Friday, February 27, 2015

Going All In - Week 6 Team Standings

Team Name       %
Full Nelson 11.96%
Lose To Gain 11.64%
Freedom Fighters 11.25%
Tiny Hineys 9.58%
Material Girls 9.38%
2000 Fit-team 9.24%
Waistin A-Weigh 8.72%
Salt N Peppa 8.48%
Re-Chewing Our Vows 8.24%
Thin Mints 8.21%
Why Not 8.04%
Whittling A-Weigh 7.98%
Electric Chickens 7.93%
Back & On the Attack 7.93%
Butt Weight 7.92%
#ShakeItOff 7.59%
Team Sassyfras 7.40%
Maui Wowies 7.35%
Asian Fusion 7.19%
Peacefully Changed 6.99%
Thinning Thunder Thighs 6.97%
Special K 6.92%
Waist Watchers 6.90%
Making It Look Easy 6.85%
Orange is the New Snack 6.85%
Fat Boys 6.84%
Thinspired 6.79%
Family Melt Down 6.70%
Royal Flush 6.70%
Ladies on a Roll 6.64%
Waist Management 6.59%
Thinner Winners 6.57%
We're Not Short, We're Fun Size 6.46%
Booty Busters 6.35%
Stress Less, Weigh Less 6.26%
Ya Gotta Wanna 6.24%
10 Weeks to Tighter Cheeks 6.23%
The Reducers 6.13%
Lighten Up 6.02%
Move It and Lose It 5.84%
Bold Resolve 5.84%
Finally Full 5.83%
Does This Cucumber Make Me Look Fat 5.82%
Flab-U-Less 5.81%
Lost And Found 5.62%
Spicy Seniors 5.55%
Colossal Cousins 5.55%
The Determinators 5.54%
Friends Through Thick and Thin 5.53%
Dwindling Divas 5.52%
W8 2NV 5.48%
All In 5.41%
Deflating the Spare 5.37%
Slim and Sassy 4.98%
Guts B Gone 2 4.92%
Weir Winners 4.83%
Less Than Yesterday 4.79%
Snowmen in the Sunshine 4.64%
Dude Where's My Butt? 4.63%
Re-booting for Better Booties 4.44%
Go Fat, Go! 4.29%
Munchin Lions 4.20%
Fully Immersed 4.10%
Frank & David 4.08%
Couch Queens 3.99%
Just Do It 3.87%
Kool-Aid Drinkers 3.40%
Seniors Driving to Lose 3.37%
Prepear for Orange 3.36%
Focus-Pocus, Its Not Magic 3.26%
The Believers 3.18%
Panther No Panth, We're Coming In 3.17%
Alumni Going All In 3.15%
XR Thighs 3.08%
Persistant Pals 3.08%
All Aboard 3.00%
Team Awesome Sauce 2.97%
Spanxless By Spring 2.86%
Mission Slimpossible 2.81%
Sisters In A Weigh 2.78%
Focused to the Finish 2.75%
Lean Queens 2.33%
Going Down! 2.29%
League of Lettuce Lovers 2.12%
Breaking Bad…Habits 2.01%
Belly Busters 2.01%
Just Sayin 1.89%
Re-Booty 1.84%
Here We Go Again 1.56%
Old Crazy Guys 1.43%
Lucky Losers 1.18%
Determined Duo 0.96%
Fearless Finishers 0.76%
Team Committed 0.64%
Wishful Shrinking 0.55%
Take Back Our Temple 0.23%

The Road to Permanent Change Isn't a Straight One!

Can I get an "amen?" I think there were more than a few people this week that wanted to shout "amen" when I talked about the stages of change...RELAPSE being one of them! Somehow it helps to know that lapse and relapse are "normal" and MOST of us will experience them on our way to permanent change!

We talked about the stages of change thursday, but focused on the action and maintenance stages...the one most of us are on. 

The action stage of change normally lasts 3 to 6 months. That is, taking real action to see change begin to happen.

A 10 week challenge is 2.5 months…just saying. :-)  Although we can feel like it goes on and on…it’s just the beginning of  being in the action and maintenance stage!  Think about it for a minute. What would be happening to you if for 6 months you were taking action?
And what is taking action again???

  • Your thought life is on fire with new, exciting, positive thoughts.
  • You are prepping , and eating healthy, you’ve grown your willpower not only with psychological changes but with physical ones as well. You are active and experiencing the effects of the miracle drug exercise!
  •  You, in 6 months will and would have lost a minimum of 50 pounds!!! 50 pounds changes your life! You feel amazing, you look amazing, you’re starting to accept this new way of life and you’re letting go of your old one.  
  • You’re letting go of what was, and embracing what is…6 months…not 10 weeks!
I say that to encourage you and inspire you to keep on going.  You want CHANGE, permanent change?…then you have to invest; time, money, energy, thought life.

