by JJ Smith
Do not drown yourself in sadness and get depressed during the holidays. Feel the sadness and hurt and then move on to happier times in your life. I lost my dad over twenty-five years ago, and holidays still remind me of him. Even though it has been a very long time, I remember the last Christmas we spent together because he said, “Let’s enjoy this one because this will likely be the last Christmas we spend together as a family.” I will never forget those words and how painful they were. He was right. However, I have learned to enjoy Christmas celebrations with family members, while still cherishing the last Christmas with my dad.
Think about the times of the year when you experienced significant loss. Do you notice that those times you are more emotional, irritable, and moody? Write in a journal about your feelings and your experiences so you do not experience emotional overload during those times. This will help you to be prepared to nurture yourself so that you can minimize the impact on you. Deliberately do things that lift your spirits, like traveling, volunteering at your church, Christmas caroling, or going to the movies. Whatever it takes to cope and heal, do that and allow yourself to feel better.
Love Yourself through Sickness
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Sometimes too much stress and drama in your life can lower your immune system and cause you to get sick. Being sick can be stressful in and of itself and make you upset or anxious, causing you to stay sick for long periods of time. For many, they want to feed a cold or just eat a lot of comfort foods to feel better. When you are sick, however, that is the most important time to eat healthy and get enough sleep to allow your body to recover and to boost its immune system. Eating unhealthy slows the recovery process time.
When you are achy, tired, or irritable, stay hydrated, eat healthy, rest, and drink plenty of liquids to help your body flush out toxins. If you work out a lot, this may be a time to take a few days off from strenuous workouts so that you do not put too much stress on your body. Doing light exercises like nonstrenuous yoga (Vinyasa, Bikram, Ashtanga), walking, or stretching may be best for a speedy recovery. This is not the time to obsess over your weight and stress about missing workouts.
Don’t Lose Your Mind on Vacations and Work Travel
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So many people ask how to stay on track while traveling for work or while on vacation. I always say we have to do a bit more planning, but every restaurant on the road has healthy options. You can also bring or simply purchase healthy snacks while traveling. It is simply not true that you cannot stay on track on vacations or work travel.
A little bit of planning goes a long way. You can figure out in advance what restaurants have healthier foods or where the healthy grocery stores are near your hotel. There are a few things I always have on me when I travel, such as nuts and seeds, protein bars, and popcorn. These snacks always hold me over and help me stay on track. Even airports have food kiosks with fruits, veggies, hummus, and other healthy snacks. You can be successful while traveling, it is just about proper planning and a decision to choose healthy.
Manage Moods through Hormonal Imbalances
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For women, especially those over thirty-five years old, hormonal shifts make it difficult to maintain stable moods and emotions. For many, mood changes start during PMS. For others, they may occur during perimenopause/menopause. But most women have mood shifts at some point in their life. Men too can experience mood change due to hormonal shifts. Both men and women can experience emotional instability and even depression.
In addition to mood changes, men and women can experience sudden weight gain due to hormonal shifts as they age, which contributes to them feeling emotionally overwhelmed in their forties, fifties, and sixties. If you often feel angry, sad, sensitive, and moody, know that it is time to get your hormones tested. Hormones affect how you feel, how you look, and, most important, how you maintain your weight and health. When your hormones are balanced properly, you will have great health, beauty, and vibrancy. When your hormones are imbalanced, you have mood swings, you crave unhealthy foods, and you feel sluggish and lethargic.
I once had an unexplained weight gain of thirty pounds, practically overnight, in just a few months. However, after balancing my hormones, I was able to feel emotionally stable and get back to my ideal weight. You too can achieve hormonal balance and know that when your hormones are functioning at their optimal levels, your body is at its peak performance and maintains your healthy, ideal weight.
Develop a Healthy Relationship with Food
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The eating habits of an overweight person are often impulsive, driven by fear, and out of control. The solution to overeating is not to starve yourself and deny yourself food altogether. You do not have to be fearful of food or scared to eat anything.
The only way to attain a healthy relationship with food is to learn to love it and ensure that the food you put into your body loves you back: it fuels you, nourishes you, and supports your optimal health and vitality. A candy bar does not love you—it is full of sugar and processed chemicals that harm your body. The people who made it do not love you either—they are just trying to make money by selling you a product. Chemicals and processed foods lead to poor health, sickness, food allergies, ailments, and other diseases, none of which I would classify as “loving” conditions. If you are in a place where you still desire candy, that just means that you are still growing spiritually and learning healthier eating habits.
