
In the next post, I’ll get into more detail about transforming physical activity into your life-enhancing partner and ally. Contact me if you have questions about how you can transform physical activity.
Enjoy the Spring! It’s a great time to create positive change in our lives.
Many of us have been worn down by societal images that depict beauty as coming only in small sizes. We’ve spent thousands of dollars in pursuit of this narrow and culturally-synthesized ideal. So many moments of our daily life have been spent bemoaning our lack of will power and loathing parts of our bodies.
Some women have been lucky to have escaped the quagmire caused by our obsession with what food we want to eat compared to what we think we “should” eat. They either never felt pressure to diet or lose weight or just decided they were not going to let someone else’s rules dictate their eating.
But most women are not so lucky. Most have succumbed to cultural pressures and yearn to fit the one-size-fits-all mold. This yearning has led women to spend 20 to 30 years of their lives cycling through diet and exercise programs, eventually giving up when results don’t match expectations. The most unfortunate part of the diet/exercise cycle is that it causes too many women to loathe their bodies and feel that they have failed INSTEAD OF recognizing that they were set up to fail. The aim of this cyclical paradigm has been to produce consumer behavior, not sustainable lifestyles. Once this fact is recognized, women can start forging their own unique paths to healthy and satisfying lifestyle behaviors instead of buying another “magic bullet” that will set them up to fail.
A great way to start this new mindset and approach is to recognize with gratitude what our bodies actually do for us. Instead of focusing on the most superficial aspects of our bodies (literally and figuratively), such as subcutaneous fat, let’s focus on its core abilities and functions; the things that make our bodies incredible.
- The ability to move our bodies by our sheer will.
- The energy to work on projects that are meaningful and exciting.
- Well functioning digestive and elimination processes. We don’t appreciate these until we learn that when they don’t work well our daily quality of life is drastically reduced.
- The ability to see the exquisite colors fushcia, orange, and violet.
- The ability to wrap our arms around our loved ones and express to them our appreciation.
- Resilience to break through tough times and come out on the other side.
Aren’t these things worth SO much more than any excess pounds we might be caring around? Do you treat your body with sufficient respect and appreciation for what it does for you?
I hope you might reflect on that question. And if your answer is no, than I offer you this: Now is a great time to start thinking about ONE single thing that you may want to try doing differently as a way to show increased appreciation for your body, a central part of yourself.
Appreciating what you have instead of resenting it, is a much better place to be if you want to make changes that will help you feel and live better.
Consider this choice as we enter Spring this year. How do you want to feel? What goals have you tried to achieve in the past to improve your quality of life that haven’t been sustainable? Are you going to continue striving for what others tell you that you should achieve, or would you like to start following your own intuition and voice?
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be blogging weekly for More’s online magazine and community. I will be blogging more frequently on More.com than here and writing much shorter posts. If you’d like to hear motivational and wise words related to moving your body and taking care of yourself you can get an email when I post weekly. Steps for doing this are below:
1) Go to my first post about how we should exercise more like we eat at More
2) Click on “view profile” (above my photo, on the right)
3) In the area where my photo is, go to and select the 4th option “Be notified when member publishes”.
4) You’ll get a prompt to join.
5) If you don’t want to join, you can read my *though-provoking* post on the front of More’s Fitness page every Friday.
I invited Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD, to write a follow up to my October blog post, “Why demonizing food often defeats us.” My former post explained the psychological reasons why avoiding “bad” foods and using “shoulds” for eating often backfires. If you missed my initial post, to get the most benefit, scroll down and read the October 7, 2008 post before reading this one.
Maryann is experienced as a registered dietitian, and her eating philosophy is very much in line with my approach to exercise. Below she sheds light on her experiences helping women stop demonizing food.
5 Steps to Developing a Healthy Relationship with Food
By Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD
Most of my nutrition counseling sessions begin with confessions. One client says she was doing great until she started eating bread while another admits to sweets being her downfall.
Like many women, I engaged in the good food/bad food cycle for years. My twenties were all about restricting my naughty favorites followed by overeating them. But I eventually learned a lesson that changed me forever: allowing myself to eat any food I wanted made maintaining a healthy weight feel effortless! So I took my experiences, researched the topic and developed helpful strategies.
The 5 steps below will help you develop a healthy relationship with food, eat better and maybe even drop those extra pounds.
1. Think about the why
My clients usually think they overeat simply because they are weak human beings. Yet eating habits are not determined by character — instead, they are a learned behavior that starts very early in life. When you understand what’s really behind your eating habits you can stop beating yourself up and take real action.
While parents are well-intentioned, the feeding strategies they employ often encourage the good food/bad food cycle. For example, pressuring kids to eat their vegetables makes plant foods seem like a punishment. Using sweets as a reward makes sweets even more appealing. (Or they combine these two by forcing kids to finish their veggies in order to get dessert!). And encouraging kids to “clean their plates” or cut back on eating robs little ones of their natural ability to self regulate food.
