I talk on almost every episode about how important it is to write down what you eat & how it makes you feel. It’s not at all about calorie or macro counting but bringing mindfulness to your food choices & your body.
There are no more excuses! I’ve created a free food journal food you & we are going to kick off a 31-day journaling challenge for the month of May!
That’s right. I’ll give you a free food journal and you’ll commit to writing down everything you eat and how it makes you feel for 31 days. Deal?
Not sold yet? That’s ok. In today’s episode I’m talking about the objections to journaling and the primary benefits (which might change your mind!)
If you’re ready to dive in, click the pink button below to get your journal but definitely listen to the episode so you understand what we’re doing & why!
In today’s episode I’m talking about the primary objectives to tracking & how to overcome them. I touch on
The time it takes
Guilt & shame over food choices
Obsession over calorie counting (this journal does NOT encourage you to count anything at all!)
Then we dive into the primary benefits of tracking and why it’s so important to take on this 31-day challenge.
Mindfulness – bringing conscious attention to your food choices, how much you eat and your goals
What’s working & what’s not – having a journal is the most powerful way to quickly & easily see which strategies work for your body & which ones don’t
Identifying triggers & big rocks – Tracking allows you to see what foods or situations are most likely to positively & negatively influence your choices. It also shows you the biggest factors in the way of your progress. There’s no better way to see these important factors.
Interpret signals from your body – your body is constantly signaling you with things like hunger, cravings, mood, sleep & energy. When you write down these signals and when you feel them, you have powerful information about your health, hormones & fat loss status.
After a recent episode on the stress response triggered by caffeine, I received a number of emails about cortisol, adrenal fatigue and if the stress in our lives contributes to weight gain or trouble losing weight.
Today we’re going to answer the questions.
The short answer is this: Yes, the stress you create is keeping you fat and much of the stress we experience is stress we manufacture.
We’ll talk about adrenal fatigue, chronic stress & what you can do about it.
We need to have a better understanding of what triggers a stress response. We tend to think about stress as emotional stress but it’s far more than that.
Much of the stress in our lives is stress we manufacture:
Getting worked up over traffic or misplacing our keys
Creating anxiety over future worries that may or may not ever pose an issue
Fixating on past challenges or regrets
Over-extending ourselves
Not getting enough sleep
Eating foods which trigger our stress responses
Stress can be caused by thoughts, emotions, injury, illness, exercise, food, fatigue & much more.
When your stress response is on overdrive it can lead to:
Decreased metabolic rate
Increased fat storage
Increased hunger
Cravings
Muscle burning
Depression
Anxiety
Fatigue
Trouble falling asleep and/or staying asleep
Illness
Adrenal Fatigue
Your adrenal glands, though small, are a significant part of your health, happiness & ability to burn fat. You’ve got two of them and each one sits on top of your kidney, like a cap.
In response to stress of any kind, your brain instructs the adrenal glands to produce & secrete stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
Think about it like a fire alarm. The first time you pull the alarm, you react! The fire department reacts. The alarm stands out and an appropriate response ensues.
But what happens if that alarm goes off every single day? Or worse, if it is constantly sounding?
You don’t react to it the same way, the fire department certainly doesn’t either and eventually the batteries will die.
When we have constant stressors triggering the alarms in our bodies, these adrenal glands wear out. They get tired. They’re constantly pumping out stress hormones. They’re both exhausted and less effective.
This means that not only are you feeling constantly exhausted and on edge, your body is unable to respond to true issues like injury & illness.
It creates systemic hormonal chaos and is a strong precursor to injury, disease and depression.
How To Make A Change
Adrenal fatigue is absolutely something you can improve. Even if you aren’t struggling with full-blown adrenal fatigue, you can benefit from minimizing stress and improving your response to stressful things.
Practice perspective. Losing your keys, getting stuck in traffic or your computer giving you an error message are not worth pulling the fire alarm of your stress response system.
Prioritize sleep. If you can’t increase the quantity of your sleep, you must improve the quality. Here’s a podcast I did on how you can improve the quality of your sleep.
