Hi folks!

Just a quick note to let you know I’m back and will be blogging regularly again after a great holiday break spent enjoying having my husband home for a blissfully long and well-deserved few weeks off.

I don’t know about you, but my 2009 was challenging. We moved into a new house (our first), which was fraught with miscellaneous construction and heating problems right from the start. A couple days before 2009 began, I fell down a flight of stairs in my new basement and spent a couple weeks recovering (but had literally zero lasting damage from it, thankfully). My husband traveled almost constantly for over 3/4 of the year. My son had a severe allergic reaction that required us to change our already healthy lifestyle to be even more careful to accommodate his food allergies. And yet, after all that, the last couple months of 2009 were almost — dare I say it? — relaxed, unchaotic and full of good things. (more…)

I’m the last person to suggest that the holidays are a good time to consider a big lifestyle change like completely plunging into the healthy eating lifestyle I recommend. There’s just too much going on, not enough time to implement, long lines at stores, holiday shopping and events to schedule, you name it. But just because you aren’t quite ready to start a more powerful weight loss program right now, I wanted to share 4 simple healthy eating guidelines to tide you over till the holiday fanfare is over! (more…)

When it comes to healthy eating facts, there’s lots of information out there that can be really confusing. And more importantly, a lot of it is sadly just plain wrong. Here I’m sharing 3 key ideas about healthy eating and healthy weight loss that you may not know — and that can help you finally start to get the results you’ve always wanted!

1. It isn’t necessarily dangerous to follow a low-calorie diet. (more…)

Oops! It’s been super hectic around here, and I completely forgot to share this pic of me (thanks for the reminder, S!) in my Halloween get-up (I was Wonder Woman in 1st grade too!) along with my little bumblebee, who wouldn’t let us change the clothes underneath to be a wee bit less obtrusive. Considering we weren’t sure he’d even wear the costume, though, I consider the night a triumph. :)

You may not associate healthy eating with eating cookies, and yet guess what? Here you go! And I assure you these little treats are not only healthy, but also very, very delicious.

Texture-wise, they’re a lot more like “regular” (i.e., non-healthy) cookies than any I’ve come across before — a real bonus! You’ll also notice that there’s no added salt, nor any leavening whatsoever; I didn’t realize it was possible to make a cookie without leavening myself, but I’ve made these enough times now to be convinced. :) (more…)

When you’re working on changing your lifestyle, you often end up peeling away behaviors and things one by one that you used to use as rewards for yourself. (I’m not suggesting I believe that junk food is a healthy reward, but it’s something you might have thought of as a “treat” or “indulgence” and it may also have been the only “good” thing you did for yourself on any sort of consistent basis.)

So let me ask you this: What are you doing for yourself now when you accomplish something, get through a tough week, etc.? (more…)

Halloween gets a bad rap sometimes because for kids, it often seems to be all about the candy, and how healthy is that? But we forget sometimes that we moms can change the tenor of pretty much most events — for younger children at least — simply by changing some of what goes on on a particular day or at a particular event. And Halloween’s no different.

Here are a few things you can do to enjoy a healthier Halloween with your family:

1) Focus on the fun of trick-or-treating. Half the fun of Halloween is just plain going door-to-door, getting treats the likes of which you don’t know until you get there and seeing other folks in your neighborhood do the same. Special events are about more than just food, and Halloween is one of the most fun holidays there is!

2) Create a fun, spooky atmosphere. My son is still too young to appreciate scary stuff, and I tend to like the cheerier spooky stuff myself, so we stuck mainly to pumpkins for our decor. But there are so many options for creating a great Halloween atmosphere in your home that require little time or expense. Consider adding a soundtrack to your decor, such as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” At most local department stores, I’ve seen Halloween CDs available in the Halloween decor section. Growing up, we had a fabulous Disney album full of spooky sounds, but it’s sadly only available on vinyl (used) and is probably considered an antique by now. :)

3) Make rules about candy and avoid arguing. I recommend limiting the amount of candy your child can eat to, say, 2 pieces on Halloween night and 1 piece for the next few nights at most. Moms of older kids swear that you can throw out most of the candy without your kids even noticing, but I’ve not tried it. In my household, we’re not having any candy because of our food allergy issues, but I’ll be making healthy cookies for our Halloween treats and decorating them with cute Halloween-themed cat pop-ups on toothpicks (available at Target and craft stores) — adorable and isn’t bad for you in the slightest.

