"DIET" IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little". - John Kenneth Galbraith



What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the word "diet"? If your anything like me you think of "restriction". But the word doesn't actually mean that. Its primary definition is:



"Food and drink regularly provided or consumed. "-Websters Dictionary

I teach my clients that healthy people aren't fat. Healthy people aren't sick. So instead of trying to "diet" to stop being fat, or "diet" to "feel better" why not just eat healthy to be healthy?

If you are struggling with your weight, I'd like you to take a new approach mentally. I'd like you to simply eat healthy. Don't worry about how much you eat. Every diet by day three has you feeling deprived and lethargic because you have restricted your calories. I think its a poor approach.

I've been on my share of "diets" and every single one of them ends up back where I started or worse! Its just a matter of time. White knuckling against your body's desire to nourish itself is simply not a rational plan for optimal health.

Again, I want to say "healthy people aren't fat". By definition, "healthy people" are exactly the weight they are supposed to be.

Before you EVER restrict calories to "lose weight", I believe you should be eating nothing but healthy food. Think about that for a moment and ask yourself if that makes sense. Why would you go from eating an unhealthy diet that is high in calories to a low calorie diet? Why wouldn't you go from a high calorie unhealthy diet to a high calorie HEALTHY diet first? Then we can talk about cutting calories!

I'll make a deal with you. If you continue to gain weight or even if you don't LOSE weight eating nothing but healthy, nourishing, vitalizing foods THEN I will give you permission to start cutting calories. Try eating nothing but healthy food for 6.5 days a week for 6 weeks. No restriction. No starving yourself. If you want to eat, go ahead! But WHAT you eat is what I would focus on. I would also give yourself permission to eat whatever you want to one half day a week. Sure the first week you will probably undo some of your weight loss. But I truly believe that after a few weeks of eating properly in any quantity you want your body will adjust, your hunger will get firmly under control and you won't even be ABLE to over-eat. I know. Too good to be true right? Try it. Im not selling you anything. I have nothing to gain from giving you this advice but the satisfaction that I might help someone who has spent their entire life fighting against their body to finally start working with it.

Focus on eating great food. Lots of it! As much of it as you want for six weeks. Go nuts (literally). Eat as much of the following as you want for 6 weeks and then (and only then) can you really consider cutting back on calories. IF you decide you need to reduce your calories after the six week healthy eating plan, you will see it will be a far different proposition than cutting 4000 pizza calories a day from your diet. It isn't that easy to gain weight on the right foods. The foods I am going to suggest you eat all work WITH your body. They control your blood sugar levels and hormones. They avoid the wild swings and fluctuations characterized by a high glycemic, high fat diet. Watch. Eat minimally six meals which consist of at least two of the following food groups at every meal:

Dairy- cheese, yogurt, milk etc.
Beans and legumes
vegetables
berries - strawberries, blueberries, rasberries, blackberries
Lean meats -turkey, fish, chicken, lean beef, lean pork
Nuts - almonds, walnuts, pecans, cashews. NATURAL peanut butter.
Whole grains - whole grain cereals, breads, Oatmeal, and whole wheat pasta
Olive oil
eggs

Add a multivitamin. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. No restrictions. Go eat. Just eat healthy food that works with your body.

If you find that removing all of your favorite "bad for you" foods is simply too restrictive, I would encourage you to eat more from the list above to "displace" the bad food for a few weeks. So if you would normally eat two bacon egg and cheese biscuits for breakfast - instead eat one and a bowl of oatmeal for a week or two.

If you would eat a bigmac and large fries for lunch, lose the fries and eat a salad with your big mac for a week or two.

I want you to focus on adding healthy, nourishing food that works with your body not removing food from your diet. Slowly displace the unhealthy with the healthy. When your diet is 100% healthy, just stay there in any quantity for a few weeks and watch what happens. If at that point you feel you still need to restrict calories, go ahead. You'll find it much easier at this point.

Good luck! Go be healthy!

