Are You Ready For Change?

I want to discuss the process of change with you today.

So often, we set lofty goals that we don’t plan to follow through on because we are just not aware of how ready we are to make change.

Let’s discuss the stages of change.

Stage One: Pre-Contemplation

Pre-contemplation. If your goal is to gain muscle, your pre-contemplation phase may be realizing that you can’t carry your groceries into the house and you want to be stronger. It’s recognizing there is a perceived problem.

Stage Two: Contemplation

Contemplation is when we are considering doing something about it. We haven’t committed yet but we’re considering it. For me, this happens all the time. I proceed from pre-contemplation to contemplation pretty quickly. This phase is all about collecting data and seeing what options are out there. Maybe it’s Googling or speaking to a coach about what needs to happen for you to get stronger.

Stage Three: Planning

Planning is putting the plan into place. It’s saying that based on the studies, it looks like if you do strength training and hit the big muscle groups three times a week, and fuel your body properly, you can gain muscle. Ideally, we’ll be very careful to create a realistic plan.

Stage Four: Take Action

The next step is taking action and executing your plan. Note that if we pick something that’s more than we can handle, we’re likely to lose motivation right away. Not being able to stick to your plan can create feelings of failure that crush our motivation. We have thoughts of, “I can’t do this. Why did I think I could do this?”, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

Stage Five: Maintenance 

When it comes to goals and health, sustainability is my favorite word. Anybody can try something and get results and move on, but we want to sustain our results forever. Many of us think it’s too late for us, that we’re past our prime. But I think we’re just getting started.

Where are you in this process?

If you are having trouble making a plan... I suggest you listen to my podcast, “I Am Overwhelmed.” This is where I discuss my 3-2-1 principle. It will help you create space in your day to start moving toward making the changes that you want. You can listen here.

“Exercise is Stalling My Weight loss”

Is it true that exercise can cause weight gain or stall weight loss? Yes. There is some truth to it. One of the biggest reasons is that when we start an exercise program, we often burn more calories. Exercise can account for about 15 to 30 percent of our total daily calorie burn, and exercise can increase our appetite. As a result, we may take more food in. If you’re exercising a lot and fueling your body appropriately, you may potentially have some weight gain. 

Another factor is that when we exercise extremely or excessively, we can throw our hormones off. There are many hormones that are affected by exercise. We can stress our bodies pretty significantly when we over-exercise. 

What Are Your Goals?

Maybe you’re asking, “How do I get around this?”. And it all starts with what goal we’re trying to ultimately achieve. What do we really want? 

I have clients who are less concerned with body composition. All they want is to continue to drop scale weight. My recommendation is that exercise is non-negotiable because of the tremendous amount of health benefits it has. But it’s all about using it wisely. 

It’s recommended that the average American get about 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, which works out to thirty minutes five days a week. So what do you do? 

If you want to lose weight, ideally, you’ll do something that keeps your appetite at bay. Walking is a great, low-intensity option that burns calories but won’t have a huge afterburn effect. Note that some studies say that if you walk fasted, it can increase your fat burn, but it may also increase your hunger. 

Walking half an hour a day, enjoying yourself, and getting all of the benefits of exercise, doing that low-intensity exercise is your best friend. 

But what if your goal is body composition change, either increasing muscle mass, decreasing body fat, or doing both? In order to do this, there are two factors. If you don’t want to stimulate your appetite too much, you’ll want to maintain muscle mass and lose fat. To do that, you’ll need to do some strength training. Nothing too intense or vigorous, but something in which you’re stimulating your muscle. 

Things start to shift when we’re talking about gaining muscle. To gain muscle and maintain the same body fat, you will gain weight on the scale. If you gain muscle and lose fat, you’ll either maintain your weight or it will decrease slightly. 

So the big question is if we’re looking for the scale to move or for our body composition to change, because they’re very different approaches. When a client is okay with the scale maybe moving up a bit, the conversation is about stressing the muscle. We have to break the muscle down and cause micro-tears in order to build it back up. It may sound intense, but it can be very fun. We just have to be committed to the scale potentially going up at first or staying the same. Photos can be a great way to track our results even if our weight doesn’t change or even goes up. 

Putting it All Together

Let’s say you do want to change your body composition. Some questions come up. How much strength training? How much cardio? How often? Well, unless you’re a fitness competitor or a bodybuilder, it’s best to have a realistic time frame, which means you can go slower. The next question is how much time you’re willing to commit. 

Strength Training

If you’re new to the world of weight training, you won’t want to do it seven days a week and do maximum cardio because your body learns quickly. It won’t continue to change. Less is more, especially to start. We want to do the smallest amount we can and still see results. Typically my clients start with three strength training sessions per week with a full-body approach. This allows us to maximize the results we can get with minimal work. 

Then we observe and see what happens. At the two-week mark, if we’re serious about continuing on and making changes and improvements, we’ll tweak something. Maybe the duration, number, or style of the workouts. Every two weeks, we’ll think about changing something, always staying one step ahead of the body before it can catch onto us. That’s why having a coach can be so helpful.

Cardio

Again, the idea is to start off with the least amount of cardio you can do and still see results. Typically, I start my clients who want to make a body transformation off with 15 to 20 minutes of cardio three times a week, tacked onto the strength training workout or alternated with strength days. It’s up to you if you want to work out six days a week or have more days off.

Depending on how fast you want to do this, you can strategize and see what your body responds to best. Maybe you have a greater fat burn effect by doing fasted cardio in the morning, having a meal, and then doing your strength training routine. You can get it all done in one day and repeat three times a week. Or you can do your weight lifting first, empty out your glycogen, and then do your cardio, which will make your body have to burn fat for fuel.

If this all works and you see changes, we keep it right here until we stop seeing changes. Maybe we increase the weight you lift. Maybe you decrease the rest time between sets. All of these are tweaks we can make to maximize what we’re doing without adding more days of exercise in a week. Once we’ve exhausted that option, we can look at adding more days. 

So, sure, exercise may stall your weight loss. But many clients of mine start seeing the positive changes - more muscle, better fitness, better endurance, more energy - and want to keep going regardless of what happens on the scale. For so long, we’ve focused on our weight, and so many of us are tired of it. We’re starting to realize that weight isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t define our health.

Most importantly, what do you really want for yourself? Not for what other people think. How do you want to proceed? Any result you want, you can have.

A Reason Many Avoid the Gym

When you think of the gym, you may imagine lots of in-shape people walking around in designer fitness wear, laughing with their friends. It’s a big community full of beautiful people.

And if we don’t believe that we’re a part of that crew, we already believe we don’t belong there.

Having a certain image in mind of how we’ll have to look in order to allow ourselves to go to the gym will only create more judgment.

We all have an image of people that are “allowed” in the gym. Imagine you’re at the gym in the current shape you’re in. Picture yourself there. What’s happening? Do you feel nervous? Does it seem like people are looking at you? Worrying about what others are thinking is human nature.

But we don’t have to care what others think. We can choose not to, it just takes a bit of work. 

The reality is that nobody at the gym cares how much you’re lifting. They don’t care how fast your treadmill is going. They don’t care what you’re wearing. They simply don’t notice. If somebody does care, it’s more a projection of their own thoughts about themselves than anything to do with you. 

Part of the solution to overcome the constant feeling of being judged is to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there again and again, and realize that nothing bad is going to happen.

The minute we decide to be vulnerable and present, we feel calm, relaxed, and believe we can show up anywhere and work out.

If we can believe that we’re perfect as is, having that self-love and self-acceptance, we stop allowing others’ judgment to take over our lives.

At the end of the day, there’s no requirement to enter a gym other than that you want to be there and better yourself. It has nothing to do with how you look, how much you can lift, or anything of that type.

This concept also applies to bathing suits and public beach and pool settings.  We can put all of this energy to better use.

What would your life be like if you were 100000% confident in your own skin? The opportunities are endless in this space.

Remember... You are beautiful and perfect just as you are... so don’t go hiding any longer.

“I Don’t Understand Macros”

In this article, we’ll talk about what macros are, why we care, how we can use them, and why counting macros isn’t necessarily for everyone. Because while there are some major benefits to calculating macros, there’s also a real case to be made for combining intuition with a gentle approach to macros, which is what we do in my Mindful Macro program.

The Three Macronutrients

The three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Generally, calculating macros requires a balanced diet with all three macronutrients. That being said, if you’re following keto or low-carb, you can still calculate your macros but you’ll be using different percentages.

The Broad Picture

We all have a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), which includes our basal metabolic rate (the calories our body burns just by being itself), the thermic effect of food (which accounts for about 10% of our TDEE), and exercise and activity (about 15 to 30% of our TDEE). This is why exercise isn’t the number one way to create a calorie deficit. 

Protein

Protein helps so many different things in our body, like the growth of muscle and skin. When you combine protein with carbohydrates and fat, you’ll be able to blunt your insulin response. That means that eating protein helps your blood sugar stay more stable than if you just eat carbohydrates. Often when we don’t get enough protein, especially if we’re engaging in lots of exercise, we’ll experience hunger and even cravings.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are our body’s quick and slow energy. Many people think carbohydrates make us gain weight, but in order to make a body composition change, you’ll need to put a good amount of demand on your body. Moving and stressing your muscle is necessary for body composition change. And to have enough energy to put in the work, you’ll need fuel. Carbohydrates give us that fuel.

If you’re diabetic, pre-diabetic, or have insulin resistance, you can absolutely still include carbohydrates in your macros. It’ll require more of a low-carbohydrate diet than a no-carbohydrate diet, and you’ll still be able to get all the benefits you need from those carbohydrates. And note that strength training can actually improve our insulin sensitivity so we’re simultaneously making amazing changes while improving our health parameters.

If we eat the right carbohydrates, we’ll get lots of good stuff, like fiber and B-vitamins. It’s about looking at food as medicine and fuel rather than as “bad foods.” Processed carbohydrates aren’t as healthy for us, but many of them can do good things for us.

Fat

“Fat” is not most people’s favorite word, and it was especially the enemy in the late 80s and 90s. But fat is so necessary. Poly- and monounsaturated fats are considered good, and you want to stay away from saturated and trans fats, even if you’re doing low-carb high-fat. 

Saturated fats have been shown to increase hemoglobin A1C in people who are doing low-carb dieting. It has a lot to do with genetics, but it is a phenomenon. To reverse this, it’s important to make sure your fats are coming from healthy sources. 

Fat supports hormones, which control everything. Somebody who over-exercises and drops body fat may stop menstruating, and their hormone levels can be off. Often there is an issue with the amount of dietary fat they’re eating. 