4) Instead of giving out junk food yourself, get creative. This year, we’re giving out several things, depending on the age of the child. We’re new to the neighborhood as well, so I’m not sure how many visitors we’ll get. Some of what we’ve bought to give away are Halloween pencils and notepads, boxes of organic raisins and glow-in-the-dark bracelets. (I believe I got this idea from Dr. Fuhrman’s newsletter, and it’s a great one!) We ordered our glow-in-the-dark items a few weeks back, but I saw them sold at Michael’s just this week when looking for other supplies for one of our household’s costumes.

5) Fill yourself and the kids up on healthy food before you go out trick-or-treating. Unlike adults, most kids just plain do not eat when they’re not hungry — at least not much. So fill up your kids’ bellies (and your own!) with a hearty meal. I recommend something very filling like a vegetarian chili or stew, as well as a healthy dessert such as my Banana Oatmeal Cookies. As a treat, some apple cider that’s been simmered with a few cinnamon sticks would be warming without being very unhealthy.

6) Create events to take place on Halloween that aren’t about food. I haven’t tried this yet for Halloween because my son is so small, but it has worked for other holidays quite well. You can create family traditions that are non-food-related by coming up with fun games to play, telling ghost stories, going for a drive to see Halloween decorations in neighborhoods farther afield … The possibilities are endless! But the basic concept is to come up with fun things to do that don’t revolve solely around food. One of the biggest challenges many of my coaching clients come to me with is how to deal with holidays and special events, and in reality, you have full control over so much of how your family’s time gets spent.

If you’re doing special stuff for Halloween that’s healthy that I’ve overlooked here, shoot me an email to share your ideas. I’d love to hear them!

I get lots of questions about why I recommend easing into healthy eating, into changing your lifestyle to a healthier one. Because it appears as if by doing it my way, it’s like peeling the Bandaid off slowly and painfully instead of ripping it off and getting the pain over with quickly.

There’s some truth to that. Doing it my way — taking it slowly and going at a pace that you can handle so that the new ways become “the way” instead of foreign concepts you superimpose on your life — is more painful than leaping into a new lifestyle because it draws out the process a bit. You’re aware that you’re in transition between your old life and the new, healthy (and wonderful) one longer. And transition’s the tough part. I’m the first to admit it.

But here’s the deal:

What most people fail to notice is that plunging in only works for a small percentage of those who try to change their lifestyles.

In the last 2 months, I can’t count the number of my newsletter subscribers, Inner Circle members and private clients who’ve suffered needlessly because they’ve compared themselves to another person’s progress in losing weight, changing their way of eating, getting healthier and happier.

Some of those people you may be comparing yourself to who are faster to progress were just 100% committed mentally and physically from day 1, so they had it “easier” in a way — in that once you’ve made the decision, it is immensely easier to get there more quickly.

Some of them are just wired differently. My husband can jump right into new things and stick with them, whereas I need time to warm up to the idea, put a toe in the water, think through putting that toe in the water, plunge a little deeper, contemplate things some more, and so on until the idea becomes a part of who I am. (This has gotten to be a much faster process for me since changing my lifestyle for the first time to a healthy one — it’s an ability that can improve, but I’ve yet to come up with an active way to speed up this process other than just keep “practicing” changing your life. At some point, your brain finally figures out you’re not going to die :) if you do something bold and new and scary and stops turning on the panic response at the drop of a hat.) But they write entire books on such subjects related to child development, so the point is that there are a lot of us change-resistant folks out there, and much of it is inborn and not some sort of character flaw or bad habit.

I’ve had women compare themselves to me because I lost 53 lbs. in less than a year, so if they lose weight more slowly, they feel like they’re failing (or failing me as their coach). Forget about it! Our bodies work at the pace they work, and we can only change what we’re individually able to change at a time. My own mother loses weight at a completely different pace than I do, so who’s to say that you’re doing something wrong if it takes you longer to drop the weight? And bear in mind that I lost all that weight by initially easing in and then simply regularly tweaking what I eat. I tweak what I eat now! I tweak my workouts now! I learn new things about every important aspect of my lifestyle — health, happiness, motivation, success, business, coaching, you name it — all the time!

Where I’m going with all this

When you look for the simple, fast answer — changing your lifestyle overnight to a healthier one, for example — if you’re ready, it will work for you. But if you’re not, and in my experience most people are not (or else everyone would follow through on those pesky New Year’s resolutions and there wouldn’t be an epidemic weight loss issue in this country), you need a different tactic.

