Why I’m Choosing Intentions Over Resolutions in 2026

New years can feel loud and demanding, especially when you’re juggling motherhood, training, and a nervous system running hot. We’re choosing a different path: intentions over resolutions, performance over punishment, presence over perfection. In this candid reflection, we map out eight intentions for 2026 that help active moms and pregnant or postpartum athletes build progress that lasts. You’ll hear why performance goals—like running a half marathon, nailing five push-ups, or squatting consistently—often bring the body composition changes people chase, without the shame spiral tied to a scale.

We also flip the diet script from restriction to addition. Think Mediterranean-inspired meals, more fiber, and simple upgrades that improve satiety and gut health. No moralizing food, just practical ways to nourish busy bodies. To make changes stick, we lean on habit stacking and micro-adjustments—prepping coffee at night, waking five minutes earlier each week, and pairing new routines with ones that already exist. It’s a gentler approach that still builds serious momentum.

Stress and grief don’t wait for our calendars, so we prioritize mental health and nervous system care with 10-minute mindfulness, a couple of yoga sessions around the kids, and breathable moments in the middle of hectic days. We talk about expecting setbacks, acknowledging hard seasons, and redefining success as showing up for the smallest possible step when life hits. Finally, we invite you to choose a word for the year—your compass when plans get loud. Ours is calm: steady, consistent, and sustainable.

If this resonates, follow along for more conversations on training through pregnancy and postpartum, pelvic health, and performance. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs permission to slow down, and leave a review with your word for 2026 so we can cheer you on.

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Chapters

• 0:08 Welcome And Podcast Focus
• 1:12 New Year Reflections And Intentions
• 3:41 Performance Goals Over Weight Loss
• 7:50 Body Image, Aging, And Self-Talk
• 12:07 Mom’s Story And Reframing Health
• 17:13 Add Foods Instead Of Restricting
• 21:40 Habit Stacking And Early Mornings
• 26:58 Mental Health And Mindfulness

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome to the Barbell Mommots podcast. My name is Christina Frabbit. I'm a public foreign physical therapist researcher and exercise in pregnancy and a mom of two who have competed in CrossFit, Power Lifting, or Weight Lifting Playment, post product, or both. In this podcast, we want to talk about the realities of being a mom who loves to exercise. Whether you're a recreational exerciser or an athlete, we want to talk about all of the things that we go through as females going into this motherhood journey. We're going to talk about fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum topics that are relevant to the active individual. While I am a pelvic floor physical therapist, I am not your pelvic floor physical therapist, and know that this podcast does not substitute medical advice. All right, come along for this journey with us while we navigate motherhood together, and I can't wait to get started. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Barb Obamas podcast. It is 2026. We have rung in the new year, and this just seems to be a time for reflection and anticipation. I always find that with the slowing down of work life, I have littles at home. So it's it feels very chaotic at home. But with a little bit of time away from work, I also find that it's my time of creativity and a time when I am thinking about my year and have all these ideas of what I want to do. And I always have to toggle it with what is realistic. And over the last couple of years, I have really moved away from New Year's resolutions, like these goals of things that I want to check off a list, like a to-do list. I still have a couple, like I want to run another half marathon this year, but I have really shifted gears to intentions. Intentions for the upcoming year, things that I have learned from prior years that I'm gonna bring into this year, building, deconstructing, changing, pivoting. Why I really like intentions over resolutions is that there isn't a pass fail or I did this or I didn't do this. Really, it focuses on the process. There's a quote, and it actually comes from the office, that says, I really wish you knew you were in the good old days when you were actually in them. I have thought about that a lot around my mom's life with my mom having passed away recently and you know, losing our babies with the miscarriages and those types of things, and trying to hold on to that joy and happiness when you're in a period of grieving. And so kind of thinking about what though we want those intentions to be. I don't know if you do anything like vision boards, but I have eight intentions for the 2026 season that I would love to see done more intentionally, more regularly in the pregnancy postpartum motherhood space. And let me know if you agree with these. The first one is around health. So instead of thinking about our goals being around weight and weight loss, is there a goal that you can center around performance? Getting more mobility, doing