Tag Archives: Optimal Wellness

Getting Back on Track After Thanksgiving

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Nothing else in your experience responds as quickly as your own physical body to your patterns of thought.

—Abraham-Hicks

For the first time in two years, my body let me know just before Thanksgiving that I was not following my own advice about loving myself for optimal wellness.

In other words, I was sick over the holiday.

The reminder to tend to my own self-care was actually a message I’d been getting for several weeks.

But I had exciting things underway with travel for a business mastermind retreat, professional photo session, and VIP day with my coach where we created plans for me to launch a new website on December 13, start a new Love Your Way Slim coaching program on January 7, and hold a beachside retreat for 8 women in Charleston, South Carolina, in April. Plus my folks were arriving for five days to celebrate Thanksgiving.

I was focused on “doing.” And it felt like “too much” happening at once.

There is so much more to wellness than checking your workout off your “to-do” list and eating relatively healthy foods.

A significant part of optimal wellness is believing in your wellness and your capacity to deal with any outer situation.

The purpose of life is to give you a chance to be the

grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held

about Who You Are. When challenges arrive, then,

move straight to clarity: This is what you came for.

Now rise to this occasion, and know that you have

every resource with which to create the right and

perfect outcome.

—Neale Donald Walsch

The good news is not feeling well forced me to take some time to “Be.” I used the time to rest, meditate, spend quality time with my family, and read a book that felt like the next logical step in my own spiritual development.

And I focused on what I know.

  • Almost all illness and injury is evidence of being out of balance and is temporary. Wellness is your natural state of being.
  • You are unique, powerful, gifted, resourceful, and loved. A great part of optimal wellness is seeing yourself that way.
  • You are never, ever, given a challenge you cannot overcome.

I am grateful that my body gave me a great reminder to take the time to rest and reflect on my beliefs about myself, what I am capable of, and what I deserve, and to tap into what is really important to me.

How are your current beliefs impacting your optimal wellness? Are they helping you be the “the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are?”

If not, how do you need to change how you think about you?

Together we can do it!

Wellness Tip of the Day

Aside

Wellness Tip of the Day: You are unique, powerful, gifted, resourceful, and loved. Part of optimal wellness is seeing yourself that way.

 

Love or Hate Your Workout? That’s Impacting Your Results

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Why is it that one person can follow a diet and exercise program and have great results and another use the exact same regimen and not see the same progress?

It has less to do with your metabolism, genes, luck, etc., etc., than you might think.

An often overlooked but critical factor are your thoughts and feelings while you are doing the diet or exercise program.

This is truly one of the missing links that causes so many diet and exercise programs to fail.

Think of it this way. How much are you going to give your exercise program your all if the entire time you’re thinking thoughts like:

“I hate exercise.”

“How soon till this is over?”

“I hate to sweat.”

“Just get me through this torture.”

With thoughts like that—and the resulting sluggish results—how likely are you going to sustain your exercise program?

Chances are not good!

Instead, what if during your workout you are choosing to think about:

  • All the reasons Why you want optimal wellness.
  • Affirmations reinforcing that doing the work will get you the results you want.
  • How good you feel after the workout.

And what if you actually chose a physical activity that you enjoy to begin with?

Wouldn’t you start to look forward to your workouts?

Wouldn’t you start to pay attention to and celebrate signs of progress—even if they were slow and steady?

Every time you had a jolt of unexpected energy during your day, wouldn’t you feel good about having gotten your workout in?

And wouldn’t all those positive thoughts and feelings make you more likely to want to get up and do your workout again tomorrow?

But, you might say, “I hate exercise. I have always hated exercise. That’s just how I feel.”

Believe it or not, you can change long-held thoughts and beliefs—if you want to.

You can learn to love exercise by practicing new thoughts and beliefs.

Now I’m not saying you are going to make this shift overnight, but if your wellness is enough of a priority that you will practice consistently, you will be amazed by the results.

Here are some 3 simple ways to practice changing your thoughts.

Figure out a compelling reason Why you want wellness. Certainly use wanting to look good in a swimsuit or for your reunion, but look deeper. What is your true, heart-felt reason that is so strong it inspires you to get up from that nice warm bed to get in your workout?

Write out, read, and feel positive affirmations. Create affirmations that shift your thinking just a little bit so they are believable. Practice reading them—and feeling them—each day when you are not working out and bring them to mind while you are exercising. Soon you won’t have to remind yourself to think those thoughts. They will come naturally.

Focus on your progress. Mentally look for and celebrate each tiny sign of success. Note how good you feel after your workout, how much easier your pants button, your increased stamina after walking up a flight of stairs. Each celebration builds your positive momentum, making it easier to sustain action.

These suggestions may be simple, but they are powerful. Practice them consistently and before you know it, you will be one of those people who loves moving their bodies!

Together we can do it!

What Did You Expect?

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What often holds women back from getting the body they want is the belief that they can have it.

Ultimately, you get what you expect.

You may hold yourself back from being willing to believe you can achieve your goal because of:

  • Fear that you will be disappointed
  • Worry that you aren’t doing the “right” eating plan or exercise program
  • Other contradictory beliefs, such as there’s something wrong with your body and it doesn’t respond like other people’s
  • Faulty beliefs about your self-worth and how much you deserve it
  • A combination of these or other thoughts

There are a number of reasons that expectation is so powerful and is such a huge predictor of success.

One is simply that you hold back on your commitment to action if there’s a part of you that believes the results are not possible.

