Imagine you built a house with only a few unsupported boards as its foundation. How stable is that house? Would you move into the upper floors? If you were brave enough to do so, do you think you’d be in for a rude awakening one day when the whole thing collapsed beneath you? 

How many of us are building a complicated life on no sleep? No real food? No meaningful relationships? How many of us are asking our bodies to be pushed to their very limits and then feeling surprised and confused when we become sick or generally unwell? Is this you? It’s a lot of us. 

I know. I’ve been this person. I have asked my body to perform at peak level without giving it proper nourishment. It can’t be done for long. Many years ago, before becoming a health coach, after suffering a great deal of personal loss, I threw myself into work as a performing artist. I said “yes” to every project. Even projects that didn’t propel my career forward or pad my wallet. I was trying to distract myself from my grief by having as many things to do as possible. It was hard and draining and I spent most of that period of time with some kind of illness in my body – a cold, a sinus or throat infection, a yeast infection, a joint injury. Huh. How was it that I was just a magnet for illness? How come I couldn’t feel well? It would have made all this hustling and pushing so much easier if I just didn’t have to combat some kind of physical ailment all the time. 

And then I lost my voice. I mean lost it. No sound. I was in a show running 8 shows a week and due to all the pushing through I’d been doing for a year, I was out of paid sick days. I had commitments to do three concerts in the next 4 weeks and I was doing a Pre-Broadway workshop presentation that week. My voice teacher at the time gave me some tough love. She told me I could keep doing this – not taking care of myself and pushing, pushing, pushing – and the inevitable result would be that maybe I could sing through these commitments but I’d lose my voice probably forever due to damage and I’d be dealing with that for the rest of my life. Or I could stop. Slow down. Back off the gas pedal and back out of as many commitments as possible. Sleep. Be quiet. Eat nourishing foods. Be around people who showed me love and compassion. Drink lots of water. Exercise to move my body but not to point of exhaustion. I had an opportunity to engage in real, foundational ways of restoring my health. I did it. It was the beginning of my health journey.

I realized after that time and the recovery it offered me that nothing could be done if my body was not taken care of. It is the vehicle that carries around my passionate heart and my active mind and it must be maintained.

Many clients come to me wanting to “have it all”. And they can. They just need to build their life on a solid foundation and then so much more is possible. It means following some basic principals. 

Good Food – Food that is made with good quality ingredients, made with love and eaten with pleasure.

Good Hydration – Plenty of fresh, clean water and keep it coming. Sixty percent of your body is water. More than seventy percent of your brain is water. It must be replenished.

Good Movement – Movement that feels good and joyful, that lets the skin release toxins through sweat, that warms the muscles with blood and that lubricates the joints, especially those in your spine. We have more lymph in our bodies than blood. And the lymphatic system, unlike the circulatory system, has no pump. Exercise it the mover of lymph. Bodies need to be moved every day in a way that does not induce pain.

Good Sleep – Sleep that is regular and undisturbed. Sleep that is restorative and energizing and allows the brain to dream and the body to rest. 

Good Relationships – We cannot live our lives without connection to other people. People in healthy relationships with friends, family and partners live longer and happier lives. Yes, Sarte said “Hell is other people”. So make sure the people you spend your time with fill you with laughter and stimulating conversation. And love. 

We must all learn to refocus our energies on these fundamental, foundational, fortifying principals. And to prioritize them. That reprioritization will make your body, mind and spirit strong. And then you can do anything. 

If a diet really worked, you’d do it once and never have to do it again, right?

This is a short post to remind you that the diet and diet book industry are multi billion dollar businesses. In case you missed it, that’s billion with a “b”. 9 zeros. The diet industry is taking your money and making you feel stupid and no one is healthier for it.

A few things to think about:

The diet industry is designed to keep you off balance. Why? So you keep coming back for more. If a diet really worked, you’d do it once and never have to do it again, right? But then who would buy the next book? Or extreme fitness program? Or diet membership? Diets are built to be unsustainable and for you to fail. And here’s the lousiest part.

Diets tell you that you  are the problem. The diet promises it works. So if you don’t succeed on the diet, the diet blames you.  

You are not a failure. Do not carry around the idea that you are weak, that you are stupid, that you can’t finish anything you start. It was the diet that couldn’t be done, not you that couldn’t do it.

Divest from diet culture. It does not serve you. 

When I work with a new client, there is almost always a sort of heart breaking moment when I give them “permission” to eat something they had decided was bad for them. It’s often something relatively mundane. Egg yolks. Baked potatoes. Bananas. Red meat. Raisins. Ordinary foods to which they had developed a sort of fear-based aversion. Sometimes I ask a client why they think a food is bad for them. They often give a sort of science-y answer that involves words like “carbs” and “calories” and that has no real root in actual science.

Many of our food fears are just beliefs about food. We don’t even know why we believe what we believe. A belief is just an idea that has been repeated over and over again. Sadly, because the medical field is quite separate from the nutrition field, your doctor, whom you may trust inherently, might have given you very specious nutritional advice. Or the news offered you something in a sound bite. Or some trainer at the gym. We develop our ideas about what is good for us from a piecemeal compilation of information that comes from people who probably don’t know much about the subject.

It can all feel very overwhelming. Michael Pollan did such an incredible job with his 2009 book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. It really breaks down the answer to the question of “Should I eat it?” into bite size (sorry for the pun) thoughts that are easy to remember. Some of my favorites are, “If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, don’t eat it” and “ Eat as much junk food as you want as long as you make it yourself.” I’m paraphrasing but that’s kind the point. The ideas are truthful but anecdotal, easy to remember, not convoluted by numbers and math problems and non-intuitive ideas about food. 

You can ask yourself some of these simple questions when you feel overwhelmed. Pick up the book if you like (a light and casual read or get the lovely illustrated version by Maira Kalman). Or just flip over your box of snacks and read the ingredients list. If you recognize most of the ingredients, it’s probably food. If you think you could, given the right equipment, make it yourself, it’s probably food. Is it a one ingredient food, like olive oil? Or even better, a one ingredient food without a package like carrots? It’s DEFINITELY food. 

Food does not need to be a science based decision. Years ago, before going to nutrition school, I did a diet that was very popular for a time and very effective. But when I tell you it required me to carry around a calculator and notebook to do complex math equations in order to decide what to eat, I am not joking. It was not fun. It was not intuitive. And it was not worth the trouble, frankly. 

I want you to find joy in the eating process. If that means a smear of mayonnaise on your sandwich, please, please, please eat it. The irony is, I hear clients draw strange lines in the sand (“I can’t eat mangos because the carbs are too high”) and then turn around and eat a donut and a mocha at the end of the day when their blood sugar is low. It’s not logical. But then again, most of what we ought to be doing around food isn’t logical: it’s biological. Lean into that. 

Begin today by eating real food. Or mostly real food. And see how your body responds (I bet it thanks you with a good night’s sleep and a quality poop in the morning.) I help clients find peace around food decisions and find creative solutions to breaking old and limiting beliefs around their bodies. If you need help with this, please reach out to me and let’s talk.