Are you overweight and stressed all the time? Do you constantly feel overwhelmed? Are you constantly running kids from place to place for activities with little time to make or eat dinner? I get you. It is so difficult being a mom. One of the hard things is that this stress impacts your weight and contributes to a larger waistline.
Stress Impacts Your Weight
When you are stressed, you are in fight or flight mode. Your body is pumping cortisol into your body and that contributes to fat gain around your organs showing up on your waistline. It really sucks that one of the things that can cause even more stress happens when you are already chronically stressed.
It is Really Important to Stop the Chronic Stress Cycle.
But How!
First Take a Deep Breath
It is important to breathe. When you take intentional breaths your body starts to move from that flight or fight response to the calmer part of your nervous system. You can do these intentional breaths however you want. Start with breathing in for 3-4 seconds and then breathing out for 3-4 seconds. There are many different methods of breathing for calmness but you do what feels right for you. For other ways to breathe to create calm see this post 10 Ways to Breathe to Create Calm and Destress.
Second Find Your Why
Now that you are calmer, you can ask yourself what you really want for your life.
Maybe you are perfectly willing and happy for your kids to have a lot of activities that keep you on the go. You could be so exhausted that you want to decide to decrease the number of activities each kid is attending. You might need to define the areas that you struggle with when your kids are really active. That might be dinners or housecleaning or scheduling medical appointments, etc. Maybe you need some help and want to carpool or have a relative participate in taking kids to activities.
Decide to think about your current situation and determine what is causing you the most stress. If ____ was fixed, I would be calm. What is that blank for you? There is often more than one thing that is causing that excess stress. What is it for you?
Third Brain Dump that Stuff
It is important to write down all the things that are bothering you and making you feel stressed. Are you running late to an activity because of when another one ends? Maybe you are not able to make dinner because you have 5 minutes at home for your child to change for the next event or practice. Are you hitting a wall of exhaustion when you get home so all you can do is scroll to have a couple of minutes of free time before falling into bed?
Getting everything out of your head and onto paper allows you to see it all so you can decide what isn’t working.
Fourth Focus on What is Important to You
No matter what is on your brain dump, you get to choose what you keep for yourself. Maybe you love watching you daughter’s ballet practice or son’s football practice. Do you hate grocery shopping or struggle with knowing what to get because you don’t have a meal plan? A meal plan? Aaahhhhhh! What? No I’m not telling you that you have to have a meal plan. Someone else can do that for you. Wash the car. Maybe wait another week. Choose the activities that are important to you and choose to let the other activities be done by another person or not at all. This is called Do, Delegate, or Delete.
Fifth Don’t Add Anything to an Already Stressful Schedule
You may want to lose 20 pounds but adding activities that help you lose 20 pounds will not work if you are chronically stressed and in fight-to-flight mode.
What is most important is to get into that calmer state of being. You will be more confident and caring and able to decide on actions for your health when you are being with intention vs constantly reacting to the things happening around you.
I’m going to take you step-by-step through these 5 steps so that you become someone who is ready to take on activities that improve your health.
Comment or email me at michelle@themorefulfilledmom.com and let me know what your biggest stressor is right now. I’ll try to include examples that relate to that stressor in my step-by-step posts.