And part of that involves understanding that just as if you were interested in becoming an overnight success about anything (say, in business via a get-rich-quick scheme), when it comes to healthy living, rather than trying to “cheat” your way to the finish line without any effort while hoping to reap all the rewards, the best pathway to success here is one that is laid slowly and methodically in a way that you learn and improve as you go and  you lay a solid, stable foundation for where you are, where you’re going and where you want to be 3 months down the line, 6 months down the line, a year down the line. (I used to be a quick-fix-chaser myself, and I’ve learned that quick fixes simply don’t exist for the big stuff for most people, myself included.)

Certainly at times you may race ahead and notice quantum leaps rather than the baby steps you’ve made previously. But initially, especially right at the start, especially as you’re working through underlying issues that are holding you back from dealing with, say, emotional issues that have you connected to food in an unhealthy way, it isn’t going to be easy.

Every day you struggle mentally with how hard it is, how hard your life it, it’s going to feel harder. Every single day. Every minute. Harder. Don’t for a moment underestimate the power of the mind.

And remarkably, if you just admit that it may be a slow, sometimes tough battle to change your lifestyle, acknowledge that it took a lot to teach you the unhealthy habits so it’s not going to be a cakewalk — no pun intended! — to create the new ones (recognizing that it will be difficult, at least sometimes, rather than wrestling with why it has to be hard for you– see the distinction?), suddenly the whole thing feels easier. It’s like by admitting you might have to work hard at times, you suddenly, well, don’t anymore. Or at least the work doesn’t feel like work and becomes something, if not joyful, then at least enjoyable and therefore not a struggle at all. So everything just flows.

I am not saying it is easy to lose weight if you’ve always struggled with it. Indeed, it was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done to date when I did it myself. And I am not saying that it is a constant, painful battle either.

There are going to be good days and bad ones, and the more you resist the bad ones, the times when you do have to dip into your bucket of willpower, the less willpower you’ll have because you’ll be using up your mental reserves resisting, complaining, feeling frustrated.

What I recommend

If this has resonated with you, I recommend you think about easing into healthy eating from whatever point you’re at now, not expecting yourself to eat perfectly, work out perfectly, be a “perfect person” pursuing a healthy lifestyle immediately if it’s been hurting you when you mess up sometimes. Give yourself permission to make mistakes and get right back on track.

I recommend you stop comparing yourself to other people, period. It’s a soul killer, and you’re always going to find someone that you don’t feel you measure up to, guaranteed. Just compete against yourself to see how well you can do, to see if you can beat last week’s results or eat even more healthfully than you did last month or last year. And give yourself a break in weeks when you’re stressed out and need just to coast until you can concentrate again on your weight and health goals. If you don’t get in an ounce or two of kale, the world won’t come to an end. Just do your best, strive mostly to improve over time, and you’ll do fine.

And my last recommendation is this: Consider that all things worth having in life that are good require effort, time and patience (love, kids, education, careers, you name it). It doesn’t mean you have to wait forever. It doesn’t mean you have to work yourself so hard all the time that you’re exhausted physically or mentally. It just means that creating a new life is not easy. There will be some stress. There will be some frustration. You’ll learn things along the way about yourself that annoy you, that you admire, and everything in between. And if you stay focused on the end result and not the frustration of day-to-day tasks, all the effort will seem, well, more effortless. And you’ll get there sooner and be happier when you arrive!

I spent a number of years abroad in Germany, where Halloween celebrations are catching on, but aren’t a part of the cultural heritage, and I guess I got out of practice about enjoying the holiday. And when I got back to the States, I was very ill and depressed and was in hiding for a while as I sorted out my weight and health problems and created an immensely happier life for myself.

But there’s something about having a child that screams “Happy Halloween” like there’s no tomorrow, and this year we’re going all out to enjoy the holiday. I’ll be sharing tips on having a HEALTHY Halloween in the next few days. Keep an eye out for more info!

Here’s a pic of some of my Halloween decorations:

Hi folks!

I know it’s been a while since I posted, but I have to admit that my son’s allergy situation has been so much more involving than I ever expected it could be, and I wanted to give an update for those of you who’ve been asking (and thanks so much for your concern — it means so much).

