Weight for Me

We all know the story.  Diets don’t work.  There are a million reasons not to exercise, yet deep inside we long to be more fit, more active… healthier.  What we aspire to and what we are remain miles apart.  We say one thing, yet keep repeating the same old patterns, producing the same old results.

I’ve been delving into a new approach: Coaching, and its remarkable.  I’m looking for for eight people who truly long to lead a healthier more active life, but after repeated attempts have been unable to sustain. I am offering a package of six sessions at a significantly discounted rate, $25.00 per session or $150 for the package.  For this particular offer, you need to be available for half an on Saturday afternoons in late October and November, and be able to connect via Skype, so yes we can do this from anywhere!

If you, or anyone you know is interested, please let me know ASAP by emailing me at sarah@loewenbehold.ca or call me at 250.733.0763

Help me out here. I’ve been working with many of you for over twenty years, yet after endless squats, crunches, curls, and copious amounts of kale, lettuce and spinach you still tell me you don’t feel like you don’t measure up?  Why?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m right there with you, Together, we must stop measuring our fitness levels with measuring tapes, scales and calipers, or comparing ourselves to others, and instead guage our health by how we truly feel.

At the end of the day no one cares what we weigh or what our percent of body fat is.  We all want those we love to be healthy, vibrant and happy, so why can’t we want the same thing for ourselves?

Thunder Thighs. Buffalo But. Hippo Hips. That’s me.  Truly.  I come from generations of farming women on both sides of family, and it shows. Who needs a horse when you can pull the plough yourself?  I’m not even joking.  I’ve cursed my California-Redwood-like legs all my life and literally ached with envy at the pictures of women with long thin legs that seem to go on for days.

I’m learning this is shallow thinking.  If I only focus on what my legs look I will never be happy – particularly at 43.  If instead I appreciate what they do for me, I realize what an amazing gift I have been given.  Truly.  I’ve run eleven marathons and still run 10 KM most days of my life. I’ve taught thousands of fitness classes and trained thousands of fitness professionals. For close to 20 years, this was how I made my living in the world.  I’ve climbed mountains, and walked beaches on five continents.

Try it.  Think about that part of your body. You know the one.  The one you think about hiding.  The one you curse under your breath.  And then pause.  Ask yourself, what has it given me?  What does it enable me to do?

Did it work?  Care to share?

My daughter makes the yummiest chocolate chip cookies in the whole World, and pretty much everytime she bakes them I ask her to throw in some ground flax seed. She raises her eyebrow, like only a teenager can and proceeds to make them her own way.  Invariably they turn out better than ever before.

Today I had a hankering for a chocolate chip cookie, but my healthy fitness pro (used-to-be, -want-to-be-again, maybe still-on-the-side-fitness-pro) voice, you know the one in your head (well maybe its only in my head), insisted I find something with flax seed in it.  After all heart disease is rampant in my family.

So, I bought some ultra healthy thing that really was some form of cardboard masquerading as a cookie. Terribly dissappointing. Not at all satisfying. And it cost like four bucks. What a rip.

I have come to the conclusion there are times for flax seed, like in my morning smoothie, or in bananna bread. There are even times for hemp hearts, particularly on yogurt, or cereal. But there are also times for purely wonderful delicious, ultra satisfying cookies sans flax, or other grains.  And if I have a yen for one of those, then I best eat one and enjoy every crumb, rather than trying to turn it into something it isn’t.  (Isn’t that a good metaphor for life?)

There is an 80/20 rule in eating. If you eat the right things 8o percent of the time, then letting ‘er rip a little 2o percent of the time is probably not going to kill you.  In fact it might even save you from devouring an entire chocolate cake, or something like it, at two A.M.

I am coming to believe the solution to satisfaction is three fold. Pay attention to the signals.  What do you really want?  Ask yourself, how are you going to feel after?  Pick the very best of whatever it is and enjoy.

Look at it. Touch it. Smell it. Hold it. Bite it. Roll it on your tongue soaking up every delicious moment of having it in your mouth. Revel. Save the flax for another time and let go of the guilt.

Life is precious, and all too short.

Yesterday over tea, I had a wonderful, beautiful, vicacious friend tell me how depressed she feels because she’s put on weight and nothing fits.  Ohhhhh, who hasn’t been there before? My experience is even stocking your closet with closes ranging over several sizes doesn’t help.  Nor does trying harder.  It just makes it worse.  Much worse.

The problem is that as women, we seem to attach most, if not all, of our value as a person to our dress size and a number on the scale, yet I can’t imagine ever loving someone less because they are a size 18, instead of an 8. (I only do this to myself, don’t you?) Just like I can’t imagine ending a relationship (well first I’d have to be in one) with someone because he lost all his hair.  Its ludicrous.

And so I remind myself I am a suite of attributes. Okay, that might be somewhat generous, but the point is that we are so much more than our dress size, so we need to stop using it to guage self worth. We need to focus on the whole person and what we bring to the world.

I think the only way to sustain healthy eating and active living is to do it because it makes you feel so damn good, instead of how you hope it will make you look, or as some sort of punishment for dessert. Falling into the vicous circle of I am fat therefore I must eat salad and sweat, pretty much always results in feeling fatter and lazier.

Take a hammer to the scale, rip the labels of our your clothes (carefully) and stop looking in the mirror. Move your body, eat lots of fruits and veggies and guage your self worth on your entire contribution to this life. You are so much more than your dress size. 

And K, I love you just as much as I did when I first met you. Truly, and thank you for the inspiration to get back to my blog.

