I have a client who hired a dozen different personal trainers before she found me. She tried just about every diet you can think of too. Every time she "got on a kick" she'd tell herself, "This is the time I'm finally going to get in shape and lose the weight." HOW SHE GOT OFF THE "WEIGHT-LOSS ROLLERCOASTER" In hindsight, it wasn't hiring someone excellent at exercise prescription that changed her life. What made this time different? A lot actually. You can see her remarkable

"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.” Jim Rohn What if I could help you find ONE habit that took about 30-60 minutes each week, but freed up about 10+ hours each week. Would you be interested to hear what it is? It’s called, weekly planning. Sexy right? YET, HARDLY ANYONE DOES DETAILED, WEEKLY PLANNING How do I know? One of the line items in our client in

“What is really important is what you learn after thinking you know it all.” Waite Phillips Ever said: “I know what I need to do, I just need to make myself do it”? If you’re telling yourself that, here’s a sanity check for you: YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. That’s not to say you don’t have any good ideas, but that statement actually points out a significant blind spot. What the statement assumes is your (or my) lack of results is simply discipline problem, a lack of accountabil

Do you have an achy joint, or two or three? Does your body give you pushback when you get active? Do you wonder if living with pain is just something you have to accept? If so, I hope to give you fresh perspective on how you can rebuild your foundation so you can get back to enjoying a higher quality of life. LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING… Think for a second about how your neuro-muscular system developed. When you arrived on the scene, you couldn’t hold your head up. Thankfull

A common frustration I hear from people is they don’t like exercise. Just hearing the word transports people to feelings of physical discomfort...and emotional tension. Besides the soreness that follows, people wrestle with having no drive to do exercise. They know they “need” exercise, but the experience, not to mentioned the discipline, is so unenjoyable that the whole idea of making it a regular habit feels like wrestling with unwanted duty, fighting an un-winnable willpow

Does the idea of transforming your health sometimes feel like a monumental task? If you’re like most people…your new year’s resolution barely made it to February? When was the last time you felt like this guy? What happened to that last health goal you set? Life…it got in the way. Sometimes, the complexity of trying to change your health can feel like it’s so far away that even the idea of getting started is hard. DO ANY OF THESE SOUND FAMILIAR? You get your diet on track, bu

Ever looked back on your efforts to change and realized you were focused on the wrong things? To say you picked the wrong goals isn’t meant to say you picked a bad goal, or a goal you won’t accomplish eventually. Rather it’s saying that the process will teach you a lot, and one of those lessons is that sometimes you aimed at something off target from what you really want, or from what’s wise to run after right now. Striving to accomplish something meaningful will make you (so

“Willpower is an exhaustible resource.” That was one of the best lines I picked up from the excellent book Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Trying to use willpower is an episode of logic, fighting with emotion. Logic is rarely ever going to win that battle. THE RIDER AND THE ELEPHANT The Heath brothers use the brilliant analogy of an elephant (emotions) and a rider (logic) to describe the internal tug of war we all go through when, for example,

Are you borrowing from your future health to pay for your current lifestyle? Is your body wracking up expenses--pains, excess weight, digestive woes, etc.? If you're mistreating it a bit, or putting as little effort into your health as possible, this post is for you. If you read my last post about goals vs. wishes where I talked about how every behavior has a positive or negative effect on our health, you may be left with a question such as: So are saying I should never…have

Ever had someone give you some tough love that you actually needed to hear? I’ve been musing on this post for months. It’s a “call people out on their excuses” post. I’ve been wrestling with how to do it in a way that invites introspective conversation (logical responses) instead of having the reader put up a wall (emotional response). Anyway, here's my attempt as some sincere questions I hope you find helpful. Feedback welcome! YOUR MENTALITY PART 1 If we’re honest with ours

Many years ago I began working with a client who had some significant weight to lose. He knew he needed exercise to be part of the equation for changing his life. Well, actually...exercise was the equation. From his perspective, all he needed to do to lose weight was to exercise, and exercise hard. It worked in college and should work again…right? Two years later, after I had put him through the ringer three days a week (hey, he asked me for it), he finally had an epiphany wh

If you are not currently at your ideal weight and enjoying good health, it’s not because you don’t care to be healthy. Am I right? You got into the state you’re in because of a collection of interrelated, lifestyle choices that compounded over time into your current level of health. LET'S ZOOM OUT FOR A SECOND Every action you take on a given day has either a positive or negative effect on your health. There’s no neutral. You're either running in circles, or you're making pro

Perhaps the #1 thing that derails people after they’ve set a goal is they expect to act logically when the inevitable emotional friction of change occurs. Being rational during an emotional state is difficult, if not impossible. And guess who is emotional about the change process…all of us. Every time something unexpectedly interrupts our well-crafted (or what we think is a well-crafted) plan, that inevitably produces an emotional response of frustration. Side note: Ladies of

How’s your month been? You haven’t missed a workout, gone off your healthy eating plan, stayed up well past your bedtime, or bypassed your daily reflection time have you? OK, whew. I have too…glad it’s not just me. Here’s another confession. I’m confident I’ll miss more workouts in my life, and also succumb to less-than-stellar food choices from time to time. BUT…am I going to beat myself up about it. Nope. Instead, let's play a little game called A LIE AND TWO TRUTHS A lie.

We've all heard the mantra--losing weight is about calories in, calories out. Burn more calories than you take in and you'll lose weight. Riiiight. If it were that simple, we’d all be trim and the above formula would have changed the world. Alas it has not. So what's missing? HERE'S THE PROBLEM Treating your health like a math problem, where one set of actions is supposed to produce X result is, from my perspective, like buying into the idea there is a formula to guarantee so

Have you ever lost weight and gained it back? Ever felt like you know what you should be doing and asked yourself "why can't I get my act together?" If so, this post if for you. “We all must suffer one of two things: The pain of discipline, or the pain of regret and disappointment.” – Jim Rohn I once mentioned that quote to a client who later told me she spent a week trying to come up with a third option. She didn't like either of those two. After wrestling with the statement