148 Staying Consistent Part 2 of 2 - Strategies

Get a customized strategy based on your dominant stress response: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, that will help you stay consistent and on track with your eating. Learn simple exercises and techniques to balance your nervous system. Plus find out the specific qualities and skills your stress response type needs to cultivate to really see a difference in how you’re showing up with your health and weight loss goals. 

In this episode you’ll learn:

• The simple exercises and techniques your stress response needs to get into balance and feel safe and connected
• Which qualities you need to cultivate most, given your stress response: self-compassion, expression, leadership…
• The specific skills you could focus on that will stop you from overeating based on your dominant stress response

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Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker. My work as a certified coach involves helping you reduce an over desire for food, eating more food than you really need, so you can feel in charge around food and good in your body. Okay, welcome to part two of Staying Consistent. Strategies.

Now, if you haven't listened to part one, stop, go back. Listen to part one so that you know your dominant stress response fight, flight freezer, fa, and how that shows up in your eating patterns and your weight loss strategies, your attempts to. Release the weight, release excess body fat. Then come back to this episode to get really a customized strategy that's going to help you the most, get you the biggest bang for your buck in balancing your nervous system so that you can stay consistent with all those healthy habits and you can handle it when your brain wants to turn to food.

You don't go off your plan a little and subsequently go off the rails with food. You don't have a few crackers and think, Ugh, the day is blown. I might as well finish the box. No, you get right back on track. You increase your capacity when your brain offers up. Mm, who cares? I just want it. So I'll be going over some specific strategies for each type, but really they are all good.

So feel free to get out your notebook and make a note for which ones that I mentioned that compel you, that speak to you, that you wanna try because you can't go wrong. And again, you can use these. In tough moments when you just want the food and you wanna overeat or overindulge, you can also think about them as preventative measures.

So when these are part of your day to day, just part of your lifestyle, you're really less likely to feel the need to turn to food. So super quick refresh. Your nervous system is responsible for basically everything in your body. It's your internal internet. It's the filter and the messenger of everything happening in and around you.

You experience your entire life through your nervous system, and it gets out of balance regularly because you live on planet Earth as a human being when you are discouraged because you can't seem to stay consistent with your healthy habits. Know that it's not a lack of willpower or self-discipline.

It's an automatic adaptive nervous system stress response, or as I think of it, a reaction. So let's talk more about specific solutions, remedies, strategies for balancing your nervous system for each of these types so you can override these tendencies because this is a nervous system, meaning body response, we address it somatically through the body.

Or if it's helpful and because it's fun to think about things from different angles, consider that your nervous system is your electrical system. It's the flow of energy. So the goal is to bring the body back to a balanced state. An energetic balance that feels safe and connected rather than relying only on your thinking.

We use the body. We know how to self-regulate using the body. This is usually something we have to learn how to do. So if you. Over anything. You over shop. You overwatch the news, you over watch Netflix or share shows, or you overeat. Then this is a learning opportunity. So think you can think of babies, right?

Babies have no way of self-regulating. They cry immediately and they need somebody to soothe them, to calm their nervous system and tell their body that they are safe and protected. And then as we get older. Hopefully we have people in our lives that will teach us to do some deep breathing that will teach us to get into our bodies and that our feelings are natural and not a problem.

But many of us were not taught this and so we're just learning it later in life or we were taught some of it and we just have a little bit further to go. What you'll notice is that when you do these practices or these balancing strategies that I'm about to talk about, the more you do them, the more you incorporate them into your lifestyle, the less triggered you will be.

And when you do get triggered, you do have an intense craving or you really, really want the food, even though it's not within your eating plan or your protocol. You know how to handle it. You know how to take care of yourself. So it's a process. Be patient. Don't expect this to happen overnight. Be patient with yourself, but know that every attempt, every effort is building upon the last, and you're increasing your resiliency, and you are increasing your ability to balance your nervous system.

So let's talk about balancing strategies for each type. Now, if you have a fight response, here's what's happening. Your system is highly activated and it wants to confront or control. You might find yourself blaming the food plan, your body, your coach, your partner. There's often anger, frustration, or intensity.

So here's how you handle it. Here's some balancing strategies to really ultimately stay consistent. Grounding with movement. This means strong rhythmic movement like walking, dancing, boxing might be a good thing for you or punching a pillow just to release that energy. Breath work so long. Exhale, breathing.

You could inhale for four, hold for six, and then exhale for eight or alternate nostril breathing to calm the sympathetic system. Lastly, try expressive journaling or voice release so you can write or you can voice record what you're angry about. Just go completely off the rails uncensored. Then you can destroy it after.

But let that mean girl, that bratty teenager inside of you rant. Now be sure afterwards that you take a shower or a salt bath to cleanse your energetic field after. So you're like. Clearing all of that out. Okay, so salt is great for that. If you're in a shower, you can just do a salt scrub. I highly encourage you to do that.