Fat also supports healthy tissues and lets us have nice skin and shiny hair. Fat has the lowest glycemic load of the three macronutrients, which slows the absorption of protein and carbohydrates, allowing us to blunt the insulin response when we eat a balanced meal.

Counting Macros

There is a protocol called If It Fits Your Macros that tells you anything is fair game as long as you stick to your chosen macronutrient ratios. But I like to focus on optimal health, with more of an emphasis on nutritious foods. These are what I call all-the-time foods (note: not bad foods!), which feel really good in our body and serve us really well. In contrast, “sometimes foods” are more processed but taste good - and you don’t have to stop eating them. The idea is you can fit all these foods in macros if you’re calculating them. 

If you have somebody calculate your macros, they’ll usually give you percentages. One very balanced way to do it is 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 30% fat (also known as the Zone diet). These percentages are calculated from your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. 

Another option is to eat one gram of protein for every pound of lean body mass you have. From there, you keep fat at about 30% and carbohydrates make up the rest. It’s really just about doing the math. The important part is that after you get a jumping-off point, you observe and see what’s happening. 

Macros Aren’t for Everybody

Counting macros may sound great, but it requires weighing, measuring, and food prepping your food. It can get pretty tedious, which may not make you want to do it long term. I certainly don’t. So a couple of years ago, I invented a program called Mindful Macros which allows you to eyeball and estimate how much of each food to eat to make up a balanced meal. It’s turned out to be very effective, especially for body transformation and quality of life.

Following our intuition, knowing when we’re hungry, and stopping when we’re full, combined with Mindful Macros, is a very appropriate for those of us who aren’t looking to competing on a fitness stage. People like me, who have a family, a business - a lot going on. For me, flexibility is the most important.  I rely on my intuition, hunger scale, and eyeballs. Together, these two approaches allow me to have an exciting, flexible, and free plan.

I’ve been following this for nearly eight years now, and I’ll never go back to calculating my macros every day. I love the flexibility. I’m within a healthy weight range and optimal healthy zone. I want freedom and results, so I meet myself halfway in the middle. It works for me. What will work for you?

“I Am Not Motivated to Improve My Health”

The scenario typically goes something like this. We know what we want to do. We’ve done it before and it’s worked. But something holds us back from doing it. The bottom line? We’re lacking motivation. 

Before we can proceed, we need to talk about what’s going on and what thoughts are coming up. Often, based on past experience, we draw an over-generalized conclusion on how it’s going to go.

Let’s say to get healthier, your goal is to lose weight. If you’ve lost weight in the past and it wasn’t super pleasant, you probably won’t be too excited to do it again. That’s why if you’re a person who’s done several diets in their lifetime, whenever there’s a new fad diet, it’s exciting. We think it might be different since we haven’t tried it, that this might be the missing piece. So we go ahead and try it and, often, it doesn’t work like we want, and that’s how cyclical, yo-yo dieting comes in.

The Process of Change

To understand motivation, you have to understand how change happens. That way, you can apply it.

Stage One: Pre-Contemplation

Pre-contemplation is when you recognize that there’s a problem. Maybe you have a patient who is a lifelong smoker with high blood pressure. They say their mother smoked for 80 years and lived to be 105, so smoking doesn’t affect their family and they’re not worried. Your strategy as a clinician is to help them see how things could affect their health. In the pre-contemplation phase, the patient would say, “I know smoking is bad.” 

If your goal is to gain muscle, your pre-contemplation phase may be realizing that you can’t carry your groceries into the house and you want to be stronger. It’s recognizing there is a perceived problem.

Stage Two: Contemplation

Contemplation is when we are considering doing something about it. We haven’t committed yet but we’re considering it. For me, this happens all the time. I proceed from pre-contemplation to contemplation pretty quickly. This phase is all about collecting data and seeing what options are out there. Maybe it’s Googling or speaking to a coach about what needs to happen for you to get stronger.

Stage Three: Planning

Planning is putting the plan into place. It’s saying that based on the studies, it looks like if you do strength training and hit the big muscle groups three times a week and fuel your body properly, you can gain muscle. Ideally, we’ll be very careful to create a realistic plan.

Stage Four: Take Action

The next step is taking action and executing your plan. Note that if we pick something that’s more than we can handle, we’re likely to lose motivation right away. Not being able to stick to your plan can create feelings of failure that crush our motivation. We have thoughts of, “I can’t do this. Why did I think I could do this?”, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

Stage Five: Maintenance 

When it comes to goals and health, sustainability is my favorite word. Anybody can try something and get results and move on, but we want to sustain our results forever. Many of us think it’s too late for us, that we’re past our prime. But I think we’re just getting started. 

This fifth stage is why creating a realistic plan that we can put into action and that we enjoy is so important. If we enjoy the journey, we’ll want to keep doing it, and we’ll be able to sustain it. 

When we make a habit change, it’ll take about six months to solidify. We have to set things up for success so that we can become motivated. The alternative of committing to an intense, complicated plan will make it much harder to make it through the action step to maintenance. We feel discouraged, not motivated.

Taking the Action

I have a client, Andrea, who successfully maintained a 55 pound weight loss for two years. One time, she told me about an article she read about motivation. The article said we sometimes hesitate to take an action because we’re afraid to fail. 

But in terms of habit creation, if we can show up every day and commit to the action that gets us to the end result, we’ll find the positives in showing up. By taking the action, we create new thoughts. Those new thoughts create feelings that drive the action even more. Ultimately, we’ll get the result we want. 

If we can have a very simple plan, if we just start and do something, even ten minutes once a week, we start to feel better and do it more and more. Committing to a baseline minimum, the smallest amount you’re willing to commit to, just doing it, may be the key to unlocking motivation. 

If you have limiting beliefs from past experiences in which you haven’t succeeded, it’s time to say, “That was then; this is now.” You can go through the change model and add the bonus feature of going right to the action, focusing on the beauty of the moment of action. 

The action can be fun! It makes you feel good and strong. It gives you thoughts of, “I’m worth it. This is worth it. This is working. I feel good,” thoughts that create motivation and drive you to continue taking action to get you to the result that you want.

I believe you can get any result that you want in your life. It just takes a bit of time, organization, and setting yourself up for success.

“I Can’t Have Food Freedom and Achieve Results.”

My Story

Have you ever had diet mentality? It may have affected you if you’ve ever been on a diet that gave you specific rules and restrictions. That’s the whole industry; there are certain rules and approaches and plans that you have to follow. There’s so much information out there that it can be so incredibly overwhelming, yet we fall into it. For the first 20 years of my life, I certainly did, for at least 15 or 16 of those years. When I was 5 I can already remember being on my first diet. 

When I was 5, one of my friend’s mothers told me that I was bigger than the other girls, that I’ll need to lose weight, and that I should go on a diet. I can still remember it. Although based on the growth chart I was actually a normal kid, it was already in my head that something was wrong with me. Over the years, that belief led me to find more evidence for why I wasn’t the same as my friends, that I should change and try to be different. That’s how I started experimenting with all the different diets out there: the Zone, Atkins, keto, Suzanne Somers, Weight Watchers, intermittent fasting, the 8-minute diet - you name it, I tried it.

The truth is that all of them will work, but to sustain the results that you get with them, you have to be able to continue doing them. Why did it take me until I was 25 to realize this? 

Freedom

Biologically, humans crave freedom. We don’t want others to tell us what to do. So what happens when we hear, “You can’t have that cake?”. The idea that we can’t do it just makes us want it even more. 

If you have any dieting history, you might think back about all the diets you’ve been on and how hard they were. Yet we somehow still believe that because it was difficult, it’s going to work. It’s the heaven’s reward fallacy, a thought distortion that tells us that the harder we work, the bigger the reward should be. It’s definitely an idea we hear often in clinical practice. As a result, the whole concept of having trust in ourselves goes out the window. 

But in order to find food freedom and get results, we have to start by trusting ourselves.

Defining Food Freedom

Often, when I say “food freedom” to people, they get freaked out. They say, “I can’t eat all the cake and candy and ice cream and pizza and fries I want and still get a six-pack. What are you talking about?” So we have to define what food freedom means to you. Is food freedom really just eating every single thing you’ve been told you shouldn’t have?

In reality, food freedom is tapping into your intuition. It’s noting when you’re hungry and when you’re full. It’s getting in touch with your natural hunger cues and your full signals. It’s asking your body what it wants and needs to feel healthy and vibrant. 

Here is an experiment I want you to do this week. If you’re losing fat, what do you crave? I crave fat. Makes sense, doesn’t it? When I’ve been doing a lot of weight training, my body craves protein. The signs are there. You’ll find freedom when you start listening to the signs. That’s how you’ll get results.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Hunger

First, we listen and start to notice. We want to get good at understanding when we’re hungry. We want to eat when we’re hungry, but before we get to the hangry zone when we can’t even focus. 

It’s important to discover and describe what hunger feels like for you in your body. Next time you’re hungry, think about what your body feels. For me, it’s a burning, radiating feeling in my stomach and esophagus. 

Now, I look for that feeling right before I’m ready to eat, but at a level that I could wait another half hour or so if I wanted to. That’s the prime opportunity to ask your body what it wants to eat.

Fullness

The next step is knowing when you’re full. Stopping to eat when we’re full can be hard and overwhelming for some people. You have to get comfortable with the slow feeling and empty space of being full.

Emotional Eating

Eliminating emotional eating takes a lot of work. It requires allowing the feelings deep inside your body and realizing that everything is going to be okay. If you can eliminate the extra food that comes in when you’re not hungry, you’ll move even closer to a space that your optimal health body wants to be at.

Notice I don’t mention what your goals should be. We’re talking about optimal health, which will look different for every person. You get to determine what your optimal health is. It doesn’t have to involve a scale number. You can choose how to define optimal health for yourself. 

Movement

Another piece of this is loving movement, remembering why movement is present in our lives and all the benefits we get out of movement besides how it can potentially make us look. That’s just another thing that will happen over time as we stay consistent.

Think about the movements that you love doing, because those are the ones that you’ll do again and again. Think about what you love about them. What do you feel as you’re doing these exercises? Creating a mind-body connection will allow you to be in the moment. That’s when exercise can reduce stress, and that’s how we learn to love movement.

Perfectionism

Many women physicians struggle with perfectionism. But if we try to be perfect, it’s hard to trust ourselves. When we constantly set high expectations and don’t meet them, we’re no longer perfect in our own eyes. We believe we did something to let ourselves down. Little by little, we start to lose trust in ourselves. When we lose self-trust, we don’t believe we have the ability to know what we need so we can have freedom and achieve the goals and results we really want.

