Episode 64 - Easy Exercise Motivation, Part IV

Transcript

Renee Stephens: Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss.  I’m your host Renee Stephens and together we’re exercising and adjusting the control panel of your mind, body system bring ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life on today’s show, the power of your daily successes to motivate you and resolving laziness.  Inside Out Weight Loss has been on a short break and I’m delighted to be back to what I love to do.  Help you and the weight struggle and share your soul’s abundant gifts.  I want to give a special thanks to Personal Life Media for their above and beyond support for me and Inside Out Weight Loss during a pretty bumpy time.  And to you, the listeners, of this free podcast who are dedicated to creating lives you love to live and by so doing, making the world a better place.  Let’s begin our journey today of healing by dropping inside and becoming present to this moment, this moment, that’s a refuge from an uncertain and sometimes scary future, dropping inside to the beauty, to the fullness of now. 

As I share a moment of bliss, courtesy of blisstrips.com where you can subscribe and get free daily blissful journeys, surf a sunbeam to places afar.  Look around for that special stream of light and step aboard a sheering vehicle to carry you away.  Hang [xx] as you glide over the ethereal surface, slipping away to places unknown, balanced, agile, lighter than air, ride this golden pathway to the perfect destination.  Then splash into the pool of sunshine at the end of the beam and frolic for a while in energy and light.  Let this episode of Inside Out Weight Loss be your frolic in energy and light.  Imagine it healing you from deep within.  If you have a physical ailment or weakness, imagine magical healing light penetrating your body, going to where it’s most needed and healing not just physical illness, but also any emotional imbalances or inner conflicts that go with it.  If you have emotional pain, imagine that healing light penetrates its deepest core.  Now, for a moment, just for a moment, imagine that you are the healing light.  Imagine that you are the healing light that is all ready within you. 

What does it feel like as you are inside this being?  Are you aware of a difference between you and the being that you’re in?  Or is it all the same?  Are you all of the same energy?  Feel yourself expanding, healing, seeking and turning darkness into light wherever you go.  Be the healing light, just for few moments and notice what it’s like to be this light.  I’d like to go ahead and share with you a listener comment that is from the Inside Out Weight Loss yahoo group.  And she writes, “Oh happy day, I was wiring in my journal yesterday regretting my small downfalls of the say as I always do until I realized that the successes I recorded outweigh the small “failures” by a ton.  So I just wanted to share my excitement about how well I’m doing with binges and my other bad eating habits.  I was actually able to eat one of my binge foods yesterday, marshmallows I know it sounds weird but I love them without overdoing it.  I had a small handful with my hot chocolate.  My other success was avoiding eating when I got home late from going out with friends.  Normally, the combination of fatigue and sadness of being alone again made me binge right before bed, but not last night. 

Thanks for letting me share my successes with people I know can relate.”  I really enjoy that post because she’s talking about just a small, day to say successes, small day to day signs that she is moving in the right direction because what she’s doing in sharing that is nurturing those seeds of change and allowing them to grow stronger and taller.  I had a client session recently and my client who was a fairly new client talked about her experience on a vacation that she had just completed.  And she said, “Oh my goodness, this vacation, well, you know, I just -- I overate and I over drank and I guess I was a little better with the drinking but you know, it really still wasn’t there.”  So, I asked her a few more questions and it turns out that she felt that she was eating about five percent less than before and drinking 10 to 15 percent less than usual quite easily, in fact, effortlessly.  And yet her comments were all about how she just wasn’t getting it.  Maybe it’s hopeless for her.  And I’ve noticed this matter again and again which is why I so recommend the success journal, why I so appreciate that posting from the yahoo group member because it’s from this small steps that big changes come. 

OK, so as you sink further into this episode, open your awareness and your heart to the presence of fellow journeyers listening to the show.  Send them your support as you feel theirs coming back to you so many, many times magnifies.  Last episode of Inside Out weight Loss, we talked about guilt-driven exercisers, especially, the over the [xx], the ones that do extreme exercise out of guilt to punish themselves, to atone for sins committed or anticipated.  And I realized that even the not so over the [xx] are often guilt-driven too, the strugglers, the intermittent exercisers who shame or guilt themselves and the occasional encounter with the treadmill or even the intermittent exercise binge that leaves them sore and sometimes even injured.  And I postulated, I prophesied that perhaps, guilt-driven exercise is somehow less effective, somehow less health promoting.  It’s still good for you, don’t get me wrong.  Guilt-driven exercise is absolutely better than no exercise as long as you do it in a way that doesn’t -- that you don’t injure yourself.  But what if, exercise had a double bonus when you enjoy it.  The double bonus would be simply that you enjoy the exercise and you feel really healthy and get healthier as a result of doing it.  Isn’t that even better?  And yes, perhaps you’re thinking great but how the heck do I get there and we will absolutely get there.  After we take a short break, just for our sponsors, this is Renee Stephens and you’re listening to Inside Out weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

Female: Listen to Beauty Now, the intersection of cosmetic surgery, longevity and biomedical innovation for confident decisions and preventative aging on personallifemedia.com.