Every person also has personal experiences and is inundated with popular diets, media stories and magazines telling them what foods are “good” and “bad.” As Michelle wrote in her piece, no one wants to do what they “should” do. That is why when women try to follow someone else’s rules of eating they become naturally defiant to it.
Think about your experiences with food growing up and how it has influenced your relationship with food.
2. Challenge ingrained food beliefs.
After understanding where your eating habits come from, you can take action by writing down the real triggers to eating: your thoughts about food. Once you capture the thought on paper, take the time to question it. If you find yourself thinking “That cookie is bad I shouldn’t eat it,” for example, write it down and challenge it by writing “Why are cookies bad? They taste good and eating one or two won’t cause weight gain.” You’ll also want to question the assumptions you make about foods you perceive as healthy or “good”. For example, if you find yourself thinking “this lunch is healthy so I’m going to eat more” come right back with “don’t all foods contain calories? Isn’t it a better strategy to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I start to feel full?”
Research shows that people overestimate the calories in foods they perceive as “bad” and underestimate the calories in foods they perceive as “good.” For example, a 2006 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that individuals ate 28% more M&Ms when they were labeled as “low fat” than when they were labeled as “regular.”
In a 2005 study published in Food Quality and Preference, subjects chose 3 slices of bacon (109 calories) as more weight-promoting than a large raisin bran muffin (460 calories). Even when calorie content was printed out for the subjects to see, people still judged the perceived “bad” food, like bacon, as more likely to cause them to gain weight than the higher calorie “good” food.
“Good” and “bad” food thinking gives too much power to individual foods and spurs the likelihood of overeating.
3. Make your favorite foods a priority
Now that you are changing your thinking, you’ll want to go against popular diet advice and make your favorite foods a priority. This can be a very hard thing to do, especially if you’ve learned not to trust yourself with eating. Write down your top 5 favorite foods (previously labeled “bad” foods) and make sure to eat at least one of those foods every day. At first you might eat quite a bit but after a while you’ll notice that a little goes a long way.
Still not convinced it’s acceptable to eat empty-calorie foods? For the first time ever the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2005) introduced the idea of “discretionary calories.” These are the extra calories one can use on whatever food they want as long as basic nutrition needs are met first – check it out (http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/discretionary_calories_amount_print.html )
Bottom line: When you know you can eat any food you want, anytime you want, your desire to overeat dissipates.
4. Combine the good-and-bad worlds
Now you’ll want to integrate your favorite foods with all the other foods out there. Instead of categorizing foods as “good” or “bad,” try focusing on the role each item plays. For example, some foods are great at nourishing your body (fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean meats) while others are simply for enjoyment (cookies, cake, ice cream, fried foods) and others are somewhere in between (pizza, hamburgers, mac-n-cheese, juice). The goal is to balance your intake of all these foods in a sensible way.
According to dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch authors of Intuitive Eating, http://www.intuitiveeating.com/ when their clients finally allow themselves to eat any food they want they eventually consume a diet that is 90% nutritious and 10% non-nutritious foods. I witness this type of behavior all the time with my 2-year old. She catches on quickly the food she thinks she can’t have. Once I give her the novel item, she eats a lot of it for a day or two until the excitement fades and then she’s back to eating a variety of foods.
5. Focus on the “how much” of eating.
According to the International Food Information Council, 6 out of 10 of Americans believe “what” they eat is more important for managing weight than “how much.” One area in which health professionals agree is too many calories result in weight gain – any type of calories. Yet a culture obsessed with “good” and “bad” foods encourages people to choose sides.
For example, I’ve worked with the elderly for years, many who are losing weight unintentionally. If we bought into culture’s idea of weight control, you’d think these people were eating only salads and fruit all day. Instead, they are given high calorie shakes, meat with gravy and rich desserts and they still lose weight – simply because they eat less food.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay attention to what you eat (that’s another topic entirely). But this idea that people have to eat only healthy food in order to lose/maintain weight creates a vicious cycle of getting on the wagon and falling off. But if women can learn to eat just the right amount that their bodies need, all the time, then they’ll be getting somewhere.
You can accomplish this feat by tuning into the amazing hunger signals you were born with but got lost along the way to adulthood. Eat according to your appetite, take time to enjoy each bite, eat satisfying food and stop when you start to feel full. After all, the best diet is the one created by you — always honoring your personal preferences. Yes, it’s really that easy.
Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen, MS, RD is the creator of RaiseHealthyEaters.com, a website/blog aimed at helping moms raise healthy and happy eaters while conquering their own food issues.
In case you need a boost to uplift your spirits as Winter winds down, a short interview with me was just posted on womensradio.com that should do the trick. The link is below.