Gentle Nutrition

When we’re really going for certain results, like total body transformation, gentle nutrition has to come into the equation. Typically when we try to build muscle mass to shift our body fat percentage, we need to have balanced meals that have some macronutrient combining involved. 

Freedom for me is being able to know how to combine foods my way, not having to be at the mercy of a food scale or exact macros. It’s being able to pick exactly what I want to eat and not having to follow a prescribed plan. 

I recommend working within a ten-pound weight range that your body may be in. The lower end is when you’re really dialling it in, having a specific goal and working extra hard to get there, focusing on your hunger scale and keeping your meals balanced and healthy. The other end is about following the intuitive piece but not being so specific about how honed in things are. Ultimately, you can be anywhere in that ten-pound range that you want to be and feel really comfortable and free with it.

The bottom line? We can find food freedom and get the exact results we want to have. It’s all about self-trust and being completely realistic, taking the time to talk to your body. 

Food Freedom and Results?

This week in my coaching groups, we talked all about freedom and results.

What do I mean by this?

You know how you want to have freedom... things like eating what sounds good to you, exercising the way you want to, going out to dinner without always having to avoid the bread.  Essentially throwing away the rules that we have carried with us for years.

There is this common misconception that we have to be so strict with our food and follow all these restrictive diets in order to actually get healthier. Even more than this, that you can’t possibly eat what your body craves without gaining weight.

Let’s talk about why this is absolutely not the case!

You can have total food freedom while still hitting your goals and achieving the results you want. In fact, when you learn to trust your body and pick up on the cues it gives you, your goals will actually be way easier to hit. Not to mention way less restrictive.

Food freedom is all about tapping into your intuition and listening to your body. Eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full. If these are completely new concepts to you, it really is all about slowing down and paying attention.

A good example is that I know I’m in fat-burning mode when my body is craving fattier foods. Similarly, if I’ve been going really hard in the gym, I know that I will need to up my protein intake to nourish my muscles.

So many of us eat when we’re not hungry, for whatever reason. Sometimes, that reason is actually anxiety, which can mimic hunger signals. That’s why it’s important to get really in tune with your body’s wants and needs.

What I’d really encourage you to do is figure out what optimal health looks and feels like for you. Not what some exercise program or diet tells you is right, but what actually feels good. Included in this might be a ten-pound weight range where that fluctuates based on your body’s needs at the time.

If you do want to achieve some more specific body results, I’d recommend combining intuitive eating with a gentle nutrition approach. This way, you eat what’s best for your body while still fueling it with the nutrients it needs to perform best.

There are many gentle nutrition programs out there. My program, Mindful Macros, is a gentle nutrition strategy that allows you to estimate the ideal macronutrients for your body. Stay tuned, I have a whole podcast episode being released later this month.

We have signs.

The signs are there.

You will find food freedom when you start listening to the signs.

You will get results by tapping into your freedom when you’re listening to the signs.

You got this, my friend.

“I Don’t Lose Weight As Fast As Others”

The Thought Model

When I think, “I don’t lose weight as fast as other people,” my feeling is concerned. I feel like there must be something wrong with me, which also makes me concerned. It turns into a negative thought spiral, all of which creates the same feeling, making our concern get more and more intense. 

When we feel concerned, we analyze everything we’ve ever done, all the times we’ve failed at losing weight. We go on social media and look at all the other “successful” people and compare ourselves. We feel hopeless. As a result, we feel like it’s way too hard to do anything to get us closer to our goals and give up.

Of course it will feel hard if we have self-defeating thoughts. When you feel defeated, you’re not going to keep doing things that you think are hard. You think, “Well, it’s not working anyway, so why should I waste my time?”

The Individual You

The reality is that there can be truth in the comment “I don’t lose weight as fast as other people.” That can be a scientific fact.

You can draw some light conclusions on how you’ll respond to losing weight based on your body type. I’m mostly a mesomorph, which means I put on muscle easily. I know when I move my body, eat toward my hunger scale, and make good, balanced decisions, I’m not necessarily going to lose weight on the scale. But maybe my ectomorph friend who has the same habits would drop weight. Or an endomorph may gain a couple of pounds. There are so many different scenarios here. It’s all about understanding how your body works and what it responds to.

So maybe you do lose weight slower than some. And maybe you lose weight faster than others. But at the end of the day, the actions you’re taking and your lifestyle have more of an impact on your ability to lose weight than the make-up of your body.

Sure, we all have different tolerance to carbohydrates and different insulin and hunger hormone sensitivities. Nonetheless, most of us can work around these things. 

The first thing to do is to stop the comparison. Stop the over-generalization. Ultimately, what does it matter how fast this process of weight loss goes if you’re having fun doing it? What if losing weight was so fun? Would you want it to go fast? Probably not. We’re too concerned with the speed at which we’re achieving our goal. We think if we get there faster, we’ll be happier. So we forget to start off with being happy with who we are as a unique person. 

If we can consider releasing the expectation that we would ever have to compare our bodies to anybody else, what’s the next step? If there’s nobody to compare ourselves to, we may be a little bored. We feel restless when there’s nothing to complain about. But maybe we can put this energy into understanding ourselves - our body type, how foods sit in our body, how we feel when we exercise - a bit more. 

Commitment and Sustainability

The most important question is, “Do you like what you’re doing?” Consistency is always going to be the answer for us to achieve sustainable results. 

What matters more than how quickly you lose (or gain) weight and how that compares to others is where you are right now, if you love where you are right now, what you know about your body type and lifestyle, and what you want. 

Fueling your body well and moving will improve your long-term health. It will allow you to carry your groceries when you’re 80 and prevent common diseases. If you can make a plan based on improving your health and enjoying what you’re doing, you’ll want to keep at it. It’ll become part of your life. You’ll exercise, eat healthy, and be accountable to yourself and others because you want to and you enjoy it.

If you’re thinking there’s nothing that sounds good long term, you’re probably setting too big of an expectation on yourself. If you have the thought, ”I can’t work out every day so it’s not worth it,” you’ll feel defeated and you won’t work out at all. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What if instead, you believe, “Ten minutes is better than nothing?” You’ll feel curious. You’ll experiment with exercising more. It’ll feel good so you’ll do it again the next day and the next. This is how you develop a lifestyle, by focusing on how exercise feels in your body but not setting the expectation too high. 

We want to create confidence and build our relationship with ourselves. It’s all about understanding who we are and pursuing being the best versions of ourselves.

Maybe you don’t even want to lose weight. Maybe the problem isn’t the food, the exercise, or the weight. Maybe there’s something else you haven’t worked through yet. It’s all a discovery process. Maybe you can start noticing your limiting beliefs and see what happens when you don’t believe them. 

If you are trying to lose weight for your health, stay in your own lane. Don’t worry about anyone else around you. This is your time to find out exactly what will work for you and what you love doing. The secret to weight loss maintenance is to do things your way so you can be consistent.

The bottom line is that you are perfect just as you are today. I don’t care if you have a little tummy or if your thighs rub together. I don’t care if you keep the same skinny jeans hoping that one day they’ll fit just a little differently. You’re worthy. All I’m asking you to do is decide what you want. What makes sense for your life? With self-love and compassion, I want you to find the next first step you can take to make your dreams a reality. 

“I Need To Be In Better Shape To Go To The Gym”

If you’ve felt that you need to be in better shape to go to the gym, don’t feel bad; you’re not alone. I’ve felt this way, too. It’s human nature: we want to be accepted. We believe that if we go to the gym and we’re not in the kind of shape that we think we should be, we’ll be judged - by other and by ourselves, too.

See, the reality is that we tend to judge ourselves for everything. In fact, we may not even know we’re doing it. But any time we think there’s something we should or shouldn’t have done, that’s a self-judgment. This belief that something has gone wrong and we haven’t lived up to an expectation is just that: a belief and a thought distortion - not a reality.

The Gym

When you think of the gym, you may imagine lots of in-shape people walking around in designer fitness wear, laughing with their friends. It’s a big community full of beautiful people. And if we don’t believe that we’re a part of that crew, we already believe we don’t belong there. Having a certain image in mind of how we’ll have to look in order to allow ourselves to go to the gym will only create more judgment.

We all have an image of people that are “allowed” in the gym. Imagine you’re at the gym in the current shape you’re in. Picture yourself there. What’s happening? Do you feel nervous? Does it seem like people are looking at you? Worrying about what others are thinking is human nature. But we don’t have to care what others think. We can choose not to, it just takes a bit of work.

The reality is that nobody at the gym cares how much you’re lifting. They don’t care how fast your treadmill is going. They don’t care what you’re wearing. They simply don’t notice. If somebody does care, it’s more a projection of their own thoughts about themselves than anything to do with you. 

Part of the solution to overcome the constant feeling of being judged is to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there again and again, and realize that nothing bad is going to happen. The minute we decide to be vulnerable and present, we feel calm, relaxed, and believe we can show up anywhere and work out. If we can believe that we’re perfect as is, having that self-love and self-acceptance, we stop allowing others’ judgment to take over our lives.

At the end of the day, there’s no requirement to enter a gym other than that you want to be there and better yourself. It has nothing to do with how you look, how much you can lift, or anything of that type.

Eating

One of the things that comes up all the time is worry about others judging what we’re eating. This comes up often with my clients who want to lose weight for their health. They’re very concerned about not wanting to be seen eating a “bad’ food because they’re worried they will be judged. They say, “If somebody sees me eating pizza, they’ll think I don’t care about my health or I’m not trying hard enough.” 

But nobody has ever actually said that to them. We create these thoughts based on what we think. Maybe that means that when we see others eating pizza, we’re judging them. See, how we talk to ourselves reflects how we see the world. It’s not something to feel bad about; it’s just the way our brains work. The beautiful thing is that we can correct it; it’s all about noticing that judgment in ourselves. 

This is where the diet mentality - classifying foods as “good” and “bad” - comes in. Suddenly, we’re not just judging ourselves; we’re judging our food, too. Alternatively, with intuitive eating, you dial into your body’s unique and natural hunger cues to decide what food will serve your body best at any given moment. Eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re satisfied will allow you to arrive at your body’s natural healthy weight. 

The beauty of intuitive eating is that we get to honor our unique bodies and achieve optimum health. We stop judging food. We heal our relationship with our bodies. We determine which foods are “sometimes” and which are “all the time” foods, but there’s room for all foods. That’s what is sustainable.

