The Reality…
My daughter just celebrated her birthday this past week! Happy Birthday, Lauren Victoria Hanley!!
Lauren now lives in Boston and there are many miles between us, so our means of birthday celebration has changed. However, today I think back fondly on our family’s celebration of life events over the years when we were all together. When celebrating life events in our family, all roads led to the Melting Pot. In case you don’t know the restaurant, it’s definitely not a place to hang out on the regular if you’re trying to lose weight. The Melting Pot is a fondue restaurant where you can indulge in a four-course meal featuring cheese fondue, salad, main course, and finally (as if you could possibly need any more food), a yummy pot of chocolate fondue for dessert.
Celebrating life! How can we say no to that? Why would we want to? Celebrating life events is part of the sweetness and joy of life…..…the birthdays, the anniversaries, the promotions, the graduations. The list of things to celebrate goes on and on. And while every family celebrates life events differently, there definitely seems to be a food-based theme to most celebrations.
The Challenge…
This “celebrating life” thing can definitely get in the way of weight loss. I have this awesome client, and whenever we talk through what has taken her off course for the week, it’s usually not stress eating or a failure to incorporate exercise into her routine like most of my other clients. It usually seems to be her busy schedule of life celebrations. Her weeks are packed full of kid birthday parties, grand openings, or family celebrations of one kind or another. There is a lot of happiness taking place in her life, and that’s a great thing! And like most of us would, she considers each of these events something that she could not possibly miss. Of course, since she doesn’t miss any of them, and enjoys them to the fullest, when she steps on the scale, she doesn’t usually get news she is happy to hear.
The Solution…
This is a tough one from a coaching perspective. Since coaching is all about helping clients achieve goals and design a happy and fulfilling life for themselves, how could you coach them to stop celebrating life??
The solution lies in balance, especially during the process of losing weight and becoming healthy and fit. There must be an undoing of what was done to get you overweight, or worse, obese. If your goal is weight loss, you must be 100% committed, and you must make some tough decisions about how to spend your time, including either saying no to certain events because you have made a decision to limit your eating and drinking during weight loss, or alternatively, a change in the way you experience or partake in the celebrations.
If you find it important to never miss a life celebration with friends or family, then you must make a choice about how you will show up and what you will do while celebrating. With advance planning, you can attend but not indulge in the food offerings.
Weight loss involves sacrifice and discomfort for the period of undoing what has been done to your body, but the healthy body you have at the end of the process makes the sacrifice and discomfort well worth it.
So make a choice about how you will conduct yourself during your period of losing weight. How many celebrations will you attend during the course of a week? Will you enjoy the food and drink offered, or will you just show up and be there to be part of the celebration without indulging in food and drink? And then pay attention to the result you are getting. If you find that too much celebrating is interfering with your weight loss plan, then decide to show up different for those life celebrations or take a brief reprieve from those celebrations during your period of weight loss.
The Invitation….
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What do you have to lose but some weight??
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