Health News

Finding the Balance

Eat right, exercise, lose weight. We hear those words all the time like they were the keys to heaven--a heaven that only accepts thin, healthy people through its pearly gates. The problem is, if it were that easy, we’d all be trim and fit. Heck, we’d be glowing with health. I might even lose that spare tire I’ve been grumbling about since I was 40. But we all know making healthy choices isn’t as easy as it seems.

What if your best intention is to eat right and exercise but you come home from work too tired to head outside for a run, much less spend an hour cooking a nutritious meal? What if it takes all you have just to make it through your day?

If you’re busy collecting your kids at day care, making sure they made it to their after school activities, and getting the laundry done in between events, dinner is a matter of speed first, nutrition second. How else could it be?

When your job demands you work 50-60 hour weeks routinely, where is the time going to come for that trip to the gym? The math just doesn’t work. Unfortunately, all too often, this is reality. We don’t get the exercise we need and we eat those extra calories hidden in that processed (but quick to fix) food we make…and the pounds slowly mount.

Let’s face it, for most people, life is just plain stressful. After meeting the demands of the day, we don’t have enough left over to do the things we know we need to do to stay healthy. So many of us feel tired, over worked, and unable to refresh. Simply put, we don’t feel well, and that makes choosing a healthy lifestyle even harder.

Sometimes, in order to get healthy, we first have to get well. And to get well, we have to admit that being tired all the time just isn’t normal.  That alone is a big step for most of us. (If this is true for you, and you want help getting well this is one of my special interests. You don’t have to be tired.)

Once we admit that we are tired, too tired, we have to stop and take stock. We need to take a look at our lives and see what is out of balance. Is it a job we hate? Or a relationship gone sour? Something is consuming our energy and we need it back.

When I get to this place in my life, I know something has got to change. That’s when I look inside and apply the seven tools of healing that I teach in the office to my own life. Time and time again, I’ve learned how much my inner wisdom has to teach me. Sometimes my inner wisdom is asking a big change of me; more often, it takes but a simple adjustment in my life to make a huge difference.

Like this spring, I was feeling more tired than I like. After making sure my problem wasn’t physical, I looked inward to see if I could glean any wisdom there. What I saw was that I was tired because I never really got lunch. Busy with patients all morning, by the time I got to lunch I was usually a few minutes behind. And then there were those urgent calls that had to be returned. I generally ended up silently eating my sandwich while I listened to patients on the phone. It wasn’t long before my lunch hour was up and I was back to work. Back to work without a single moment of rest.

When I checked inside, I realized that I needed to make taking a lunch a priority. I preach self-care all day, it was time to start listening to my own words. I began scheduling differently and, lo and behold, what a difference it made. Now I have time for a lunch break and time to make phone calls. I am better able to work the rest of my day because I am refreshed, and feel less pressured because I have my work done. I come home happy instead of harried. Who would have thought that an extra half an hour in the middle of the day could make such a difference?

I would never have known this if I hadn’t taken the time to listen to what my inner wisdom had to say. It’s amazing how smart that inner knower is!

 If you find yourself feeling tired and overwhelmed, I hope you take the time to explore what your life is trying to say to you. You might be surprised. Change comes in all kinds of doors. And if you need help figuring out how to get to the root of your tiredness, I’m here. There is help for that all too common tired feeling that most of us spend our days ignoring. You don’t have to live that way. Come on in and we’ll check it out.