Winter Fitness Strategies to Manage Indulgence

Thawing freezing fingers and toes in a cozy bar with a big glass of red, or racing home to snuggle up on the couch with a big bowl of pasta and a cozy blanket has a powerful pull during cold winter days. Days off exercise can quickly lead to weeks off and suddenly the fitness discipline and diet regime you worked so hard to cultivate earlier in the year has evaporated. Finding balance in New York winter can be difficult and requires a little extra dedication and planning to compensate for the cold. 

Get Moving

Weather permitting, walk wherever you can. Pick places to eat that are further away for lunch, walk to a further subway stop, take the stairs. Go out shopping rather than buying online. Incidental exercise counts. Purchasing a personal exercise tracker such as a Fitbit is one way to keep an eye on your daily baseline activity. 

Make Time to Workout

A few days away from your routine can easily slip into a few weeks off. Set yourself realistic goals and schedule your weekly workouts ahead of time. Pack light exercise equipment such as skipping ropes when traveling. Plan your gym days and honor that time as you would a business meeting. If you are feeling unmotivated or find your workout is getting stale, schedule time to attend some of the classes offered at your gym or book sessions with a personal trainer to give new energy to your workouts and to help keep you accountable.

Lift to Stay Lean 

Pick up those weights to maintain muscle tone, not just for definition but to keep your metabolism stoked. When you can get to the gym, utilize that time to work those big muscles which will help you burn more calories, build tone and reduce body fat. Think deadlifts, squats, lunges, pull-ups and rowing.

Mix in Cardio 

Enjoying more decadence than usual? This is a great opportunity to amp up your cardio workout routine to effectively use all that extra energy. Your muscles use sugar as fuel so when a little too much indulgence takes place use it wisely by applying yourself to some challenging workouts, such as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) which torches calories to help stave off that unwanted fat.  The great thing about HIIT workouts is they can be done in a limited amount of space with little to no equipment. So even if the weather outside sucks you can still get something done!

Get a Handle on Your Eating and Drinking Habits 

Don’t let one bad food choice or decadent meal be the catalyst for an entire day or week of overindulgent eating. Balance your big meals out with healthier choices and make it a priority to drink purified water. Not just a glass here and there, at minimum half your body weight in ounces per body weight per day. If you are hitting the caffeine and cocktails then you are going to need even more to help hydrate and flush out the system. 

Build in Detox Days

Include some short detox days in between indulgent days. After an indulgent weekend carve out time during the week to cleanse the body. Eat lots of leafy greens, rehydrate with purified water and herbal teas. Add anti-inflammatory herbs and spices to soups, salads and juices such as ginger, mint, cilantro, parsley and turmeric. 

Work In, Not Against Your Environment

How to hack your environment to get leaner and happier 

I was listening to a podcast the other day called The Health Bridge, hosted by Dr Sara Gottfried and Dr Pedram Shojai. If you enjoy listening to Podcasts I would highly recommend this one. They work together bridging eastern and western medical principles and discuss topics ranging from weight loss, hormones, mental wellbeing, food to chemicals and pollution. Over the past few podcasts they have been discussing the “100 Day Gong” they are doing together in a bid to gain motivation and enthusiasm in their listeners to improve their health, fitness and wellbeing. The Gong is all about finding, or creating ways to work in health and wellbeing into your daily routine. As Dr Sara likes to put it “biohacking your environment.” Working it in really is so important. Life gets in the way sometimes so the better you can set your environment up to support your healthy lifestyle the more successful and satisfied you will be. 

5 Steps to “working in” your environment

1. Goals. First is to address your goals, what are you trying to improve within yourself? For example, it could be to lose weight, build muscle and reduce stress levels. The next step is to think of what you can do and how you can do it to 'work in' your environment to help you achieve these.
2. Assess your daily and weekly routine.  You need to look at specifically how, where and when can you add things to your routine that will help you reach your goals. Most people have time before work to fit something in. It could be 40 squats while waiting for the coffee to boil. It could be meditating for 3 minutes before getting in the shower. Take a look at how you can you make your work environment healthier. Standing more, walking meetings, getting out for 10 minutes during lunch, it all counts. Take a look at how your day unfolds, there are always free minutes here and there to do something good for you. 
3. Create a timeline. It does not need to be 100 days. It could be 10 days, 2 weeks or a month. The choice is yours and the key here is committing. Pick realistic goals in a set timeframe that you know you can achieve. Letting yourself down is unproductive. 
4. Hold yourself accountable or find friends. If you are doing this alone then plan mini celebratory milestones, for example after successfully working in through 2 weeks book a massage, movie or go hiking with a friend. 
5. Be flexible. Don't let a change in routine or an unexpected event cause everything to unravel. Modify and switch as needed, the important thing is keeping a level of consistency and progress will happen. 