a better, uh, working into feeling better in your hip or your squat. Um, instead of talking about trying to lose five pounds, can if we are gonna do goals, think about, you know, trying to run that half marathon or trying to consistently squat 100 pounds in the gym or to be able to do five unassisted push-ups on our toes, something like that. And because I know that so many people do do these resolutions that are our goals, when we focus on performance-related goals, what is really wonderful is that usually the body composition change is a consequence of that goal, right? If we have a goal to run a half marathon, our running volume increases, our caloric demand increases, we start to be intentional about our nutrition, we have more calorie burns, so we sleep better. And the positive feedback loop often comes into play. And then as a consequence of that, your body starts to change. And so instead of anchoring that intention or that goal or that resolution on the scale, can we anchor it to something related to performance? When you are particularly in the early postpartum phase, I think it is so difficult seeing how your body has changed, and some of those changes being permanent changes to your body's look and aesthetic. That motherhood transition can be so hard on self-concept and self-image when we've just seen how much our body has changed and those feelings are so real. That's gonna continue into the aging process, right? Like our having to be mindful and intentional and aware that our bodies are gonna change as a consequence of aging. We're gonna have more wrinkles on our face, we're gonna have more skin that sags, we're going to look like we have laugh lines and frown lines and the stress uh 11s in between our foreheads with that menopausal transition, our body composition, the rigidity of our skin, all those things change with age. And I just think so much about how when I look back, hopefully I can make it into my 70s and 80s and look back. And I know that I'm gonna kick myself if I spend my entire life um hating my body for what it looked like instead of praising my body for what it is capable of doing and anchoring my intentions in 2026 around what I am honored that my body is able to do and working towards that goal versus anchoring it in um in shame or hatred or body self-hatred that is just such a huge part of our culture and the marketing to women so commonly. I think I told you this story. My mom had um had a lot of struggles with mental health issues. And this is like kind of last little story before I go to my number two. And she was on a medication that was more popular, you know, 10, 15 years ago than it is now, because we have uh different variations of it. But one of the big side effects of it was changes to your metabolism. And so it kept my mom really stable from a mood perspective, but it caused her to gain a lot of weight. And um, and then it also made it really hard for her to get it off. And so she had gained over a hundred pounds, over a hundred and a bit pounds uh across her midlife between struggles with mental health and mood and um stress eating and metabolism changes, et cetera, menopausal transition, all the things. And then she had gone on Ozempic, and she was um able to lose over a hundred pounds. And my mom did amazing in her midlife, in her 50s and to her early 60s. Her low back pain had gone away, she was starting to fit into clothes again. She had gone on a really big journey to try and help with her health. And when she got cancer, because of the risk of weight loss and things that they do not want you to lose weight, she um didn't go on the Azempic anymore. With that, um, she gained a little bit of weight when she was in her cancer treatment. And I remember her complaining about the fact that she had put this 10 pounds on. And I said, Mom, like this is not the time in your life for you to be like hating what your body looks like because you can breathe now, you can move now. Like the cancer treatment has given you your quality of life back, you know, at least temporarily. And, you know, she said, But I worked so hard to get this weight off, which was so real, and that's such a real sentiment. What I took away from that conversation is that my mom spent her entire life wishing her body looked something different. And then five years later, she would look back on her body from five years ago and be like, Oh my gosh, I wish I had that body. And then in five years away, she looked back and she'd be like, I wish I had that body. And so, even struggling to breathe with cancer, it was so ingrained in her that she hated her body, she hated what her body looked like. And if only her body would look like this, she would be happier with her body. And that time never came. That it really has made me think about this in 2026 about how much time do we spend being hurtful to our body, things that we would never say to a friend of ours or somebody that we love and cherish deeply, but we say it very commonly to ourselves. So, can we anchor those intentions, resolutions, goals to something performance related and allow those health changes and behaviors to make it easier for that performance advantage? And then know that often those body composition consequences happen. And if you do want those weight loss goals, like