I started to tear up as my coach and group members responded to my question “How do you stay motivated and energized at all time without feeling exhausted and frustrated?”  It was a welled up emotion ready to crumble, to burn down my old belief system, to shed my old skin and to go through metamorphosis.

I have been working my tail off for the past year to develop my new business as a certified yoga health coach. I was addicted to stress response. I thought I would lose my edge if I didn’t hurry to complete my to-do-list, I would feel worthless for not hitting my goals, I depleted myself worrying about the outcome that was beyond my control. I wasn’t in sync with the ebb and flow of my nature.  The ego wanted to win while I was burnt out physically, mentally and emotionally.  

So this had been my pattern: Worked more, pushed harder, achieved sooner, then crashed and burnt.  And the vicious cycle repeated…  

What type of personality do you have?  What belief system do you hold on to?  What pattern do you have? Are you able to notice the breakdown as it happens or after the fact?

Breakthrough

Having refined my daily habits for almost a year, I have learned to be more steady with my habits, my time of life, the nature and most important of all, with myself. This time was different.  After my meltdown at the group session, for the first time in my life that I actually caught myself not being in the flow with easeful living.  

I was breaking out of the old pattern, my previous identity as a go-getter and constantly longing for more was shifting. Something more subtle has emerged, I have finally heard my own inner voice. The voice that speaks CARE + CONNECT + COLLABORATE.  I listen and care for my needs, connect and collaborate with my heart.

Meditation = Easeful Living

Is your monkey mind constantly chasing the next thing to accomplish, the next desired outcome, the next idea, the perfect relationships and any new shiny object that fancies your imagination? It is important to have meaningful goals and focus on achieving them. If you are, like me, a health coach or wellness practitioner, you have meaningful goals you want to achieve and are likely quite invested in impacting your communities’ health and wellbeing. But the need to serve others and create impactful programs can  end up hurting us if we aren’t practicing good self care habits and allowing ourselves space for reflection, meditation and integration of lessons learned.

After my breakdown, it became even more clear to me that meditation is my keystone habit. If we sit in silence,  the clarity of our intention in our work and personally becomes more clear and allows us to accept the results (favourable or not). We simply become more resilient to whatever life throws our way.

What is possible?

Meditation is one of the 10 habits in my own program, based on Body Thrive. It is a non-negotiable daily practice. Whether you are new or a seasoned meditator,  you will come to crave the peace and freedom that meditation offers. If you are a goal-oriented go-getter like me who wants to be in control of everything, meditation can allow you to become more and more okay walking into uncharted territory and letting things simply unfold. You become more and more grounded and able to receive. This means greater connection with your group members/co-collaborators.  

If you have a growth orientation to life (common in this tribe),  you know there will be many more breakdowns and breakthroughs to come. But the sooner we welcome the burn down, the sooner the transform comes.

The challenge

How do we keep our new identities as we move into the next phase of our lives? Just like in practicing meditation, I ask myself.. How do I stay present in the moment?  How soon do I catch myself wandering off?  When will this new identity become me?  Is it when my internal longing is completely detached from the external world?  I am not even sure what it means at this stage of my life.  I just have to be here with trust, patient and humility. Be comfortable with the unknown while making choices that bring me closer to my true self.  

How will you go through transformation? What does easeful living look like to you?

Setting New Year’s Resolutions

We have all been there.  We set up these lofty goals with high motivation. We want to exercise more, eat healthier, gain or lose 10 lbs, meditate more, have more energy and less stress. More often than not, these well thought-out and good intentions last as long as our motivation is high. In fact, USA Today reported that by mid-February, 80% of resolutions fail. This is at least in part because while we are highly motivated on January 1st, most of us have busy, overcommitted schedules and, as current habit science studies show, we are low motivation most of the time. According to University of Scranton. Journal of Clinical Psychology, there is only a mere 8% of people who are successful in achieving their resolutions.

How do you make sure you stick to your healthy goals even in the midst of a chaotic life?  

Your Big Why?

It is important to know the reasons for your goals. Without the compelling reasons for what you have to achieve, you will lose steam rather quickly and find yourself on the same ground if not worse than a year ago. It is not just about having better rest, it is about having more energy to carry on the daily activities with ease, spending quality time with your loved ones, reducing emotional eating that has caused your weight gain, being a calm and confident mom to your children or having the time and space to reach your higher potential.  