Seeing People After You’ve Gained Weight

Many of my clients have been chronic dieters for years, losing and gaining weight again and again, and they often worry about what others will think when they see them again after a while and they’ve maybe gained some weight for any variety of reasons. We start judging ourselves for having gained weight. We think it says something negative about us and we assume others are judging us in the same way. 

We create the story that others are judging us with the same exact words we judge ourselves with. But that’s impossible because no two people think exactly alike. Chances are, the people you care about don’t even notice the fluctuations in your body. And the more you accept your own unique body, the less fearful you’ll feel of other people and their judgments. 

Finding Freedom

When you don’t judge yourself, you won’t assume others are judging you either. It all starts with us. Whether it’s about going to the gym, how we’re eating, our weight gain, or our clothing choices, we have to come to terms with what we’re doing, what we want, and who we are. Then the other voices around us cease to matter. When we can believe in how we’re showing up, we become free.

When you’re free of judgment, anything can be going on in your life - unemployment, weight gain, anything - and you’ll maintain your self-love. If we can accept and honor where we are in our journey, that’s freedom. When we can release that judgment, we won’t be worried about how others perceive what we’re doing. The first step is to love, accept, and own ourselves and our decisions. 

It’s not about never judging yourself. It’s about recognizing when we do. That’s what will lead you to freedom.

“I Have No Grace For Myself Over The Holidays”

In general, it’s already hard enough to give ourselves grace in everyday life. In general, we always think that we “should” do it better. Now add the holidays: expectations are higher, you’re busier, and there are more triggers going on. We’re already primed to give ourselves even less grace over the holidays. 

Perfectionism

Let’s talk about perfectionism. Maybe it’s gotten us pretty far in our careers. It’s allowed us to provide good care for patients even when we’re exhausted and sleep-deprived. But as the years go by and we work more and more, that perfectionism can spill into all areas of our lives. 

Perfectionism tells us we have to be perfect, but there is no such thing as perfect. You’ll only think you’re perfect when you have 100% nailed the very high expectations you or somebody else had for you. 

Perfectionists live in the all or none zone. If they think a goal isn’t hard enough, they believe it isn’t worthwhile. The grey zone is difficult. But when we set expectations, all or none thinking won’t serve us. It’ll lead us to an unhappy place of pressure that builds and builds until we can’t take it anymore, pop the valve, and release it somehow, usually through one of various buffering behaviors such as over-eating, over-thinking, or over-shopping.

Exercise Goals Over the Holidays

It’s time to evaluate whatever goal you’ve set for your health this holiday season. Maybe you want to work out for two hours every day over the holiday break. Is this realistic? Can you 100% meet this goal? If not, consider a different goal.

Think about the concept of “baseline minimum,” when you set a minimum amount of exercise that you plan to accomplish during the holiday season. That is what you commit to doing. If you commit to five minutes five days a week, you celebrate that accomplishment. If you want to start living in the grey zone, where you can find contentment all day long, it’s about setting smaller goals. 

Part of giving yourself grace is coming to terms with not every goal having to be a mega marathon goal. It means committing to something you’re willing and wanting to do and then doing it. That way, there’s no room to beat yourself up.

But let’s say you shoot a little high, wanting to work out 45 minutes, three times a week throughout the entire holiday season. And let’s say you fall short. That’s an opportunity to give yourself grace by reevaluating. All you have to do is reevaluate and then choose to move forward with a new plan. 

Maybe you’ve been in a situation when you haven’t made an exercise plan. You get ten days into the holiday season but you haven’t worked out. And you think, “Well, New Years is almost here. I’ll just start on January 1st.” This is a pretty popular way of thinking.

If you’re heading into this holiday season and you don’t exercise, I want to put out there the fact that there are many benefits to it. Something as simple as walking is amazing. Those endorphins alone will help you feel better and give your brain the space to create new thoughts that allow you to find unconditional love and ultimate grace for yourself.

Eating During the Holidays

What if you could be the person who never worried about eating during the holidays or on vacation? It’s not about being perfect, but rather how good you feel when you follow a nutrition style that makes you feel healthy. 

When we set high standards of avoiding every potentially indulgent thing during the holiday season, we better have a good reason for it. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure because you probably won’t meet that expectation. This is where we want to set realistic nutrition goals during this holiday season.

My style is a combination of intuitive eating with gentle nutrition. Intuitive eating means knowing your hunger cues: when you’re hungry, when your full, and what your body is asking for. It’s not a diet plan. It’s about you getting in touch with your body, whether it prefers to eat carbs or not, to be five pounds heavier or five pounds lighter. When we’re willing to honor our unique body, we can have complete food freedom. Then you’ll enjoy the holidays, vacations, and every day. 

The Hunger Scale

The hunger scale will allow you to get through the holiday season open-minded to listen to what your body is telling you, finding a new love for yourself. It’s less important what the food you eat is, and more about your ability to say when you’re hungry and full.

It’s all about getting hungry first and stopping when you’re satisfied. Before you eat, ask yourself if you’re hungry. (If the answer is no and you eat anyway, it’s a perfect opportunity to give yourself grace.) 

It’s okay to stop eating when you’re full. We don’t have to eat everything because it’s there. But if you do overeat, take a grace period to reevaluate and make a plan for next time, when you wait until your body is hungry to eat again. 

When you do this and realize nothing has gone wrong, that you can keep it going year-round, you’ll get in the zone, stop restricting, give yourself grace, and realize you don’t want to overeat or indulge anymore.

If this is a new concept for you and you’re used to sticking to a certain plan to get results, ask yourself if the plan has worked for you. Has it been sustainable? Whatever you’ve done in the past, don’t judge it. Judgment is the opposite of grace. 

Everything you’ve done in the past - whether it included yo-yo dieting or extreme exercise - it’s all okay. You didn’t waste any time. It got you to this point, where you can find your sweet spot- that space where you can achieve what you want your way. 

It takes evaluation of your body type, your food preferences, and movement. But if you can stop judging, realizing your past has given you data and knowledge, you’ll learn that every new minute is a clean slate. You don’t have to wait until New Years’; you have a clean slate right now. What is the next best step forward? That is giving grace. 

Reevaluate where you are now. Look at the past with non-judgment. And look at the future with hope. Everything you’re doing is amazing. I hope you have the most amazing holiday season full of love and grace.

“I Am Dreading The Holidays”

Holiday dread starts even before Halloween. What will we do with all of our leftover Halloween candy? Will we have time to make our children costumes? How will we celebrate during the COVID-19 pandemic? How will the holidays shake out with our work schedule? Will we have time off?

Holidays tend to come with a lot of stress because we put extreme expectations on ourselves and others. But if we do a few key things, we can get our minds in the right place to cruise into this upcoming holiday season feeling great both mentally and physically. 

Having a Plan

When we have a plan, we think, “I have it all figured out.” We feel content. As a result, we’re grateful for having a plan, whatever it may be. As long as you know what to expect, you set yourself up for success. 

So think about the holidays you’ll be celebrating over the next few months. Get a calendar. Mark the time you have off and note anything else relevant. Have conversations with the people who will be involved in your celebration. Communicate so there is no guessing. 

Planning the holiday season will free time up for you and allow you to enjoy the experience even more.

Mental Planning

One great habit to develop is to do a simple thought download. It’s essentially a journal entry where you dump your thoughts down on paper and see what thoughts are coming up. There’s something magical about seeing your thoughts written down. 

Starting now, give yourself three minutes every day to dump all your thoughts down on paper. After a few days, you’ll start to see some trends. You’ll notice what’s really going on for you.

Try this exercise. Pick one person you’ll be seeing during the holidays. Maybe this is a person who typically disappoints you. Write down all the ways that they disappoint you and what expectations you have of them. Once you can see things more clearly, you can decide if you want to communicate what these expectations are. When you do that, you may realize that your expectations are unrealistic or that you never communicated them. This can open the door to improving your relationships with the people you care about. 

Another practice you can adopt is asking yourself “what do I need?”. That simple question will help you understand what you need to enjoy the holiday season instead of stressing about it. 

Physical Planning

Food

Many of my clients find the holidays difficult when it comes to their health goals. They want to enjoy all of the foods and drinks that come as part of their holiday celebrations. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that while continuing to pursue your health goals. It’s all about expectations and planning. 

You have to be honest with yourself about whether or not it’s realistic to stick to your food plan during the holidays. If you know you’ll be at Aunt Betty’s for Hanukkah and you can’t resist her lasagna and triple chocolate delight, you can plan to have it. It’s much better to plan for that than to insist on resisting it and disappoint yourself when you show up to Betty’s house and struggle to meet your unrealistic expectations. 

If you have a plan that you’ll go and enjoy some of your favorite things, you’re keeping the promise you made to yourself. But if you make a different promise and don’t keep it, you’ll be really disappointed in yourself, which is the last thing you want during an already stressful and packed holiday season. In fact, your disappointment may be the very thing that leads you to throw your plan out the window during the next celebration, thinking, “I already messed up so I’ll just go crazy now and try to be good again after the new year.”

One of your most powerful tools during the holiday season will be following your intuition when it comes to food. Learn to determine if you’re hungry. If you are, you should eat. Learn to determine when you’re full. If you’re comfortably full, you should stop eating. These two simple rules will allow your body to tell you what it needs without making any specific foods off-limits.

That way, you can enjoy family and food and all of the things that make the holidays so special while also feeling confident that you don’t have to have strict guidelines and rules in order to achieve progress. All it requires is trust.

Exercise 

We all know that during the holidays, we may be a bit more tired. Maybe we stayed up late. Maybe the wine was flowing. So sometimes we wake up and decide that we’ll save the exercise for next year.

This year, try to make a plan instead. Choose a minimum amount of activity you’ll do during the holiday season. Choose a realistic exercise routine that you’ll be able to stick to during the holidays. It can be as simple as going on walks with your family, going skiing, or doing some laps in an indoor pool. You can get a great workout doing so many different things. Use that to your advantage. It’s not about changing how your body looks. It’s about doing movement that feels good for you.

Accountability 

You have to be accountable to yourself first. The way to make any habits sustainable long-term is to be our own best accountability partner. It’s about continuing to cultivate the relationship you have with yourself by keeping your word to yourself. Show up for yourself like how you would for a friend. Do this because you’re worth it. You don’t need other people checking over your shoulder. 

The more you can keep yourself accountable, the more consistent you’ll be. As a result, others will know what to expect from you. This will help you create the boundaries you want.

Boundaries

There will be situations during the holiday season that will require you to communicate boundaries. It may not be super comfortable. Challenge yourself to set boundaries for yourself and others.