Few people realize how much change costs.

We fail to recognize that it took years to establish your problem behavior, your habits, but we believe that we should reverse these deeply embedded patterns in a few weeks.
In reality, it takes an average of about 6 months of concentrated action before you are 
ready to move into maintenance.

Change never ends with the action stage.
Maintenance is the stage where you work to consolidate the gains you attained during the action and other stages to prevent lapses and relapse.
Maintenance is a critical stage of change and can take from as little as 6 months to as long as a lifetime. Without a strong commitment to maintenance, there will surely be relapse, usually back to the pre-contemplation or contemplation stage.

It takes work and time to perfect the tools that it takes to change. Knowing or understanding what it takes, doesn’t mean you are actively practicing these things.
Maintenance is the stage of perfecting and sharpening the tools.

This I know to be true…
The path to permanent change is rarely a straight one…but knowing that, helps us not feel lost when we’re on that path! As we journey through the active stage and the maintenance stage of change,  we learn that there’s also a big difference between lapse and relapse.

Lapse; a momentary fault or failure in behavior, a break in the continuation of something.

We surely will have lapse during the action and maintenance stages of change, but guilt and self blame won’t help us get back on the path…it’s just sends us to full on relapse.
The beautiful thing about relapse…I said beautiful, is that relapsers most often take one step backwards in order to take two steps forward!

Relapse...a scary word in all of recovery.
Relapse is a process, it's not an event. In order to understand relapse prevention you have to understand the stages of relapse. Relapse starts weeks or even months before the 

event of physical relapse.

There are three stages of relapse.

1. Emotional relapse
2. Mental relapse
3. Physical relapse


Emotional Relapse:
In emotional relapse, you're not thinking about overeating. But your emotions and behaviors are setting you up for a possible relapse in the future.

The signs of emotional relapse are:
* Anxiety
* Intolerance
* Anger
* Defensiveness
* Mood swings
* Isolation
* Not asking for help
* Poor sleep habits 


If you don't change your behavior at this stage and you live too long in the stage of emotional relapse you'll become exhausted, and when you're exhausted you will want to escape, which will move you into mental relapse.

Mental Relapse: 

In mental relapse there's a war going on in your mind. Part of you wants to overeat and go back to old habits, but part of you doesn't. In the early phase of mental relapse you're just idly thinking about it. But in the later phase you're definitely thinking about using...your drug of choice.

The signs of mental relapse are:
* Thinking about people, places, and things you "used" with

* Glamorizing your past life style
* Fantasizing about using
* Thinking about relapsing
* Planning your relapse around other people's schedules

It gets harder to make the right choices as the pull of addiction gets stronger. We talked about the tools to use at this time to stop the mental relapse.

Physical Relapse:

Once you start thinking about relapse, if you don't use some of the techniques to grow out of this stage, it doesn't take long to go from there to physical relapse.  It's hard to stop the process of relapse at that point. That's not where you should focus your efforts in recovery. That's achieving abstinence through brute force. But it is not recovery. If you recognize the early warning signs of relapse, you will be able to begin to contemplate, prep, and get back into the action stage of change.

The most important thing you can do to prevent relapse at this stage is take better care of yourself. Think about why you overeat. You use food or alcohol to escape, relax, or reward yourself. Therefore you relapse when you don't take care of yourself and create situations that are mentally and emotionally draining that make you want to escape.


How many times does a person relapse before changing permanently????  One, to many times!

Where ever you are right now. Whether you are in an action stage that is productive and clear, or feeling like you are slipping into the relapse stage. Or full on relapse…the answer to you changing for good, getting to goal weight and keeping it off, is to stay connected..stay committed, stay in one of the stages of change here at THW!

I would characterize myself as very optimistic, so forgive me if you need to, when I say that unless you stay  connected, stay committed to us, or to another program or a group of people for accountability, you will find yourself slipping, relapsing  and discouraged. We need accountability in our lives in the areas that we struggle…we were not meant to go it alone!

Our winners for the week:
Noon: Team "Materials Girls" Sandi and YoYo with a 1.77% of weight loss!
6PM: Team "Lose to Gain" Stewart and Kelly with a 7.61% of weight loss! What a week!!!

Our heart winner of the week with the greatest individual % was Erica N. with a 2.95% of loss! Congratulations Erica on your 2nd heart!! You've got a matching set now! :-)

Your Challenge for the Week:


  • In preparation of next week's lesson, Listen to week #3 "What's in Your Back Pack ~ Controlling What You Can" and do the homework provided.  Glenda and I will be team teaching on this subject next week and you'll want to come prepared.