Why Goal Setting Does Not Work

We all have things we want to achieve in life. When it comes to health it could be weight loss, gaining muscle, losing body fat or just improving fitness and wellbeing. There is so much emphasis out there on goal setting to attain success, it’s the way I was taught in school and in the workplace. We all love the idea of a big goal igniting a new found level of motivation in us, jotting down new years resolutions or joining a gym as the guarantee that those life changing things will now happen. 

The problem is that thinking about something won’t make things happen. No one gets to a goal without looking at the process of how to get there. For changes to occur in life you must first look within. This can be the hard part. Change requires mental adjustments that allow you to be open to addressing certain areas of your lifestyle. When a goal seems too large or too difficult it can be easy to blame work, family or other circumstances in your life that can make things more difficult, but not impossible. 

Setting certain goals can have a negative impact by creating a false perception of “when I reach my goal, then i’ll be good enough.”  Researches from four of the top business schools have found “in many cases goals do more harm than good.” This can place too much attention on the wrong things and puts you in a perpetual state of feeling like a continuos failure until you reach the goal. When a person feels they are failing at something it is a de-motivator, this can cause you to throw all those good intentions out the window. According to Ray Williams “The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear.”

So what to do instead?  Take the focus away from larger goals and foster an interest in building a lifestyle structure that will have you moving towards your desired image of health, wellness and weight loss. Stop thinking about the symptoms or outcomes of the problem and focus on the process, or as Scott Adam's puts it, the system and not the goal. It sounds so simple right? 

And in some ways, it is. 

Move away from those size goals, restrictive diet goals or trying the latest weight loss trend and instead start adding your own actionable systems to build a healthy lifestyle into your daily, weekly and monthly routine. As stated by Adams who is not referring directly to weight loss yet it rings so perfectly true “Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike”. Just because your buddy next door lost 30 pounds on a Paleo diet or your other friend swears by training for a marathon to get results does not mean this is the path for you. 

Find Your System

Recognize your weaknesses:

Is there a time of day you find you feel is the hardest to make good food choices? Then fill that time with something else. Schedule a meeting with a colleague, go for a walk, make a herbal tea or catch up on a call or email with friends or family. 

Play up to your strengths: 

What do you enjoy that will improve your health and wellbeing? Maybe it’s walking or practicing yoga. Whatever it is you enjoy doing find the time to fit it in. Go for a walk at lunchtime or meet a friend for a walk instead of a drink. If you feel you don't have time to exercise in a studio then find some classes online you can do in 20 minutes before work. 

Break it down: 

Making big dietary changes all at once usually results in a period of dedication which slowly (or quickly) unravels as resolve dwindles . You need to address your behavior patterns which directly relates to the systems in your life. Start small, such as adding vegetables to 2 meals a day, eating a high protein breakfast or replacing unhealthier snacks with fruit or nuts. Over time the more healthy and nutritious foods you are consuming will leave less room and desire for junk. 

Build in small achievements:

Did you make it to the gym 3 days this week like you scheduled? Or did you eat vegetables and lean protein for dinner Monday, Wednesday and Thursday? Whatever systems you are successful with each week should be recognized. It could be going to see a movie or having a massage. Celebrate the small wins as they are what will get you there. 

Try new things: 

Get out and try a bunch of different activities. Get out of your comfort zone. Hiking, group classes, swimming, tennis, Pilates, social sports on the weekends, running clubs. There is bound to be something that motivates you. Keep things from getting stale by mixing it up.

Schedule activities:

Find some activities and book them in. Don't wait to do it. Recruit friends to help hold yourself accountable. 

Be honest and realistic with yourself about what can you manage to do just today or for the next week. This is creating a system and set of processes in your life that you can build on to get you to where you want to be.

Habit is what keeps you going. Start creating healthy habits and you will be pleasantly surprised at where you will end up.