October 7th, 2008
My good friend Sarah e-mailed me and mentioned that she was about to re-start Weight Watchers (WW). I was surprised to hear that because just a few weeks ago, she told me how well the program was working and that she was losing weight. When I asked her why she had stopped WW, Sarah informed me that overindulging in her daughter’s birthday cake over a few days had led to a three-weeek backslide and a six-pound weight gain.
This phenomenon, “over eating something leads to blacksliding,” is very common and a real problem for many women. There are important psychological reasons this happens and my hope is that by understanding the causes, you’ll be in a better situation to prevent it.
In this blog entry, I am going to focus on explaining the psychology of how demonizing food often backfires, leading us to backslide into an eating frenzy. Then, in a future blog, I’ll go into some specific solutions to help you change your mindset and behavior.
You’ve probably heard that categorizing some food as “bad” is harmful to weight control. In basic terms, when you tell yourself you can’t eat a certain food for some reason, because it is high calorie or “bad for me”, you create a tension that often leads to a type of obsession with certain foods and an on-going war within yourself.
There are two psychological theories that help explain why this is so. Reactance Theory is almost self-explanatory. When someone TELLS you what you can or can’t do, you react against that – you rebel. This psychological effect comes into play whether the person telling you what to do is someone else or yourself. “Michelle, you CAN’T have this piece of cake because it is BAD and will make you gain weight.” My reaction to this would be: “Don’t tell me what to do, I want the cake, and I’m going to eat it.” Often, we eat much more of the cake than we even wanted as we prove that no one can tell us what to do. Demonizing food sets this dynamic in motion.
The second theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Within this very complex theory is a gem that applies to this situation. It’s about how we “regulate” ourselves. If we do things because we want to do them, SDT refers to this as “intrinsic regulation”. Research has shown that doing things out of intrinsic regulation leads to better commitment and follow through, and even happier lives. (Why? Because our actions are inline with who we are and what we want.)
But when we do something because we are “supposed to” we have a type of regulation whose name is as unappealing as the effect: Introjected Regulation. Introjected Regulation is caused by having partially internalized a belief that we learned from outside of ourselves (from our culture, family, physician, etc.), but we haven’t fully made it our own. That’s actually how it becomes a “should”. We know we “should” do it, but deep down we don’t own this belief and it isn’t experienced as compelling.
I believe Introjected Regulation is women’s greatest enemy when it comes to eating well, exercising, and losing or maintaining weight. With Introjected Regulation, we do things out of guilt and/or the sense that “I should” do it. For example, “I should walk away from the cake table”, “I shouldn’t eat the cake because it is bad for me”, etc. However, because Introjected Regulation is in force we don’t have a deep conviction to say no to something we actually want, making it hard to be very committed. The result is that we feel very ambivalent about the “should behavior”, and often do not sustain it for long.
So why does this lead us to backslide? Imagine a boomerang. What do boomerangs do? You throw them and they come right back. In this case, the boomerang is “I shouldn’t eat this bad food” and that introjected energy and intention ricochets right back and smacks us. When we behave out of this “should” stance it often backfires and leads us to do just the opposite and more (ie., the backslide). So you see, operating with these types of “shoulds” can be self-defeating.
Because awareness is the first step and the key to preventing this introjected phenomenon, I’m going to ask you to take this month and try to be really mindful of whether and when you find yourself judging a food as “bad” and the “should messages” that accompany it.
In a future blog post, I’ll go into more depth about how you can learn to circumvent this phenomenon to avoid boomeranging into an eating frenzied backslide. In addition, stay tuned for an upcoming guest blog post from an investigator doing innovative research on why menopause often leads to weight gain.
If you have any personal experience with this issue please share it. I’ll respond to everyone who comments. I welcome any comment, including those that don’t agree with my ideas above.
Warmly,
Michelle
Posted in Eating, Women's Motivation | 5 Comments »
July 24th, 2008
New Prescription Paradigm for Exercising
My newest study was published last week in Women’s Health Issues. We found that when mid-life women set exercise goals to lose weight or improve health, they spent significantly less time exercising than those with goals to improve well-being and to reduce stress.