The top 3 New Year’s resolutions in 2017 are diet or eat healthier (71%), exercise more (65%) and lose weight (54%). Sure you want to lose 10 pounds, but your bigger WHY, when you dig deeper, could be that you want to have the swift mobility to play with your kids or grandkids. Your big WHYs will be the anchor that grounds to stick to your new healthy habits you when you are distracted by other shiny objects or ideas, or simply being over-consumed by the busyness of life.

Which of your current habits  adversely affects your health and the quality of life which, if addressed, would make you feel how you want to feel — lighter in body, calmer in spirit or more grounded? You may have to do deep soul-searching to realize what is out of integrity in your body. When you do, WRITE IT DOWN and connect it to HOW YOU CAN FEEL  when you upgrade these habits. Now these habits will reflect your new identity, how you see yourself and how others see you.

Design your day based on how you want to feel

Once you get clear on how you want to feel, you need to invest time, money and effort to make it happen. You have the full control of designing  your future self of who you want to become, what shape you want to be in and how you want to feel.  It comes down to prioritizing by asking ourselves some of these questions: Do I want to sleep in for another half an hour or get up now and invest in an invigorating run? Do I want to spend $5 on Starbucks everyday or invest it in my yoga membership? Do I want to conveniently order in pizza or invest extra time to prepare my own healthy food?

The state of your well-being is directly related to how much attention you invest in eating healthy, doing regular exercise, having restful sleep, sitting in silence and connecting to the rhythm of nature.

Invest in Wellness pros

Your time on this planet is limited and precious. If you are smart enough to know there are better ways to do things that will bring your desired results faster, wouldn’t you invest in that?

Changing habits is hard. Effective habit changing strategies is not common knowledge. If you are like many people, you may know WHAT you want to feel, you just don’t know how to get there.

Invest your time, energy and money in those who have been where you are and know how to get you to where you want to go faster and with greater ease – be that a holistic practitioner, a personal trainer or a health coach. That is what they are trained to do. They can help you shift not only your habits but also your mindset towards growth in body, mind and spirit.

What gives a better return on investment than you investing in you? What you gain in working with someone who gets results is not only a healthier you now,  but also incalculable savings   on costly prescription drugs or expensive medical procedures in the future. The coolest thing  of all is living in a healthy, thriving body gives you more time and freedom to participate in life full-heartedly, in whatever shape and form that suits your fancy.

Don’t Do it Alone

Human beings thrive in groups. Studies have shown that we are more likely to hit our goals when we are involved in a community with like-minded people headed towards the same direction. The accountability factor in group community keeps us on track with our commitment, reignites our motivation when we slack off and level up our performance by learning from each other’s successes and failures.

If you have been working on your health goals by yourself with great and sustainable success, good for you, because for most of us, when life throws us a curveball so go the health goals out the window!  If you have tried doing it alone without significant results, may be it is time to open yourself up to the group experience as the power of group connection will transform you beyond your own expectation.

Still not convinced? Ask yourself if it is the ego, the fear of being vulnerable or the self-sabotage attitude that is holding you back from connecting in a dynamic group.

Update your Operating System

We often cannot make commitment to change because it is inconvenient, it stirs up our existing relationship with people around us, it challenges our outdated belief system that was passed down to us from our parents, our culture, or imposed on us by our peers and it disrupts our complacent lifestyle. The stakes are high if you don’t keep your New Year’s resolutions. Our current lifestyles are making us sick – whether that is from being overscheduled, overnourished or under-exercised – pick your poison. Lifestyle and autoimmune diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attack, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia (the list goes on and on) are on the rise. Do you want to wait until you can’t afford not to change because it is a life and death situation?

Is there any room for health improvement in your body? Do you want a vibrant health by design so that you can carve out how you want to live life to your highest potentiality?  What else is possible when your body, mind and soul are in alignment?

Set your New Year’s resolution mindfully.  Invest wisely.  Live meaningfully.

As you look back in your life, do you notice a pattern of your body weight?  Do you forget to eat or do you reach out for food when you are upset?  Do you know someone who eats exactly like you but doesn’t gain an ounce while you struggle to keep the weight off?  Where do you feel discomfort when you have digestion issue?  Is it your stomach, intestine or colon?   

