93: Ditch toxic resolutions & set goals for lasting change

Jenna D'Apice: 0:01

Hello, welcome to the no Wellness Wanker Eek podcast. My name is Jenna DePiece. We navigate the worlds of wellness each and every episode and it's a big time for diets to be pressed upon you. It is huge. We're eating, we're drinking, we're having fun, but we don't need to succumb to all these pressures.

Lyndi Cohen: 0:18

Lindy Cohen, nutritionist, dietitian, wonderful person, hello the feature of crappy New Year's resolutions, of which I had made many really bad New Year's resolutions in the past. Me too, you know. I'd say like weight loss goals, it's like 10 kilos this year, this is my year. This year I'm going to be the skinniest me I've ever been. I'm going to shock everyone. You know, I don't know. It was outrageous.

Jenna D'Apice: 0:43

I'm waking up at 6am every day. I'm doing every gym class. This is going to yeah, like some magic switch has just flicked in your brain and you can become a totally different person overnight. And that's just not how life works, yeah.

Lyndi Cohen: 0:56

You're not going to suddenly start bullet journaling overnight. You know I do like resolutions. I just don't like the diet variety, and what we know is that diets have a really high failure rate. They just don't work in the long term, and Business Insider did a survey where they found that over 50% of people set the diet related goal for New Year's resolutions and that 80% of those will have failed by the time it becomes February, which is just not what we want no, and it's such a bad way to start your year.

Jenna D'Apice: 1:28

It's like you are setting yourself a goal that statistically, majority of people will fail. It's built for you to fail. And then you get to February and then part of you and I know it's kind of like every day, if you've eaten too much, I'll start again tomorrow, and then you have that same mentality for your whole year. I stuffed it up in February. Next year is my year and it's just these big blocks of time we just wipe out and we don't need to be doing that.

Lyndi Cohen: 1:54

It's lost time. Exactly, I talk about this idea in my book. Your Weight is Not the Problem about Diet Burnouts, which is the idea that the more diets you go on, what you end up finding is that your ability to stick to each new diet becomes less and less and less. So you know, maybe months ago you could stick to a diet for a while, but now you're going. You know the cycle of which I'm failing at this diet is daily and at my point, at the most extreme, multiple times a day, I would say, okay, now we're going to the next meal, I'm going to do better, and then I'd fail at that. And so if you're struggling with diet burnout, what you don't need is to try harder. How about we set resolutions that are not toxic and that are actually going to help you have lasting change? Because I got to tell you, actually I'm a really big fan of resolutions. I'm a resolutions kind of girl.

Jenna D'Apice: 2:40

They can be good and I can see where you feel like they're not a good thing, because if you've been dieting your whole life, you've never had a resolution that isn't guilt driven or about changing or changing your weight, like there are other things that you can strive and get excited for that are positive for your life and they actually you could actually succeed out and make you feel Good can we talk about some of those ideas? Do it.

Lyndi Cohen: 3:05

I'm really excited. So I mean, some of these are my, I, my kind of goals as well and I just I haven't quite quite know how I'm going to tackle them, but I'm excited. So idea number one is to be less busy and to do more of my creative things generally. Thoughts on this.

Jenna D'Apice: 3:20

I love this. I feel like we live in a world that we are just jamming every single minute of every single day and Sometimes you just don't need to live like that. I tried this year. I was really happy. I like just wanted to slow down a little bit and just be more conscious with what I'm saying yes to, because you don't need to worry about disappointing everybody all the time and then burning yourself out. It's so nice to have a weekend where you have no plans and you can upcycle some furniture you wanted to do and paint something called do something creative, something you want to do it. If you want to land around and watch the TV show, that's okay. If your body needs rest, you need to allow yourself time to do these things, and it's okay.

