Let's Stop Doing It Backwards. . . the only way to live healthy and effortlessly
Ya’ll know I love talking, writing and sharing about health, fitness and most anything related to living a healthy lifestyle. And, joy, you know I love bringing that into the mix because that’s all of our goals, right? To live a healthy, full life that can be joyful and IS full of joy even when it may not seem to be a joyful time or season.
They are all intertwined in such a way that I know you can’t have one without the others. In order to live healthy it has to be all encompassing. It is an overall way of being well.
You can be so wonderfully physically fit. You can eat the most nutritious whole foods. However, if you are not taking care of your mind, your thoughts and nurturing your soul and what speaks to you, brings out your gifts, and fills your heart, you really cannot be well.
A few years ago I created an online program called Better and Beyond. (Thank you for all of you who joined! I had a great time with it!) I really wanted to encourage women to look beyond the end of the program and where they were at that point in their journey. We focused on diet and I provided workouts which is what we know to do, right?. But I also added a third component that included steps each week to include nurturing the mind and soul. I knew that part had been missing from all the programs I had seen and experienced.
Based upon my own personal experiences and working with clients who have had the most success, I know that addressing what is going on in your mind and heart is THE most important part of creating a healthy life.
Healthy body, healthy thoughts, healthy emotions all working together and each getting the attention they need. It is the putting all of these things together that brings that spark and the wellbeing to navigate a life full of experiences, challenges and, of course, joy.
For long-term living I have always believed in a non-diet mentality. We cannot live in an all or nothing mentality for long – it is just not sustainable. What I want for myself and for those around me is to be able to live each day fully and effortlessly without obsessing about food, workouts, counting calories, stressing about going to dinner or having a birthday celebration. Living and enjoying our days should not be that hard. It should be about feeling our best and being our best. (And it’s really hard to do that if your mental space is crowded out by the cycle of worries and anxieties over food and what you “should or should not” do).
In order to live with this type of freedom, we have to re-educate ourselves and forget all the hype we’ve been fed by the media, the trendy new obsessions and culture, and the billion dollar diet industry. To really create new habits and create your own personal healthy lifestyle, it takes reversing the steps we have learned.
We have to start on the INSIDE first. You have to change your thoughts, your self talk, know your WHY and discover your own self-sabatoges, and how you handle stress. It means focusing first on the way you think and why, your beliefs, and your own inner workings, for a lack of better words. Getting healthy on your inside is the only way to make any new endeavor stick.
Only THEN will tackling the food and the exercise work.
We have been taught backwards all these years. Let’s just STOP.
Let’s start over and begin at the beginning and only then begin to look at the other two components.
Here’s the thing, even if you have created that healthy balance in your mind and emotions first and have also created that healthy lifestyle and way of eating and moving and living that is so personal and unique to you . . . you may find a time when you feel back at square one. You have to re-create what works and doesn’t work for you.
Being brutally honest, that is where I am. I am in a place of putting myself through my own program and coaching. I am taking the steps to re-create some of my thoughts, beliefs and my own negative talk and establish some new habits in my own health and wellbeing.
I have been fighting with myself over this (so glad only my dogs can hear me!) but have finally come to realize it is just another one of those seasons of life. We are constantly changing and growing, so we just have to continue to educate ourselves, try new things and take care of ourselves, in all three areas of our wellness.
It is not a one and done!
It continues to be about making daily changes in our thoughts, our hearts and in our bodies.
At some point, what we thought, what we did, how we treated our bodies, the foods that nurtured and fueled us, may no longer serve us, and that is okay. It does not mean we have failed. It means we keep moving forward, experimenting, fine tuning, learning, moving our bodies and nurturing ourselves to create different habits and patterns and discover what works and feels good.
But it is so worth it! Learning what feels good to us and knowing what gives us the energy to do the things we want, to thrive, and to be our best where we are and in whatever season we are in is definitely worth the effort.
It is not about comparing one woman’s method to another’s and has never been a cookie cutter way of living. It is about creating an individual way of living to fit personal goals, challenges and seasons. That is why I love working with women and helping them begin thinking clearer, differently, and more in tune with their health and wellbeing. It is about learning how to listen to their bodies and living each day intentionally, fully and to feel their best.
I’m considering another round of my Roadmap Coaching Program, to go along with my own rebooting (:. Let me know if you are curious about learning to tune into your own thoughts and mindset, creating your own healthy habits and intentional days that bring you an effortless lifestyle, energy for days, longevity, and joy from thriving and being your best.
It's simple. Hit reply to this email OR Join the waitlist HERE.
Most of all. . .
Live Well!
M-D💚