this is not a to to shame individuals who have goals around weight loss, but can we also add maybe a performance goal and just do a little bit of a check-in on what our self-talk is when when thinking about um when thinking about those intentions and that goals and what that's rooted in? Now, the next thing is that in that same vein, um, many people are starting diet plans and all these types of things to try and increase their health. And can we kind of flip the script and focus on adding things into our diet rather than focusing on taking things away? When we take things away as humans, or we say, okay, we're not, we're gonna cut out all sugar or we're never gonna eat this or we're never gonna eat that, two things start to happen. One, our scarcity brain is like, what do you mean I can't have it? And then we're like, okay, well, I'm gonna start this on Monday, so I'm gonna eat this entire bag of chips because I know on Monday I'm not gonna be able to have them again. And then that loops into our scarcity brain, where when we are afraid that resources are gonna be limited, we loop into that scarcity mentality and we end up overcompensating and overeating often. And I just read scarcity brain by Michael Easter. And so it was really interesting to think about this kind of coming into the new year. Some of our intentions as a family are a couple of things. Number one is that the Mediterranean diet from a health perspective is some of the strongest evidence we have for reducing risk of cancer, all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, et cetera. And so we are going to be adding in more meals or looking for more recipes that focus in on that Mediterranean diet, which basically means that I'm trying to add in a lot more vegetables into our diet. We are okay, but definitely not as much as we need to. And then one of the things that Ellen Seppi, she's in the older adult division with me when I work, where I work at the Institute of Clinical Excellence, she really got me into this. And then I went down a lot of rabbit holes, has been around many gastroenterologists and those who are involved medical providers in gastrointestinal cancers, are saying that one of the biggest risk factors for many of us, based on changes that we've had in our diet over the last several decades, is that our fiber is way too low. When our fiber is low, our risk of cancer goes up. And so one of the things I'm adding in is an intentional increase in the amount of fiber in my diet. And so my husband has been laughing at me because as we have this kind of started for us at the end of 2025 into 2026, is I've been adding like chia seeds, I've been hiding chia seeds in like everything for us for our kids, just to start adding in or being very intentional about adding fiber in. And so the intention for this 2026 season is how can we add in things? And ideally, um things that are not super cumbersome, right? And this is gonna go into number three is when oftentimes people start these big challenges, things like 75 hard, they're such a drastic change that they're not sustainable for a long period of time. A lot of popular diet trends are like this too, like the ketogenic diet and the carnivore diet, all these things where you're like, I'm never gonna have sugar ever again. And an apple is too much sugar. And therefore, in the short time or short term, it can be really beneficial. But then we see a lot of weight regain when we get to this time where we're exhausted from the rigidity of these different health initiatives and end up coming back right into our solid, um, our previous habits, rather. And so my third intention is when thinking about adding in, can we have it stack to make things more manageable? For me, one of the things that one of my intentions for 2026 is to have earlier mornings. I do not like early mornings for me, and it's funny because all my parents are gonna know that when I say sleep in and I say 6:30, um, that having littles, especially one that likes to get up at 5:30, that that truly is a sleep in from a morning perspective and flow of the morning perspective. But having that early morning and kind of habit stacking little easy things um make things more manageable. And so one example of habit stacking is that as I was cleaning up for dinner or cleaning up after dinner, I make coffee for the morning, which may seem like something that you do all the time, but that was not something we would always make coffee in the morning. And that made getting up earlier easier because I knew coffee was already made. I just had to press the button. And then by the time I let the dogs out came back up, I would be able to get my cup of coffee. And I really appreciated that. Getting up early in the morning, talking about making these like incremental shifts, I am now getting up from 6:30 to I'm now getting up at 5:15 in the morning. Five kind of sounds a little miserable, even though it is only 15 minutes. Um, but I actually started at 550 in the morning and then I went to 545. And so over the course of like the last, I would say seven or eight weeks, I've chopped down by five minutes until now I'm at 5.15. And that made it feel like, okay, it's just five minutes earlier. It's just five minutes earlier, and I was able to trick my brain instead of going from 6:30 