The longitudinal study, released last week in Women’s Health Issues, sampled healthy women who were between 40 and 60 years old and worked full-time. We collected data on women living in the Midwest at three intervals, including one-month and one-year periods. The subjects answered questions about how much they exercised, what their exercise goals were, and how committed they were to achieving these goals.
Although regular physical activity helps prevent cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis, among many other illnesses, most mid-life women do not exercise enough. Understanding which types of exercise goals motivate women to exercise, and which ones don’t, can offer clues to developing better strategies to help women exercise more and prevent these devastating conditions.
We wanted our research to be practical for women and their physicians to easily understand and use. Our findings suggest that the typical way that most women approach exercising may be undermining their participation in it.
It is important to note that these findings challenge how society thinks about exercise. It’s counterintuitive. Instead of prescribing exercise to prevent disease, healthcare providers who emphasize physical activity as a means to enhance women’s quality of life might better facilitate long-term participation among healthy women, making disease prevention more likely.
Our research indicates that women are more committed and are more likely to plan exercise into their daily lives if they know that exercising will make them feel better immediately. Unfortunately, the standard approach to exercise taken in our culture has mainly taught Americans to consider exercise as a type of medicine to prevent disease and lose weight. It turns exercise into something we should do rather than something we want to do. This undermines and harms women’s motivation and participation.
The study also revealed another trend: women who exercised to lose weight reported exercising less than those who worked out to maintain their weight, regardless of how much they weighed.
Because research shows that exercise is effective for maintaining weight but less so for losing weight, we think that women who exercise to lose weight may not see results. Thus, they get discouraged and may quit working out.
So how can this research be used to help a woman exercise more? Healthy midlife women will embrace exercising if it nurtures them, not depletes them. Both my coaching with women and the research I’ve conducted show that women are more likely to be hooked on exercise and make it a priority if their reason for doing it is to enhance their day rather than prevent an illness that they may never get. Ironically, taking a life-enhancement approach to exercise results in midlife women improving their health and controlling their weight.
Bottom Line: With life enhancement as your goal, you are more likely to choose physical activities that you enjoy doing, making it much more likely that you will stay motivated and remain physically active.
Implications for successful weight loss: Physical activity should be a behavior you do to enhance your well-being rather than burn calories. Regular physical activity will contribute to your long-term successful weight control, but to do so you need to sustain it over time. Ironically, to achieve your weight loss goals, your reason for being physically active might need to be changed to improve your daily quality of life instead of burn calories.
If you have any questions about this study, or would like a PDF of this published study, just email me at michelle@essentialsteps.net or fitness@umich.edu and I’ll send it to you.
Warmly,
Michelle
Posted in Strategies, Women's Motivation | 2 Comments »
June 22nd, 2008
I seem to continue coming back to the topic of the problems with exercising intensely without meaning to.
Yes, in general, it is thought that the more intensely you exercise, the better health benefits you’ll get. (Although this association is less clear for women.) However, if women (and men for that matter) want to sustain exercise across their life span it is important that high intensity exercise is enjoyable or at least tolerable.
Sure some women do enjoy exercising intensely (Gina Kolata, fitness writer for the New York Times, is a great example of this.) But, in my experience, I’ve found most midlife women do NOT enjoy exercising intensely (including myself to a great extent). I’ve also discovered that a small minority of women exercise intensely and have done it for years even though they really dislike it. What motivates them to keep it up? Many are really concerned about their disease risk factors because of family history. That’s a good motivator for some. But I’ve found not necessarily for most.
Most women are too busy, have too many commitments, and are frankly too tired to make time for intense exercise. If this is what most women consider as being the only, or the most “valid”, type of exercise then they are pretty much doomed to not do it. Why? They dread the idea of doing it and consider it a “chore to accomplish”.
If exercising intensely is something you dread and don’t have energy to do, what’s the point of striving for THAT type of exercise? Doing so pretty much shoots women in the foot motivationally. There is some interesting research that explains why.
