Marathons + Cold Plunges

This blog is a little different than my norm. As a coach, performance consultant and nutritionist, I know that the choices we make are often guided by unconscious beliefs or how we ‘see’ things. Check out the ‘see-do-get’ Franklin Covey Model below.

One important step in healing and living a purpose driven life is to learn to uncover limiting beliefs. When we do things that are guided from a ‘limiting belief’, we may never experience our whole selves and what we were put on earth to do.

This indirectly impacts overall health and wellness.

I’ll explain through some examples.

We can start with a common mistake I see which is based on a belief that many women have.

If you believe weight loss is about calories in versus calories out (see), and you want to lose weight, you’ll perhaps exercise more and eat less.(do) Right? Operate from a calorie deficit? What I see often is that when women don’t get the results they want, they just do more of the activities they were already doing. They run further and longer and they start skipping meals and paring down meal sizes. And guess what happens?

Often….nothing. (result) Or they gain more weight.

Why?

Weight gain is a symptom of a larger imbalance in your body and if you want to address the real cause, it’s going to require a mindset shift. Because in order to shift the results we are getting, we must go back to our belief system about midlife nourishment and health in general. And this is hard because we have many companies with vested interest in making sales. And our entire medical system is set up in a disease model. So if you feel this, take this pill. (quick fix) We’ve been trained to expect fast results and to put our trust 100 % in our GP. It’s so ingrained we don’t even notice it. And a belief is simply that is true for you. There is no right or wrong.

When we change our beliefs, we change our results. We can do this through education, journaling, meditation, and even working with a coach or therapist.

What belief is keeping you stuck?

Here’s another one. If we believe that we will be taken care of, we act accordingly. We may run to our Dr. for every ache and pain, seeking solutions for symptoms. While this might work short term, if we don’t take accountability, and dig deeper to learn where the imbalance really lies, then we will constantly be addressing symptoms - never getting to the root causes. And there is never just one root cause. Health is complex!

Here’s a personal story to demonstrate unconscious beliefs and thinking. [which explains the blog title]

I ran my first and only marathon at the age of 30. I was talked into it by the women I was training with…I had only ever wanted to do a half marathon. After all…at that point in my life the longest I had ran was about 10 km. Anyway. It was a rainy day the day we left on the Casina Niagara Marathon, and I felt crappy when I first started out. It was the year when ‘anthrax’ poisoning was a concern. Remember that? I was convinced I was going to be poisoned at the water stations. lol. Anyway…as I was nearing the finish line (about 3 km to go), I decided I wanted to walk in that last section. I was tired and up until then, I had never run that far. The marathon training takes you up in mileage but you never run the complete distance of 42.2 km. So when I passed my longest distance, I decided flat out that I was done and that walking the final 3 km was the way to go.

Luckily, my friends noticed what I was doing…and they grabbed my hands and made me keep going, one step at a time. Arm in arm, we crossed the finish line together! It makes me emotional just remembering it.

They could have finished with better times had they gone ahead…but they didn’t. The recognized I needed a ‘nudge’.

Anyway.

Fast forward to last fall when I decided to do a cold plunge. For reasons I won’t explain now, I was able to get into the cold lake, but would get out pretty quickly in anxiousness.

Notice the patterns in these 2 stories? I would often find myself giving up just before I was successful. I felt really uncomfortable and I didn’t like that feeling. (our brains love the comfort zone) I unknowingly gave more meaning to the ‘discomfort’ than was really there.

Interesting….right?!

Now what if I let that belief guide every decision in my life? What if I gave up on my nutrition biz when things got really hard and uncomfortable? What if I quit on my kids? My marriage? My health!? You get the idea.

What if I didn’t even run the race? What if I didn’t believe I could?

Now you.

What belief is holding you back from really going big in life? What is keeping you from really believing things can be different?! I bet I know! It’s your daily habits that may not be the best choices, that are keeping you safe and in your comfort zone.

Perhaps you need some ‘running friends’ to give you that nudge that I needed. Or a coach?

It takes a different way of thinking to see real, transformational kinda change.

Book a free strategy call to learn more about how I can help.