We’re still knee-deep in the nitty-gritty of figuring out what’s OK for Alex to eat and what’s not. When we’re right, it’s a triumph. When we’re wrong, he’s itchy and absolutely miserable when he’s tired, meaning he has trouble calming down to sleep and then is wakeful all night. Meaning I also get very, very little rest myself for the 48 hours or so it takes for his body to stop reacting.

And since he seems to be most allergic to — of all things — citric acid, which is in just about every “natural” and “green” product on the planet, all of the green baby wipes (except for 1 brand, which gave my little guy diaper rash — ack!), most soaps and shampoos (green and otherwise), as well as many, many, many healthful foods (like most berries, celery … the list is actually really long), we’ve had to get really creative just to be able to do normal things like… um … bathe. :) Food is challenging enough, but I’ve also been learning lots about making soaps and things from scratch or by using safe household ingredients.

Glycerin also seems to be a trigger, and it is in everything that citric acid is in and then some in the soap and cleaning department. I’m hoping I’m wrong about glycerin, but right now it’s not a priority, and it’s impossible to find cleansers without 50 ingredients anyhow, so who knows what’s making the kiddo itch on that front? We’ll eventually learn what works and what doesn’t. (And with luck, my son will outgrow some of this sensitivity anyhow — though that won’t happen quickly, of course.)

We’ve finally discovered really basic soap made from olive oil (yep, just olive oil that’s been made into soap). We’ve had to switch from the phosphate-free laundry and dishwashing detergents to the less environmentally friendly kind. And in fact, I believe that it was switching all detergents to the greener ones a few months back that ended up being what caused my son’s immune system to get to its breaking point with citric acid; prior to that he was not allergic to any of the foods he now cannot eat at all. Truly, there were no signs. To this day, other than this allergic response (which he inherited from both parents, unfortunately), he’s still never actually been sick except for one solitary very, very mild cold.

I don’t blame the cleaners for this problem, by the way, and I don’t think they would ever be harmful for the vast majority of people. I just wish there had been some way to know they were harming my son before they wreaked the havoc they did on his health. Clearly citrus was a weakness for Alex to some extent all along, and once it was in everything, it was just too much.

So that’s where I’ve been, and that’s why I’m mostly just working the hours each day when I can and otherwise spend my time sorting out this challenge in which right now, nothing is simple. Coming up with new ways to prepare the same 10-12 foods is challenging, but slowly we add 1 more thing, and then another, and slowly we’re finding a few staple recipes that work. But for example, we can’t take the multivitamins that we used to — the only ones I recommend because they’re the only ones on the market without vitamin A and iron (see my Recommended Resources for details) — because everything contains either citric acid or some other form of citrus that causes my son to react.

To say I’ve spent time researching this is a huge understatement. And yet I’m pressing on.

But that’s why this blog has been a little neglected.

And while what I’ve just written seems tough, we’re all hanging in there. This isn’t an ideal time for my family, but we’re happy and staying as balanced as we can.

And today’s my birthday, so I’m celebrating by taking a much needed breather from work and other obligations to relax as much as possible, eat healthy food, work out and do other things that are good for me.

It’s so funny — when I was leading an unhealthy lifestyle, the last thing I’d ever want to do on my birthday was anything fitness-related, and there’d be a junk food fest pretty much from morning till night to “indulge.” I was always glad to have a day of down time, but I always felt worse after that day of “rest” than I did before it started because of the foods I ate on special days.

But now my priorities have shifted drastically. If something isn’t good for me, if I don’t benefit from the food or activity or person in some way (not just food can be toxic, after all! And I don’t mean *benefit* in any sort of materialistic way here in the slightest, but rather I mean in the sense of being beneficial to my soul), I don’t want it to be a part of my life, and particularly not on special days like birthdays.

And on that note, I’m going to do something I haven’t done for myself in some time as a birthday gift to my body — I’m off to make some green juice :) — and then I’m going to get in my usual Thursday half-hour of HIIT (high intensity interval training — maybe the best way to burn fat and help your body feel great at the same time) before the day gets away from me. After these workouts I feel so revved up and empowered, and I miss them when I don’t get to do them at least a couple days a week.

Hope you’re taking good care of yourself! Our office is closed today and tomorrow, but if you need assistance, shoot us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. (We’ll start reviewing the coaching applications we’ve received in the past couple days on Monday, and of course my Inner Circle Coaching Club is always open.)