You, you'll just notice, you'll notice how amazing you fell after. It's very, very therapeutic. Here's some qualities. If you were a fight response, here's some qualities you wanna focus on. Cultivating more connection. Curiosity and openness. And I'm also gonna share with each type the qualities and skills to develop.

So skills for the fight response are reasoning and rational thinking. So how is it being, you know, unfair that you have to eat this way? How is that relevant? Okay. How is it relevant to your eating decisions that you live in this particular body and somebody else gets to live in a different body and they eat a different way?

You just want to think about that rationally. How is it relevant? Okay. Second is notice that mean girl and answer her with self-compassion. So don't identify with her instead, relate to her in a different way. And number three is celebrate your small wins and success. Let's talk about flight. If you are a flight response, what's preventing you from staying consistent is that your nervous system, your body wants you to escape.

So there is panic, overwhelm, and sometimes perfectionism and over efforting. So here are some balance strategies for you to stay consistent. The first one is orient to your environment. This is especially helpful if you are feeling anxious. Look around the room and name three things that you see, two things you hear, and maybe one thing that you feel.

Breath work. Again, you can do the 4, 6, 8. That's inhale for four counts. Hold for six, and exhale for eight. This also slows any racing thoughts you might have. There's tapping EFT or acupressure points. This is great for anxiety and any kind of avoidance tendencies. You can do a walking meditation or gentle rocking.

Again, that rhythmic movement, as I mentioned earlier, gives your body a sense of safety. Think about what we do with babies, right? That's exactly what we do. And structured safety rituals, or as I've talked about in the past, restorative practices. What are the things that you know fill your cup? Is it having a nice tea?

Having a little tea ceremony for yourself? A nice bath music meditation. What are your specific restorative practices? If you don't know, explore, try something. See if it suits you. Walking in. Nature is also another great one. Specifically, you wanna focus on these qualities, so we want more of these qualities.

Commitment, so not quitting. Curiosity, leaning in courage and leadership. And here are some skills to develop. Slow down while while you eat, plan ahead so that you are not making impulsive decisions with food. You want to develop the skill, staying focused. You wanna work through any all or nothing thinking, and you wanna think of yourself as a leader that you and only you move yourself forward.

Let's talk about freeze response. This is the numbness. This is shutting down What's happening energetically and preventing you from staying consistent is that your nervous system feels trapped or helpless. You feel stuck. Here are some strategies. Get into your body. This is huge for you. You wanna get out of your head and into your body, so that might mean exercise, it might be walking, it might be movement, it might be yoga nidra, which you can find on Spotify or YouTube.

It's totally free. You can find little 10 minute exercises. I literally do them all the time. It's like deep. Restorative rest when or if you don't have time for a nap, try that. Yoga nidra, NIDR. A small safe movement, like just wiggling your fingers and toes. Again, we're just trying to get into the body, so any kind of stretch or gesture, even something that is like lifting the arms, any kind of getting back into your body will really help.

And lastly, co-regulation. Freeze response has a tendency to want to shut yourself away from people. And so you instead, you wanna balance that tendency with connecting with others, with a safe person or even an animal, even your pet, through connection, through touch, through voice, or even texting a friend.

Okay? So the, the strategy there is to reach out, to connect. Qualities for you. Self-compassion, expressiveness, openness and courage and skills to focus on cultivating, identifying your emotions and processing emotions. This is huge. I think this is huge for everyone, but especially if you are free response, asking for help, seeing vulnerability as strength, because why?

Because it requires courage and sharing. So sharing with somebody that you trust. Two more skills, being extraordinarily kind to yourself when you feel down when you're in the valley, and also, again, as I mentioned, moving your body. So you wanna get skilled on moving towards getting into your body. That's very important for you.

Last one, let's talk about fawning. So again, this is people pleasing and putting others ahead of yourself at your own cost. Here's what's happening in your nervous system. It's trying to keep you safe through appeasement, and there can often be a history of conditional love or approval that leads to this.

Here are some balance, a couple of balanced strategies for you. One is to cultivate touch based presence. An example of this is to place both hands over your heart or your belly and breathe slowly reconnecting to yourself. When you put your hand on your belly, see if you can sense your belly. Then see if you can sense your hand and then see if you can sense your hand sensing your belly.

So it's your, the sense of your hand, feeling your belly. And notice the differences there qualities to focus on cultivating courage, stillness, patience. Trust and confidence. And lastly, a few skills for you to focus on. Setting boundaries, saying no and dealing with the discomfort of that, getting out of a perfectionism and or like that all or nothing thinking, and really checking in with yourself.

So place a hand on your heart and ask, what do I need right now? All right. Those were all of the balancing strategies. I hope that was helpful and I'll talk to you again next time. Bye.