Cultivating self awareness around triggers, emotions, and self-limiting thoughts that lead to our behaviors is a very important part of the process. 🌀
🎯 Over time the target is to self manage the point of trigger before the behavior itself, “head off” our emotional chain reaction that leads to the unwanted behavior.
Awareness is the 🔑 that begins the ability to implement your intentions.
You have goals and desires, now you must bridge the gap to behaviors and actions.
While having discipline is an important aspect of behavior change, YES. But being too rigid, too strict, leaves you with little room for making mistakes, which are inventible. When you do slip up without having any self-compassion, you’ll feel guilt and shame. This down spiral will likely lead to you stopping all together.
Having self compassion can lead to great mindfulness, optimism, higher self-efficacy, and more enjoyment through the process. Too much self compassion, you’ll let yourself slide all the time, and eventually stop.
Too much of either of these, ends up in very little action.
🙅🏻♀️ #unpopularfact Intermittent fasting is certainly not for everyone; individuals who are pregnant, have diabetes, or have struggled with disordered eating should not follow any intermittent fasting lifestyle.
Here are my top 3️⃣ possible side effects of intermittent fasting and how they impact mental health…. 👇🏻 1️⃣ Brain Fog and other cognitive side effects 🧠 The brain and body have to adjust to not getting consistent fuel every couple hours, this can lead to blood sugar swings, mood changes, headaches and even fuzzy thinking.
2️⃣Feelings of frustration or failure 😣 For most people it’s not natural to go 5+ daytime hours without eating, feeling frustrated by the demanding structure of IF could lead to eating between meals, or binge eating, followed by feelings of guilt and disappointment.
3️⃣ Can lead to eating disorders and disordered eating tendencies 🍽 Only eating between certain time windows may limit many opportunities for eating, and therefore lead to the under consumption of food and calories.
Some people may develop eating disorders or disorder eating tendencies due to the stress and hyperfocus on food, calories and the time.
Furthermore, following this structure may lead to ignoring of bodily cues of hunger and fullness.
Food may be viewed less important as following the structure is, and may consciously or unconsciously under eat for their body‘s needs, leading to physical, emotional, and hormonal side effects, such as loss of menstruation, hair loss, and dis regulated blood sugars.
💯 Keeping up with ANY strict way of eating is difficult.
🎯 To build a better relationship with food, you might consider trying mindful eating practice or intuitive eating.
Candida, or yeast is a fungus that naturally occurs all over our bodies – in our mouths, rectums, vaginas, and on our skin. It’s part of our ‘mycobome’ – (think microbiome but for fungus!)
While candida can be opportunistic, most of the time it exists in harmony with the rest of our microbes. However, there are practitioners quick to blame ‘candida overgrowth’ in anyone with gut symptoms, fatigue, and weight gain as the culprit. Followed by the prescription of dietary restrictions and a pile of supplements. But what are the facts?
✅ a spit test or stool test CANNOT diagnose candida – we would expect to find yeast there! Researchers are looking at small bowel cultures to diagnose fungal overgrowth in the gut, but so far, a higher level of yeast hasn’t always correlated with symptoms.
✅ dietary patterns do not appear to ‘cause’ candida! In fact, one well designed study found no association between refined carbohydrate intake and presence of candida.
✅ diet cannot ‘treat’ candida! While you might feel better on a diet lower in refined carbs, we need to ask ourselves, did improving diet quality account for symptom improvement?
✅ candidiasis can occur in the gut – but is typically seen in someone severely immunocompromised – for example undergoing cancer treatments or with HIV. Candidiasis needs to be treated with anti-fungals – not diet!
✅ many times, there are evidence based explanations for your symptoms – and ones that don’t require crazy restrictive diets. (hello – so many patients get ‘blamed’ for not following dietary protocols strictly enough and that’s why they’re not getting better? A more likely answer is, they didn’t have candida in the first place.)
Intentional nourishment is one of the most fundamental aspects of my practice.
🙌🏼While listening to our bodies is HUGE, and listening to our feelings is an important part of mental health and healing.
⚠️What if your hunger and fullness cues are off? Most of my clients (and myself) do not always wake up hungry, or have sufficient appetites due to chronic stress & metabolic downregulation, therefore focusing on the MECHANICAL EATING side of things is important.
If you are sick? You still need to eat. If you are stressed AF? You definitely need to eat. Just not feeling hungry? You still need to nourish your cells.
⚠️What if we have never been taught to listen and trust our intuition? What if we have never listened or honored our biofeedback before? What happens in times of weakness or doubt? What prevents you from reaching out to a quick-fix diet or your old ways again?
⚠️ALL OF THESE questions are why I am not the biggest fan of intuitive eating, yet I believe the book and the principles are ground-breaking for yo-yo dieters and important to understand FOR SURE. 💯
💜Nourishing with intention takes intuitive eating much deeper, it is a fusion of body, brain and feelings. It’s creating and maintaining a balance amongst knowledge, hunger cues, feelings and cravings.
💜Practicing nourishing with intention until you find your balance and can trust your body again.
