goals forgotten by February | Triumph Wellness

Mind Monkey Warning: T-minus 5 weeks

February 12, 2013 by Emily Segal 1 Comment

Sorry for the unintended blog break there! When you are in the health or fitness industry, January is a busy, busy month. In a major “be careful what you wish for” kinda way, I decided to up-level my business and was literally slammed with new inquiries! Hey, I’m not complaining!

Now I am settled in with a new crop of wonderful clients who, with my support and guidance, are well on the way to fulfilling their dreams and desires, yay! And I can get back to a more regular writing schedule.

So I am 5 weeks out from the Tel Aviv Half Marathon of 2013. What I want to write about today, is my struggle to increase my speed, set a personal record finish time, and the monkeys that are getting in my way. If you remember, I had decided that since I have already run this distance several times, I would work on my speed to keep things interesting. Turns out it’s much harder than I thought it would be!

This is a re-cap of my racing “career” for perspective:

2005: Westchester County Half Marathon ~ This was my first attempt at a long distance race and my goal was just to finish it no matter what. Finish time: 2:23:56

2006: Yonkers Half Marathon ~ I came into this race under-prepared and over-confident. The race itself was a nightmare of pain for me. Finish time: 2:35:39

2011: Tel Aviv Half Marathon ~A return to long distance running after several years off as I adjusted to life in a new country. My goal was just to finish. Finish time: 2:36:11

2012: Tel Aviv Full Marathon ~ Decided to double my distance and go for 42.2 kms in honor of my 45th birthday. My goal was to finish before the 6 hour cut off. Finish time: 5:44

2013: Tel Aviv Half Marathon Goal Finish Time 2:15.

The difference between my last two finish times in 2011 and 2006 and my goal for this year is about 21 minutes. Spread that 21 minutes out over 21 kms of running and it’s basically running one minute faster per kilometer.

THAT SOUNDS SO EASY!!!

What’s one minute faster? When I was in the planning stages I felt that was totally doable. Here in the trenches, I can tell you it feels like the fight of a lifetime for me!! When I am out there running and trying to maintain my desired race pace, I feel like I am pushing against a 40lb sled! And really, this is still a pretty slow pace for most people. The average half marathon pace for women is 2:12. That is a demoralizing thought.

There are very real issues that impact speed such as age and weight (both have increased over the years!) but truly I think I am up against a mental block. The bottom line is that it plain hurts to run faster! And it is scary. I feel like I could trip and sprawl more easily. I feel like my heart might explode or that I won’t be able to go the distance. And the biggie, behind almost every fear: What if I fail?

So that brings me back to the beginning of the post and the January influx of new people excited to start on a new path to health and fitness. At first, it’s exciting! It seems doable. We are pumped up to get started!

Then a few days pass, or weeks or months, and we get tired of watching our calories, planning and journaling our food. Surely we can skip the workout, just today. We look over a month of “work” and see that we have lost a tiny fraction of the weight we need to lose. It starts to feel impossible. And hard. And scary. Besides, our friends are giving us flack for not being able to eat out with them, and drink, and stay up late. They’re right, who wants to live such a strictly disciplined life anyway?

WARNING:

The fact is, we DO want to achieve something here! If we listen to all the monkey chatter about “I can’t”, “It’s too hard”, “It’s not that important anyway” we will never get what we want.

NEVER

The reason working with a health coach is so valuable, is because you have someone reminding you of this and calling you back when you start to party with the monkeys.

In lieu of personal health coaching, I give you Bruno Mars and some muppets to say what I would say to you. And what I say to myself every. single. day:

Pin It

Filed Under: coaching exercises, Exercise, Goals, Growth, health coach, Inspiration, Running, Tel Aviv Half Marathon Tagged With: Achievement, Anti-Ick Techniques, Exercise, February slump, Goals, goals forgotten by February, Running, Self-Improvement, Tel Aviv Marathon, weight loss

Incorrect Assumptions

June 14, 2012 by Emily Segal Leave a Comment

Several of you have asked what’s happening with my suspected gluten intolerance. So I am happy to say that I have good news! I think my “gluten intolerance” was more of an “over-eating intolerance”.

Yup, that’s correct. I made an incorrect assumption. Allow me to explain:

You see, every time I ate gluten, I had gastric distress. But when I looked closer (thank you Health Coach!), I realized that every time I ate gluten, I also tended to over-eat because I just LOVE breads, crackers, tortillas, pasta, crackers and crackers. However, when I woke up to this fact and began to carefully measure and eat a small portion, voila, I am OK.

That got me thinking about how we often attribute an effect to a cause without properly evaluating other causes.

For example, a million years ago I worked at a family planning clinic. Women would often complain that the birth control pill they had recently started taking had caused them to gain weight. While I am sure that in some cases there may indeed have been a hormonal problem caused by the pill, many times, when we dug a little deeper, we found a different cause entirely.

These women were going on the pill because they were in new relationships. In new relationships we often eat together with our lovers often as a form of romantic entertainment don’t we? We eat out in restaurants a lot more than we did when we were single. And as time goes on and we get more comfortable in the relationship, maybe our previous desire to stay slim when we were “on the market” mellows a bit, we eat a bit more, workout a bit less and waistlines expand. But it’s a lot easier to blame the pill than to take responsibility for our own actions, isn’t it?

I also see this incorrect assumption effect in play when I hear people say “Yeah, I tried to be vegan but I just didn’t feel well.” Usually when I can get these people to open up a little more, I hear them say that yes, they really weren’t eating very well in that phase. They were not cooking or were relying on processed vegan foods, or never took the time to learn about their nutritional needs or how to meet them as vegans. They rarely ate the large amount of green vegetables vegans need to thrive or they were eating too much fat or sugar.