Lyndi Cohen: 4:02

So having blank space in your calendar, opportunity for play, creativity and rest, I really like that. So what if that was something you go? Okay, that's something I would like more of in my life. The other thing you could want more of your life is the ability to go swimming with your family, instead of just watching from the sidelines or being in photos, because your kids are going to turn around in 20 years and go. I'm so glad you went in that photo. They're gonna go. Where's mom? Where were you were there, right, but how come I can't see any photos of you? So we have to be turning up in our life because on your death bed, you're not going to go. I wish I had had had a flat stomach or you know. Let's sell your light, you're gonna go, oh my goodness.

Jenna D'Apice: 4:43

And so I wish I didn't spend as much time fretting About where or not I had enough, so I had too much cellulite and it's so ironic because sometimes I feel if you get caught into like Doom, scrolling on instagram, you're seeing everyone with these amazing bikini bodies that you would never have and you're getting in this cycle of like I could never go to the beach. But if you put the phone down and go to the beach, it's actually where you see that everybody looks different. No one is looking at you and everything's fine. The real world at the beach is actually amazing. There's older people, younger people, all shapes and sizes, sexes, genders, everyone living, but and that's real, which is amazing, because in the fake world on your phone, where you feel like you're not good enough for the beach is fake. It's amazing when you have the realization.

Lyndi Cohen: 5:27

Amen. I will say that there are some beaches which are not indicative of the relation. When I go to Bondi or Bronte I'm like this is a different world we don't need to keep going there.

Lyndi Cohen: 5:40

I mean the beautiful, I love them and I like the people who live there. I just, I just it does. It does tricking me to feel a little bit worse about myself, as opposed to when I go to, I guess, a bit more, of the less trendy beaches, where I do feel like that is a little bit more representative of every day humans. Now, another thing that we could be doing in twenty twenty four what is it?

Jenna D'Apice: 6:01

Well, for me, I'm really enjoying running right now and I want to keep running, and what I have found in again these, you can have big surprises. I always thought I'm only, if I'm running, I'm going to run like everyone else and I'm going to run 10 kilometers and I'm going to be a marathon runner, yada, yada yada. But I can't do that, so I'm not going to run at all. When, really, when I've actually gotten into running, what I love the most is like a 15 minute run around the block, and I love it is so achievable. If I get home from work and I don't have time, I don't. I don't want to do a full gym session, but if I'm just going to put my shoes on and run for 15 minutes, I get such an endorphin kick. It's so much better than doing nothing and I am loving it. So I never would have expected that it could be like these little short snippets of magic.

Lyndi Cohen: 6:45

Talk to me about this. I'm very interested in this, jen. What you're saying is you're sending yourself a time. Is it a time goal Time? Okay, are you like listening to three songs? And then you're like well, that's about 15 minutes. I'm going home. Is it like I have to do 15 minutes? You're just like no, I'm just going to go for a run. It's going to be a little short power run and I'm going to come back.

Jenna D'Apice: 7:03

Well, what I've kind of worked out is my block from like my house around a few streets back to my house around my whole block takes me around 15, 14 minutes if I time it on my Apple watch. So it's like I know that, like if I'm like I get home from work at six o'clock and I know like I can be if I put my shoes on, I can be out the door in five minutes and I can finish this at six, 20. And I it's so achievable and small, that's what I love. So it's not. And then sometimes the best part is I'll keep running longer. But other times I'm like, nah, this one block, that's all I needed today and I'm very happy with that. Oh, I love this.

Lyndi Cohen: 7:37

I love this One of the participants in Keep it Real. She asked me. She said hey, I just I think I can commit to doing five minutes walk. I think that's what I can do, but my brain tells me that's not enough. What's the point in doing that? And I say there is so much point in doing that so much.

Lyndi Cohen: 7:56

What you're doing is, hey, you're moving your body, you're feeling really good, You're probably going to sleep a little bit better that night. You're probably going to get a little bit of a kick in your mental health for doing it. Plus, the best benefit is the relationship with exercise that is, shifting from something that feels like a chore to something that feels, hey, this is doable, I can enjoy this as well. And you might find some days you go for longer. And you might find some days you turn around and you go home after your five minutes and that's totally cool. So, lowering this bar, not having to set ourselves, having collaborative goals or fitness goals. What if the goal is simply to go out there to enjoy ourselves and to be consistent and consistently enjoy it.