Maybe you want to make a conscious decision to decrease the amount of time you spend on social media on your phone. Sticking to that boundary will give you confidence that you can maintain boundaries with others, too. The first step is to be rock solid with the boundaries you set for yourself. 

If you can plan, set boundaries, and stay accountable to yourself (and others), you can cruise through the holiday season achieving any result that you want. 

“The Holidays Are So Challenging”

In this article, we’ll focus on two of the most common challenges that come up during the holidays: our health and comments from others. 

Exercise

There are a couple of things that typically pose a challenge to exercising during the holidays:  there’s less time and we’re in a place without our usual exercise equipment. But these challenges are surmountable as long as you create a realistic exercise plan.

Sit down and think about a realistic amount of time you can commit to exercise during the whole holiday season. Write out your plan and decide the minimum amount of exercise you can commit to no matter what. Schedule in what works for you.

Let’s say you’ll be with family on Thanksgiving. Maybe Thanksgiving day itself will be a rest day for you. Or, if not, maybe you’ll fit in twenty minutes in the morning before the festivities begin. 

Scheduling in your exercise is how you’ll get past the roadblock of not having enough time or the right equipment. You can get creative with your exercise. You don’t need something elaborate; walking works. Jogging is great. 

Once you commit to a holiday season exercise schedule, make it non-negotiable. It’ll help you enter the new year feeling energetic and amazing.

Food

We know this challenge well: there is so much food everywhere during the holidays. But maybe that’s something to be grateful for. When we come from a place of gratitude, we can savor and enjoy our food. 

If you approach the food situation with gratitude, you don’t have to stress and worry about temptation. Gratitude will put you in a more mindful place and help you eat intuitively. It’s all about asking yourself if you’re hungry or full, and what your body needs in any given moment. 

Commit to one goal: only eat when you’re hungry. If you can live by that rule, you will be so much happier during the holidays. You’ll cruise through the season and even make progress. You can start this habit today and carry it with you forever.

If you’re new to this, you may not have a strong sense of your natural hunger cues. If you’ve been on diets, it can take time to redevelop this sense. But it’s possible to regain that ability, and it’s worth trying. 

Drinking

Festive holiday drinks are so fun, but it can get a little crazy. That’s why it comes down to having a plan. 

Try to really decide ahead of time how much you’re willing to drink. Focus on how you feel after you have a large quantity of alcohol. How are you sleeping? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Yes, in the moment, drinking will be fun. But how will it affect you long-term? Keeping that in mind will allow you to make a better plan for you.

If you know ahead of time that your family likes to bring out the spiked eggnog and frosted martinis for Christmas, you’ll want to plan for that. If you want to partake, own it ahead of time so you can enjoy it. You don’t have to be restrictive, but you do need to have a plan. Every sip of every drink should be worth it to you. 

You don’t have to take the food and alcohol out of the experience and have a boring holiday in order to be healthier. You’re welcome to have whatever you want. Just get hungry first, plan your alcohol, and keep water nearby to double hydrate whatever you’re drinking. That will allow you to feel better and stick to your exercise plan.

Comments from Other People

When it comes to comments from other people, you have three choices. You can be prepared ahead of time, deciding how you’re going to respond and feel. You can be prepared to set a boundary when these comments come up. Or you can just avoid the party and the comments altogether.

Maybe your Aunt Betty will comment on why you’re not eating dessert. You know that Aunt Betty shows love through food and you don’t want to hurt her feelings. You’ll think, “She feels bad that I’m not having dessert, which makes me feel bad.” Then you start considering having the pie that you already planned not to have. Instead, you can say something gracious like, “Everything has been amazing and I’m so full. I’m going to wait until I get hungry again.” Nobody can argue with that.

Or maybe at the dinner table, you’re comfortably full, so you stop eating. And then somebody will ask, “Aren’t you going to finish that?”. Again, you can go back to, “The food has been so amazing. I’m not hungry at all. I’m going to wait until I’m hungry again and I can really enjoy it.” You can own it.

If you haven’t seen your family members for a while, they may notice you look a little different and pay more attention to what you eat. They may say, “You barely ate anything.” This is a great opportunity to educate your family with, “I’m just really listening to my body and I’m not hungry right now.” It may even motivate and inspire other family members to get curious about intuitive eating and food freedom.

Or somebody may flat out comment on your body and ask, “Have you lost weight? You look so thin.” or “Have you gained weight?”. This can be triggering for many of us, so it may be a good time to set a boundary. Maybe you’ll say, “I’ve been really trying to listen to my body.” Or maybe you’ll set a boundary and say, “You tend to focus on my body and it makes me really uncomfortable. I’d prefer if you stop doing that.” Most often, people will listen to you.

I hope these tips will allow you to have the holiday you deserve knowing you’re in complete control.

“I Feel So Alone”

The Feeling of Loneliness

Loneliness tends to hit you right in the pit of the stomach. It radiates to the heart. It’s darker in color. It’s a slower emotion, which is why it can feel like it’s never going to go away. It’s heavy.

What thoughts make us feel this way? “I’m isolated. I have no one. Nobody understands me. No one is there to help me.”

The truth is that loneliness isn’t cured by having tons of relationships and friendships and being around people all the time. Instead, we can combat it by having deep connections. 

Relationships versus Connections

You could have a hundred friends and still be lonely. For example, maybe you have dozens of sorority sisters, but you don’t connect with any of them. An outsider looking into the situation would think that you’re not lonely at all. How could you be? You have sisterhood and camaraderie. But inside, you may be feeling alone because you haven’t made deep, quality connections. 

Resolving Loneliness

Dealing with loneliness all starts with us loving ourselves, being confident, and finding strength within ourselves. When we do this, that can be our first deep connection. If you’re deeply connected to who you are, you can eliminate loneliness by yourself. 

How to Foster Your Connection With Yourself

Awareness

Step one of fostering your connection with yourself is self-awareness: understanding who you are, why you’re here, and what you want. 

There are so many things you can do to learn more about yourself. Don’t be afraid to explore that. You can do a reading with an astrologer. You can do an Enneagram personality test. You can play a get to know you game to get feedback from others.

Anything that can give you more self-awareness is powerful. Ultimately, we’re not who we were yesterday; we’re who we are today. And how we show up today has a hand in deciding who we will be in the future. We have total control in deciding how things will go from here on out. 

Knowing who we are and how we’re unique is really powerful. We start to respect ourselves more when we understand ourselves more. When we don’t know who we are, we aimlessly wander and hope something sticks. In contrast, when we really know who we are, we start taking action, making change, and taking our life in the direction we want.

Acceptance

Step two is self-acceptance. “This is who I am. I was made perfectly imperfect and I can love that.” There’s no such thing as perfection and no need to chase after it. If you try to chase it, you’ll just get frustrated and give up. So accept who you are as you are. You have permission to love yourself as you are today. That’s how you stop feeling lonely. 

When we feel lonely, we wonder who we can find to make us feel better. We feel like we have no one. But you can have yourself. It’s just a matter of starting the process of believing that. You have to do the work to make yourself believe that you are enough as you are to give yourself everything you need.

When you have a solid relationship with yourself, you’ll be able to build stronger relationships with others. When you come into a deeply connected relationship with another person, it will no longer be about you running from your loneliness. It’ll be about how you show up to the relationship with love for yourself and a knowledge of what you want.

If you hold yourself to these standards of how you want to show up for yourself, you’ll attract people that are doing the same thing for themselves, instead of attracting people who always want more and more from you, which may make you retract and stop pursuing finding a relationship.

How to Build Confidence

When you have the confidence to start putting yourself out there into the world to attract deep, meaningful relationships, you can enhance the ability to experience life with other people. 

Take Care of Your Physical Health

By taking care of your physical health and establishing an exercise routine, you can decrease feelings of loneliness. It’s all about confidence building, understanding your unique body, understanding what you want for yourself, and showing up for yourself. 

In fact, some of the strongest relationships I ever had came from sports teams. That’s because, through activity, you’ll gain confidence and meet other people who show up for themselves. Gyms and classes are a supportive, community environment where you can build strength from within and externally with others who want the same thing. When you confidently move your body and create a complete awareness of who you are, it feels safe. Those types of relationships take off. 

Take Care of Your Mental Health

There’s also the facet of mental exercise, constantly challenging yourself to be aware of your thoughts and how they show up. Our thoughts create our feelings, our actions, and our results. We can reevaluate our thoughts, create new beliefs, and create the results we want based on a belief. This takes time, work, and commitment, but it can be one of the best things you can do to combat loneliness.

Set Small Goals

2021 is coming up. Instead of making all or none goals for the new year like “I’m going to eat perfectly,” set a small goal for yourself - any goal that will help you overcome any resistance you’re feeling. Go to the place that feels heavy and then pick the smallest goal possible, the smallest step forward, to get out of that situation. 

Maybe what feels heavy is that you feel overscheduled. You commit to too many things on the weekends. You want to have the flexibility to sit around if you want to. Instead of committing to not scheduling anything every Saturday for the rest of your life, try to pick one Saturday this month to have two hours of unscheduled time. Own it. Show up. Try it and see how it feels. If it feels good, do it again. Keep building until you hit it just where you want it. 

This is how we change and develop new habits. This is how we’ll stop feeling lonely. It’ll give us the confidence we need to believe in who we are to have an improved relationship with ourselves so that we are willing to create deep and meaningful relationships with other people. 

“I Can’t Let Go of My Anger”

You know that stirring feeling deep in your body that won’t go away? Mostly, it doesn’t feel good... But there’s a littlepart of it that does feel nice, which makes us want to hold on. That’s anger.

Anger is typically located in your chest, and it radiates to all different areas like your head. It’s fast and aggressive. It’s gnawing. It’s bright red or orange. 

Back in the day, when homo sapiens survived based on their ability to vanquish enemies and bring food home to their tribes, those who made it tended to have dopamine released when they were angry. That’s why sometimes anger can feel really good and be hard to let go of… Could that be because we have good reason to feel angry? 

What Anger Does

Why is it a problem when you can’t let your anger go? What is the problem with holding onto anger? Let’s say anger is the circumstance. Your thought is, “I should not still be mad about this.” So what comes up? Typically, when we say “should,” it can bring up a good amount of anxiety. Because what it says is, “Where I am right now is not okay.” When we feel anxious, what actions do we take?

We ruminate. We think about the scenario again and again. We relive it. We’re irritable and snappy and in a bad mood. Some blame comes up, maybe for yourself or the other person in the situation. It becomes this drawn-out drama. Typically, our anger makes us want to do something. But we can’t go out and do the physical things anger makes us want to do, because it’s not socially appropriate. So what do we do? We bottle it in. The result is a mess. We don’t want to feel this way but we don’t know how to get past it.

