March Week 3: Structuring Your Weight Release - Part 1

I hope you are great and enjoying the wild and wacky weather this spring is bringing in.

I would like to take the next two weeks to look at creating a structure for your eating and exercise within your daily calorie budget for weight release - one that is repeatable so that it can become a low maintenance habit rather than something you have to consciously focus on all the time.

LANDSCAPING YOUR SUCCESSFUL WEIGHT LOSS STRUCTURE, PART 1

I was out in my garden last Sunday.  It was a glorious day and my front yard is coming to life. There are roses and other flowers blooming, but also all the other plants that go all year long.  I love my front garden -- there is no grass and the plants don’t take much water or care -- it is both beautiful and low maintenance. (This is going to tie into weight mastery in a moment - so hear me out.

TRIAL AND ERROR AND TRIAL AND SUCCESS

My garden was not always like this. It took time and trial and error to set up a garden that now I look at and love and hardly work in at all. I didn’t know anything about gardens when I bought my house 20 years ago and I certainly didn’t have the money to hire a landscaper.

It was up to me to turn a garden of ugly overgrown bushes and dead grass into something I called my own. So I started with an idea—I wanted an English looking garden, non-formal looking, but lots of foxgloves and English type plants.

I planted my English garden. It looked great.  Then it died!  The foxgloves and hollyhocks needed lots of water and cool weather - it didn’t work with the conditions of my southern California yard. So I had to come up with something that looked like an English garden but had more desert friendly, low water plants.

This took a few years of fiddling and trial and error. But I was patient and flexible - changing out plants that died off with new ones that didn’t. Understanding the seasons and finding plants that offered a variety of different looks all year round.

Now I have a garden that is mine and it works for me. I love it and am proud of the journey I invested with my garden. It loves me back by requiring little water and giving me lots of visual pleasure year in and year out.

SO RITA, WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH WEIGHT LOSS???

The same happened with my own journey to losing weight and keeping it off.  I had to be patient. I had to be persistent. I had to create my own structure of eating and exercise that worked for me, and I had to cultivate it over time. It didn’t come right away.

I want to walk you through some basic steps to start building your own weight release structure. This week I am going to invite you to look at the structure or lack of structure that already exists and next week, in Part 2, we will build onto this.

Research shows that creating a consistent structured way of eating results in a much higher overall success rate with weight loss and keeping it off.

The problem is that when we go on an external structure - like a diet - often the times the diet wants us to eat and the foods that we are supposed to eat on it do not work for us and our lifestyle, kind of like my first English Garden that died because I planted cool weather plants in a desert - not a good fit!

In fact, research shows that most successful masters of weight evolved their own way of eating, both the foods they ate and the structure they ate it in over time. Why?

Because once a structure is in place it can become a habit and then we do not have to give it too much conscious thought. Over time this successful structure of eating becomes part of who we are.

HOMEWORK FOR THIS WEEK

Allow the Inner Coach in you to step back and observe the structures and systems that you have without judgment.

1. Observe the structure of how you feed yourself and exercise.
   • Is there a structure already in place?
   • Does any of the structure work for you?
   • What of your structure doesn’t work for you?
   • Do you have a contingency structure, a plan B if plan A doesn’t work out?
2. Where is there a lack of structure in how you feed yourself and plan exercise?
   • Is there a time of day or the week where you lack of structure causes issues?
   • Is there a time during the week (like the weekend) when it all falls apart and you get into trouble?
3. Do you also have systems in place to allow for you to repeat your structure week in and out?

Enjoy making these observations this week and I will meet you back here next week when we will walk through the steps to creating a year-round successful weight management structure!

Enjoy your week!