Jenna D'Apice: 8:34

We love that. Another thing that I really like doing and I've gotten it so much more into it this year is just getting more and more into my passion for cooking. It is so fun when you get into working with seasonal produce and what if you see something that's on special at Woolies because it's in season, and then you're like, what can I do with this? And it can be a really fun activity with your family. Sometimes it can be really meditative, if you just like I was making like a potato salad. I just had to peel these potatoes and I felt like I was just really zenning out in the zone, couldn't focus on anything else, and it's so many benefits I love it.

Lyndi Cohen: 9:10

I think this comes back to the first idea you're talking about is being less busy and having more time, because if you are constantly rushing and you don't have enough time, then the idea of peeling potatoes well, it's like who has time to peel potatoes? But I guess you know that's part of what is divine about life, jenna, I want to keep going with all of these ideas and we're going to come back to it. But firstly I want to jump forward to this idea of having not a resolution, like we were talking about with the running. We don't want to have like a hardcore resolution of lose 10 kilograms in a year, but instead there's this idea of instead of having a resolution, we have a word. It's something I've done for many years where I have this one concept and every year I pick a new one. So one year I had community and that was all about me going. You know what it was just this reminder throughout the year to go. You know what my word is community. So maybe I will go to that event where I'm more inclined to see people, or maybe I can make time to go to my mother's group and go and see people, or maybe I can meet a new friend at the dog park and that really just I kept coming back to this word and it was very helpful.

Lyndi Cohen: 10:18

Other years I've had like the word calm, I've had the word joy. Current word at the moment is energy, all of that, preserving my energy, helping to get good energy, good energy of people and also my physical energy. And next year I haven't quite come up with it yet, but I'm very close. But it's something about sitting with discomfort and how I feel like so much of the things that we do when we're numbing or we're trying to like run from hard things where there's emotional eating or drinking alcohol or you know, for people it could be any kind of addictive kind of behavior or it could be just like compulsive watching TV or gambling or smoking or drug taking or all the things that we do to try and numb ourselves.

Lyndi Cohen: 11:04

We're doing it because we're trying to avoid discomfort and I think sitting in the discomfort can allow us to have big growth. It means so we can kind of, you know, achieve the things we want to achieve. So next year I think it's a big growth year for me and I'm going to be able to like keep reminding myself to just the discomfort is the growth. Keep sitting in it. That's going to be my reminder. Jenna, you've also done this right?

Jenna D'Apice: 11:25

Yes, I always do this For me and my girlfriends. When we have our Christmas lunch, we sit and we have our words saved on someone's phone from last year and we can reflect on our words from the year that was set, our words for the next year. It's so good because it's a resolution that's not about losing weight and it can fit into so many aspects of your life. Like this year, my word was pace and about like slowing down, getting my life into a better rhythm, having time to go to bed at the right time and all of these things it just trickles into and I feel like it's such an easy thing to just always go back to and think about oh no, that I'll be too busy if I say yes, that I don't really need to do that, or that values my energy, I can put it here and it's been really helpful.

Jenna D'Apice: 12:06

And then next year, my word is presence, because I feel like I'm already I'm getting married like halfway through next year and already in like the initial planning stage. I feel myself like getting overwhelmed and stressed and I got engaged this year and all of these things were happening and I feel like there was some big moments this year that I was too flustered and I wasn't really there. And I want to at least and I know it's very easy to say that this, and I'm sure a lot of people try but at least make a concerted effort to enjoy getting married and enjoy that stage of my life and be present and enjoy it. Oh.

Lyndi Cohen: 12:43

I love that. That is such a good word. If you're listening to this now, what I want you to know about the safety of using a word is that you genuinely can't fail. You can't fail. So let's say Jenna, you're being a little bit less present, that's all yeah exactly.