A fascinating body of “emotion-exercise intensity” research by Ekkekakis, et al., shows that high intensity exercise tends to decrease pleasure/positive affect among midlife women and others. If intense exercise puts you in a worse mood then you’ll be much less likely to keep it up beyond your initial burst of motivation.
Today I read some more research by another group of investigators (Hutchinson, Tenebaum, 2007) showing that when people exercise at higher intensities, they become very focused on their physiological experiences (examples: high heart rate, exertion, breathing hard, etc.). Clearly, if you didn’t like the experience of intense exercise, and doing it makes you focus on it, a negative experience is likely to result!
After reading this, if you don’t like intense exercise, I hope you find this information helpful and relieving. If you don’t know already, exercise does NOT have to be intense to offer you great physical and mental health benefits, especially if you don’t do much physical activity.
I can’t say this enough. Don’t make high intensity exercise your goal unless you like it or have serious health concerns to avoid. Instead, let yourself do lower level exercise, hopefully, that is convenient and enjoyable. Walking is one of the best ways to exercise. You can do it anywhere, and except for good walking shoes, it won’t cost you anything.
Walking on most days is what I do for the majority of my exercise. In the last year, to add some variety, I added a high intensity workout in the gym (one day a week). The way I get through it is by reading my Oprah and More magazines, and listening to music when I get tired of reading. (Note: the music is high energy “dance music”.) These things distract me from the physiological experiences that I don’t like too much. In addition, this is the only time that I have to read my magazines, so I am more motivated to do this workout. I also vary the amount of time I do, depending upon my energy level and how much time I have. (If I only have 15 minutes - so be it.) I share this with you as an example of how one can approach more vigorous exercise if one doesn’t like it.
What about your experiences with intense exercise?
Posted in Exercise Intensity | 2 Comments »
June 4th, 2008
One of my wonderful clients made a great analogy between how differently we approach exercising than we do eating a meal. She said that sometimes we only have time to grab something quick, when we are on the go, as a meal. She pointed out that this strategy is acceptable to us for eating but not for exercising. Her point is very insightful and I want to expand upon it below.
Most busy women would never consider the concept that they have to cook an elaborate dish for EVERY meal. Why? Because we don’t have time to have our meals always be elaborate and great. We know that depending upon any given day and time, our eating strategies have to change. In general, we probably do have specific strategies we use for our and our family’s meals. However, we know that our meal plans can “go out of the window” at any point, and we’ll just have to improvise and often eat to a “lower standard” than we want and/or had planned to.
In contrast, many of us don’t give ourselves the same leeway for exercising as we do eating! We make exercise plans and goals that we feel we need to rigidly follow. We don’t give ourselves many options or give ourselves permission to be flexible with our exercise plans. So, when “life happens”, as it always does, most of us do not improvise with our physical activity/exercise plans, like we do with eating. The result of this rigid approach (e.g., one that does not permit improvisation or flexibility) is that we wind up not doing ANY physical activity. (We’d starve if we did this with eating.)
However, most people would benefit by developing a mindset about exercising that parallels their mindset about eating. We should have general strategies and goals for being physically active, but similar to eating, have flexibility, back-up options, and/or strategies. Similar to grabbing a liquid meal or hunk of cheese when we don’t have time for our planned sit down meal, when time is tight, and we can’t do our planned exercise session, let’s improvise and figure out the “next best” thing. It could be parking further away for your meeting, getting off the train 1-2 stops earlier, or asking a friend to walk after dinner. Whether it is later that day, the next day, or a “lower standard” of physical activity (is there really such a thing?!), give yourself the same permission to improvise with physical activity as you do with food. Follow this M. Segar recipe and you’ll have consistent on-going physical activity in your life!
Footnote: It is interesting that eating is considered by many to be “essential” to living our best lives, and exercise isn’t. Yet, having a more flexible approach seems to accompany eating more than with exercising. Why are people more flexible with the behavior that is, for the most part, considered more essential to living?
Posted in Strategies, Women's Health | 2 Comments »
May 8th, 2008
I am writing to you about self-care at an auspicious moment, close to Mother’s Day and just weeks after becoming a mom myself.