Foods that love you are those that contribute to your health and wellness, such as fruits, nuts and seeds, and vegetables. These healthy, natural foods make your body stronger and able to fight illness and disease, and have beauty and vibrancy. Natural, healthy foods make your body strong, fight illness, restore your body, produce beautiful skin, revitalize your mind, give you energy, slow the aging process, and will taste so much better than you can imagine once your taste buds have been reprogrammed. You have to be deliberate about finding healthy foods because unhealthy foods are readily available and easily accessible. But in some instances, I bet you have driven right by the farmers’ market or health food store. It is time to make a stop there and begin to change your life.
Do not stress about trying to stop eating unhealthy foods at the beginning of your journey. It is a process that involves breaking your addictions to the many unhealthy foods you eat and think you “love” today. Just be aware of exactly what you are eating and know that there will come a day when you will no longer love foods that do not love you.
For me, I overcame my addiction to sugar, sweets, and junk food over time by taking gradual steps. Instead of eating regular chocolate chip cookies with refined white sugar, I began to eat sugar-free cookies that contained artificial sweeteners. Although they were not very healthy, due to either the white flour, trans fats, and artificial sweeteners they contained, they did help me break my addiction to white refined sugar. Breaking my addiction of white refined sugar was my personal gradual first step. As I continued my journey to eating healthier, I learned about the dangers of artificial sweeteners and trans fats, and that discovery motivated me to stop eating sugar-free cookies as well. You will find the right approach for how you transition to more healthy foods that is right for you and it’s going to be gradual.
CONCLUSION
Some people struggle with their overall weight and food in general. They feel they lack willpower or they are lazy and unmotivated when it comes to eating and exercise. People often make excuses for their excess weight by saying, everyone in my family is overweight so it is hereditary. They also say they do not have enough time to exercise and eat right ever since they injured their back, and so they gained a lot of weight. Even though these things, genetic factors, injuries and the like, play a factor in overeating, they are still just excuses that prevent people from resolving their weight issues.
We all have the ability to maintain a healthy body weight, and it should be a lot easier than it seems at times. Enjoying great food with family and friends enhances our soc
ial experiences. There is nothing wrong with occasionally enjoying food and celebrating life. The issue is when you use food to cope with the hard times and struggles in life. We have abused food so much that our health and life are at risk. We can make excuses for why we overeat all day, but in the end, the truth is emotional eating represents an inability to love and care for ourselves.
If you struggle with emotional eating, you are not properly connecting to yourself (mind, body, and spirit). When we are truly connected and aligned with our body, mind, and spirit, we know how to meet our physical needs, as well as spiritual and emotional needs. We know what true physical hunger feels like versus emotional hunger. We also know how to process emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger. We have stopped using food to soothe, comfort, calm, and distract us from unpleasant emotions and feelings. You may have stopped asking others for what you need, but you can learn the skills necessary to care for your own needs and put an end to emotional eating.
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Establish Success Habits
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YOU CANNOT SOLELY rely on willpower and self-control to lose weight—you have to control your environment and circumstances. Your ability to maintain self-control will depend on your environment. If your house is hectic and chaotic, or if you are stressed or in a bad mood or easily distracted, you will struggle to maintain self-control. In order to have more self-control, you will have to build success into your environment.
When you wake up, what is the first thing you see? What surrounds you? How have you set up your private space? Your environment directly impacts the progress you have on your weight-loss journey. Do you have toxic people in our life? Do you have unhealthy foods throughout the house? Do you have mental hazards all over the place? You need to set up your environment properly in order to achieve health and weight-loss goals. Clear space in your mind, home, and life so that you can avoid setbacks and failures.
Your environment is stronger than your willpower. For example, think about how casinos are designed to influence you while you are there. They have no clocks, no windows, nothing to give you a sense of time or anything to hurry you out of there. The carpet is usually busy with lots of patterns to keep you stimulated and alert. Free drinks are served so you do not have to get up to go buy one. Other environments, such as nightclubs, hotels, and churches, are intentionally designed to bring about a certain kind of behavior as well. Some of these places even consult behavioral psychologists to get the setting just right.
So, ask yourself, how much have you thought about your environment? Do you know if your environment is set up for weight-loss success?
Distractions—like trying to type an email, watch TV, and respond to Facebook posts all at the same time—cause people to struggle on their weight-loss journey. Distractions have become so common throughout our day, and this has been detrimental for dieters. Studies show that dieters eat 40 percent more than nondieters when they are distracted. We do not know why distractions cause dieters to overeat, but studies show that they do.
When folks go to weight-loss boot camps, the entire environment is set up to avoid distractions and anything that may impede success. The “camper” even has doctors to monitor them, trainers to push them, chefs to prepare healthy foods, and everything required to help them achieve success. They have one goal and that is to ensure that you achieve weight-loss success, and everything in the environment is set up to support that goal.