Lyndi Cohen: 12:56

Come back to being present. Okay, cool, I got you. Thank you word. Thanks for reminding me, and I think that's what's so nice about this, and you know we're talking about some of these ideas that you could do to. You know these intentions that you have.

Lyndi Cohen: 13:07

What you have to do is you find one word that you think represents what it is that you would like more of in your life than I think that's something that we wanted to. It could be healthier boundaries or whatever it is. Learning to say no, accepting more joy into your life, having more presence all these things that we all need a little bit more of, and that is a really good challenge for 2024. It could be something related to, you know, having a real fitness goal that's actually tangible. Like I want to be able to do an unassisted pull up, right, yes, imagine like how cool that would be. And, yes, that's a bit different as well, because you're actually attaining a goal, but you could just go. I just want to explore how, moving my body and Seeing what it can actually do, and then, once I've done a pull-up, or maybe I can do, okay, maybe I can do special kind of like push-up or you know, some really kind of cool things.

Jenna D'Apice: 13:55

Or it's something I've always thought about doing is like I really would like to be able to do a handstand, and it's like a handstand is something like you can just literally practice in the lounge room when you think about it. It's not like this big thing of you're trading for a marathon, it's like little tiny things. It's like I'd like to be able to do that.

Lyndi Cohen: 14:09

Hmm, I would really like to be able to do that. That's really cool. I like that. Some other ideas is to consume less and to be more mindful. I mean, I'm constantly decluttering my house until I realized, lindy, the problem is not that your house is cluttered, the problem is you keep buying stuff, so you're getting more decluttered. If you didn't buy as much, you wouldn't have to declutter as much, so that's also. I haven't quite worked at how I'm going to solve that problem, but that is also on my mind, and maybe it's on your mind, and something that you might want to integrate in in 2024 and remembering, of course, none of this stuff is coming back to weight.

Lyndi Cohen: 14:42

You can see how sometimes I think we go on a diet. Often I think we go on a diet as a band-aid solution for the other things in our life. That isn't quite working, because it's much easier to just go on a diet quickly and to lose weight and feel better in yourself, as opposed to like Confront a relationship that's maybe feeling a little bit hard, or to deal with the fact that you're overly stressed to work or you have someone in your life who's asking too much of yourself, and so I think, rather than using a diet as a band-aid to fix things. I think we need to address what is actually going on here and what would actually make me feel better in myself, give me more self-esteem, better mental health, so that I didn't feel the need to derail my health by going on a diet.

Jenna D'Apice: 15:23

Another good resolution that has nothing to do with actual dieting is just working on your body image. If that's something you want to do for the year, like not letting the way you feel about your body, then derail your health and turn you to things like dieting and that's all about. If you just like Constantly changing the switch. If, like if you always thought a specific way about your body and it hasn't got you where it needs to be, but you think you need to be, maybe it's time to try a different approach.

Lyndi Cohen: 15:49

And if you listen to episode number 17,. It's called hate your body 15 ways I learned to love my body. That's the podcast that I think it's got. It's got loaded with a whole bunch of tips to help you feel better in your body.

Jenna D'Apice: 16:00

If you haven't listened to it, please go and have a listen another Resolution which is such a doozy that I love is just all year. If you just want to focus on this one thing, it would, I think, transform your life. And just focusing on your sleep If that is all you need to focus on for a whole year, it can take. I've been working on my sleep for probably two years and I still haven't really got it there. It's a big thing to change and it leads into better energy, more time for family because you're not tired and drained sleep.

Lyndi Cohen: 16:33

It's everything. It is the. It is a foundation of good health. Also, something else you could think about is drinking less alcohol. It's something I did last year and well, this past year and now, my goodness, it changed everything for me.