Your Ayurvedic Constitution

According to Ayurveda, there are three body types (doshas or constitution) that correspond to our physical and personality traits: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. Understanding your dosha is the first step in gaining tremendous insight in your body as you learn the right diet, exercise routine and lifestyle that are optimal for your health. You may find an Ayurvedic practitioner to accurately determine your dosha or you may take the online dosha quiz to get an idea. Most people are a combination of two doshas, but one typically predominates.

Don’t get too hung up on the detailed analysis of your dosha quiz as you might find different results each time you take the quiz.  You want to know your dominant dosha so that you start paying attention to how you body reacts to different foods at different time and you become more connected with the food that you eat.  As time goes by and you get to know yourself better, the quiz result will become closer and closer to your true self.  For example, when I was younger and less self-aware, I thought I was Pitta-Kapha, but having looked back at how I reacted to eating in my younger years, I realized I am actually Pitta-Vata.

Let’s look at your diet based on your body type:

Vata

Vata is made up of ether and air.  It is light and dispersing. Those with predominantly Vata are naturally thin and difficult to gain weight.  Foods containing a lot of ether and air which are raw, dry and cold should be avoided.  

Vatas favour sweet, salty and sour tastes. They should eat moist, warm, oil and heavy (grounded) foods.  When Vatas are out of balance, their poor digestion will cause bloating and constipation.  They tend to forget to eat when they are overwhelmed or upset.  Looking back at my own life, I realized that my Vata imbalance that had caused me to not feel hunger when I broke up with my boyfriend during my final exam in university many years ago.

Check out Overweight Vata Podcast.

Pitta

Pitta is made up of fire and water.  It is intense and radiating.  Those with predominantly Pitta are medium build, can gain and lose weight fairly easily.  Their digestive fire is strong and sometimes they think they can eat anything.  I am very Pitta (more than 50%) and I had had very huge appetite during my younger adulthood.  This is a very common problem for most Pittas because we think we have been eating this much of food in the past without putting on the extra weight and we should be able to still do the same. The reality is our body becomes more efficient as we get older and it requires less food.  So if we don’t adjust how we eat, we can still gain weight easily.  This is exactly what happened to me when I was in my 30’s and I started to pile up a couple of pounds every year, going from size 0 to size 6.  Not until this spring when I started intermittent fasting (meal spacing that cycles between at least 13 hours of fasting and eating) that I finally regained control of my healthy weight.

Pittas favour sweet, bitter, and astringent tastes. They should eat sweet juicy fruits, cooling vegetables like cucumber, kale and lettuce while avoiding hot and spicy foods, alcohol and caffeine.  When Pittas are out of balance, they suffer from acid reflux or heartburn.

Check out Overweight Pitta Podcast.

Kapha

Kapha is made up of water and earth.  It’s heavy and dense. Those with predominantly Kapha are heavy build and find it harder to lose weight. I have a Kapha girlfriend who loves to have healthy snack frequently in small quantity, and she likes her sweets too. You can see the snacking (or meal stacking) and sweets are aggravating Kapha. It will be very difficult for her to maintain a healthy weight unless she starts to intermittent fast and obey her dosha-favoured diet.

The Kaphas favour pungent, bitter, and astringent tastes. They should eat a lot of vegetables and high fiber foods like legumes while minimizing dairy, oily foods and sweets. When Kaphas are out of balance, their slow digestion may lead to weight gain.

Check out Overweight Kapha Podcast.

Meal Stacking May Cause Disease

Regardless of your body type, if you are constantly eating (i.e. snacking or meal stacking), you will have food at different digestion stages along your gastrointestinal tract —  an apple from an hour ago in your stomach, a cookie from 3 hours ago in your intestine and your lunch from 4 hours ago in your colon. This constant buildup of food depletes our energy to actually do a proper job in digestion, absorption and elimination. When food builds up like this, we start to accumulate ama (toxins from undigested food and usually caused by weak digestion). If you have more Vata in your constitution, ama will accumulate in colon, Pitta in small intestine and Kapha in stomach.

You want to pay close attention to ama because it is the first stage of disease according to Ayurveda’s six stages of disease.  

So how can you prevent ama from building up?  