Just think about it. How likely are you to give your workout your all or stick to your eating plan if you are questioning how effective it will be?

It can feel like a huge risk to put all your emotional chips in the game. It can lead to sabotaging thoughts such as, “What if I give it my all and still fail?”

But how likely are you to succeed if you aren’t giving it your all? By holding back, you are actually creating the outcome that you don’t want.

This is why really thinking about what optimal wellness means to you and the value it will have in your life is so important. This is why is it critical to be focused on creating a healthy lifestyle rather than a “diet” that you are doing for a limited time.

It helps you redefine success and the parameters of the game.

If you only define success as the numbers on the scale, it’s easy to “fail.”

But if success includes having your clothes fit better or being a smaller size, having more energy, doing more, feeling better, being more engaged in life, improved health, endurance, strength and stamina, etc., there is no way you could give your plan your all and “fail.”

And if you are focused on creating a lifestyle there is no end buzzer in which the game is over and you “fail.” It doesn’t matter if you reach your goal in 12 weeks or a year. What matters is that you are making progress. (See definition of success above.)

Expecting results is powerful. How much you hold back on being willing to believe you can achieve your goal is how much you will fall short.

The good news is that, as Abraham-Hicks says, a belief is just a thought you keep thinking.

This means that you can change your beliefs by choosing to think new thoughts!

Choose to think about:

  • How it will feel to be slim and healthy
  • How eating healthy food in the right portions and moving your body will help you achieve your wellness goals
  • How hard your body is working on your behalf
  • How much you deserve—and can achieve—the the body you want

What else can you do to shore up your expectation that you can achieve your goals? How does that impact your success?

Together we can do it!

Wellness Tip of the Day

Aside

Wellness Tip of the Day: Self-love is at the core of optimal wellness. Eating healthy, moving your body, and choosing happiness spring naturally from self-value.

Happy 4th of July!

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Today in America we are celebrating Independence and Freedom.

So to all my fabulous readers, I wish you:

  • The freedom found in optimal wellness.
  • The freedom of independent thought to focus on and create the life that you want.
  • The freedom to choose your response rather than just to react.
  • The freedom to choose the foods that you eat and in what quantity.
  • The freedom to move your body in ways that feel good to you
  • The freedom and independence that comes from claiming dominion over your body and mind.

Health brings freedom. Feeling well helps you connect more with joy and do more of what you love. Allow your life to keep getting better.

One a personal note, I would also like to wish my brother, Richard, a very happy birthday. Sending you much love!

Wellness Tip of the Day

Aside

Wellness Tip of the Day: To create optimal wellness and wellbeing begin stretching your beliefs to accept that it is possible.

How Was Your Mental Workout?

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

Often my clients are surprised that creating optimal wellness requires working their mental muscles in the same way they exercise their bodies. It takes discipline, practice, and consistency.

Just as you might plan to get up and do your physical workout, you also need to plan to work your mental muscles if you want to shift your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to help support and change your actions to get different—and more desirable—results.

How long do you think you will maintain a workout program if you force yourself to exercise through sheer willpower but spend the whole time thinking about how much you hate it? Let’s just say your chances of long-term success will be pretty slim.

But how likely it is that you are going to go from hating to exercise to loving it in an instant? You wouldn’t expect to get off the sofa and be able to go run 3 miles the first time out, so why would you expect to create new mental patterns that quickly?

The truth is that mentally, most people are the equivalent of coach potatoes. They just react unconsciously to the physical stimulus around them in the exact same way they’ve always reacted, or people around them react. They have no idea that they have just as much potential to control their thoughts and reactions as a body builder has to curl a 50-pound dumbbell.

Just because you have hated exercise in the past—or have always hated it—doesn’t mean that you have to hate it forever. That is a practiced reaction that you actually do have the power to change—if you want to.

I know because I was one of those people. As a kid, I was not physically gifted. My lack of grace was a running joke in my family. Reading was my pleasure and the idea of working physically hard and, heaven forbid, actually sweating were abhorrent to me.

In other words, I hated exercise. Oh, my parents poked, goaded, and prodded me to get off the sofa and move, but I resented the heck out of it.

As a teenager and young adult, I only worked out long enough to meet my weight-loss goal. As soon as the scale hit my target weight, I went right back to my more slothful habits—only to regain the weight I had just lost—and usually then some.

It wasn’t until I started shifting my thoughts that I began to be able to exercise more consistently. First, I made peace with the need to exercise to maintain my health and feel physically well. Slowly and surely—with mental practice—I began to look forward to it, and eventually to actually enjoy it.

Now, my day is off big time if I don’t get my workout in. All truly is not right with the world! I enjoy moving my body and working out—and I love how good it makes me feel. And I love to sweat!

Building your mental muscles is a process, just as building your physical muscles is a process.

You first figure out your goal and create a plan to get there. There are lots of mental exercises to choose from, such as centering exercises, meditations, making lists of things you appreciate, visualizing, affirmations, journaling, and consciously shifting your thoughts on specific topics.

Just as you decide if you want to run, life weights, or do yoga, you pick what feels right to you—and what you will actually do consistently. And then decide how often and for how long. Just as with physical exercise, start off easy and build up.

With practice, you’ll begin to notice that you don’t instantly get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic, and even better, you’ll find yourself pushing yourself in your workout because it feels good and you want to.

What can you do today to exercise your mental muscles? How can you make that a consistent practice that you are just as committed to as your physical workout? What difference does that make to achieving your wellness goals?

Together we can do it!

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