Month: March 2015

“My sun sets to rise again.” — Robert Browning

It’s spring! What a great time to get refreshed, start new positive habits in your life and set new goals. Spring is known as the time of rebirth, spring cleaning and shedding off the old. I do think that spring cleaning your home, de-cluttering and cleansing can be very healing and motivational to many people. If you’ve felt blocked in the past, not reaching your goals, clearing your space can be a good start to generating new energy and to try again toward your goals.

Maybe it’s time for a new perspective. Have you felt depressed or unfocused? Maybe find a new group to join like a writer’s group, singles activities, or a church, maybe find a new activity to participate in like group painting, sports, or running.

If food and nutrition is your focus, do a spring cleaning of your kitchen. Get rid of old canned goods (if they aren’t expired, donate them to the food shelf), remove any junk food. Try some new foods, rearrange your kitchen to make it more convenient to prepare and pack healthy food. If you have others in your house that aren’t on board with the cleanout, designate a drawer and a cupboard for the foods that you don’t want to have at eye level. Studies have shown the foods you see will be the foods you crave and eat. http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/diet.fitness/09/21/kd.mindless.eating/index.html

Fill your refrigerator and countertops with healthy snacks and fresh vegetables. Have your healthy proteins made and easy to grab when you are heading out the door, or that you can quickly prepare into dinner. Have items like baby carrots, snap peas, hummus, apples, boiled eggs, and other easy to grab refreshments. Keep you cup for tea where you can see it, keep your water glass or bottle handy.

Same with fitness. What can you clear out of your life? What fresh, new habit can you add? What are you really dedicated to achieve? Why is it important to you? What’s kept you from it previously? Maybe you need to focus on just one thing. Again, what do you REALLY want and what are you willing to give up to have it or to achieve your goal? Try to set a realistic, time-framed, specific goal (I will lose 1 pound a week for the next 12 weeks). Write it down, note why it’s important to you (I want to get off blood pressure medication, I want to look fabulous in my bikini, I want to have energy to play outside with my kids, etc.). What are you willing to give up to have it? (happy hour, more than one “free meal” a week, a tv program that you watch that you could instead be at the gym, and so on). You can do it! Use this spring as your time for renewal and take the steps to move toward your goal. We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new ending.”—Zig Ziglar

I’m always here to help, so please email me if there is something I can give you some information on or a question you would like me to write about. [email protected]

Liz Jones is the Wellness Coordinator for the City of Mesquite and a wellness professional in Rockwall, Mesquite, Wylie and surrounding areas. She is a writer, certified yoga instructor, personal trainer and wellness coach. She holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership and Strategic Management, with a graduate certificate in Ethics and Leadership. Her undergraduate studies included communication, business, writing, art, fitness, and dance. Liz Jones can be reached at: [email protected].

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Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be –George Sheehan

Keeping a success journal is a great way to track progress with a goal. Whether you have decided to eat clean, boost your fitness program, increase your stress management, or focus on saving money or improving your credit, tracking will help you to see what you have accomplished.

There are many tools that you can use, from a good old notebook to write down your physical activity and exercise, or apps for your phone like MyFitnessPal.com or FitBit apps to track your food intake. Journaling can help you track as well. As a writer, this is my preferred method of tracking most things, although I use apps as well for fitness and occasionally to see where I am at with my daily nutrition. Journaling can help you feel like you are not having to necessarily “log” everything you do, and can help you to really hash out what is going on to look at to see where you can make changes.

If you find that you are struggling with clean eating, having a journal to reflect back on can help you identify the barriers that are getting in your way. Was it a stressful day? Did you have meetings and forgot to pack your lunch? Maybe stress management is your goal. A journal can help you see how you feel after a yoga class, or taking a walk, or sitting in your yard meditating or watching the birds fly by. What was effective? What seemed to be happening on the days when you felt your best or felt like you lost sight of your goal.