Because of this, I feel compelled to write about one of the most common challenges of motherhood: Pushing your own self-care to the back burner. Motherhood itself brings a fierce love and desire to care for our children, but it’s also accompanied by a strong societal message that a mom’s needs should only be met after we take care of everyone, and everything, else. Rarely does this approach leave any time for our own self-care!
It is no wonder that a recent study reported that women sacrifice sleep to accomplish all of their “to do’s” and “to care for’s”, to the detriment of their long-term physical and mental health.
Sometimes the hiatus from one’s self-care is necessary and temporary. However, I’ve often found that women’s care-giving of others often becomes an entrenched mindset and habit that can go on indefinitely for 20, 30, even 40 years. Given our role models, and strong societal pressures, it is easy to understand why women often put everyone, and everything, else above their own self-care.
During the past 14 years working with midlife women, I have discovered that they choose to change the status quo and learn how to prioritize their self-care because they decide that they want to get more out of life. They determine that their on-going self-care, quality of life, and health are worthy investments.
If you want to be such a woman, let me share the secret to on-going self-care. I call it Permission² (squared). Permission ² parallels the concept of Yin and Yang, the ancient Chinese idea of opposing, yet simultaneously complementary, elements that keep life in balance.
Women who practice on-going self-care give themselves two types of PERMISSIONS (Permission²). The first PERMISSION relates to feeling entitled to take care of yourself so you can feel energetic, healthy, and positive. It essentially says “yes” to one’s own self-care. The first PERMISSION allows women to truly devote time to the things that will enable them to age with energy, meaning, enthusiasm, and health. This PERMISSION empowers women to say “no” to others’ requests that will interfere with the time they had planned for their self-care.
The second PERMISSION refers to the opposite. Because “life happens”, other priorities emerge unexpectedly. This second PERMISSION allows a woman to be flexible with her self-care goals. In contrast to the first PERMISSION, this one says “not now” to self-care. By confidently saying “not now” to self-care, a woman can tend to the immediate needs of life when necessary, and then easily return to her self-care plan.
Life happens – always. So, Permission² allows a woman to balance her self-care plans and goals with life’s unexpected demands. It is essentially the foundation for sustaining any self-care and health behavior over time (dietary change, exercise motivation, etc…), and keeps a woman and her life in balance. As I embark upon motherhood, I am confident that Permission ² will enable me to continue caring for myself as I take care of others. I hope you will give yourself the gift of Permission ² too.
Please share any of your challenges, strategies, and/or successes with permission(s) to say “yes” or “not now” to self-care.
Posted in Women's Self-Care | 1 Comment »
March 19th, 2008
If you lack on-going motivation for exercising and feel like you don’t have time for it, this blog is for you! But in order to understand the steps you need to take to help you, it is important first what is often the true hidden reason women say “I don’t have time to exercise.”
Time is a rare commodity these days. But, do women who are regularly physically active actually have more time than those who aren’t?
Women who are regularly active don’t have more time, but they do create time for exercise. What tends to distinguish the “I don’t have time” women is that they don’t prioritize being physically active. (Caveat: Women living in extreme circumstances such as mom’s with a newborn, women working 2-3 jobs to make ends meat do truly have less leisure time available for an activity such as exercise.)
The real question is why do some women prioritize fitting physical activity into their days and others don’t?
One reason is that the women who prioritize physical activity do so because it constitutes an important aspect of their self-care; it reduces their stress and enhances their sense of well-being. Their daily quality of life is enhanced when they are physically active, and diminished whey they are not - so they are very motivated to fit it in! These women do what I call “want-based” physical activity.
In contrast to that group of women, most of us consider being physically active as a “should”; something that we are “supposed to do” rather than something that feel we need or actually want to do. We don’t consider physical activity as an essential aspect of our self-care. In fact, “should-based” physical activity can feel draining, more like a self-care detractor! Who really has time in their day for another “should”!?
The deeper differentiator between women with “want-based” and “should-based” physical activity isn’t how much time they have, it is how they personally experience being physically active.