Sharpen Your Axe

If the axe is dull and the edge unsharpened more strength is needed but wisdom will bring you success. - Ecclesiastes 10:10



If you've been working on being honest with yourself you probably have discovered that you are settling in many areas of your life. If you did the "honesty inventory" I described in a prior post then you have probably identified areas of your life that you need to change. First of all congratulations! As I discussed before just becoming aware of the lies you have been telling yourself has moved you into a higher level of living. But you can't stop there. Now you have to truly commit to not only remaining in truth but changing that truth to what you want it to be!

One of the rules along the way that will save you a lot of time comes from a pretty famous story no doubt originating from bible quote at the beginning of this post. The story goes like this:

A lumberjack who worked for a demanding boss for over a year was suddenly fired for low productivity. He was replaced with a lumberjack who was promoted by the same boss in less than two weeks for high productivity. When the first lumberjack heard this, he went to the forest and asked the lumberjack who took his job what his secret was. The second lumber jack said " every twenty minutes I take two minutes to sharpen my axe".

The point is simple (again, most profoundly useful life strategies are). Whether you are trying to lose 30 pounds, rekindle your marriage or get that promotion at work you need to work smarter not harder. Here are some suggestions for "sharpening your axe":

1) Get 8 hours of restful sleep. Sleep deprivation in the name of productivity is an oxymoron. Sleep deprivation leads to poor focus, low energy, hormonal changes, mood problems, anxiety and furstration. A restful night sleep will undoubtedly help you perform whatever your task is the following day.

2) Exercise daily - It improves mood, strengthens you body, fights fat and boosts your immune system. Its simple. You are either vibrantly healthy while trying to perform you tasks or you aren't.

3) Eat properly - Give your body what it needs. Whether you are trying to get amorous with your spouse or filling out the applicatino for the business loan, eating properly will keep your blood sugars level and help you maintain focus. Your body will work with you instead of against you by rewarding you with energy and well-being while you accomplish your task.

4) Don't multi-task. Perform one thing at a time, always. You're lying to yourself if you really believe you can do two or more things at once that both require your attention. Obviously, you can maximize efficiency by using "net time" which is simply those times when you CAN actually do two things at once but we as humans in the 21st century think we can way more simultaneously than we really can. We can listen to an audiobook on self-improvement while we jog or drive. But we can't really email and drive or study for an important test while playing poker online. We can't really review those reports and surf the web. You know where multi-tasking is negatively effecting you. Get rid of it. Try it for a week and watch what happens when you focus on one thing at a time.

5) Create a list of goals for the day and review them in the morning, again at noon and then again in the late afternoon early/evening. Live purposefully. Decide what is most important to get done today and tackle that task first. If you do this every day you willl undoubtedly become more productive. Make sure you are making realistic, objectively verifiable goals that in themselves are small steps to a larger goal for your life.

6) Delegate. Don't fool yourself into believing that you're going to "go it alone". Succesful people have support systems. They have people who believe in their life purpose and work with them to accomplish it. Outsource those things that don't honor your time or that someone else is simply better equipped to do. I love to coach and write about personal growth but I am not a computer programmer. I let the good folks at blogpot do the programming that made this blog possible without me having to learn html. Likewise I currently have a web designer designing my website. Could I learn how to do this on my own? Sure I could but its simply not worth my time to learn. I am a life coach, not a web designer.

7) Clear your head. Spend at least 10 minutes a day minimum in silence. Complete silence. We have so much information bombarding us every day. Our brains are always being programmed whether intentionally or unintentionally by the environment around us. TV, Radio, people on the subway, newspapers, websites, co-workers, texts, tweets. . . well you get the idea. Try taking just 10 minutes a day to sit in silence. You'll immediately see a boost in overall productivity.

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

"You never find yourself until you face the truth". -Pearl Bailey

"I really don't think its that big of a deal"

"It's only a few pounds"

" We are just in a rough patch right now".

"I'll quit soon".