Tracking your success can also help you focus on the positives. Instead of thinking about what you didn’t do, where you dropped a ball, write down the things you did accomplish and focus on building on that. Staying positive and not letting your mind get stuck in negativity is one way to really help you keep moving in the right direction. If you only focus on failures, such as “accidentally” eating a doughnut when you are trying to eat clean, or not getting your cardio done for the week if exercise is your goal, you will be less likely to want to continue on the path toward where you want to be. Focus on the good nutrition that you got each day, did you get your vegetables in? Did you drink enough water? Write down your workouts and how you felt afterwards. With all things, building on strengths and success will beget more success.

Some good tools that I have found:
FitBit app (and wearing a FitBit)
MyFitnessPal.com
MapMyRun.com
CreditKarm.com (for improving and tracking credit rating), as well as monitoring my savings accounts bi-weekly.
Blank journals
BodyforLife.com has great fitness and nutrition logs that you can print off.

Let me know what questions you have about wellness. I can be reached at [email protected].

Liz Jones is the Wellness Coordinator for the City of Mesquite and a wellness professional in Rockwall, Mesquite, Wylie and surrounding areas. She is a writer, certified yoga instructor, personal trainer and wellness coach. She holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership and Strategic Management, with a graduate certificate in Ethics and Leadership. Her undergraduate studies included communication, business, writing, art, fitness, and dance. Liz Jones can be reached at: [email protected].

“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.” –Euripides

Balance… what does it mean to you? Is true balance in life possible? There are different types of balance; physical balance, emotional balance, life balance. While the above quote makes a good point of keeping balance in your life being beneficial, is it something that is truly achievable?

I don’t know that finding complete balance in life, at all times, really is possible. I think we need to strive for finding a good mix of how much energy we put into our work, our families, ourselves and our emotions. However, I don’t believe that we can have an equal balance in all areas, at least not if we expect to EXCEL in what we do. It is difficult to commit to eight hours of excellent work, eight hours of quality family time, and eight hours of healthy sleep every day. I think we need to look at life balance more from an averages standpoint. If I want to excel in my work, quite often I need to throw myself into it more than 8 hours a day or more than 40 hours per week. To get a book written, I need to work on it consistently and somewhat obsessively. When my focus is on work, clients and writing, it is probable that the time I spend with my family or getting good sleep will be less than its equal part.

To be a good partner and parent, I need to make sure that I make my family a priority and sometimes that means they will take precedence over my work. If someone in our family gets sick or has special needs, other things need to fall to the wayside. What does it mean to be an excellent parent or partner anyway? When I was raising my son, who is now turning 25, I worked full-time and often worked more than one job, I also went to college full-time for most of his childhood, and I raised him as a single parent. I don’t think there was a lot of balance in my life during all those years, but had I not thrown myself into what I was doing I never would have been able to build a home for us to live in or gotten the degrees I needed to pursue work that fulfilled me and supported my family. Now my family consists of a being part of a two-parent family and having a teenaged bonus daughter and an adult son. I’m done with all of my degrees and although I am still constantly working on continuing education and additional certifications, school is not a full-time priority in my life.

I think we need to make sure we are getting enough of everything, but not necessarily seeking balance. Life is much more of an ebb and flow of priorities and focus. As Franklin Covey says, schedule your priorities. It’s OK if those priorities change over time. What I am saying is maybe we need to shift our focus to acceptance and not feeling guilty when we don’t have complete balance, per se, and instead focus on shining in what is important to us.

Let me know what you’d like to read about. If you have questions about fitness, wellness or empowerment, please send me an email: [email protected].

Liz Jones is the Wellness Coordinator for the City of Mesquite and a wellness professional in Rockwall, Mesquite, Wylie and surrounding areas. She is a writer, certified yoga instructor, personal trainer and wellness coach. She holds a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership and Strategic Management, with a graduate certificate in Ethics and Leadership. Her undergraduate studies included communication, business, writing, art, fitness, and dance. Liz Jones can be reached at: [email protected].