Have your largest meal between 10 am and 2 pm  – when your digestive fire is the strongest. Eat when you are truly hungry (not emotional hunger) and space your meals for proper digestion, absorption and elimination.  According to Ayurveda, Vata should eat 3 to 4 times a day, Pitta 3 times and Kapha 2 to 3 times, and no snacking in between meals. This is also called intermittent fasting. This concept is foreign to some people who have been told to constantly graze to boost metabolism.

Besides meal stacking, dosha imbalance may also happen when you violate your daily habits like eating late heavy dinner when the digestive fire is weak, going to bed late with full stomach obstructing digestion and proper body cleansing, eating junk food or not eating mindfully.

What is your take?

Should you care how you eat for your body type?  Intermittent fasting or meal stacking? Experiment it for yourself, connect and listen to your body, and notice how you feel. Check in with your body when you crave certain food.  Is it the pure craving or is it dosha imbalance? Our body is very intelligent, if you attune your diet and lifestyle to your body constitution and the natural rhythm of life, you will start to find your healthy weight and have a radiant longevity.

Most of us have tried diets, exercise programs, herbal remedies or lifestyle regimes that have worked, for a period. We feel better and more optimistic about our future health… right up until  life gets busy or our new routine disrupted. We get distracted, commitment and motivation lessen, until eventually we veer off the path entirely and are back to square one — feeling alone and frustrated.

Then you start to doubt your own knowledge, may be it wasn’t the right information that could actually help you.  So you seek professional advice and get into the specialized program like Weight Watchers to make sure you get it this time.  Wow!  It works great and you are pumped.  You said to yourself: “This is it. I’m on my way to an ever-improving health!”.  Wouldn’t you know it, as the program ends, the vicious cycle begins like before.  So you go on to try Herbal Magic, Jenny Craig, Dr. Bernstein and many more with short-lived results. Sound familiar?

Why was the result not long-lasting? Was it not having a clear and big enough goal or intention?  Was it lack of discipline or sustainable motivation?  What was actually lacking here that causes most people to fail in achieving their health goals?

Think Automation, Not Willpower

BJ Fogg, James Clear and Charles Duhigg are well known habit change experts that teach us how to automate new habits.

Let’s look at weight gain as an example. Studies have shown one of the contributors to weight gain is snacking (unhealthy snacks are worse).  If you are a snacker, you know it is extremely hard to fight the temptation.  When you feel the urge (James Clear called it “reminder”, Charles Duhigg called it “cue”) for a cookie, you want to pause, take a deep breath and ask yourself:

1. What time is it?
2. Where are you?
3. Who are you with?
4. What did you just do prior?
5. What emotional state are you at?

The above 5 questions will determine the trigger of this habit of reaching out for a cookie or cookies.  

Know Your Triggers, Shift your Habits

Let’s look at some examples of these triggers. Every afternoon around 2 pm (time), or when you are chatting with a co-worker, Mary (people), at a break in the cafeteria (place), or you just poured yourself a cup of coffee (preceding action), or when you feel alone and sad (emotional state). Say in this case, your trigger is feeling alone and sad.

In order to verify if the cookie is actually what you need to satisfy your urge, replace the cookie with another reward like celery stick or chocolate. Is the urge gone? If not, replace it with a completely unrelated reward like going for a walk, pick up a phone to call a friend, and keep testing until you find the new reward that satisfies your true need. Let’s say you conclude your need for cookie diminishes as you call a friend.

Great!  Now that you have identified your reminder or signal for action as feeling alone and sad, and your reward is eating a cooking.  You want to design a new routine or system for yourself by writing down a plan:

Each time I feel alone and sad (reminder), I will call a friend (routine) because it provides me with companionship and care (reward).

What is missing here is not the cookie, it is the feeling of companionship and care!  When you get this, you can add in new habits that include friendship or social life.

• Take a moment to tap into your own desires for a healthier you. Ask yourself:
• What bad habits do you currently have now that stop you from getting healthy?  
• Can you identify the real urge?
• What new habit can you add to your daily routine?  
• How do you design your environment to make this new habit easy to do?  

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Studies shows this new behaviour will take root overtime and become automatic.

Slow and steady wins the race and you will see the compound effect of small changes overtime. Before you know it, these tiny healthy habits add up, and replace your outdated unhealthy ones. A new you emerges.