Anger is Your Friend

But what if I told you holding onto anger is actually your friend? What if anger were our little buddy that reminded us that we have the ability and right to keep our boundaries? Maybe it’s the voice that protects you from other people stepping past your boundaries.

So let’s say instead of thinking, “I should not still be mad about this,” we think, “Anger is here to protect me. Anger is trying to remind me to not ignore it.” What feeling comes up? Relaxation. I feel like I can let my guard down. One of my actions is that I’m not so uptight. I can let everything be. I’m not afraid of confrontation or others trying to cross my boundaries. In fact, I’ll probably respect other people’s boundaries even more. The result is that anger can stay. It’s welcome any time.

Embracing Anger

Let me offer a personal example. Once, I hired somebody and was working with them on a project. We had clear conversations about my expectations. Not all of them were in writing, but I had trust and open-mindedness that things would go as we discussed. But as the months went on, the things that were promised verbally weren’t happening and I started to have a gut feeling that something wasn’t right.

Four months in, I knew it was time to move on. I spoke to the individual. And in the end, we agreed. But after all was said and done, I was angry at myself. I thought that I should have stood up for myself even more. But this was all-or-none thinking. I had stood up for myself. Did I say every single thing I could have said? No. But maybe that is how it was supposed to go. Maybe the positive end result was that I knew what the next step was.

When I started to look at it that way, and realized it was my dear friend anger that pointed out to me that my boundaries were being crossed, it changed everything. I started to open my eyes to all the other places in my life that I was letting boundaries slip and slide. I realized that for me to be able to serve my family and clients and self, I needed to be much clearer about these things.

I started deciding how I wanted things to go, and I noticed that every time I was just starting to make a decision, I paused and thought, “But what would so-and-so think about this? Wouldn’t it make them feel bad?”. 

Then, my coach dropped a life-changing truth bomb on me: “Your life and your business is not a democracy.” This powerful and clear thought allowed me to take ownership of what I really want and not be afraid of my anger.

My word for 2020 was boundaries. And it’s just now, two months before the end of the year, that it’s all starting to fall into place. So now, as we’re starting to approach the end of this year, it’s time to look toward choosing a word for 2021. What do you want for yourself? What can you commit to? 

“I Can’t Be Happy Unless I leave Clinical Medicine”

My Story

I am a neonatologist by training. After I graduated fellowship, I just had my first baby and I was ready to start a brand-new job. I signed on to stay at the institution I trained at. It was more time than I wanted, but I was so tied to my training institution that I couldn’t imagine leaving. 

Thanks to my mother-in-law, who essentially became our live-in nanny, things went smoother than they usually do. But I was away from my baby nearly all the time. I was either working full days and coming home to see her for just a couple of hours, or I worked overnight shifts. And that’s not to mention the other responsibilities of the job like research and projects. 

I realized three months in that I wasn’t sure I took the right job. I would even go in and stalk the schedule of the other institution I interviewed for on AmIOn. And it looked great. I thought it could work for me. And I second-guessed why I hadn’t taken that job in the first place. 

I thought I had to leave my current job for a different job to get the result of having the life I wanted. So I interviewed with the director of the new hospital that I was hoping to work at. It seemed like a great fit. I was ready to go.

When I took the job, I felt relieved. I loved my colleagues. I loved being back into the delivery units. I loved every second of it. 

But we will always find reasons why we can’t be happy. Just switching the circumstance alone will never improve everything. And even though my schedule was improved in terms of time, I noticed I had to work more on weekends and holidays. 

The truth is, there are trade-offs no matter what we do. But at the time, I didn’t realize it. About four years into that job, I started feeling like things weren’t right, and I heard a pretty big corporation was looking for a neonatologist. I’d have set hours. No weekends or holidays. An increased salary. 

I believed that a set schedule with no holidays and weekends was what I wanted. So I changed my circumstance yet again. I took the job. I thought this would be the thing that would finally make me happy. I started the job. It was a very steep learning curve.

Around this time, I found coaching. It was a huge epiphany for me. I learned that we really do have control over our thoughts and situations. I realized I couldn’t just keep trialing a bunch of different positions with the hope that I’d eventually be happy. I had to find contentment from within and then make the decision to move on if I wanted to.

I decided that I wanted to be a coach. I went to coach training. I started coaching as a side gig. I was loving it. I wasn’t sure where it would go, but I started to see that this could be what I do all the time. Yet I realized I couldn’t just jump straight into having my own business. I couldn’t just change the circumstance without first getting really clear on a few things: how I want to feel and what result I wanted.

What happened? The coaching felt natural and good. I kept going. I took more clients. I created programs. I gained a great group of women physicians. They saw progress. The momentum moved. It felt right. I got so busy with my business that I didn’t’ know what to do with my full-time job.

Ultimately, I made the decision to leave my full-time non-clinical job because I found happiness. I wasn’t running away from it. But I had found what was driving me. Things made sense. I found clarity. I made the decision that I wanted to go in a different direction. 

That’s how you have to make decisions and changes. It’s about doing it because you’re ready to move forward with an open mind and go for it. Not running away or changing something in hope that things will get better elsewhere.

You Can Find Happiness Today

At this point, you’ve probably figured out the lesson of my story. Just changing a circumstance and leaving medicine won’t make you happier. That happiness has to come from the work you do within. 

Think about it. Whatever circumstance you find yourself in, how can you find contentment today? No matter what’s going on at work, with your boss, with your colleagues, with your patients, how can you find some kind of contentment right now?

The answer is working on your thoughts, choosing what you want to believe so you can gain the feeling that you want to feel. 

I promise you can find contentment somehow right here, right now, today. The question is are you willing to do so? We often indulge in thoughts that keep us trapped. It’s difficult to let go of the thoughts that are protecting our ego, like “I’m right. This shouldn’t have happened to me.” 

But all that does is create more pressure. It holds us back. It prevents us from finding the contentment we’re really seeking. While you may choose to leave your current situation, the first step is having a conversation with yourself saying, “I can find contentment today from within. How will I do that?”. 

When this comes together, the amount of mental space you’ll create will blow your mind. Our chief complaint for today was, “I can't be happy unless I leave clinical medicine. I can’t find contentment in my current situation.” But you can.

How to Find Contentment Today

So let’s find contentment today for right here and now. We can do that by finding a belief that creates contentment. For me, content is soft blue. It radiates from my chest. It’s slow and smooth. When I feel content, I want to pause. I want to smell the roses. I want to be intentional and deliberate. I want to honor all of the amazing things that I have in front of me here and now. I want to enjoy my life. 

I generate all these things I want to do by feeling content. From there, I can work backward and find the thought that’s making me feel content. For me, it’s, “This journey is going exactly as it’s supposed to. Everything that I’ve done has led me to this point. I had to go through all of this to learn that contentment has been staring me in the face all along.” As a result, I believe that I’m living my life on purpose. 

I hope you can find that contentment for yourself, too. 

“No-one can do it as well as me”

Do you have trouble delegating and asking for help? Do you say that you’re doing too much because nobody else can do it other than you? I personally do, and here’s why.

Asking for Help is Hard

What happens when you think that no one can do it and only you can? For me, it makes me feel a lot of pressure. I take the action of yelling and saying things I don’t want to say. I dwell. As a result, I believe that I’m really the only one who can do it. 

Sure, there will be certain things you’re the best at. But there are also thing that other people can do just as well as you. Maybe they won’t do it exactly like you, but you can probably train them to do it well enough.

To do so, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable that something might get done not exactly as you’d have wanted it. As long as you can accept that, or you’re ready to have the conversation about how you want something to be done, it’ll be okay.

If you’re trying to grow as a person, to bring joy back into your life, to unload some of the unnecessaries, it’s worth the discomfort to see what’s on the other side. 

For example, about two years ago I started noticing that it was very difficult for me to keep up with the laundry. I asked myself why I wasn’t asking for help. It wasn’t that I thought I was the best person to do laundry. I was just afraid of the unknown. It was all a matter of me not being as flexible as I could be. 

In the end, I ended up going out of my comfort zone, asking around, and finding an amazing woman to do the laundry. And it completely changed my life. By being open to something that was uncomfortable, I learned a lot and overcame my hesitation to ask for help.

Why We Have Difficuty Asking for Help

Even though my husband Mark wants to help me, time and time again, I avoid asking him. Why? In my mind, I’m protecting him by not asking him to do something. I’m not willing to give up the control of knowing that if I do it, it’s going to get done. 

But by doing this, I’m not helping Mark. I’m setting myself up to resent Mark. In my mind, I’ve protected him, but I’m actually developing some irritation or resentment, because I’m thinking, “Why can’t he be doing this?”. 

I’m also enabling him. Because I can’t ask Mark for help, he’s more likely to rely on me. In return I start to resent him for not knowing how to do it himself. And all of this has nothing to do with him.

So maybe by “protecting” other people, we’re really hurting them. In fact, asking for help can really help the other person.

If you find it hard to ask for help, think about why. Does it lead to thoughts like, “I should be able to do this?” and “This shouldn’t be a big deal”? Often we think we’ll be weak if we can’t do it all. That it makes us not enough. 

But what if you just started by asking for help with something small? Even just something like pairing the socks. You might be surprised with how well it goes. After you do that, you’ll gain comfort with asking for help. It’ll make you feel empowered, not weak. 

It’ll create a sense of partnership, equality, and positivity in your relationships. Because part of relationship building is give and take. And it helps your loved ones feel more comfortable asking for help when they need it. By asking for help, you set an example and inspire others to do the same.

Obstacles to Asking for Help

When we believe we have to do everything, it’s a choice. But you have to overcome the belief that you have to do everything and give up control. You might find that watching somebody else do it will even be preferable or advantageous to doing it your own way. 

If we want to make a change and give others a chance to show that they too can do things, we have to communicate directly and give the other person the space to try. We have to express our needs.

How to Ask for Help

Nobody’s a mind reader. In order for somebody to help you how you want to be helped, you have to be ready to have conversations. 

For example, I recently started working with a new coach. It became immediately evident that we have very different styles. It made me uncomfortable. So I had to do something brave: I had to have a conversation. I had to ask what his vision was and be honest that I didn’t believe we see eye to eye. 

It was a straightforward conversation with a lot of silence and pauses. But it grew our ability to work together more. When we met each other halfway, the magic started flowing. We both had to be patient with each other, do the mature thing, and come together.