One of the questions within my coaching program in the weekly-check in form: “How is your hunger? Are you constantly thinking about food? Do you feel hunger and fullness cues throughout the day? “
I ask this question because: When your body is properly FED, so is your mind.☺️ ⠀ I will never forget how it felt to restrict myself. ⠀ Not just of food…of fun experiences, I will never, get back. ⠀ I will never forget HOW STRESSED I would be, if I’d be gone from the house for any length of time and I didn’t have food with me. Most of the time, I’d pack my lunch box and be eating cold chicken and asparagus out of plastic containers no matter where I went.
I’ll never forget, when I was following a strict meal plan, told to eat 6 small meals per day, & having to set a timer for 2.5 hours, to allow myself to eat again. My meals were SO SMALL ~250 calories, I’d be so hungry, I’d have to force myself to wait until it was time to eat again. (this is NOT okay) ⠀ I will never forget thinking ‘I can’t wait for that one moment where I can eat a burger…for my re-feed, because I earned it for all the work I have done’. ⠀ They said: “Your body is #goals!” “I wish I could be like you! How do you do it?”
I was celebrated for depriving myself, I got in stage in a tiny bikini & won trophies for this “willpower”. 🏆
I was so wrong. ⠀ I was starving. ⠀ Your body is smart. It KNOWS when you are underfed & overdoing it. You cannot outsmart it, no matter what you do. ⠀ For many people, a yearning for food, longing for that next meal & daydreaming about food, is not a sign of a lack of ‘willpower’ or a mindset issue. ⠀ It’s your body screaming at you to feed it. ⠀ When we are properly fueled, it has a beautiful in flow effect throughout our entire system…& that includes your mind. ⠀ Imagine CLARITY about what you actually WANT & NEED to eat. ⠀ Imagine FOCUS on life outside of your next meal. ⠀ Imagine achieving BALANCE, not because your TOLD you must, but because your body TELLS you itself. ⠀ And the only way to get there, is to stop restricting and start nourishing.
Most of new clients hire a personal trainer wanting to lose weight. But ☝️ we usually have to enter into a different kind of diet before we can actually “diet”. Here’s why this process is important: Most people come from a place of chronic dieting with only short periods of over eating…when they get sick of this yo yo approach to “dieting” It’s not unheard of for new clients to have been attempting a calorie deficit (and typically over-exercising) for 90% of their “fitness journey” 👉 meaning that their bodies are already in a stressed out, down-regulated state. (This was me up until May 2020. )
Instead of exacerbating this stress with MORE exercise and LOWER calories… Our first goal is an optimal psychological and physiological baseline.
This is where you “earn the right” to diet; think of it like your buy in.
This could mean building/finding a sustainable maintenance calorie intake and amount of exercise. For others it might mean even pushing past this and eating in a small surplus to create an environment that’s extra supportive of muscle building for a period of time. *USUALLY* this looks like a progressive, structured increase in calories and revamping workout programming to be more focused on strength training instead of mostly cardio-based 🏃♀️
So where to start? Use the chart below to get an idea of daily calorie amounts, 1800-2100 calories per day, 25-30% coming from Protein. Focus on eating enough food, tracking your biofeedback (Sleep, Hunger, Recovery, Energy, Digestion, Stress) and see how all that improves.
Chronic dieting and over exercising often comes with the need for mindset shifts FIRST.
Jumping into more dieting when you have already been dieting frequently, or if you’ve even just dieted too recently, can quickly lead to you spinning your wheels: 🚫more metabolic adaptations (not good) 🚫muscle loss (really not good) 🚫no progress being made, even perhaps when taking things to extremes. The “diet before the diet” is just as important than the diet itself when it comes to mind & body changes over time. Please spend just as much, if not more, time optimizing your metabolism, building muscle, and living your life, so that when the time does come to diet down, things will be easier & allow for HEALTHY progress 💞
Thank you Coach Kasey Jo for original post and inspiring this content.
🔅TLTR: MOTIVATION is the driving force behind your actions. It isn’t something you simply have and keep forever, motivation is like campfire that you must keep stoking to benefit from the warmth 🔥
🔅SUSTAINABLE motivation comes from an intrinsic source. A place within you where you have self respect and self acceptance. You know the value of health. You believe in the power of your choices, and how they can impact your future. You chose to move your body, to nourishing your body, to prioritize your health, because of those reasons. 💛
🔆Creating motivation is the first step, and having a coach to help manage and maintain that motivation can be a crucial piece of your health and wellness journey 🧩!
🗣 Click link to set up a call to chat about how to get motivated for your goals Calendly – Megan_mefit📱 💪🏻
Lacking discipline is rarely about laziness–it’s often due to setting unrealistic goals, standards, and focusing on what others are doing instead of what you need as an individual.
Examples of a better approach: •Workout 2x per week versus 5-6 days per week. •Hiring a professional to help guide you versus doing what your co-worker is doing. •Small caloric deficit versus Intermittent fasting. •Focusing on daily protein intake versus worrying about about carbs/fat
🤍Play the long game, and make your lifestyle sustainable! ☮️Contentment will bring freedom.
Wellness Simplified with Meganmefit 