I, like many of you, have tried a lot of diets over the years and been increasingly frustrated by the shifting rules of healthy eating coming from so-called experts with questionable conflicts of interest. Today on The Work IN I am highlighting the low hanging fruit when it comes to eating yourself well. If you’re looking for a practical place to start that will give you massive results this is the episode for you.

So often when we want to change our health we can get overwhelmed when it comes to the diet piece. There seems to be so much conflicting information out there. But we don't have to get stuck in the weeds. There’s 3 starting places that are easily within our reach.

Exercise is a classic lever to reduce stress. That’s what they tell us anyway. But rarely is there any guidance given about how or why it works let alone how to make it work for you. That’s what our Work IN is today. I will be giving you a more practical understanding of the mind body connection to exercise for stress reduction and how to harness different intensities to build long lasting buffers to stress triggers.

 It’s so tempting to try to change everything all at once. Tempting and unnecessary.And for some people it ends up being an exercise in frustration and failure. When it comes to getting healthy for the long haul what we really want is lifestyle renovation. Just like in any good renovation project the starting place is often with the cleanup. That’s our Work IN today. How do we support the changes we want and clear our path to health and fitness results?

There’s no doubt undoing generations of misinformation about what is healthy and stopping the progression of our self induced chronic disease pandemic is going to take time. And while changes at the macro level of health policy are important, what matters more is that we take back personal freedom and control to influence our own physical, mental and emotional health. That’s our Work IN today. We’re kicking off a series on Titrating change in our body and mind on the path to chronic health. Today we’re talking about the most important change you need to make before any other change can happen.

I’m always careful when I teach to direct awareness to the muscle connection in poses, to give permission and freedom for students to feel whatever it is they feel. Maybe it’s because I always used yoga as a crosstrain or maybe because I came to it from the fitness side, but I want my students to understand some of what the body is naturally designed to do. To understand how to work with it rather than fighting to put it into shapes that are more performative than practical. 

To me these are not unicorn traits.

What used to be a common practice, setting new year's resolutions, has really fallen out of favor becoming yet another casualty of our cultures black & white thinking. So I’d like to offer an alternative for this year with the caveat that while it’s great to think about new goals at the beginning of the new year it’s also important to remember that we can update them anytime. We can make intentional changes and choices anytime in your personal and professional life. And I’d argue that we should if we want to continue to grow and change for the better. Without those conscious changes, at some point we start to stagnate.

So I’d like to introduce you to the concept of flex and flow…