The “want-based” women personalize and tailor physical activity to their likes and desires. They do what makes them feel good, what reduces their stress and gives them energy. In general, women who do the “should-based” exercise tend to follow other people’s recommendations, including what the media and/or “experts” say constitutes the RIGHT way to exercise and be fit. But this “should-based” approach doesn’t lend itself to being sustainable nor to being a life-enhancing experience. And there is no RIGHT way to exercise.
The majority of American women fall into the “should-based” category regarding exercise and physical activity – and don’t do it consistently. This is because of the predominant exercise prescription that we have learned from our culture during the past 25 years.
Importantly, I’ve found that “should-based” women can become “want-based” by learning how to tailor physical activity to themselves, their desires/likes, and lives. If you want to transform your relationship with physical activity to be “want-based” you can do the following:
1) Make a conscious decision that you WANT TO start getting the incredible self-care benefits that physical activity brings (improved mood and sleep, etc.);
2) Decide what experiences you want to have from physical activity (Reduced stress? Social time with friends? Etc.)
3) Chose a physical activity that will give you that experience(s). (Reduced stress? Try walking outside in nature; Social experience? Ask a friend or family member to take a walk, or join a gym with you.)
4) Plan it into your day, and give yourself permission to leave whatever you are working on/accomplishing to do your planned physical activity.
5) Evaluate whether the physical activity you chose gave you the experiences you wanted. If it wasn’t a positive experience, try a new type of physical activity, a different teacher, or try a lower intensity, try a different time of day, etc.. (Figuring this out can be a process that may take some experimenting to figure out, but it is worth it.)
6) Decide that enhancing YOU AND YOUR SENSE OF WELL-BEING ARE WORTH spending time on.
7) See a good, short article about developing intrinsic motivation by Jay Kimiecik at http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20000101-000021.html.
If you have any feedback, comments, or questions, please add a comment here or email me at michelle@essentialsteps.net.
Posted in Women's Motivation | 2 Comments »
January 8th, 2008
By focusing our New Year’s resolutions and efforts on the “outcomes” (e.g., losing weight, getting organized) we often rush into the behaviors that we hope will get us there. But, it is the BEHAVIORS THEMSELVES that determine our ultimate success and our ability to persevere over time.
We should think about the behaviors that are essential to achieving our desired goals and choose one to focus on at the beginning of this important endeavor. It is important to understand that changing eating habits and becoming more physically active are VERY different behaviors and should be treated as such. The conventional approach to lose weight suggests focusing on both diet and exercise concurrently. If your goal is to lose as much weight as you can quickly starting to diet and exercise at the same time will get you the best results. But if your goal is to achieve a fairly large weight loss goal and/or you want to SUSTAIN the weight you lose, think about a different approach.
Changing your eating habits and learning how to make exercise a regular and consistent part of your life at the same time is very challenging. Eating and exercise each have their own “tasks” and “rules” associated with them. Both require distinct discipline, and have associations with separate sets of emotions (often negative). Think about how likely it is that we can learn how to integrate these two very distinct behaviors into our lives so we can sustain them both over time? You know if your previous efforts to initiate diet and exercising at the same time have worked for you long-term. If they have, continue to do it. If they haven’t, why not try a different approach?
Posted in Women's Health, Women's Self-Care | No Comments »
December 29th, 2007
To answer this fundamental question I have to tell you about a study I conducted. In 1994 while at the University of Michigan, I researched with Vic Katch and others whether exercise could help breast cancer survivors decrease depression and anxiety symptoms. The data showed that the breast cancer survivors who exercised significantly decreased their depression and anxiety levels, compared to the control group that did not exercise. I thought that was the end of the story…
Three months after the study ended, we asked the study participants to come back to participate in focus groups. The survivors talked about how wonderful exercise had made them feel both mentally and physically. Of course, I was thrilled to hear how much exercise was benefiting these women!
But I was then shocked to discover that almost everyone had stopped exercising, when their commitment to the study had ended. I asked the study participants: “Why did you stop exercising when it had made you feel so good?” They gave me many answers. These women said that they had stopped exercising because of their many daily responsibilities - cooking and cleaning, chauffeuring children, taking care of others, etc.