It was a very important day at The Healthy Weigh. We learned that lapse happens…relapse happens to all of us! What can we learn from it? How can we grow from it? What will it take for you to pick back up and say here we go! I’m changing…I’m doing this thing for 
life!!! One day at a time!

Always encouraging you,
Letha

Friday, February 20, 2015

Respect Yourself!

I can hear Aretha Franklin singing in my ear right now!!! "R E S P E C T find out what it means to me..." (I always wanted to sing like her! )

Anyway...this week was ALL about RESPECT...Respecting yourself, that is! This was the kind of week that made me wish for one on one times with all of you. Time to sit face to face on a big couch (with our feet touching) and talk. Talk about this very thing that's got my thinking ROCKED...self respect!

We've all heard of "self respect" and we've talked about "self respect" but this approach was something I've never thought about before!  Donald Miller, author and speaker shared this concept at the very beginning of the year by email...a little "beginning of the year motivation." I read it and haven't stopped thinking about it since.


And it is this…You are in a relationship with yourself. Make it a healthy one.


It seems that we can all relate to being in a relationship with other people.  In fact, sadly most of the time we are driven by other’s approval of us. We feel good when people like us, we don’t feel so good when we hear that they don’t. We have to be honest with ourselves to admit this…but for me anyway, it’s true. I want to be loved and respected and valued by others…and when I am, I feel better about me.

As I grow older and understand more about beliefs and why we feel about ourselves like we do, I believe that we shape the opinion of ourselves largely in part by others opinions of us. From our upbringing and what we were told about ourselves to our adult hood…the opinions of others somewhat shape us.   It’s as though we wear certain clothes and act a certain way and try to succeed at things so other people will tell us we are good or valuable. And when they do, we feel a little better about ourselves and when they don’t, we start thinking we are losers.

Donald Miller, said that one day He spent a few hours with a friend  that he has a great deal of respect for. He’s the kind of guy Don would really like to be. He’s kind, productive, generous, humble, super disciplined, and respectable. Later that night Donald, after spending time with his friend, caught himself  disrespecting himself a little bit. Just being overly critical. And then it hit him. 

I’m in a relationship with myself.

I know that sounds a little odd, but if you think about it, we really do operate like two people. We are a person who lives and breathes and does things; then we are another person who judges ourselves. It’s as though we have a critic in our brain. 

Donald went on to say... "Then I had another major epiphany."
“The reason I respect my friend so much is because he does respectful things. I mean he’s disciplined and considerate and generous and kind and, well, he doesn’t look like a slob.” 
 “I began to wonder, if I do more respectful things, perform more generous actions and, show more discipline, will I actually have a little more self respect? In other words, because I’m in a relationship with myself, maybe I should act in such a way that my “self” could respect my “self” a little more."

And it worked. He would find himself wanting to eat a half gallon of ice cream while watching TV and I asked himself “if you skipped this, would you have a little more respect for yourself?” and the truth is he would. So he skipped it. And he had much more self respect. 

He liked himself more.

"This sort of thing translated into a whole host of other areas of my life."  He said, "I started holding my tongue a little more and found I respected myself more when I was more thoughtful in conversation. I found myself less willing to people please because, well, people who people please aren’t as respectable, right?" 

Here’s another thing he realized: Human beings aren’t really motivated by goals as much as they’re motivated by character transformation. 

Every story that we love is about a character that doubts himself or herself in the beginning and believes in himself or herself at the end. The most powerful stories are about people who learn something about themselves that changes their identity for the better.
  
I want you to know the day after I read this I started asking myself many times a day…Would I respect a person who is doing this? It has been incredibly motivating!

We all want to be loved.

We all want to feel approval. So why not get into a healthy relationship with yourself where you do respectable things to earn your own respect?

I’ve noticed the people I admire the most are the people who respect themselves, who have standards that seem to have little to do with the opinions of others and much to do with their opinion of themselves.
Some questions for you… 

If you spent time with a friend who packed their own food and ate a great lunch everyday would you respect them?

If you spent time with a friend who got up early…earlier than most to go to the gym every day would you respect them?

If you had a friend who spoke positive words about themselves and  instead of playing the victim, choose to look at the redemptive perspective of life difficulties would you respect them?

How about a friend who year after year, walked and ate well and maintained their weight…would you respect them?

How about a friend who prioritized and you could see that they cared for themselves, their families and their work…respect?

So how about the friend who quits?
The one who you see a year later who has put weight back on?
How about the negative friend, who’s always griping about life?
How much respect do you have for the person you know who blames everyone else and justifies their wimpy behavior ? How much respect do you give them?
Do you respect the person who is feeling stress and uses drugs of choice to numb or avoid?
What about the friend who stands at the pantry door and eats crackers out of the box? (I put this one in for me)

What kind of character transformation could you possibly have if you started to act in a way that earned your respect!?