wakeups to 5 a.m. wakeups and then really rocking my body with a new health habit. So that is number three. So thinking about performance instead of only focusing on body composition, adding things rather than taking things away, and then habit stacking for making things manageable. Number four, um, what I am hoping that you all will be thinking about, or my piece of advice for the 2026 season, take them or leave them, is that we often focus many of our intentions around our physical health, which I think is amazing. But can we have intentions for the 2026 season that center around mental health and well-being? What I have seen with many of my friends and family and colleagues, especially as we hit middle life and we are in this messy middle, is that life is just lifing. And I have talked to so many who have had really, really significant challenges. We have had a friend whose house just burnt down. We have had friends who have lost neighbors and parents and kids that have had struggles. And it is hard to maintain a high level of work performance, keep up with everything at home, marriages, relationships strong, keeping with your friends. Like there's just so many things that are challenging to maintain if you are in middle life, right? And between 20 and and or I should say 30 and 50 for many is middle life. How can we prioritize the fact that as a society, as a culture, we are just so stressed out? Like if I hear breaking news one more time, I think I'm gonna get a nervous tick because social media is stressful, and I'm looking at all these things happening in our world that are stressful, and you have stuff at home that is stressful, and you feel like you never get a reprieve from it. And so um, one of my intentions was um doing a 10-minute mindfulness meditation. I got the calm app and I'm doing their daily calm. 10 minutes is super manageable for me. And I have added in some yoga around the kiddos so that it's not taking into some of my very limited alone time. And if the kids do it with me, they do it with me. If they don't, they don't. My six-year-old says it's boring, my four-year-old thinks it's fun sometimes to come and join with me. And that to me is mind exercise versus physical exercise. And so I've been trying to do yoga a couple of times a week. Prioritizing that mental health space, I think is something many of us need to be thinking about and taking a reflective pause to see how we are doing and be real about it, right? Because that comes into my next period is that our nervous systems for many, and especially when you're just in the thick of motherhood, are just overstimulated and stressed all the time. And for many, you know, we're kind of like, okay, this is just the season of life we are in. Absolutely. And there are things that we can do that are small, like pausing, having an alarm in our phone at 1 p.m. every day that goes off and we close our eyes and we take five deep breaths, or find out that time when you are at your max of overstimulation and go into the bathroom, close your eyes and take five big breaths, right? Unless your partner was in there beforehand, then don't take five deep breaths or go somewhere else. And I think that part of it focusing on mental well being. And for someone like me who has always been Been a very type A, high drive, can handle a lot of things. And that has just been my mode forever and ever and ever. Acknowledging that it, even though I can do it, it isn't the best thing for my health, has been a very hard gut punch for me in 2025. And what that means for me is that I need to be very intentional about doing less and being very intentional about where I put my energy. And so I think that that nervous system intention or goal is something really important. My next two like kind of pieces of thought for our intentions for 2026 is number one, anticipate setbacks. And number two, anticipate hard periods where everything isn't going to be perfect and optimized. One of the things that I have learned from 2025 is that life waits for no one, right? I was in the busiest professional season of my life between September and December. I took on an assistant professorship position. I was teaching a new course. I had eight courses booked in the fall. I had multiple online cohortes, cohorts. Like there's just a lot that was going on. And in that three months, I lost, I had just lost my dog. I had had a miscarriage and my mom died. And when you're in this busy professional season and then life hits you like a ton of bricks, one, it's so easy to think, oh my gosh, this isn't fair, and kind of spiral that way. And the second thing is that you realize how resilient you are. And so my some of my intentions have been around like spiritual reading and reading around mindfulness and uh meditation. And I have really started learning a lot from Eastern religion. And one of the things around Buddhism is knowing that suffering is inevitable. And that might sound really negative, but it's actually for me, it has been very liberating. When I was going into life assuming that there weren't gonna be setbacks and that I got rocked every time a setback happened to me, then I would be struggling to find this equilibrium and I would be perseverating on that setback. Working what I want to work on in 2026 is that there are