I’ve learned over the years the majority of my food choices actually occur in the grocery store, not when I open the fridge or the cupboard. Chances are, if I buy it someone in my house, will inevitably eat it. This means the important decisions I make about my diet are made as I nonchalantly load up my shopping cart, while carrying on a dialogue with my daughter about why we are not getting Cocopuffs or Count Choculas.

Here are ten tips I try to keep in mind so I don’t lose it in the cookie aisle. Some of these are adapted from Ramona Josephson’s Heart Smart Shopper, and others are gleaned from my own tumultuous experiences in the supermarket.

1. Always make a list, to avoid the spur of the moment and impulse decisions.  If you have tips on how to remember or not lose the list, please share because I am not sure my list has ever actually seen the inside of a grocery store, something I inherited from my mother. 
2. Never go shopping while hungry. It’s absolutely unbelievable how much more I spend and how many truly bad decisions I make while roaming the isles at Thrifty Foods with a gnawing, growling stomach.
3. Shop Wide. Typically the perimeter of the store contains all the essential items and the aisles contain evil, but irresistably seductive, items like Presidents Choice Chocolate Chip Cookies and Lindt chocolate, so I try not to go there unless I absolutely have to. 
4. Load up on grains, veggies and fruit (not Pirate Peanut Butter Cookies) and store them in the biggest area of your cart. When shopping for produce, variety in colour indicates a variety of nutrients.
5. Be discerning in your choice of dairy, meat and meat alternatives and store these in the child seat area to help minimize how many you buy. (I’ll get to where the child should go in just a moment.) Low fat options for dairy are preferable and a good rule of thumb when selecting meat is the faster the animal the leaner the meat. No, cows are not fast.  Nor are pigs. Fish and legumes are good though.
6. Foods like oil and sugar should be limited, so put them in that bottom undercarriage of your cart. This limits how much you can carry and maybe you’ll even forget about them.
7. Read food labels, particularly of products you consume regularly. I always check ingredient lists as they are listed in descending order, so if sugar is first on the list, which it often is with many packaged cereals, (and cookies) there is a problem. I also check  for percentage of fat content and total calories per serving. Ideally no more than 30% of total calories ingested should come in the form of fat, and not more than 10% from saturated fat. Serving sizes vary from product to product, so if comparison shopping you’ll need to do some basic math.
8. Watch for terms like “light’ or “lite“. This can actually refer to taste or texture and not calorie content.
9. Don’t be seduced by products promising to be fat free. They can still be loaded with sugar, and therefore calories.
10. Avoid trans fats, hydrogenated fats and saturated fats. All of these terms indicate your body can not break the fat molecules down, consequently they get deposited in your body.

 N.B. – Oh and tip number eleven. I love my daughter more than life itself, but grocery shopping is much easier when I go by myself. I know this isn’t always possible, so until she was almost five, I used to shop with her in a backpack. Product shelf placement is a science. Ever notice kids meltdown more in grocery stores than anywhere else on the planet…

Okay, and maybe I melt down in the cookie aisle, which reinforces my shop wide strategy, avoiding the chocolate covered Hob Nobs when they taunt me from the centre aisles.

I’m somewhat in shock about having a teenage daughter. I don’t know if I ever got over the shock of becoming the mum of a teeny tiny baby, never mind an adolescent, who is taller than me.  Not that it takes much.

Yes, it is the greatest thing in my life, but in all honesty trying to arise this creature these days is no easy feat. Unless it’s horseback riding day, in which case, miraculously, this beautiful young lady is in the car, riding helmet on, smiling ear to ear, eyes sparkling, tapping her dusty riding boot and looking at me with that look.  The sort of look only a teenager can muster.

During the week though, its quite another story and so between the teenage awakening, or lack thereof, and my morning exercise thing, oh and the ironing I couldn’t get motivated to do the night before, mornings are ram-jam packed full, so we pretty much always make breakfast in the blender. I have come to love it.

I use many recipes out of a Super Smoothies cookbook, but I also make them up a lot, depending on what’s in season and what’s in my fridge or freezer.  Our favourite goes like this:

A couple of Bananas, a bunch of frozen mango, a chunk of frozen orange juice concentrate, some soy milk and mixed with some low fat soy milk, and some vanilla or a couple of sprigs of fresh mint.

What about you? Any favourite blender breakfast concoctions? Any tips for getting teenagers out of bed in the morning?  Any morning coping strategies (or lack thereof) to share?

The people in your life who love you, don’t love you more when you are a size 6 and less when you are a size 16, so why should you?

I stumbled on this book in Misty River Books in Terrace, and I absolutely love it.  This Is Who I Am celebrates beauty in all shapes and sizes through stunning photographs and short one page summaries of various women’s relationship with their bodies.  The author advocates a getting-comfortable- in-your-own-skin approach and talks about how the images of women in the media represent an incredibly narrow segment of the population, and how even these images are doctored to create an even more unrealistic and unattainable standard of beauty.

Like many of you, I know this in my head, but yet still struggle to truly accept my body as it is right now.  I find images very powerful and so being able to page through these photographs reminds me that real beauty – the kind that stops you in your tracks – radiates from real people living real lives.  I’m happy to share, so let me know if you’d like to have a look.

Warning: This is my favourite rant

We all come to this earth with a basic shape and for most of us it is some variation of either an apple, where we carry weight around the middle, or a pear where weight tends to accumulate in the vicinity of the hips and thighs. Nothing will alter it. Not thighmasters, fat cream, a million sit ups, or even diet pills will have an impact.

You can lose weight, but you will be a smaller apple, or a smaller pair, but you can not spot reduce.  Anything that promises anything otherwise, is well…..a big fat lie.

Exercise regularly. Be the best you can be, but let of what you think that should look like.