How many times a day could you ask that question…would I respect a person who was doing what I’m doing right now?

These things I learned from Donald Millers New Years Email:

  • People are deeply motivated by the potential transformation of how they see themselves.

  • The opinions of others can be nice, but they're hardly objective.

  • You are in a relationship with yourself and your opinion of yourself can help transform you.

  • You’ll respect yourself a lot more if you do respectful things.


If you really want to change who you are on the deepest level, start listening to that voice inside you and start earning its respect by doing respectful things. You’d be surprised at how fair and balanced you actually are when you change your decisions so that your “self” can start to respect your “self.

Our winners for the week:
Noon: Team "Tiny Hineys" Janie and Marci with a 1.96% of weight loss
6PM: Team "Thinning Thunder Thighs" Angela and Tina with a 1.97% of weight loss!
Congratulation to you all!

And Congratulation to SO many of you who have already lost 20 or more pounds, made changes on the inside and are doing the work to change for life! We are 5 weeks in and have such great weeks ahead!!!  Let's make the next 5 just as powerful!!!

Your Challenge for the week:
Lose 2.5 pounds
Drink all your water EVERY day.
Take 3 walks in the sunshine

Do all of these and you'll be entered into a drawing for $50! ( two drawings at each gathering!!)

Have a great week respecting yourself!!!

Always encouraging you,
Letha




Thursday, February 19, 2015

Going All In - Week 5 Team Standings

Team Name       %
Full Nelson 10.30%
Freedom Fighters 10.29%
Tiny Hineys 8.43%
2000 Fit-team 8.23%
Back & On the Attack 7.93%
Butt Weight 7.92%
Material Girls 7.74%
Thin Mints 7.49%
Fat Boys 7.15%
Peacefully Changed 7.13%
Why Not 6.90%
Waistin A-Weigh 6.88%
Orange is the New Snack 6.64%
Salt N Peppa 6.60%
Whittling A-Weigh 6.56%
Re-Chewing Our Vows 6.49%
#ShakeItOff 6.48%
Royal Flush 6.31%
Maui Wowies 6.28%
Thinning Thunder Thighs 6.20%
Waist Watchers 6.17%
Asian Fusion 6.09%
Ya Gotta Wanna 6.08%
Waist Management 6.06%
Ladies on a Roll 6.05%
Special K 5.84%
The Reducers 5.81%
Thinspired 5.68%
The Determinators 5.54%
10 Weeks to Tighter Cheeks 5.53%
Team Sassyfras 5.53%
Stress Less, Weigh Less 5.52%
Electric Chickens 5.45%
Booty Busters 5.38%
Lost And Found 5.37%
Making It Look Easy 5.35%
Dwindling Divas 5.33%
Slim and Sassy 5.29%
Finally Full 5.28%
Thinner Winners 5.25%
Family Melt Down 5.24%
W8 2NV 5.19%
Spicy Seniors 5.14%
We're Not Short, We're Fun Size 5.14%
Bold Resolve 5.13%
Does This Cucumber Make Me Look Fat 5.09%
Guts B Gone 2 4.92%
All In 4.91%
Friends Through Thick and Thin 4.69%
Snowmen in the Sunshine 4.64%
Colossal Cousins 4.43%
Lose To Gain 4.37%
Weir Winners 4.26%
Move It and Lose It 4.23%
Re-booting for Better Booties 4.18%
Lighten Up 4.14%
Dude Where's My Butt? 4.11%
Flab-U-Less 4.09%
Frank & David 4.08%
All Aboard 3.87%
Couch Queens 3.77%
Fully Immersed 3.77%
Focused to the Finish 3.72%
Go Fat, Go! 3.68%
Prepear for Orange 3.66%
Kool-Aid Drinkers 3.45%
Just Do It 3.40%
Focus-Pocus, Its Not Magic 3.26%
Panther No Panth, We're Coming In 3.17%
Alumni Going All In 3.15%
Seniors Driving to Lose 3.08%
XR Thighs 3.08%
Deflating the Spare 3.00%
Less Than Yesterday 3.00%
Persistant Pals 2.98%
Belly Busters 2.83%
Sisters In A Weigh 2.78%
The Believers 2.67%
Lucky Losers 2.56%
Munchin Lions 2.50%
Spanxless By Spring 2.43%
Team Awesome Sauce 2.39%
Going Down! 2.29%
Mission Slimpossible 2.15%
Here We Go Again 2.14%
Breaking Bad…Habits 2.01%
Re-Booty 1.84%
Team Committed 1.72%
Lean Queens 1.59%
Old Crazy Guys 1.43%
Just Sayin 1.22%
Fearless Finishers 1.14%
League of Lettuce Lovers 1.09%
Determined Duo 0.96%
Take Back Our Temple 0.80%
Wishful Shrinking 0.55%