Renee Stephens: We’re back now.  Before the break, we were talking about the possibility that guilt-driven exercise is less effective somehow than exercise that comes out of a sincere desire to do great things for yourself.  Now of course, this is my hypotheses and I can’t say for sure, because I’m not aware of any scientific research on the topic although I do remember a fairly recent study of hotel maids.  Maybe you came across this one as well.  Researchers looked at two groups of maids who worked in hotels or motels and one group they simply measure their caloric output and the other group they measured their caloric output but they told this group that actually doing the work that they of changing the bed linens and the towels and the rest of it was actually very healthy exercise, that it was great exercise to be a hotel maid, so that was the only difference. 

One group was told it was great exercise and the other group wasn’t told anything.  They them later measured the caloric output of these two groups and found that the group that was told that it was great exercise, that it was very healthy doing the work that they did actually burned more calories than the group that wasn’t told anything.  Now, the study didn’t reveal whether this group of maids actually increased their caloric output because they did more activity since they knew it was good exercise or if they were simply doing the same activity but getting a caloric burning bonus out of it.  We don’t know the answer to that yet.  But we do know that that positive attitude created positive health benefits for those maids.  How does it relate to exercise?  Well, if you can bring a positive outlook, if you can feel really good about yourself for doing the exercise then perhaps you can boost it’s effectiveness in boosting your health, in burning calories.  And now, the big question, which is, well, gosh, Renee sounds great, but how the heck do I get there because it’s so ingrained in me, I’ve been such a guilt-driven exerciser for so long and as I’ve mentioned before, I absolutely can relate because I have done a heck of a lot of guilt-driven exercise.  And the answer is something that you already know if you’ve been listening to the early episodes of Inside Out Weight Loss. 

The answer is that the motivation can come from that place of unconditional self acceptance.  What does that mean?  At one level, it means, that you’re not fighting with yourself over forcing yourself to exercise but not wanting to do it.  So that whole struggle that take so much of our mental and emotional energy of, oh my god! I really should do it but I don’t want to, I feel so lazy, let me find an excuse, let me find a reason not to.  So we want to resolve that conflict.  How do we resolve that conflict?  Well, for one thing, we can recognize that both parts of us, the part of us that says, yes, let’s get on the treadmill, let’s go outside for a walk, let’s do whatever it is, that part of us obviously has a positive intent.  It obviously wants to give us a gift.  What might that gift be?  It could be health, it could be feeing good in the short term, it could be fitting into our skinny jeans, it could be all of the above.  And then, the other part of us, the one with the not so obvious gift also wants to give us a gift.  I mean, lets’ just pretend for a moment that the part of us that was, we call lazy, the part of us that we don’t like because it gets us to lie on the sofa and vegetate and eat chips or whatever it is that we want to eat.  Let’s just assume for a moment that that part of us did have a positive intent.  And what might that be?  I’ll tell you a little story about that. 