Lyndi Cohen: 16:46

If you are finding that, hey, you're just drinking as a default, just because it's there, because that's how you've always done it, but now you're going, oh, it's really messing with my sleep or it's messing with my food or even my relationships, then maybe you want to try going on a little booze break. In January, we're having a new intake for booze break, so if you want to come and create a healthier relationship with alcohol, then it's something that I can help you with. I haven't drunk alcohol in a year and a half. I still have the occasional drink, but I just don't consider myself a non-drinker. I can help you become the kind of person who thinks, oh, I don't miss alcohol and I don't feel boring. In fact, I feel like I'm having more fun without drinking alcohol. I'll leave a link below so you can see if booze break is something you want to give a go.

Jenna D'Apice: 17:29

Another resolution that could work for you is just cooking at home more throughout the week. Maybe you find even I've found sometimes like I'd always be like oh it's Friday, I'll get takeaway, oh, it's Saturday, I'll get takeaway. Even if you're at home, it's actually so much more fun to cook and I know if you're not in the cooking space you're going to be like Jenna shut up. That's not true. But on Saturdays you can actually be so much more fun to cook because you have all of this time and you can go to the supermarket, walk around or go to a farmer's market and then use those things. You have so much more time on the weekends and I always used to think, oh, it's the weekend, I don't want to cook. But if you enjoy it, then it's like oh, it's the weekend, I have so much more time, I can make something so much more elaborate than I used to be able to.

Lyndi Cohen: 18:12

Totally. You're popping on like an Italian playlist.

Jenna D'Apice: 18:14

Yeah.

Lyndi Cohen: 18:15

Having some good vibes, like dancing around the kitchen, you know, like a little Pinterest picture right there and there, and you can do something that's a little bit more extravagant. You can make pasta from scratch yes, you can do really ornate kind of seasonal dishes and impress all your friends or just yourself and just like love it and then watch Netflix and have a great Saturday night. I'm all about that. And if you are struggling with this idea of like I don't know what to cook and I don't even know what's healthy and I feel completely overwhelmed, then I do have lots of recipes for you. I have over 500 recipes inside.

Lyndi Cohen: 18:48

Back to Basics, which is an app which I designed to help you be healthy without dieting, because all I could see when I was looking at other health apps that help people with cooking more at home, they just felt like macro counting or calorie counting and they were so disordered. So I just wanted to create an app that could help take the mental load of cooking, that could help encourage you to get in the kitchen cooking stuff that's balanced but that doesn't require a good jillion ingredients and minimal washing up, because I'm big about minimal washing up, especially during the weeknight. So if you haven't tried Back to Basics. You can try it free for seven days. I'd love to see you inside, back to Basics. It's a really good way that you can kind of go listen. I'm setting an intention that's got nothing to do with weight loss and it's got everything to do with feeling better in my body.

Jenna D'Apice: 19:34

Because I think if you've been dieting for a long time in your whole life, you probably don't love cooking that much, because cooking when you are dieting isn't fun. You're measuring out tiny dollops of sweet chili sauce and then not wanting to add anymore, and nothing tastes good and you're scared to add any flavor and of course you're not going to like it because what you're producing isn't good. So then it's when you get away from dieting and then get into cooking. It's a whole new world.

Lyndi Cohen: 20:01

It is some laughing over here because it is a whole new world. I remember when I was dieting I'd make the stupidest combinations. Yeah, and you're eating really weird food and everyone's like yuck. And I'm going to ask you, that was yuck and I somehow convinced myself that that was an acceptable thing to have as a meal. And it's not.

Jenna D'Apice: 20:19

We can do better, we can have flavor, we can do better we can eat carbs.

Jenna D'Apice: 20:22

Thank goodness, because I think what we're saying here to take away is the new year knew me Like it's not something to mock because it doesn't need to be a new you. But there is something beautiful in a new year just to switch up your mindset, set an intention, something that's going to be really nice for you in the new year, not something that's going to make you bad about yourself. So it is a nice time to like fresh year, fresh start, tiny little mental shifts, not huge dramatic changes, and nothing to fail at. I love that everyone.

Lyndi Cohen: 20:55

I hope you have a very, very happy new year and I'll see you in 2024.