Titrating healthy lifestyle: Using guardrails to get out of your own way
“The best relationships, the healthiest relationships are intentional. As are the healthiest people.”
-Ericka Thomas
Transcript
Episode 216
Titrating change: Getting out of your own way
Once you decide that yes you CAN make yourself healthy again, it’s time to get started in a place that will give you a strong foundation and quick win. But where? There’s a story Debra Adele tells in her book The Yamas and Niyamas about a helpful monkey who grabs a fish out of the water and takes him up into the tree. As the fish dies the monkey laments, “But I saved you from drowning!” Sometimes the things we do for our health seem like they should help but they can actually make it harder for us to succeed in the long term. One of those things is going cold turkey on anything. 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?
Most of us have some idea of what is healthy and what isn’t, many of us probably have already started introducing some of those things. We might even be aware of the things that we are “supposed” to stop doing in order to be healthier. Some are obvious like smoking, drug or alcohol use, or junk/fast food. There are many ways that our modern lifestyle supports and even rewards unhealthy habits. We’re going to look at 3 of these areas and some of the small bite size changes that can lead to big results.
Some common ways that many of us block our health results that we may not be aware of.
Where we get in our own way
Not eating enough or under nourishing the body. The body sees fat stores as a safety mechanism. It is protective for the body to hold onto fat. The same way pain is protective. Which seems counterintuitive I know but true. Nourishing the body is more than counting calories and macros. We need a variety of whole, nutrient dense foods. Preferably without a label. If we believe the misinformation about nutrition, and get stuck in the counting world of fitness we can lose touch with how the body is naturally designed to respond to food through digestion and metabolism. It’s easier to count calories and macros with food that’s in a package but it isn’t easier for the body.
Not recruiting the nervous system. Yes I’m talking about stress but not necessarily in the way we normally talk about. Stress is good for us and we can use it to get better health and fitness results. Controlled stress is how we tell the body what we want from it. Allowing appropriate rest and recovery from all sources of stress gives the body a chance to catch up and adapt. That’s resilience. This can be exercise but it could really be any kind of chosen discomfort or challenge. Humans have an appetite for discomfort. If we don’t give ourselves healthy forms of challenge with opportunities for success the mind body will find unhealthy ones.
Undermining, underutilizing self care. What we see as self care is not actually what the body mind unity understands as self care. It can elevate the importance and ritual of how we feed ourselves, how we move, how we sleep and support our relationship to ourselves and others. We need to be fed in many ways including social connection, friendships, challenges, building self awareness, family and romantic relationships, simply having fun. This is all active rest and recovery for the mind body/body mind.
Now in these 3 areas we can use a really simple tool to start that renovation clean up, to get out of our own way. Because let’s face it sometimes on the surface it looks like we’re doing everything right and still not getting the results we want. We’re literally the monkey in the tree. Remember we aren’t going for cold turkey. It’s fine if you want to, that can work too, at least in the short term, but today we’re taking a bite size approach.
Setting guard rails.
Guard rails allow change in our lifestyle and health habits without complete cold turkey deprivation. They can also protect those changes long term. They allow shifts in the HOW we incorporate each of our health pillars in bite size ways that may feel far more doable and sustainable long term than a complete overhaul of everything all at once. I think of guard rails like those railings that pop up for you when you’re learning to bowl. Bowling is an excruciatingly bad experience if you are only throwing gutter balls. But those rails let everyone who’s playing have a good time and get something out of it. And they help you learn the game. Basically that’s what we’re doing here, learning to play the game of health and fitness.
So let’s talk about what guard rails might look like in each of our 4 wellness pillars starting with movement.
Movement
Exercise and activity carry some false beliefs that we can unravel right here. You know them, like you need a gym membership in order to work out, or all exercise needs to be painful in order to work, or that if you are already in pain, for any reason, you can’t or shouldn’t move at all. These are the kinds of beliefs that setting guard rails can help us get past. There are 2 guard rails we can start with.
