Welcome to week two in the Keep It Simple Series! I hope that you were able to get a few tips from last week’s video and are slowly building up your healthier pantry!
Today I have a quick and easy tip that comes right from my Grandma!
Educate
When To Take A Break
I have tried a variety of diets over the years. The fad diets would lure me in with their promises of fast weight loss and happiness and I would commit with a gung-ho attitude. I stick with the program and did what I was suppose to do and most of the time was met with moderate success. But there would always come that point in my diet where I would take a break.
I would have lost a few pounds, I would feel better about my body and therefore myself and I felt like I could get back to life as regularly scheduled. The diet had done what it was suppose to do and I could move on. I never viewed these diets as lifestyle changes and that is what helped perpetuate the cycle of losing and gaining weight.
There finally came a point where I realized that I couldn’t just change my life for a few weeks and then take a break while I went back to my old lifestyle. I had to make a lasting change that would go on forever. It sounded daunting, but I knew that I needed to take a big step if I wanted to be healthier and finally enjoy life to the fullest. So I flipped a switch in my brain from diet to lifestyle change and got on the path to a healthier me.
And it worked. While it was really tough at first to think that I would never be able to go back to what I used to eat if I wanted to keep moving forward, I fought my way through and got lasting and healthy results. I wasn’t taking a break this time. I was all in and I was never going to change. But weirdly, that kind of got me into trouble again.
I had committed so much to being the healthiest me possible that I scared myself from straying at all. I couldn’t miss a workout, I couldn’t overeat, I couldn’t choose the wrong food or everything would come crashing down around me. That switch that I had flipped got stuck in the opposite direction and now I was worried about failing and returning to the unhappy person I was before.
It was an important lesson that I had to learn to be able to move on. I couldn’t view the way I ate and exercised as a temporary change but I also couldn’t be so afraid to stray that I was rigid in every aspect of life. I had to learn to be flexible and trust myself to do what my body needed at the right time. So how do you know when you reach a happy medium?
By trusting yourself.
When you first start, it’s going to be hard. You’re going to want to eat like a million Big Macs and you’re going to want to sit on the couch rather than do a 30 minute workout. It’s really hard to let yourself take a break at this point because it will be so easy to slip back into your old habits. Once you start to realize that all your old habits have been replaced with new and healthier ones it’s a little bit easier to see where you have wiggle room.
While I don’t personally believe in having a “cheat” day or meal (it just doesn’t work for me), it’s ok to know that one meal is not going to destroy what you have worked for. If you notice that your body is sore and achy and the thought of heading to the gym for your workout makes you want to cry, then it’s ok to take a rest day. That’s your body’s way of saying, “Hey, I need a break here!” That’s ok, rest days are good. Enjoying life is good. Being flexible and able to adjust to the situation is good.
It takes a little bit of practice to find the right balance for you and your body. Be kind to yourself as you discover what works for you and what doesn’t. Remember, it’s what you decide to most of the time that is going to impact your overall health not the tiny slip ups every now and then.
Keep It Simple Series: Building Your Healthy Pantry
Hello and welcome to the first part in my keep it simple series! Also welcome to my very first video. I won’t lie and say that I’m not nervous about this whole endeavor, but I am excited to add a new dimension to my blog. I hope that is able to connect me better with my readers.
Today’s video is about building up your healthy pantry/freezer. I’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to give everyone a little reminder as well as inform any new readers that I might have. This video is going to be a little longer than the rest of my videos in this series, but I wanted to make sure that I hit all the important parts.
So without further adieu, here is the debut of the Keep It Simple series!
Keep It Simple: A New Blog Series
For those of you who read my blog regularly (Hi mom and dad!), you may have noticed that each Wednesday I put up a “How To” post. I’ve been offering tips and tricks on being healthier as well as other little life lessons. I want to continue on in that vein, but I am going to change the format up a little.
I mentioned the other day that I wanted to keep expanding my blog and help reach more readers. One of the ways I want to do this is to start filming and adding videos to my blog. I think this is just another way that I can reach out to people and offer the knowledge that I have gained from my own healthy journey. It’s also going to be a challenge for me to step out of my comfort zone and do something new. I am perfectly comfortable writing on my blog, but being on camera is going to be a whole new beast. Even though I am a little nervous about this new venture I know that it’s good to keep pushing myself, especially if I want to grow my readership.
