Category: mental health

#40: Staying Sane

Yet another good reason to exercise.

Oh, the sad horror of losing your mind. I’m constantly doing that now, but I’m able to find it again, usually minutes later. What this is really about, though, is dementia, and boy, will I ever do whatever it takes to keep that demon away.

Thankfully, there is tons of research being done right now to help us learn ways to keep our brains young, active, and sane. So now not only can we say that exercise helps reverse or relieve age-related body changes such as sarcopenia (the loss of muscle), symptoms of menopause, and osteoporosis, it also decreases the risk of dementia. Even more, higher levels of exercise might correlate with even lower risk of dementia. Awesome.

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#39: Clear Your Clutter (reprise)

For my readers new and old, I thought this post worthy of a re-post.

Maybe some of you are familiar with this New Year’s resolution: Clean out the house and keep it clutter-free. It is hard work to keep the house uncluttered when you’re busy, and even more so when you’re busy and have children. When you work, too, well, it’s almost easier to just give up. But don’t.

When you live in a cluttered home, you hold clutter on the inside, too. In fact, when you visit a person’s home and it’s just stuff everywhere, you can tell a lot about that person. Not that he or she is necessarily dirty or lazy, but that he or she likely has some unresolved issues. It’s true: Clutter is only a surface expression of a deeper issue. When you keep your home organized and clean, your heart and mind are more free and available to the people and things that are important to you.

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#37: Focus on the Progress…

…not the slip-ups!

Focus on your progress, not your slip-ups. For slip-ups there will inevitably be. If there were no slip-ups, there would be no challenge, and life would be easy, and everyone would be healthy and skinny and“The Doctors” would go off the air.

Focus on the now. What can you do, say, think, feel, eat right now that will make you a better you? Just because you ate a huge dinner out last night does not ruin your diet and give you carte blanche to continue eating badly until Sunday night at midnight, at which point you will virtuously start from scratch and never slip up again. Start right now. The body is amazingly forgiving.

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#35: Overdoing It

Be consistent without overdoing it—or it will not last.

I’m not a fan of deprivation. So if you ask me what I think about your “grapefruit cleanse,” I’ll probably tell you what I think, and it won’t be, “Well, get to it!”

Have you ever tried to go without sugar for a week? Alcohol for a month? Meat for a day? Then you likely know that for that sugar-free week your mind was racing….and all it was thinking about was the jar of Hershey’s kisses on your co-worker’s desk. Deprivation doesn’t work. It makes you crazy in the head until you break down and eat not just one Hershey’s kiss, but half the jar. If you had rather taken just one candy for after lunch each afternoon, you would have been satisfied of your sugar craving, and would have moved on to the rest of your day just 26 calories heavier, rather than the embarrassing number of calories heavier you are now that you ate seven kisses without taking a breath.

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New Year’s Toast

From my heart and core.

It’s nearly time to put a pretty fantastic year to bed. In 2011, I put FaceBook to work for my business. I got t-shirts designed, made, and onto many of your backs. We worked hard, then harder, and made brides-to-be buffer and new mommies slimmer. I learned from you all and I certainly hope you learned a thing or two from me. I feel like I’m giving everything I’ve got to my “ladies,” my trainees, and my workouts, but there is always, always room to grow. So look forward to many new challenges from the Fitness Girl in 2012.

#34: Small Steps Forward

New Year’s resolutions are oh-so cliché. And yet…

There’s something about the new year, the clean slate, that motivates us to make positive changes. I see it maybe more than a lot of people because of my business, since starting a new workout routine ranks pretty high on the list of all-time-most-cited resolutions. I get it, I really do. It’s more “me” to use every new month—or even week—as a chance to start fresh, but how wonderful it must be to be able to put something you really don’t want to do off for months at a time! I’ll start next year! Really! In 2012 I’ll be ready!