We as a world have drifted so far from truth that we have forgotten it is a major foundational virtue of a functioning society, family, workplace and individual. We have gotten to a point where deception, fraud, and outright lies to ourselves and others is normal. Ask yourself right now what you are hiding. Ask yourself right now what you don't want to admit about yourself. Imagine if you co-workers knew everything about you. Or your parents. Or your kids. Do you get a sick feeling when you think about this subject? Stop. Feel that feeling and ask yourself why you feel it. To make real changes in your life you MUST get honest with yourself and others. If you have not practiced honestly and authenticity in a while it can be very uncomfortable.

If you have some nagging issues in your relationship but don't discuss them for fear of "rocking the boat", you are a prime candidate for an "honestly inventory". If you have a few things you hope your boss never finds out about because if she did you might lose your job, you may very well need to evaluate your honesty. If you don't like to budget because you don't want to "face" the reality of your finances - you need to assess your authenticity.

Ultimately "truth" and "honesty" is nothing more than living in reality. When you are being dishonest to yourself or someone else you are actually living in a fantasy land that you created. You become incongruent with reality. When you live incongruent with reality to any real degree you make uneducated choices. When you make uneducated choices, you increase the probability that those choices will end up with a poor outcome.

If you lived your life under the fantasy that people can't get injured, you might do all sorts of things that aren't good for you. If you still believed in a Santa Clause you might think you didn't have to save up any money for the kids' Christmas! At their very core, isn't profound mental disability nothing more than profound dishonesty?? A severely psychotic person literally sees and hears things that aren't there! Well, when you distort your real situation to make yourself "feel better" or to avoid conflict or shame or guilt, or any other negative emotion, you choose the path of fantasy world and then operate your life as if that fantasy were reality.

On a very practical level, lie to yourself about that weight gain and you will keep operating like you aren't fat and unhealthy leading to more ill-health and a lifetime of chronic medical conditions. Choose to keep saying "i'll do it later" when you know you won't just means it won't get done. Keep pretending that staying at a career you really hate makes sense to you somehow because of the money or the pestige and you will operate from that story and spend the rest of your life a slave to your occupation. Keep calling your disintegrating marriage a "rough patch" or keep making up stories about how "all marriages are like this" and divorce is not far away.

The first step to any life change is truth. Brutal, unequivocal, some-times painful, often liberating, TRUTH!

"I have to lose weight"
"This marriage is broken"
"This job is not for me"
"I am addicted"

The truths are the launching pad for change. The person who decides they will not spend 60 hours a week at a job they hate starts to think about alternatives. The one who drinks alcohol, watches tv, or does any number of escapes to pretend their career is fine and just "not think about it" is lying and destined to stay at that career until someone else forces them out.

Ever wonder why practically every diet program or exercise plan begins with you assessing your current situation or taking a"before photo"? Its so you get in touch with reality and then use reality to guague your progress. Truth is nothing more than finding reality and admitting its existence.

Identify those areas in your life where you aren't being fully truthful with yourself or others. Get out a notebook and write down the brutal truth. I know it may feel scary at first but believe me, you are closer to change just by doing this exercise than you may have ever been before. Go through the major areas of your life like career, finances, spirituality, relationships and physical health and do an "honesty inventory". Identify where and why you are distorting reality.

Remember stating the truth doesn't mean you WILL fix something right away. Alot of people don't like this exercise because they feel that identifying things they aren't ready to fix will make them feel guilty. Maybe it will. But let me be clear about what I am asking you to do. I am asking you simply to be honest. You may very well say something like:

"I am significantly overweight and unhealthy right now. I don't feel good about myself and I know that I am endangering my health living like this. But I don't have the willpower or self-discipline to lose this weight right now so I am not even going to try".

That MAY be the truth!! (I submit it probably isn't but that's for another post!). If that is your truth right now, so be it. Even THAT truth is better than "I really don't want to lose weight because I think diets are unhealthy", or "It's not that bad", "I'm not that vain". Lies. Truthfully admitting you have a problem you are unable or unwilling to solve right now is far better than lying about not having a problem at all. Try it. See what comes up. Often when you do this exercise you realize that what you have been saying to yourself is not true. You start looking at the issues that you are lying about and decide that you can change the truth to a new truth.

This is how change happens.

"The truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time but it ain't going away. - Elvis Presley