My thought of “nobody can do it right. I have to do it myself” came up in the situation. I could have stayed there. But I realized it wouldn’t be helpful to me or the people I serve to do so. I wanted to grow. And to grow, you have to let go. For me, letting go is getting rid of the desire for control. It’s communicating to work toward a mutual goal. 

The conversation is hard. We don’t want to hurt people. We don’t want to create discomfort. But if we’re willing to be open in conversation, we can achieve so much. 

If you need more help in your life, what’s holding you back? If you can get past this obstacle and ask for help, what could your life look like? What if you were willing to watch somebody else do the task instead of you? What if you gave them that trust? What if it worked out? 

There are people out there who want to help you the same way that you want to help people. If you’re scared, evaluate it. Start small. Go all in. Ask for he

“Everyone needs something from me”

This is such a common thing that happens to women physicians. In our profession, we’re always giving to everyone. We take care of our patients, our staff, our families, and our friends. It’s only natural that you feel stretched thin.

I don’t know about you, but when I think that everybody wants or needs something from me, it makes me feel burnt out and unworthy. Because if I believe that everybody is around me just because I can do something for them, I start to think, “I’m not enough. I need to do something for someone to prove my worth.”

So when we’re feeling unworthy, what comes up? Typically, it takes us down a negative spiral. We start thinking about all of the inadequacies we have in our life. We think, “Do my relationships even mean anything at all?” The result is that we continue to believe that we always have to be serving and giving.

So how do we recognize that this is happening? How do we reflect on it and move forward? How do we start setting and owning boundaries?

Why It’s So Hard to Set Boundaries

First of all, many of us don’t even know what a boundary actually is. Boundaries are a verbalized contract between two people. And if they’re a contract, they serve as protection. Setting a boundary protects a relationship, whether that be a friendship, marriage, parenthood, pet ownership, work relationships, or other family relationships. 

So why don’t we set more boundaries if they’re going to protect us? We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. We don’t want to make people feel bad by telling them no. But the truth is that if we don’t communicate our boundaries to other people, in the long run, it’ll just damage the relationship by leading to resentment and disappointment.

Each party in a relationship sets an expectation for the other party. Without boundaries, these expectations go unspoken and unmet. Without communication, everybody grows apart, rather than together. 

How to Stop Thinking of Setting a Boundary as a Difficult Conversation

Think about somebody in your life who sets healthy boundaries. Do you resent them for communicating and standing up for what they want? Probably not. Chances are, you probably respect them. Maybe you even admire them.

When you can stand up for yourself and what you believe in and you have the guts to verbalize it, you’ll also be somebody who is excellent at setting boundaries. We have to be proud of setting boundaries. It’s about internalizing what you want and what makes you feel comfortable within each hat that you wear. 

Because the boundaries you set in each relationship will all be different. It’s with reflection ahead of time that you’ll decide how to show up and have the confidence to verbalize your boundaries. And ultimately the thought of “everybody needs something from me” won’t be so predominant anymore. Because when you set a boundary, you say, “This is exactly what you can expect from me.” It’s no longer about what others try to take from you, it’s about what you can give. Then there’s no ground for disappointment anymore. 

Setting Boundaries With Yourself

Now that you know what a boundary is and why it’s so important, you can start in a place where it’s not so uncomfortable to set boundaries: with yourself. Maybe you’re somebody who spends more time than you want on social media. You can set yourself the boundary of only spending one hour on social media a day. Verbalize your boundary. Write it down. Tell your friends. Do what you need to do to have accountability. 

It has to be realistic. If you don’t follow through on boundaries you set, you’ll lose confidence. Because when you set a boundary, you do so to improve your life. And if you don’t stick to it, you’re telling yourself that you don’t deserve the boundary and the improvement. 

So we have to be deliberate and specific about the boundaries we set, especially with ourselves. That’s the hard part. Then we can move on and get comfortable setting those boundaries with other people. 

Setting Boundaries in Relationships

Do you have a stressful relationship in your life? One in which you give more than you receive? That the other person always seems to need something? What qualities do you associate with this person? Typically, it’ll be not-so-favorable, which will strain the relationship. But if we can call out these qualities, it will take the power away from them. 

Let’s say you have a great aunt. You don’t live that far from her, so she always ask you to do things. She wants rides, and a place to stay, and a cat-sitter. So every time you see a phone call from her, you feel like you have to do something you don’t want to do. But you keep doing it, because she’s getting older, she doesn’t have anybody to talk to, and you want her to feel bad.

So you have to make a decision. Is it worth it to set a boundary? How much is this stressing you out? Maybe you can change your thoughts around the circumstance to, “I’m so blessed to have my great aunt in my life and I’m happy to help her as much as she wants.” 

But if you can’t, you have to set a boundary. That’ll protect the relationship, tell her what to expect from you, and what you’re willing to give. That puts you back in control.

You have to come up with a plan. Decide specifically what you’re willing to do and what you’re not willing to do. So next time she calls and wants to stay at your house for the next two weeks and you think it’s super inconvenient and you don’t want to do it, you can say, “No, that is a little much for my family right now. We’re not able to accommodate you.” 

Because your aunt is used to hearing yes from you, she may fight it. That’s why it’s so important to own how you’re showing up. Give your boundary and stick to it. You can’t go back on it. Even if she calls you tomorrow and asks again and again. If you go back on the boundary, you’ll backpedal instead of making strides in the relationship. You’ll have to work even harder next time. So it’s your responsibility to have your own back.

Looking Forward

If you become excellent at setting boundaries, you may just keep getting tested all the time. But that doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It’s just more practice for you to show up for you. And if you do that, you’ll generate feelings of worthiness. The more you do it, the more that thought of, “everyone needs something from me” will transition to “I make it obvious what I’m able to give to people.” 

Instead of feeling unworthy and overwhelmed, you’ll feel empowered and in control. What will your action be? You’ll keep setting boundaries. People - employees, patients, partners, and family - will know what to expect and you’ll keep living the life you want to.

You’ll be tested. You won’t be perfect. But your willingness to keep learning, trying, and improving will keep you growing and evolving.

“I Don’t Know How To Feel Better”

Typically, the whole reason why we engage in different activities is that we either have to or we want to do them for pleasure, to feel good. Think about how many things in your life you do just to feel better. 

But what if we had such a handle on our emotions that we could comfortably feel any emotion, even uncomfortable ones, and quickly shift into feeling however we want, whenever we want? Can you imagine your life if you could feel however you wanted to feel whenever you wanted?

But it takes work to get there.

Common Negative Emotions

Overwhelmed

In my coaching groups, a lot of people’s thoughts make them feel overwhelmed.

Overwhelm is when there seems to be a powerful force over us. This typically comes up when we think we have a million things to do. We think the thoughts, “I have nobody to help me. I don’t even know how to get started.” 

Close your eyes. Picture a time in your life when you were completely overwhelmed. For me, it was when I had my first daughter. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Breastfeeding wasn’t going well. I had post-partum depression. I couldn’t even keep up with washing the bottles. I had no idea how anybody actually enjoyed this. I had this tremendous sense of overwhelmed.

When I channel this feeling, I feel it at first in my chest, but it’s so powerful that it radiates into my stomach and shoulders. It’s a very powerful emotion for me. It’s a flashing, bright red. It’s actually very slow, but within that slowness, there is a burning sandpaper back-and-forth, quick movement. It makes me feel trapped. That’s how the negative spiral continues, by making you feel like you have no choice or power.

Typically, when we feel overwhelmed, we actually don’t do anything. We avoid anything at all that we potentially could do because we really believe there is no help or time. The result is that we keep believing that this is our life and we have no choice.  

How We Start Feeling Better

So what do we do now?

The first step is recognizing and calling it out. Just by saying out loud, “I’m overwhelmed,” you automatically take the intensity and the power out of that feeling by half. 

After you recognize, you have a decision to make. You can decide to stay in that place of overwhelmed, or you can choose to create a different thought that will create a different feeling.

When you practice this work long enough and at an intense level, you can say to yourself, “I’m overwhelmed and I want to feel content.” You figure out the opposite of what you’re feeling and channel that pretty immediately. You can just flip into the new feeling. 

But for now, to feel content, you have to think a new thought; you have to reframe. That means you have to come up with a thought, a belief, that makes you feel content. 

So what does content feel like in your body? For me, content is below my chest, in my stomach. It’s powerful, nearly as intense as overwhelmed. It’s an ocean blue and it’s slow, but with a repetitive, slow wave back and forth. 

I think, “Everything is as it should be. I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Nothing has gone wrong. Everything is perfect. There is nothing I need.” 

Now that I deeply understand the difference between these opposing feelings, I have a choice to make. Which one do I want to feel?

Confusion

Confusion is by far one of the most common negative feelings. It’s a very indulgent emotion. It’s a cycle. We get confused about something, and get a little frustration, which amplifies the confusion. Then we just give up. The longer you stay in confusion, the more it’ll spiral. 

My school district is doing an amazing job at virtual schooling. But there are a lot of components and I found myself getting confused, thinking, “There are so many components. I’ve never done this before. I don’t know where to start.” I feel the confusion in my head, in my temporal region. It’s gray. It’s a medium speed, and it seems like it’s going to go on forever. It’s like rubber. 

When I feel confused, I want to vent. I want to create drama. My result is that I believe that things are too complicated and there’s something wrong with the system. I go from confusion to blaming. My ego thinks, “This confusion isn’t myfault. Something’s wrong with the system.”

And when we blame, we believe we have zero ability to change anything, and we’ll just have to stay confused, and we indulge in that confusion. As a result, we feel powerless and don’t make any changes. 

How We Start Feeling Better

Step one: we recognize we’re confused. We say, “I’m confused.” 

Step two: we make the decision. Do we want to stay here or do we want to change it? Staying confused isn’t such a big deal because when you recognize it, you can start gathering data. You can ask yourself, “Why? Why am I confused?” It’ll troubleshoot and get you the answer. 

Step three: reframe. If you don’t want to stay confused, where do you want to go instead? Certainty. Unlike confusion, certainty you can feel all day long. It triggers confidence. Instead of feeling powerless, you can feel certain and confident. 

For me, certainty is in my chest. It’s navy blue. It’s slow and smooth in texture. I could sit in certainty all day long.

When I feel certain, I think, “I know how to do this. I’ve done harder. I can figure this out. I’m capable. Nothing can stump me. I’ve got this.”

My actions as a result of certainty are not indulgent. I take action. The result is that I truly believe I can do absolutely anything. 

Anger

Believe it or not, anger feels pretty good in some people’s bodies. It releases dopamine.