Maybe one of your resolutions this year can be this: Resolve to use each new day—each new hour!—as a jumping-off point for those things you’d really like to see yourself do. Resolve to start now. When you take baby steps—walk just 10 minutes on the treadmill; eat out just one less time a week—your stride gets stronger fast. Soon you’ll be walking 20 minutes and buying new cookbooks. But you can’t rush to the end result. You have to be patient and see those baby steps as part of the entire picture. Without them, you’ll never get to the long strides. The baby steps are all part of the plan. That weight won’t just fall off because you worked out really hard one time. But you’re better off than you were before that one workout.

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#32: Morning Pages

Write it down.

I was just in the shower thinking about writing, and how I love to write, need to write a blog post, but don’t know what to write about. I was thinking about how I used to do “morning pages,” the daily ritual writing prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. There was no “I don’t have anything to say,” because there was no choice. I had to write. Every morning. It was so good for me, as a writer in training and as an evolving person. So just now, in the shower, I thought, what if I do that again? My morning pages? It might not be done in the morning, but if I could sneak in a few paragraphs every couple of days, I might just rediscover the therapy of writing.

It’s totally facing a demon, isn’t it? If you’ve ever tried to write before (without particularly having anything to say), you know just what I mean. It makes me nervous, a little nauseous, forcing myself to face a blinking cursor. What is so valuable about it makes it worth it, though. It’s a purging of sorts, and also, wondrously, the written word tends to hold us accountable. In that way it can be hugely therapeutic.

Case in point: One thing I suggest frequently to people frustrated by their inability to lose weight is to chronicle their eating and/or exercise habits. Whether for my eyes, a public blog or just their own private use, writing it down is surprisingly effective. You might think you eat healthfully, but when you look back at a week’s worth of brought-in lunches you ate standing up in the conference room, you realize that extra roll on your tush might just be made of mozzarella.

Logging your workouts can also be tremendously eye-opening. It doesn’t have to be fancy; just a note penciled into the corner of a box on your calendar will do. Look back at two weeks of exercise notes and you might find that you’re neglecting your weight training and running a bit more often than your knees would prefer. Or you might see that you’re never finding more than 30 minutes at the time you go to the gym…maybe an earlier arrival is necessary to get in a more worthwhile workout.

So…let’s write it down. Frustrations, successes, big dreams and letdowns. Whether you share yours with me is up to you. I’ll continue to share my journey with you!

#31: Doing 40

Might as well get used to it….

My grandpa turned 96 in June. His mother, my great-grandmother Belle, lived to be 101. So if the Frost genes are working for me, I won’t be so extreme as to say my life is half over…although it’s true that I am now the big 4-0.

Far from making a special point of writing about this occasion, part of me thought I should rather just ignore it, let the moment pass by without a mention, since after all, I truly feel no different. But being in the business of helping people stay youthful, I figured I should at least give it a mention.

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#25: If You Are What You Eat, Then….

Is your body the temple it should be?

My mom asked me once again if I’m vegetarian because it’s healthier or because of the animal cruelty. I said both, and more. Environmental issues are a huge part of it. But when I simply said, “and yes, the way the animals are treated is horrible—beyond horrible,” her response was, “I just don’t want to think about it.”

That is exactly what the farming industry wants. The whole business depends on people not thinking about it. You pick up your perfect-sized Perdue cutlets and they look nothing like the bird they used to be. They’re all the same size, same color, no mess, no muss, sizzle and serve. And thank goodness for that, because if you saw how it really went down, you would NOT want to eat that chicken.

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#23: Embrace Your (Fleeting) Passions

Work to find the “yes.”

As parents, Mike and I try to say “yes” to our children more often than “no.” We both very much dislike a morning or couple of days when we hear ourselves saying “no” too many times. I start to put myself in the shoes of my child, and imagine hearing “no, no, no.” The kids smile less during these episodes.

So we work to find the “yes” in the situation. Maybe instead of “don’t do that” it’s “do you want to do this?” I guess we aim to have our glasses half full most of the time instead of half empty.

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