I don’t have a video for today but I am working behind the scenes to start filming. But I don’t want to leave you without some helpful advice for your first Wednesday of the year!
If there is one thing that you take away from my blog it should be that being healthy doesn’t have to be hard. I want to drive home how simple it can be. I think that media and advertising makes it seem like you have to complicate everything to be as healthy as you want to be and that in turn has confused so many of us at to what is actually. The truth is that you don’t need to do anything crazy to make your life better. When I first started out I bought into the whole more is more theory and thought that I had to do the latest fad diet or exercise routine to get the results that I wanted. Nope! The habits and routines that have stuck with me all these years and are the most successful are the simple changes that I made over time.
If you are just starting out this new year with the mindset of a new you, take this advice to heart. The simpler the better. It will be easier to change your unhealthy lifestyle this way as well as make it last.
With this key idea in mind, that’s what these Wednesday videos are going to be all about. Simple meals, simple exercises, simple tips and advice. These are the things that I do everyday to help keep myself healthy. I have a lot of great things planned and I’m sure that they will help you realize just how easy it is to live a healthier life!
Check back next week to see the beginning of my simple health series and get ready to live your healthiest year yet!
Monday Musings: Cookie Cutter Bodies
I haven’t done a Monday Musing in awhile, so I thought I would bring that back. Sadly while the title of this post has the word cookie in it, there are no cookies. I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you soon I promise. On with my musing.
Most of us want to be thought of as unique. We want to be seen as individuals and to have no one else like us. In general, I would say that these feelings are fostered in schools, at work, and in our daily lives. We are praised for being us and told that there is not another out there just like us. You think to yourself, “I am me and no one can be me like I can.” That all stops though when it comes to our bodies. Suddenly we want to have that person’s abs, that one’s buns of steel, and those eyes and hair.
You have probably thought of your dream body a lot. I know I have. I used to pour over magazines and watch movies and yearn for the perfect bodies that those people all seemingly had. Why couldn’t my body look just like theirs? I wasn’t happy having my own body looking the way I do because it seemed like everyone else looked a different way. How many of you have done that?
I know that there are so many of us who constantly pick apart our bodies and wish to wake up with the body of a goddess. I know that many of us work tirelessly to make that dream body come true, hoping if that we finally look like everyone else we will finally be happy. I know many of us just want our bodies to blend in with the general population instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. I have been there and I have felt those emotions time and time again. It took me a long time to be able to start to accept my body for what it was instead of what it wasn’t.
I think that it’s time that we start valuing our bodies like we value our individuality. We don’t NEED to look like everyone else, in fact unless you are an identical twin it is impossible to look like someone else. That is ok. No, that is great. Just like you want your thoughts, ideas, personality, and talents to be special, you should want your body to be special. It isn’t perfect, but guess what? No one has the perfect body and that is a beautiful thing.
For those of you caught in the dark thoughts of poor body image, I know that you have heard these words before. Love yourself, you’re special, no one can be like you. Those phrases bounce off you and make no impact. They all sound like ways to say you’re not beautiful but there are other things about you that you should be happy about. You might not have the legs of a model, but you’re hilarious. You don’t have long flowing hair, but you can sing like an angel. Don’t focus on your lack of a six-pack, you’re the next Mozart on the piano. Those are all good things to be, but when you look in the mirror and aren’t happy with what you see, those things don’t really matter.
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to look like anyone else! All you have to do is look like you. Stop trying to come up with a way to look like the girl next to you at the gym. Instead come up with ways to be proud of the body you possess. It can do so much and it deserves a little TLC. I know from experience that when you start to love what you have, your outlook becomes more positive. You may never have rippling arms, but you have arms and they are pretty great.
I know this has been a long musing, but I can’t stress enough how important it is that we start loving our special bodies and stop trying to become clones of each other. Start today by being thankful for the body you have and tell yourself that you are special and unique and there is NO ONE out there who has what you have. Be proud of that. Own it. You are you and that is awesome.
Life Healthfully Lived 