“I’m eating great and exercising, but…”

I have a friend who is on an interesting journey: she has slowly become vegan.  She doesn’t impose this on friends or even her immediate family.  She does the cooking in her house and will simply leave animal products out of her own food.  She doesn’t look much different and this became a topic of discussion that SHE initiated recently…

I didn’t realize that she had also increased her activity level.  To be honest, she’s more active than most people.  She chases two VERY active boys and they do very active things–including hiking.  But apparently she had stepped up her game.  As she sat watching the rest of us eat contraband, she noted a touch of frustration at her lack of weight loss given all of the rather large changes she had made to her nutrition and physical activity.

*ding ding ding*  My alarms went off.  Because it’s not just about diet and exercise.

My own training and education puts at least 3 other domains on the radar here and two of them were going to be more personal than a casual conversation with the kids.  But one was a “go”.

“How do you handle stress?”

Her wife smiled.  My friend lit up a little bit as if she thought she totally nailed this one.  “GREAT!  I just take it and put it in a box and shove it aside–gone!”  To some extent, I knew this about my friend.  She’s not comfortable with the ugly conversations even when they don’t involve her.  While she’s an amazing friend and powers through those that are needed to be a support to a friend in need, they’re definitely something she’d rather avoid.  And hey–it’s life.  There’s a lot of that.

I told her that compartmentalizing stress and storing away is not “managing” stress and that doing so creates chemicals in our body that can keep weight on us.

She had to really let that sink in.  She truly believed that what she was doing was ideal because she never felt any stress or anxiety–she felt great.  It was a tough sell.

I’m thankful she nudged me to put together the next Just Feel Good program schedule and publish it.  There are a LOT of things like this–things we have no idea are keeping us heavy or unhealthy or unable to heal.  Things that aren’t always hard to address if we know to address them.

So talk to me… how do YOU manage stress?  What do you do when faced with a stressful situation?  Be honest!  And hey… #jointhejourney