After listening to the reasons why these women had stopped exercising it became clear that their barriers were not due to being cancer survivors, but from just having internalized women’s cultural roles and responsibilities. The epiphany I had was that although these breast cancer survivors had been comfortable making a commitment to exercise to fulfill our study requirements, they had not felt comfortable committing to exercise just to improve their own health and well-being!!
Moreover, that women who had faced a life-threatening illness had difficulty prioritizing their own health and wellness demonstrated exactly how deeply women have internalized being the caregiver of others but not necessarily themselves.
Do you relate to this? Over the years I have been amazed by how many women do. The BIG question is, if we feel this way do we want to CONTINUE doing so? Why?/Why Not?
What types of things do you do to help you expand your care-giving role to include yourself?
Posted in Women's Self-Care | No Comments »
December 1st, 2007
The question I posed in the title has been the driving force of my professional life since 1994. But before I talk about this question I want to define “women’s essentialsteps”. Generally, essentialsteps are the things women do to take care of themselves. I use this term more specifically to refer to physical activity because physical activity constitutes the essentialsteps for women’s continued health and well-being.
Why? There is a huge body of research showing many many many amazing physical health, mental health, and quality of life benefits from physical activity. Regular physical activity reduces the risk of getting breast and colon cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, among many other things. It helps reduce the re-occurrence of breast cancer. It staves off developing Alzheimer’s disease. It improves cognition, memory, and intelligence. It enhances well-being and mood, even as well as anti-depressants. Physical activity acts as a “wonder drug” on our mind and body. So why don’t we all get regular doses of physical activity then????
This is THE question of the day! Everyone wants to know the answer to this question. I have spent the past 14 years thinking about and researching why women don’t sustain physically active lives. I’m not going to present my resume here, but I’ve spent over 11 years studying this through a few graduate degrees and research at the University of Michigan and working directly with women over years in the community. One of the reasons women don’t sustain physically active lives because they ARE NOT MOTIVATED TO do it. That takes us to the next question. Why aren’t women motivated? I actually believe that I’ve figured this out. This answer represents part one of two posts regarding “why women don’t take their EssentialSteps?”
Women may be motivated to START exercising but they don’t STAY motivated to do it. My interest is in THE SUSTAINABILITY of physical activity. Many of us get motivated to start exercising when we are making New Year’s Resolutions, when “bathing suit” weather is approaching, and/or for an upcoming trip, Bat Mizvah or Wedding. Does this sound familiar? So, we typically start exercising for reasons related to changing our body shape or weight. I’ve discovered over the years and published about the problems associated with women taking this approach to exercising.
- We often have unrealistic goals for what exercise will actually do to our bodies and can’t achieve them. (Believe me, we’ve been sold a lot of hooey from companies marketing their fitness products and services.)
- We are exercising FOR AN EVENT. When that event is over, we have no reason to continue.
- We select physical activities aiming to “burn calories and lose weight” or “tone up”; most of which we don’t enjoy. In addition we may exercise so intensely to achieve our body-change goals that we just can’t sustain it for very long OR we injure ourselves. In addition, for some of us, exercising actually reminds us that we don’t feel comfortable with our bodies. Whichever reason it is, we don’t continue for very long.
- So, the approach that we take to exercising is one we’ve learned to take in our culture, and I call it the “Vicious Exercise Cycle”. We just keep doing it the same way, time and time again. Hence “vicious”. But my friend and colleague Harriet recently mentioned that there are two meanings to the “Vicious Exercise Cycle”. We are stuck in the same cycle over and over again. But the cycle is ALSO vicious; it is cruel and brutal because it keeps us at war with our bodies and consistently leads us to feel like failures. Given this, WHY WOULD WE STAY MOTIVATED TO EXERCISE OVER TIME?????
I’d love to hear your reactions to this, as well as your thoughts and experiences regarding your personal difficulties with staying motivated to exercise.
Posted in Women's Self-Care | No Comments »