gonna be hard periods, but I can do hard things. And there are gonna be setbacks, but because I'm not thinking about past fail, that if I binge on sugar one day because I'm super stressed out, that all of a sudden I have failed and I failed my resolutions and now 2026 is is doomed to be a failure. Um because I'm trying to work on that mindset piece and hence why I'm I'm pivoting more to intentions over resolutions, I think that can be um a really important like reframing um around, you know, what my mindset is. And it's been really interesting, kind of as I'm grieving, just exploring different aspects of religion and spirituality and those types of things and what those look like for my life versus, you know, you know, celebrating what that looks like for other people. And then the last thing that I'm gonna challenge you all to do before I close off this podcast is to try and set your word or your phrase for the year ahead. What do you want that word to be? And return to it often. And so maybe that setting an alarm every three months and at the end of every quarter, reflecting on have you stayed centered on whatever that word could be? 2025. I think my word ended up being survival or you know, grit. I don't think I would have felt that way at the very beginning of 2025. I didn't anticipate how bad it was gonna be. My word for 2026 is calm. And that doesn't mean to slack off. That doesn't mean to be lazy. That means to very intentionally set myself up so that I, as much as can be avoided, do not go into this overextension, over-leveraging, and overwhelm that has really been a cornerstone of 2025 and honestly the decade before that. I always joke that present Christina hates past Christina because past Christina thinks that all this is gonna work out and we have all this time to do these things, and then current Christina in real and reality knows that I've overextended, and then current Christina doesn't learn, and then future Christina ends up struggling with it. And so um I am going to center around that word, around calm. I want to quietly and consistently reach towards my professional, personal, family, emotional, mental, spiritual goals. And that subtle consistency, I think is gonna get me a lot further for my next 10 years of my career and my life. All right. I hope you all found this helpful to kind of do a big summary of the eight kind of points for intention for 2026 that I hope that we can reflect on. Um, one is thinking about reframing some of our body composition goals to lead with more performance-related goals, knowing that body composition is often the consequence of performance-related goals. That's number one. When it comes to health, especially diet, thinking about adding things to your diet versus taking them away, recognizing that when you add in things like fiber, protein, uh vegetables, it actually makes you more full and you end up doing the less part as a consequence. Habit stack to make things more manageable. These challenges that start in January, they're wonderful if you can maintain them. Using little incremental changes, you don't have to go like gunning out the gate January 1. For example, me taking five minutes less and waking up five minutes earlier every week or two to get me to that early wake up time was way more manageable. And now I do not feel as shocked in my system, but I have this new positive goal that we'll see at the end of 2026 if I'm still doing. When we are thinking about our intentions, oftentimes we're focusing on physical health. Can we also focus on mental health? And then next that it make that intention then to have an intention around putting our nervous system into a good place because our world is stressed. And I I have said this before. I don't even think we really truly recognize how much our high stress world is impacting our health negatively, right? I just I truly believe that in 10 to 15 years we're gonna realize that we have really rocked our health with some of these stress things. The next two um thoughts for our intentions is to anticipate setbacks. And as a consequence of that, knowing that we're gonna have setbacks, try not to make your goals or intentions yes, no, pass fails. Also anticipate that there are gonna be hard periods in your year where having the habit is going to help you stay with the habit during that hard period. Don't assume that your year is gonna be easy breezy because that's just not true. It's not how life is. Life, there's suffering in life. Like that just happens. And so if you anticipate that you don't want to go full fledged ahead into a hard moment, but know that you're going to have hard moments, that they are inevitable. Um, and having that reframe can help with staying consistent. And then set your intention, word or phrase for the year and return to it often. That is me in my feels and in my reflections for 2026. I hope that some of these thought processes were helpful for you. Um, if you have your own word or your own phrase or some of your goals, I would love to hear those. Um, I really love connecting with people on the soft, the vulnerable, the reflective moments. And so make sure you reach out to us. Um, we would love to hear from you. We will see you all next week about uh all things pregnancy postpartum. And I look forward to the 2026 season.