First guard rail : ALL ACTIVITY COUNTS. The sooner you embrace this the faster you can see results. It’s a very important mantra especially for those of us who are just starting out. If you don't move a lot, every little thing you do that isn’t sitting on the couch is going to ask the body to start to adapt. Walking to the mailbox, parking farther from the door, standing up for 3 minutes every 30 minutes during the day, walking the dog around the block. Any and all ,movement beyond what you currently do is going to work. But our belief about it is almost more important as we learned from some of the mindfulness studies.
Second guard rail in movement: STOP HIITING YOURSELF. For those of you who are stuck in the no pain no gain mindset here’s your permission to back off. Current exercise science is telling us that going all out at every workout may not be the best choice for long term cardiovascular health. I’m not saying you can’t do HIIT sometimes, I’m saying without appropriate recovery there are diminishing returns. Including damage to the heart muscle, damage to joints, and a loss of fat adapted metabolism - meaning you’re burning sugar rather than fat for energy. The answer here (especially for over 40) is more Zone 2 cardio (80%), get your intensity from heavy resistance training and limit the HIIT to once or twice a week.
Exercise is that controlled stress we talked about earlier. It gives us a physical discomfort that we know won’t last and can make us stronger in other areas of discomfort. It’s a good kind of stress that the body understands. In order for it to stay good we need to build in the recovery part. Hence this guard rail STOP HIITING YOURSELF.
Nutrition
We can apply guardrails to our nourishment too. HOW, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE we eat are very effective guardrails. Remember we don’t have to do all of them and this is going to look different for everybody. Our goal is to support a nourishing diet long term, not for 30 days only.
First guard rail: WHEN you eat.
Fasting is a fad these days but it is a fad that’s based on our evolutionary biology. When done appropriately it can be very effective for many people. It’s only been in recent history when we have been in this culture of abundance and convenience around food. IT wasn’t that long ago when we had to go out and kill or find or grow what we ate. That changes our relationship with our food. We didn't always get what we needed every single day and the body would adapt.
Today we can get an over abundance of calories and still be undernourished. The body will adapt appropriately. It’ll save everything. You can be overweight and undernourished and you can be normal weight and undernourished in this category. Our food society allows for both.
And our culture tends to subconsciously reward the self sacrificial approach to eating. Maybe that's skipping meals in favor of meetings or shoving food into our mouths between family events or while walking out the door or mindlessly grazing while watching tv, video games or doomscrolling. All of that behavior, even if we’re eating healthy whole food, is telling the body mind something. It’s saying we aren’t really in a safe place. And because we aren’t safe, digestion isn’t online, the immune system is heightened, and all energy needs to be saved up. That’s a recipe for autoimmune if I ever saw one.
Second Guardrail WHAT and HOW WE EAT.
The truth is it doesn’t matter how many calories are on our plate or the exact amount of protein weighed by grams. How about we start with noticing when we’re actually satisfied when we’re eating? Can you savor what you are eating? Do you sit down to eat? Do you let yourself enjoy your food?
Not all of us can or want to stop eating entire food groups or go cold turkey on caffeine or alcohol. Having done that I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary although some people might find it helpful. Same is true for alcohol. Alcohol is empty of nutrition and it’s poison, a class 1 carcinogen. However in the context of savoring your food and company and in moderation there may be some other kinds of nourishment there. Not everyone who drinks has a drinking problem and not everyone with a drinking problem is problematic. You have to look beyond the behavior to really why and what people are drinking for. Lot’s of us have a sticky relationship with alcohol and it has nothing to do with moralizing. It is toxic and can make everything harder for your body mind.
When I say HOW that can include what we eat but it doesn’t have to. I’ll give you an example from my own kitchen. I pretty much eat a whole food diet these days. I’ve done the paleo primal, low fat, vegetarian thing in the past and and except for the low cal/low fat one they all had their benefits. Now I use some general guard rails around how I heat and drink.
Protein first on my plate.doesn’t really matter what kind. I find that when I don’t eat protein of some kind with a meal I end up really hungry later. I limit carbs from my trigger foods which are potatoes in any form, white rice and bread. These things don’t have an off switch for me. I don’t eat after 6 PM on most days. When I do it always affects my sleep. When I’m hungry during the day I eat. When I drink wine I also drink water. I filter my water.