I am happy to respond to any thoughts or reactions you have.Just shoot me an e-mail at michelle@essentialsteps.net.
As Winter winds down, try to be conscious about how you want to enter the next season and the contributions you want to make to yourself, your well-being, and health.
Be on the lookout for an upcoming post detailing the specific strategies women use to prevent demonizing food and the negative things that result from this harmful stance toward eating.
Many people purchase home exercise equipment (cheap and expensive) and it winds up dusty and unused. Some people feel that this unused equipment becomes a monument to their failure! Wrong! Let’s explore some factors that can make using home exercise equipment more enjoyable. The list below can help you assess what things you could try that might improve your experience. Experiment with some of the suggestions below to find out if it changes your experience with your home equipment. If you have more than one type of home exercise machine, choose one to use with this check list.
Exercise equipment can be one tool you use when the weather is bad or just to add some variety to the other physical activities you use.
Try many of the suggestions below to make your experience more enjoyable, at least, more palatable:
The equipment is in a room you enjoy being in
The equipment is by a window where you can watch people or animals passing by outside
You don’t have to move the equipment at all, or very little to have it in the place where you get on it
You listen to music that makes you want to dance while exercising on your equipment
(And preferably change it with a remote when an “uninspiring” song comes on.
You multi-task at the same time (Some would argue this subtracts from the experience.)
-watch TV (news, your favorite program…)
-read a book or magazine you enjoy (might need to get larger printed texts for this.)
-talk on the phone
-visit with someone
You feel confident and relaxed while using the equipment (This is very important. Often, dislike of home equipment is really due to a sense that we are not doing it right. We can find people to teach us.)
You do intervals (e.g., 1 minute of higher intensity and 3 minutes of less intense, repeat, this makes the time go very quickly.
Don’t feel that you have to exercise intensely for it to “count”. Do the pace that is most appealing to you. Toss out the gold standards! You won’t do things for long that don’t’ fit into your needs and personality.
You vary exercising on the home equipment with other physical activities on a weekly basis (Although some people enjoy working out only on home equipment.)
You give yourself permission to get on your machine for only 5,10,or 15 minutes when you really don’t feel like exercising (This will truly help you remain consistent.)
Your purpose for using the equipment is to claim an Opportunity to Move or give yourself a “gift”
Before we know it New Years will be here, along with the annual ritual of making New Year’s resolutions. But how quickly these seeming commitments fade away! If you want to think about the long-term sustainability of your resolutions this New Years, keep reading. If not, check back another time.
Between the hysteria over the “obesity epidemic”, having your doctor tell you to lose weight every year, and seeing movie starts with perfect bodies (even a few weeks after delivering twins) it is no wonder that most women lament their weight and maybe even loathe their bodies.
Ninety-nine percent of women I coach tell me in the first session that they need to lose the excess weight they are carrying. In this post, I am going to tell you what I tell my clients so that, this year, your New Year’s resolutions will be more likely to be successful.
There’s a radical but true concept for most women: Focusing on “losing weight” undermines your ability to sustain any weight you lose and leads to long-term failure. It also prevents developing positive and life-long relationships with the very behaviors that are essential to weight control as well as other very important perks such as enhancing one’s well-being and health (exercise and dietary intake).
In addition, in the last few years there have been a few “meta-analyses” (reviews of many studies) on weight loss programs, and all show that the vast majority of people regain their weight two years after starting. If that’s not enough to convince you, think about your own experiences over the past 20-40 years with weight loss efforts. Have you been successful in sustaining your weight loss?
If you have not been successful, I want to suggest a women-specific, motivational, behavioral self-regulation framework and principles to help guide you to New Year’s resolutions that are SMART. This framework can help women who eventually wish to lose weight or who just want to start taking better care of themselves and not think about weight at all. The S.M.A.R.T. framework below will not only help you better sustain your desired behavior but also guide you to make changes that nurture not deplete you. At the very end, I’ll also offer you a variety of resources for targeted assistance if you want extra guidance. The reasons why my S.M.A.R.T. framework will work better for many women, will be clear when you read the very simple principles below.
As you end 2008, do you feel ready to make resolutions that reflect self-care and self-love instead of self-loathing or self-rejection? If so, read on. If not, don’t bother reading this information.
SUSTAINABLE: Smart New Year’s resolutions are sustainable: Smart resolutions begin with the end in mind because creating long-term sustainability is your core goal. An important reason most resolutions don’t work is that they reflect a desired long-term goal. However, most women haven’t put sufficient thought and planning into selecting a path that can be sustained for a VERY long time. If your goal is to sustain a behavior for the rest of your life (30-60 years, right?), isn’t it worth taking 6 months to 3 years to REALLY learn how to do this? Logic and wisdom tell us that anything worth doing, is worth doing right.