Avoid or minimize foods which trigger your stress response. These include sugar, processed foods, toxins, caffeine, alcohol and any food to which you have a sensitivity.
Laugh and smile more. Seek out people & things that make you feel happiness & levity. It doesn’t matter if it’s weird cat videos or quality time with people you enjoy. Decide to laugh & smile more often.
Get a massage, have an orgasm or go for a nice walk. Or, go for the trifecta.
I posted a powerful video on the Primal Potential Facebook page yesterday. It has nothing to do with weight loss and yet, I think it has almost everything to do with weight loss.
I really hope you’ll take 3:30 to watch this short video because it’s absolutely worth it.
In fact, I think it points to a connection between social media and obesity.
The video talks about how disconnected we’ve become from real life & how social media and virtual relationships have undercut truly being social and fostering meaningful relationships.
Here’s what I think:
We have a hard time making good decisions in the moment because we’re routinely NOT in the moment.
We’re distracted. We’re detached. We’re distracted & detached from others but, more importantly, from ourselves.
This allows us to avoid the consequences of our decisions in the heat of the moment.
We have a hard time prioritizing our health because we’re disconnected from ourselves.
When we spend more time in real life, more time connecting with real people, I believe we become more connected to ourselves.
When we are more connected to ourselves and our real lives instead of the lives of those we watch through the media, we are more mindful of our choices and their consequences.
I’d love to know: does this video make you want to make any changes? If so, what change will you make?
I shared on Facebook that I’m planning to leave my phone in the car when I go into stores or the gym so I can pay more attention to the people around me. I’m also instituting a tech-curfew for myself.
Sure, it’s a book about concentration, not a book about health or fat loss, but I’m telling you right now: if you harness the power of concentration for weight loss, you will dramatically improve your results.
A couple episodes ago I talked about a clip from the movie “Any Given Sunday” and how Al Pacino (the coach) shares with the team that games are won & lost by inches and the inches we need are all around us.
The same is true in behavior change, fat loss and health. The inches we need are all around us and the power of concentration gives us many of those inches we need.
Listen to the full episode to learn how we can apply the power of concentration to all our weight loss, health, fitness and personal goals.
The Power of Concentration begins by talking about the power of focus. I’ve shared many times how I think one of the most destructive things we can do is try to achieve too many objectives at once.
This is how my simple mind thinks about it – you know that carnival game where you have a gun & a target? When you pull the trigger, the gun shoots water at the target? The more consistently you hit the center of the target with the stream of water, the faster the ballon above the target rises, driven by the concentrated force of water.
But, what would happen if you tried to hit 3 targets at once? You still only have 1 water gun & one source of water. You’d make slower progress while still exerting the same amount of effort, balloons over each target rising more slowly.
This is why we need to harness the power of concentration. As it relates to weight loss or fat loss, I believe we do this by tackling ONE behavior change at a time.
I learned a few key lessons from The Power of Concentration which I share in detail in today’s episode. They include:
Identify & eliminate areas from which your energy escapes (and is wasted)
The bank president story – establish the mission & do something each day to move you in that direction. At the end of each day, evaluate what action(s) you took
Never make decisions in a negative state of mind
Make decisions more quickly. Silence the internal debate. It wastes both time & energy
You will benefit more from doing 1 hard thing than 12 easy things
Practice the power of concentration
I share some of the ideas about how to practice concentration in ways that relate to your health & fat loss goals including breathing, focus and visualization.
You might not believe me, but I’m telling the truth when I say that there is an undeniable (and very powerful) link between your body language and weight loss. There is. I hope you’ll be open minded enough to listen to today’s episode in its entirety to see what I mean, why & how you can capitalize on this.
Not only does our body language influence how we feel, but it influences our hormones. For real. In this episode I will share the link between body language, weight loss and our hormone production. Specific power poses can actually reduce stress hormones in as little as two minutes!
Our body language impacts our outlook, our attitude, our self-perception and our choices. Simple changes to the way you sit, stand and to your facial impressions can have a dramatic impact on your mood, confidence and consistency.
Do not miss this full episode to hear specific changes you can make, how & why to make fat loss & healthy choices exponentially easier!