3rd Guardrail: WHERE YOU EAT
Do you eat out or at home? Alone or with family and friends? Do you pack a lunch or hit the cafeteria or drive through? Do you hate to cook or are you a budding chef? I get some push back here because this guardrail can feel like a lifestyle judgement. The good news is that even if you hate to cook or your work/life doesn’t allow for meals at home there are a lot more healthy choices to eat out these days than ever before and the more you learn about how to build your plate for yourself the better choices you can make.
Sleep
Sleep is a major health pillar. There are a lot of guardrails that we can choose from to make it a priority.
First guardrail: BEDTIME and WAKEUP
You decide what these are but all the sleep experts say that consistency is important here. Then we can lean into getting to bed closer to 9 PM to maximize that deep sleep time.
Second guardrail: NO TECH IN BED
The blue light from phones and devices WILL interfere with your sleep. It affects your brain.
3rd guardrail: SLEEP ON EMPTY
The gut needs as much rest and recovery overnight as your brain. So give yourself 3-4 hours without food before sleep. This includes alcohol. Alcohol at night is notorious for disrupting sleep quality. Knowing this you can make an informed decision.
4th guardrail: GET OUTSIDE
Sunshine during the day does help boost our circadian rhythms. You can multiply the benefits with a walk (ZONE 2) in the evening especially.
Connection
Our final pillar of health intersects all the others. That is connection. Not only with others which is great of course to have healthy relationships but that connection with ourselves as well.
Here’s some guard rail options.
First guardrail:TECH FREE TIME FOR THOUGHT
This might be meditation or prayer, journaling or reading for personal curiosity or entertainment. This is the kind of time where you get to figure out what you really believe about the world, to process things that are going on or have happened to you in the past. It helps you build personal self awareness and gives us a buffer against some of the wide world of crazy out there.
Second guardrail: PRIORITIZE RELATIONSHIPS
Put those meetups on the calendar. Schedule family dinners and make them a priority. Schedule date night, no matter how long you’ve been together. Reach out to family. Whatever works for you. We all know where we could do better in our relationships. Personally I’m not good at this. And I’m so grateful to my friends who have insisted on staying friends. It’s far too easy to let go and let life get in the way. The best relationships, the healthiest relationships are intentional.
As are the healthiest people.
Ultimately your health and fitness path is going to be unique and personal. It's about doing mostly healthy things most of the time. And to that end there are 2 over arching guardrails that can help keep us from getting overwhelmed and off track.
The first guardrail: LOOSEN YOU GRIP
THis whole episode has been about guardrails, not hard and fast rules. It’s about establishing principled practices for yourself rather than black and white regulations. But a lot of what we do (or don’t do) to take care of ourselves (or not take care of ourselves) is part of our identity. And any time we brush up against that the question becomes “who will I be if I don’t do this anymore?” or “who am I without this habit?” Those are the kinds of questions that will derail any lifestyle change. So instead we can start that internal conversation with permission to loosen our grip on that identity. We don’t have to let go of it entirely, or if we do we can give ourselves permission to pick it back up again if we want. We can give ourselves that kind of permission because of this second over arching guardrail.
2nd guardrail: Major in the majors
I heard this phrase from one of my favorite podcasters Dr Stephanie Estima on The Better Podcast and I love it. It’s like base mileage if you’re a runner or cyclist. What do you do every day already? How do you move, eat, sleep and connect? Start with those. We don’t need to get into the weeds with supplements, hormones or the latest insta fitness fad if we don’t move, don’t nourish ourselves and refuse to sleep.
Again we aren’t looking for everything to change all at once. We don’t need the kind of help that the monkey offers the fish. We want to build a strong foundation for change by supporting our health choices with practical guardrails. It may be challenging but because we are approaching lifestyle change in bite size ways those choices are sustainable for lasting benefits.
Thanks for listening!
Until next time, stop working out and start working in
Connecting the dots for your personal health and professional wellness can be daunting. You don’t have to go it alone. Head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources including a link to book a 30 min fitness strategy call with me. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening.
Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a health coach and trauma informed yoga professional bringing real world resilience and healing to main street USA.
I offer trauma release + yoga + wellness education for groups and individuals…regular people like you.
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