And quite often I think that new vegans don’t adjust for the lower calorie density of plant-based foods. The fatigue and loss of vitality they experience as vegans is quite likely due to a too low caloric intake. (Yes, you must eat a higher VOLUME of food on a plant-based diet. Can I get a yay to that??)

Could there be people who ate great and ate enough calories and STILL felt bad as vegans? There probably are. But it’s a lot easier to blame veganism than to take responsibility for our own actions.

Are there places in your life where you are drawing incorrect assumptions?

Maybe you assume that your metabolism is “messed up” because no matter how hard you try, you just can’t lose weight? Get your metabolism tested and I’ll bet it’s just fine. You probably have trouble losing weight because you have never gotten to the root of why you gained it in the first place. Or because you have a problem being consistent with your changes or sticking with it long enough to see results. It’s a lot easier to blame our metabolism than take responsibility for our own actions.

Perhaps you have drawn the incorrect assumption that you need to eat some low-carb fad diet in order to lose weight. Incorrect because you never counted your calories and if you had, you would have seen that your low-carb fad diet is simply a lower calorie diet. You could have achieved the same weight loss by just eating smaller portions of the regular food you enjoy. It’s a lot easier to blame a certain food (carbs) than to take responsibility for our own actions.

I don’t mean to sound preachy. We all do this. I did it with the gluten issues above and as I am learning with my coach, I have done it repeatedly with my incorrect assumption that I cannot achieve anything without OVERCOMING some sort of major adversity. I am stuck on my hero scenario. (in case you, um, hadn’t noticed…)

I hope you can see how believing incorrect assumptions takes your power away. It makes you a victim. It gives you no hope.

The only way to move forward is to… take responsibility for our own actions.

Explore your assumptions. Shine a big ole flashlight on them. Expose them for what they are, and

Filed Under: coaching exercises, Growth, health coach, Rants, vegan Tagged With: Dieting vs Lifestyle, goals forgotten by February, Self-Improvement, vegan diet benefits, weight loss

Banish the Blues

February 5, 2012 by Emily Segal 4 Comments

When you work in the weight loss industry, January is a busy, busy month! Lots of new clients with high hopes and goals they want met. A mind-boggling number of email requests for info. The whirling energy of new beginnings.

Yet, a few weeks later, not even a full week into February, and many of my newbies are already gone, programs postponed, dreams shelved, goals forgotten. Those of us who work out in the gym, call this the February Phenomenon: how all those new gym membership cards never see the light of the laser swiper after February 1st.

If you are one of people I am talking about (but probably you would not be reading my blog if you were), please do not take offence. I mean none. Yes, as a coach I am disappointed when people allow excuses to block their progress, but I have been there myself and in many areas, still am there! I am not one to judge. Change is hard. Excuses are SO easy to believe! However…

Ouch!

So now that I actually have time to blog again (see, there is always a plus side to things!), I want to tell you about some of what has been going on with me personally.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably know that I have winter slumps. Maybe it is S.A.D. and all to do with diminished sunlight, or maybe it is a sort of natural cycle of hibernation that I should respect more and worry about less. But worry I do, because I don’t much like the me who feels a bit lost, fuzzy, sleepy, and most definitely un-sparkly come January and February.

But I do like it when magic happens.

On January 16th, I was ~~writing~~ whining in my Morning Pages about some life issues I am confused on and I penned:

I need help with this. I can’t do this alone. I need someone who can see it from the outside. Please put that person in my path today.

Later that morning I got a normal email from twitter telling me that someone named Káren Wallace was now following me. I use social media to be in contact with people I am genuinely interested in – not just to collect random noise – so like always, I clicked through to Káren’s website. I saw that she is a life coach specializing in self-care and clarity for women and… what is this… she happens to be offering a scholarship to her Soul Intensive Care Coaching Program for one lucky person.

Now, when you ask for something as specifically as I asked, and then a possible answer drops into your lap, you would have to be dumb to turn away. (Yet how many times do we in fact brush it off and turn it away?). I applied for Káren’s scholarship immediately, and not surprisingly, I won it.

I had my first session with Káren last Thursday and already my personal rain cloud is brightening. Káren is in Australia and we have our sessions via Skype. My unbelievably generous scholarship will include 4 one-hour skype sessions, and just as I believe Káren is the person I asked for, I saw right away that she exudes calm, peace and love right over the computer wires, 8 time zones and half a world away! That is some amazing gift!

As I spent an hour absorbing Káren’s calm over Skype, together we set up some doable, FUN, goals for me to accomplish this week, and I hung up with just a teensy bit of my usual sparkle feeling buzzing around my heart. By evening the buzz had grown to a hum so loud I actually had trouble sleeping. This from the previously hibernating bear!

By the next day, I felt back to my old self again and that sparkle in my step carried me through a 24km training run on Friday! (I will write a more comprehensive training update soon as we are now getting closer to race day and the ~~excitement~~ terror is ramping up).

Moral of the story:

1. When you’ve got the blues, ask for help and then open your mind WIDE to see the answer you are handed.

2. Please don’t be a victim of the February Phenomenon! Excuses or Results, take your pick.

3. Do me a favor and go to Káren’s Facebook page and click “like”. She is one smart lady and I know you will enjoy her content. You can tell her Emily sent you as a way to thank her for putting the shazam back in your favorite blogger’s blog!