I had a client who wasn’t much of an exerciser and she liked to spend of time lying on the sofa, watching TV and felt really badly about her “laziness”.  Laziness is not a term that I like but a lot of people use it.  She felt really badly about her laziness and her overeating when she was in the situation.  So, I asked her, “Well, what would you like to do or how would you like to be instead of lying ion the sofa in the evenings and snacking away?”  And she said, “Well, you know, I’d really like to get up and I could be cleaning the house and working on my homework and my projects and I could be out talking to friends and I could be doing this and I could be doing that”.  And I was listening to her and I thought oh my gosh, wow!  You know, I’m exhausted because I know that this client of mine has a pretty full life.  She’s a student, she works full time that’s’ a heavy load.  That’s a lot.  So, when I think about being a student and working full time and I think about and then my downtime I have to get up and be creative and do projects and go in the garden and straighten things up and whatever it is, I think, god, I’m just exhausted.  What about downtime?  Maybe the part of her that was lazy was a part of her that recognized that she had a real desire, a real need for actual downtime, for turnoff the brain and veg out time.  But because she was in struggle when she was vegging, feeling guilty about it, she had what we’ll call low quality veg out time.  So, what’s the lesson if you’re going to veg out?  Do a really good job it OK.  I want you to be a better vegger outer.  It takes skill and dedication to perfect it and I want you on the program, quality vegging-out time.  So, back to this conflict of the part of you that wants to exercise and the part of you that doesn’t want to exercise, we say, well, if the lazy part, the no exercise part had a gift for you, what might it be?  And that gift could in fact be rest and renewal.  Rest and renewal so that you can more fully be active when you’re active, so that you can more fully be effective when you want to be effective, more productive when you want to be productive, more present when you want to be with your friends.  And I know you might be thinking, well gosh you know, I have nothing but downtime, I take too much of it, I just can’t get up off the sofa.  And if that’s the case, I want you to look inside and ask yourself, “Do you beat yourself up about it?” or “Do you allow yourself to indulge?”  “Do you take real downtime?”  Real downtime, that’s why people who enjoy meditation really enjoy it because it is in fact real downtime.  All you’re doing is sitting there and doing absolutely nothing.  If you have low quality downtime where you’re busy distracted by watching the news and ir depresses you, a lot of people are very, very upset by the economy right now, and I can’t say that I’m immune to that myself, there’s a bummer.  If I read too many headlines and listened to too much news, I get down.  But that’s not the kind of downtime I’m talking about.  I’m not talking about feeling downtime, I’m talking about really vegging out, giving your mind, your body true renewal time. 

So, perhaps for you, the first step in becoming more motivated to exercise and exercising more is to plan real quality downtime in your day.  One of my client is an expert at the [xx] should be doing.  She has so many should be doings it would take about 20 of her to do all of those things.  Spend more time with her grandmother, do a better that work more time with her children, be a better wife, spend more time cooking, more time cleaning, more time with her husband, more time for everything.  And so, she’d had to have many, many duplicates of herself to do it all.  And understandably, she found herself very low on the motivation to exercise front.  She wasn’t doing a lot of it because in the little bit of downtime that she had, she was so busy shooting herself that she really wasn’t even renewing then.  So, the first step in becoming more motivated is to resolve that conflict, to recognize the positive intent of the part of you that you think of as lazy.  And by simply recognizing that positive intent or that gift that that part of you is wanting to give you, you cultivate self acceptance, unconditional self acceptance.  In other words, the kind of self acceptance that doesn’t matter what you do, the foundation of lasting positive behavior change is unconditional self acceptance.  And I know that I did a whole series on this earlier in Inside Out Weight Loss on Unconditional Self Acceptance.  And I want to mention it again because it really truly is the foundation of any positive behavior change.  What does it mean to accept yourself unconditionally?  It means, to take ownership of the behaviors that you have had that you hate, the behaviors that embarrassed you, the feelings that you’re embarrassed by or don’t like, the parts of you that you think are not good enough.  It means taking ownership of all of that, taking ownership of all of you, the big you.  In other words, the you that is bigger physically that you’d like to be.  If you looked in the mirror and said yes, there are a lot more pounds here than I would like to be here or a few more pounds and you said, and I forgive myself, its OK, I accept myself as I am.  I see the soul that is here in this body and I am grateful to have a body, a body that allows me to live and have this human experience because once we accept ourselves as we are now, warts and all, then the natural consequence of that, the natural consequence is wanting to take wonderful care of ourselves.  It becomes irresistible to take great care of ourselves and then it’s a very simple matter to add those behaviors of taking great care of ourselves because we truly want to do them.  We want to eat food that makes us feel good, we want to engage in exercise that nourishes our bodies, that invigorates us, that makes us strong and supple and healthy.  Unconditional self acceptance is the foundation on which all behavior change is built.  It is the fertile soil that allows new behaviors to take root. 

And on the next episode of Inside Out Weight Loss, I’ll take you through a guided journey around unconditional self acceptance to create, to build, to strengthen that foundation that I suspect you’ve already started on.  And from there, we will add motivation techniques to get you moving.  That brings us to the end of our show today.  Thank you for being present and thank you for your support and encouragement.  This is your host Renee Stephens and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet enabling you to share your abundant soul’s gifts.  Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves.  Further shows on the Personal Life Media Network, please visit our website at personalifemedia.com.  There’s loads of great content to feed your mind, body and spirit, all completely free.  And if you haven’t done so already, please visit my blog at personallifemedia.com/renee, you’ll find a link on the right hand side to the yahoo group where you can support and be supported as well as to the products that are available for sale on my site.  Take good care.

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