And the way to approach this right, is in a sequential manner. Smart New Year’s resolutions take a sequential approach to behavior change. (Most weight loss programs direct you to learn two vastly different and difficult behavioral changes (diet & exercise) at the same time. For most of us, our lives are just too busy and complicated to be able to integrate both diet and exercise into our lives at the same time. Because women juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, we have even less energy, attention, and time to learn and integrate both dietary changes and regular physical activity at the same time.) My sequential strategy has you learn ONE behavior at time so that it can stick. After you have had adequate time to learn how to integrate that behavior into your life in a positive and consistent way, then you work on learning the next behavior. (I advise taking 3 to 12 months to really learn ONE behavior.) We wouldn’t build a house without building a solid foundation first. Why? The foundation is essential to the support of your house over its life span. Similarly, we should also build a solid foundation to maintain the behavior we desire to maintain before we start on the next one. Sometimes the smartest way to do something is also the most simple and commonsensical.
MY SELF-CARE: Smart New Year’s resolutions address women’s underlying comfort with making their self-care, well-being, and health a top priority. Regular self-care is the “oxygen mask” women must consistently put on if we are to optimally take care of ourselves (and others) and experience life to the fullest. It is very difficult to sustain any self-care behavior (i.e., exercise and healthy eating) if we don’t feel like we deserve and/or value making regular time for our own self-care. (Self-care includes creating time to move our bodies as well as other nurturing activities like reading a great book while we relax on the couch.) Targeting improved self-care attitudes and behaviors is one of the first steps a woman should take and is essential to create a solid foundation to support any health behavior that you desire to maintain for life.
ACHIEVABLE: Smart New Year’s resolutions are achievable. This principle isn’t new to you. But I want to suggest you take it to a different level. Pretend you are in kindergarten and learning something for the first time. Give yourself permission to set VERY SMALL goals at the very beginning. Why? Because it is truly the smart thing to do! Become very consistent with these small goals. Learn what gets in your way. Learn how to overcome these things. And ONLY THEN, increase your goals – and by just a little. Keep this up. Take one – two months to learn how to add 5 – 10 minutes of physical activity to most of your days. You have your whole life to sustain physical activity (or healthy eating or another time management, etc). Why not take sufficient time to learn how to do it well? That is the only way you will be successful sustaining the behavior for the rest of your life. The mantra I teach clients is: Consistency first, then quantity.
REJECT “quick fixes”: Smart New Year’s resolutions reject “quick fixes” and unrealistic goals: Smart New Year’s resolutions are made by women who have learned, often numerous times and from firsthand experience that “quick fixes” don’t stick in the long-term. Smart women are ready to create goals based on what they can realistically attain, not goals based on false advertising and impossible cultural standards and pressures. If they desire to lose weight, they value losing it in a way that they can maintain over the long haul, instead of losing it quickly and then gaining it back.
TAILORED: Smart New Year’s resolutions are tailored to fit into your life. When you think about what behavior you want to change or thing you want to achieve, think hard about who you are. Tailoring to who you are is of utmost importance. If you don’t respect your likes, needs, and wants when selecting a behavioral path to go down it is extremely unlikely that you’ll be able to sustain it over time. If you hate the stair master, don’t include that in your new attempt to be physically active. Instead choose activities that will feel good, or at least not bad to do. If you love bread, why pick an eating plan that removes it completely? When you decide to change in ways that respect what you want and like, you will rediscover a deep trust in yourself as you begin to reap the rewards of improved mood, energy, health, and quality of life.
If you didn’t read the November More Magazine article that my work was just featured in, e-mail me (michelle@essentialsteps.net) and I’ll be happy to send you the article.
Below is a list of resources that may help you achieve your SMART New Year’s resolutions.
Regardless of what you decide to do for your New Year’s resolutions, I wish you a wonderful, healthy, and fulfilling 2009!
If you have thoughts to share about my ideas or your own experiences with New Year’s resolutions, please comment on this blog post. I welcome all comments, including ones that disagree with me.
Please forward tell any friends, family, colleagues, or health-care providers that you think would be interested in reading these ideas.
RESOURCES TO ASSIST YOU IN ACHIEVING S.M.A.R.T. NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS:
Health at Every Size (physical activity and eating behaviors) Health at Every Size is a “movement” and an alternative approach to “dieting”. I list a few different URLs where you can read more about it. There isn’t an official website like the rest of the URLs below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size, http://www.healthyweightnetwork.com/living.htm, http://www.jonrobison.net/size.html
EssentialSteps Phone Coaching with Dr. Michelle Segar (physical activity and the prioritization of self-care): www.essentialsteps.net
The Hunger Within (eating behaviors): http://www.thehungerwithin.com/
Do It Yourself Nutrition (eating behaviors): http://www.do-it-yourself-nutrition.com/
The New York Times’ fitness writer, Gina Kolata, has written two great books on the research about fitness and dieting: 1. Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise; 2. Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
