This is part 3 in the Weigh it Out: Caring for Your Body in 2021 series.
As you well know if you’ve been following this blog, I am a Certified Weight Loss Coach as well as a Master Coach and Psychotherapist. Since it’s kinda the season for it during January, we’re working on caring for our bodies.
We’ve covered the elimination of sugar and flour, the basic types of eating, and feelings (and how we eat them sometimes). The next topic I want to cover is really hot right now—and every January, really—and that’s EXERCISE.
Whether you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between, you’ve probably done it at some point. I’ve had clients run themselves into the ground, exercising 4 hours a day, and never lose a pound.
Weight loss is so much more about what you put in your body than how much you move it, and that’s hard for many people to hear. Who wouldn’t love to eat pizza, pasta, and pastries all the time and just “work it off”?
I want to talk about exercise now, not as a weight-loss method, but as an accountability tool. In addition to a ton of reasons to move our bodies that have nothing to do with weight, we can use exercise to develop meta-skills. We can use it to honor commitments to ourselves, to prove we can set goals and follow through, and to feel and be present in our bodies.
If we learn how to exercise for the purpose of feeling good on a regular basis, then we can take that skill and apply it to other things in our lives. Just like we can learn to manage our urges to eat healthier food, we can practice honoring our commitments to ourselves. This is where long-term results come into play—we do not have to settle for short-term fixes, gimmicks, and fads.
The minimum baseline
Managing yourself, feeling empowered, and gaining control is achievable. One tool that can help is called the minimum baseline. It’s like baby steps.
Example: I helped one of my coaching clients this week decide on her new minimum baseline for exercise. Her new minimum baseline is that she’ll walk for 10 minutes 3x per week, no matter if it’s hot, cold, raining, or snowing out.
Once you’ve proven to yourself that you can meet this minimum threshold regularly, you can do more. But you can gain control and confidence by setting a tiny goal and meeting it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Make sure it’s a very small thing you are willing to commit to.
It can be one walk once a week for 5 minutes. It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you plan it out, schedule it and follow through no matter what. You’ll be using your prefrontal cortex, the most advanced part of your brain, to do this. In this way, you’ll be proving to your brain that YOU are the one in control, (not your feeling brain the midbrain/limbic brain) that wants to do whatever it wants in the moment for short-term gratification.
This is what my weight loss program is all about. Learning how to use your brain for long term gains, rather than allowing the short terms costs like not wanting to exercise or eating cookies for dinner to add up to equal a YOU, you don’t recognize. You deserve to get the results you want in life in general and ALSO, where your health, body, and self-image are concerned.
If you haven’t heard it today, I love you! I hope you practice loving you no matter where you’re at in life.
***
If you’re enjoying the teachings in my blogs but have a feeling you’d like more in-depth work one-on-one, set-up a mini session with me here. It’s totally free, and you can ask all your burning questions. Talk to you soon!