Self-discipline cannot compete with the pure pleasure of eating momma’s sweet potato pie. There is a reason that between 90 percent and 95 percent of those who lose weight on a diet regain it all within three years. You are going to need more than self-discipline to win this weight-loss battle.
For too many of us, reliance on self-discipline fails to bring about the change we desire. This is an old model of motivation that said those who can lose weight are disciplined and strong while those who cannot are undisciplined and weak-minded. It is said that self-discipline is something we pull from deep down inside of us, but unfortunately, many of us cannot find it. Studies are showing that self-discipline is playing a very limited role in helping to change one’s eating habits. So, we have to ask: How do we create better habits? How long does it take someone to create a habit? We have to apply effort, not self-discipline. Self-discipline requires you to change something on the inside (inner world), whereas effort requires you to rearrange things on the outside (outer world).
When you are in the moment of deciding whether to eat junk or something healthy, self-discipline is often not enough. You probably have experienced that. So instead of self-discipline, you have to focus on effort. Put effort into setting up your outer world (our environment) to allow yourself to succeed. Doing this “pre-handles” the problem before you get tempted to avoid struggling with self-discipline.
You have to control the things in your environment that trigger you to eat unhealthfully or get off track. This is key to long-term success with weight loss. You have to recognize that the human mind is easily tempted. Rather than trying to resist temptation, you are better off rearranging your environment to avoid running into so many temptations.
Let’s talk about how this works. How do we rearrange our “outer world” and set up our environment to ensure weight-loss success?
WHAT ARE SUCCESS HABITS?
A success habit is anything we do or put in our environment for the purpose of helping us avoid temptations throughout the day. This means we prepare things in our physical environment that set us up for weight-loss success. Many of these things are inexpensive and require little effort. Then, over time, success just happens.
I have many success habits in my life now. One, I choose to eat out only in places where I can eat healthy food. My favorite restaurant is one that serves bison steak, sweet potatoes, and green beans. I know I can get a healthy meal at this enjoyable restaurant, so I go there instead of going to an unhealthy Italian restaurant with very few healthy options or a restaurant with buffet. For many, buffets present a particular challenge. The reality is that food is one of the most addictive substances on earth, so we have to have habits in place to avoid overeating.
Another example, liver cleansing has been the most impactful detox method that helps my body burn fat and so I take a liver supplement consistently. You know how I remember to take it every single day? I have the bottle on my nightstand right next to my glasses. I wake up, pick up my glasses, and then take my liver supplement on an empty stomach, with eight ounces of water. This ensures that I consistently take the supplement that has the most positive impact on my weight loss.
My business partner struggled with water intake. He knows how critical water is for weight loss and was determined to find a way to drink more water daily, but somehow, day after day, he never did. He finally installed a water cooler in his office to make it easy to keep a glass of water on his desk. He sees the water cooler and grabs a cup of water as he moves about throughout the day.
We have to acknowledge the deep attachment to food and must respect this so we do not set ourselves up to fail. So, I do not want you to worry about self-discipline. Instead, focus on setting up success habits in your life, which create the habits to help you succeed long-term.
The remainder of this chapter will focus on the most common success habits that people use to avoid temptations and stay on track on their weight-loss journey.
SUCCESS HABITS TO HELP AVOID TEMPTATIONS
1. Prepare your home environment for success.
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Think about what your physical environment looks like. Does it energize you or is it chaotic and hectic? Are there piles of clothes on the floor? Is there one room that you have wanted to clean up? As an example, your bedroom is meant for relaxation and romance: does it create that vibe for you? If not, maybe start there. Start small and just focus on one room that you can organize and clean up so it will make you feel good when you walk into it. See if cleaning and organizing this on
e room makes you feel energized and lighter on your feet. This will also give you momentum that will allow you to clean and organize the next room. The goal is to clean up small spaces or one room or closet at a time.
2. Immerse yourself in learning.
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Have you immersed yourself in learning about health and weight loss? If you want to learn and master anything in your life, you have to immerse yourself in it. Let the knowledge consume you. Knowing everything about eating clean and detoxing helped me stay slim. However, unexpected weight gain forced me to learn about my hormones and how they were affecting my weight. I studied over a hundred books and articles on the topic to learn everything I could about how hormones impacted weight loss, how to get tested, and what treatment options were available. I loaded myself up with information, found a hormone doctor, and successfully balanced my hormones for weight loss.
Learning about health and nutrition is how the miracle of weight loss begins. It is time to get excited about learning what will lead to greater weight-loss success. Start buying books and magazines that inspire you to eat clean, work out, or master the mental. Read success stories like the ones in this book and other inspiring stories of weight-loss success. This will inspire you to want the same thing in your own life. Follow in the footsteps of winners.
