Active Relaxing is a hard sell…
🙋🏽♀️”Hey coach I’m at a plateau and I want to lose fat.”
Coach says “ok, let’s do 20mins of breath work.”
🙋🏽♀️“20 mins of breath-work! sorry coach I’ve not got time for that, coach I need to sweat, be in pain and eat only once per day.”
Coach replies, “This is like putting your foot in the accelerator in a traffic jam.”
🙄
📖 Story time.
🛣️Imagine You are driving on a motorway heading to the beach. 🏖️At the start, the road is empty, with no problems or troubles. Then cars slowly start appearing.
🚗🚙🚗🚙
Some fast some slow. You keep driving. Then more cars, you have to slow down, but you keep going. As you get closer to the beach the road goes from 4 lanes to 3 then to 2 and eventually to 1.
🚓🚕🚙🚗🚕🚙🚓🚗
You see more cars and more cars ahead in the distance. The road starts to fill up, your are slowing down.
🛑NOW You are stuck in traffic and you come to a complete halt, you are just 10mins from your destination. 🏖️ So so close but there are just so many cars on the road.
You see In the cars the people are so mad.
😡😤😠😡
You now have a choice, wait or turn and go back home.
Who knows how long you’ll have to wait? Is Putting your foot on the accelerator going to help now?
🤔 You think to yourself this journey shouldn’t be so hard. This is a lot like fat loss. It can start easy then slowly it gets harder and harder.
🏖️ Like fat loss, the beach is your destination or goal. 🛣️You have a road ahead. Each car on the road represents your stresses. 🚘 The more stresses you have the more your progress halts.
🛑 Keeping you from your destination.
Stress can be any number of things like
😥 Too much exercise
📉Low calories
💤 Lack of sleep
👨💼Work
😦Mental stress
🤒 Illness
🥗 Low nutrition quality.
🧬Lack of metabolic flexibility
🛣️Like the road losing lanes the closer you get to your goal these things become more of an issue. The longer you’re in a deficit your ability to recover can decrease. There may be the same number of stresses but the longer your journey the smaller the road gets.
😳Stress equals fat gain this is well known. So logically relaxing equals fat loss?
🤔 Not exactly what purposeful relaxing does is it removes some of the cars from the road and adds an extra lane to help with traffic.
📝 If you want to get to your goal, You’ll still need to drive, driving is doing the WORK, eating right, and exercising.
🏖️ Moreover, the closer you get to the beach there will still be traffic. Stress is inevitable, but with Breath-work, you have a tactic to keep moving.🌬️
What I’ve found very useful is if my Lumen says carb burn in the morning, and my eating and exercise have been on point, then it seems I’m on a single-track road with a backlog of traffic.
🛑 🚗 🚙 🚗 🚗 🚙 🛑
The metabolism’s fuel for stress is carbs. This could be an overly simplistic way to look at it as there could be many other reasons for carb burn in the morning, but as a first approach is actively relaxing to down regulate stress, is magic. 🌬️
A very common thing I’ll hear is “but I don’t feel stressed” a cheeky reply “so why are youself medicating with food?” Food is a powerful stress reliever, especially high calorie foods.
So what’s one thing you can do if you are over-stressed? Even if you don’t feel stressed
🌬️ Breath-work. It’s free, it’s calorie-free and it works
One system is called coherence breathing.
5 seconds inhale 5 seconds exhale for 20mins
Is a game changer.
“I don’t have 20mins.” I hear you say, then you’ll need 40mins.
Ok, okay, 5 mins is better than nothing, if you have Apple Watch this is in built.
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