The last time I was angry, it was when I got a letter in the mail from the IRS. It turned out my husband made a filing mistake and we owed $12,000. I was so angry, thinking, “I do so much. This is the only thing I asked my husband to do and this is what happened.” I felt anger in my head, my neck, my chest, and upper stomach: everywhere. I was fired up. It was red, fast, and flowing smoothly. 

My actions? I yelled quite a bit that day. And as a result, I believed that my husband should have met my expectation. 

So how did I make myself feel better? I called it out. “That’s anger.” I made the decision that I wanted to move on. I decided I wanted to reframe my anger as compassion.

Compassion is always the first step in healing. For me, it’s right in my heart, radiating out. It’s bright pink. It’s a perfect speed, not too slow or too fast. It feels like a fluffy blanket. When I feel compassionate, I think, “If we are all human, nothing has gone wrong. This is life. This is okay.” 

I can rewrite the story. I can think, “Mark didn’t want this to happen. He did everything he could to prevent it from happening but he did, and that’s life, and it’s okay.” 

As a result of compassion, I don’t yell. I’m soft-spoken and accepting. I start appreciating my relationship and myself. As a result, I believe that we’re all just doing our best all of the time. We never set out to hurt people, but as humans full of emotion, these things happen.

You can do this whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been at this for a while. Spending some time on our emotions will transform and change your life. 

“I Don’t Have Confidence with Money”

A practicing gastroenterologist and money coach, Dr. Latifat Akintade helps women physicians have financial peace of mind, something that so many of us are unfortunately lacking. But she wasn’t always a money expert. 

When she graduated fellowship four years ago, Dr. Akintade knew nothing about money. She loved being a physician but when she looked around, she saw that there was so much burn-out in medicine, especially amongst women. Her goal was not to let that happen to her. She wanted to work because she wanted to, not because she had to. 

See, Dr. Akintade was achieving her goals - but slowly, feeling like she was depriving herself. After learning about the psychology of money, she was able to integrate what she learned, achieve her goals faster, and ditch the sense of deprivation. Now, she wants to help you do the same.

And achieving this isn’t just a matter of having confidence in the amount of money you have, clarifies Dr. Akintade. It’s having confidence in money - period. There’s not a certain amount of money you have to earn before you can get this peace of mind. It’s all about your mindset.

What Money Coaches Can Do

There are a lot of different reasons why somebody may choose to work with a money coach. Maybe you’re tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. Maybe you’re afraid of money or don’t enjoy your money. Or you want more money but you feel bad about that. Or you have misconceptions about how money should be spent. Basically, if there’s an imbalance between what you earn, what you have, and what you spend, a coach can be of help to you.

Your Money Story

Like a lot of things in life, we all have a money story that’s a product of all of our life experiences and the things we’ve learned - mostly unconsciously - throughout our lives. For example, one of Dr. Akintade’s clients is very financially wealthy by most standards, but sought out a money coach because she felt she still had a lot of money issues. Through her work with Dr. Akintade, this client realized that her money problems stemmed from a lack of self-love. Ultimately, she learned that how we relate to our money is a reflection of how we relate with ourselves and those around us.

When you start evaluating your money story, you might be surprised about what you find. After all, these are unconscious beliefs. One client of Dr. Akintade’s came to her saying she’s a physician who lives paycheck to paycheck. They discovered that the client doesn’t spend money on herself. Rather, every time somebody is upset with her, she spends money on others. Essentially, she was trying to buy love. Again, here, the solution came down to working on self-love; when you love yourself, you don’t need others to love you.

The reality is, when it comes to fixing your relationship with money, it may not require conversations about money. Rather, you may need to talk about everything else first to get to the bottom of the true problem.

Scarcity Mindset

What we don’t realize is that the baggage that we’re carrying with us affects more than just what we make, but also how we enjoy what we have. That’s why it’s worth making investments in ourselves. That’s what makes expenses like coaching - whether they be a life coach or a money coach - so valuable to us.

When you have a scarcity mindset, saying things like “I can’t afford this,” it causes you to do things like hoard money which stops you from investing it - whether it’s in yourself or in the market. The result? You don’t have money. It’s a bit of a cycle. You think you don’t have money and, as a result, you don’t have it. 

The same way that there are people who don’t know how to have money, there are those who hoard money. Some are so afraid of decreasing their cash reserve that they don’t invest or pay off their debt. 

People will also often say things like, “I don’t have the money.” But what does that mean? Well, it’s up to you to define. According to Dr. Akintade, as long as you have enough money to afford your basics, you have enough. From there, you choose what you spend your money on. It’s like with time. When you say you don’t have enough, it’s not usually because you actually don’t have any time. It’s because you’re choosing not to spend your time in this way. Money is the same way; it’s all about putting your money where your values lie.  

How to Become More Confident With Money

Somewhere along the line, fear starts to seap into some people about money. They worry they’re going to mess something up. 

The first part of building money confidence is learning to overcome that fear or making the choice just to allow it to come along with you on the ride. The second part is breaking the taboo of talking about money, findind people who can talk about money openly, whether it’s saving, spending, or goal-setting. Having people who are understanding and like-minded to be your champions is crucial. 

In fact, focusing on and writing down our goals can be incredibly helpful because the more we achieve our goals, the more confident we are. Before you know it, you start building a muscle that makes you feel more confident with accomplishing your goals.

Objectively rating yourself on a scale of zero to ten where ten is amazing confidence and zero is “I suck at everything money-related” can be helpful. If you’re currently at a one and want to be a four, you can make a plan for how to make that jump. 

Dr. Akintade’s bottom line? It’s all about having choices. You can make as much or as little as you want to make. 

“I Don’t Know How To Feel My Feelings”

Typically when my clients come to me, it’s because they’re having a problem. I hear complaints like “I’m drinking too much,” “I’m eating too much,” “I can’t stop snacking,” “I’m over-exercising,” “I’m undereating.” Which really means, “I’m doing something that’s allowing me to not feel my feeling. 

These habits are all behaviors that we do to get rid of a feeling we don’t want to feel. It’s called buffering: using an external source to create neutrality or even pleasure so that we can get rid of uncomfortable feelings. We do it because our feelings feel uncomfortable, but also because we just haven’t practiced feeling them enough. 

Frustration

Recently, a client described a situation with her children in which she would get really frustrated and just want to scream. But she couldn’t name the feeling. So we talked about the thoughts that were going through her mind. Things like, “Why can’t they just do what I ask? Why does everything have to be so cumbersome?”. The thoughts told my client that her expectations weren’t being met. How frustrating.

So after she learned to name the feeling, we worked on learning how to describe how it feels in her body. Knowing how our emotions show up in our individual bodies allows us to have great insight into our lives. Eventually, you’ll be able to know exactly what’s going on with you when you feel a particular feeling. Instead of saying, “I just feel lousy and I don’t know why,” you’ll be able to understand what’s happening.

For my client, her head felt like it was going to explode. The feeling felt burnt orange, fast, and sandpapery. And it makes sense that a burnt orange, high-pressure, fast, sandpaper feeling in your head makes you crave release as fast as possible, which my client did in the form of yelling at her kids. Then an hour later, she would beat herself up for it and go into a downward spiral of guilt, comparison, and self-doubt.

So how could she allow the frustration without giving into an action that she wouldn’t be happy about?

How to Process Emotion

The first step is just allowing the feeling so you can later channel it into something different. Allowing the feeling is letting your guard down. It’s letting the feeling in, allowing the frustration to dissipate throughout your entire body. You’re not avoiding or resisting it. It’s knowing that the feeling can’t hurt you. 

What if you can’t allow the feeling to dissipate through your body? If it stays all jammed up in your head? Well, that means you’re resisting the feeling. You’re saying, “No, frustration, you can’t come in.” Allowing it in means it can come through your head, flow through your body, and leave. But with resistance, you’re building more and more pressure that you’ll eventually have to release.

When we allow the feeling to come in, it can go away much quicker than if you resist it. All you have to do is believe that it won’t hurt you. 

Restlessness

A lot of my clients come to me when they’re buffering a feeling they don’t want to feel with overeating or overdrinking. Physicians, in particular, often feel restless. They have a million things to do and have to do them perfectly because lives are on the line. They’re expected not to make mistakes and can never take a break. It’s a lot of pressure, and it can cause restlessness.

We usually feel restlessness in our upper stomach. It’s fast. It’s orange or red.  It’s slippery. You can’t really catch it. So you’re chasing after it. You can’t slow down. You wonder if this is normal. This is the type of feeling that leads to buffering. Eventually, you can’t deal with it anymore. 

I had a client who buffered by overeating for decades. She had the hardest time slowing down the feeling of restlessness. So we made a deal. We said she could eat anything she wanted whenever she wanted. But if she noticed restlessness in her body, she had to allow it to slow down before she proceeded. That was the only rule.

When she allowed restlessness to dissipate in her body, she could understand what she was thinking. Thoughts like, “I should be doing something. I should have done that. I shouldn’t have skipped my workouts this week.” She was using the thought distortion of should statements, which is a way of telling ourselves we are not good enough. All of that led to tremendous restlessness and drove her to eat. 

Once she started allowing this to be there, she would recognize and reset and then decide if she wanted to reframe her emotion or her thought. She’d allow the restlessness to dissipate and notice right away that the intensity of the feeling went down significantly. 

Guess how many times she went to the pantry after the mastered this skill? Zero. As long as she could allow the feeling and decrease its intensity, she never went to the pantry, curing a decades-long history of overeating to overcome restlessness - and she did it immediately. Realizing that this was normal, that she could feel any feeling, and that she could have any result she wants, changed her life forever. 

How to Accept New Feelings

So let’s say you get really good at recognizing, feeling, and dissipating your feelings, and you’re ready to really take ownership of your life. Did you know that you can flip into any emotion you want, any time you want? 

It’s all about recognizing an emotion you don’t want to have, calling it out, realizing why you’re having that emotion, and deciding how you want to feel instead. 

Let’s say we’re restless and we want to feel calm. Calm is my favorite feeling. It’s in my heart. It’s soft blue and breezy.

For me to feel calm, I have to understand what thoughts make me feel calm. For me, calm is “There’s nowhere I have to be.” “There’s nothing that needs to get done.” “I can choose to slow down and still live the exact life I want to live.”

If I make the decision to feel calm, I go to that place. I feel calm in my body. I let it right into my heart. I think, “Everything is perfect. I’m perfect right here. No changes have to be made.” And what action does it make me want to take? Go outside, sit in a lounge chair, and pet my dog. Not running into the pantry and snacking. 

When you recognize, call out, and allow your emotions, you have all the power to choose how you want to feel. You can have anything in your life that you want. It all starts with feeling your feelings.