I’m a big believer in (and recommender of!) life balance, which is particularly challenging for moms! By my definition, achieving a balanced life means you’re taking care of yourself well enough not to feel crazed much of the time, not to feel frustrated and frazzled and always attempting to compensate for stuff we’ve done wrong.

I often use the image of a tidal wave crashing in as the sign of a life out of balance with stresses not being handled well (stress = the huge waves!), versus a balanced life feeling calm like a quiet lake that you drop a rock into and tiny ripples disturb the surface temporarily and then dissipate. Is your life like that quiet lake or more like an ocean with lots of tidal waves crashing in, stressing you out as you go?

True balance to me means, among other things, eating well and avoiding trigger foods to ensure a Physical Food Drama-free life. It’s getting enough physical activity in that I sleep well, feel strong and have a great way of relieving day-to-day stress. It’s taking a minute now and then to just *be* and relax. It’s making sure to take small pockets of time for self-care. It’s being able to help my clients and Inner Circle members and still spend as much time with my family as possible. It’s being able to take a little time to learn new things each and every day and apply them in my life and share them with others. And often — despite the words of the guru-who-shall-go-unnamed — in my life, even though I feel “balanced,” there’s still certainly stress, and lots of it because let’s face it — life’s stressful, particularly with families to take care of and all the obligations that go with being a member of our communities. Good stress is stress too, after all, and there’s always plenty of good upheaval in a family. And personal growth — whether we’re talking about taking care of our bodies or anything else — is stressful, yet vitally necessary if we want to thrive!

This past week has been a week where it’s been a struggle to keep my balance. I was at a business conference for a couple days, sleeping in my own bed at night but spending my days absorbing knowledge, making plans and taking action on that knowledge and worrying a wee bit about my son as I spent long hours away from him for the first time in his young life. Just after discovering on my own that I had to get my car inspected, I got a ticket for not getting said inspection on time. *sighs* I dropped my glasses at the park with my son while wearing my sunglasses and when I located the lost glasses, they’d gotten pretty badly mangled. (I also wear contacts, but only for short periods of time.) We’ve also had web server trouble, email trouble and other stress around here that I won’t bore you with. What a week!

The bottom line is that in weeks like this one, it’s good that most of the time my life’s mostly in balance (there’s no such thing as perfect balance because it’s different for each of us) because when the problems start crashing in like waves, I was remarkably calm, considering. That’s not always been the case for me, certainly. And I say this not to brag.

If you find that you’re struggling with your weight, odds are good that your LIFE is currently out of balance, not just how you eat. I’m not saying you need to rework each and every aspect of your life just to lose a few pounds(!), but sometimes looking at the bigger picture will help you see what’s really going on. And how you currently handle stress is indicative of whether you’re balanced or feeling out of control, overwhelmed. So what can you do to destress? Even tiny changes typically add up to a great sense of relief in the slightly longer run.

Reader Question: Will I ever “get it right”? What is the right balance of improvement that I can sustain?

My Answer:This is a tough question and yet a really important one as well. Because I’m not working with you as your coach, I don’t know your exact circumstances or where you are in your own journey to weight loss and health. But there is absolutely a way to get to a point where the healthier lifestyle takes over and you get to stop thinking about it because it just becomes who you are, how you live your life rather than the “tacked on, artificial” thing that it feels like at first if you’re anything like me and my clients.

So the answer is YES, you can absolutely get it right and lead a healthier, happier lifestyle that supports your body and soul so that you’re able to get the weight off without any of the mind junk that’s held you back in the past, which gets you more satisfied with yourself and your life as you go.

How can you get there? It does mean listening to your body, taking time to take care of yourself, being as consistent as you can manage in eating well, giving up unconstructive beliefs you’ve held about yourself and weight loss that have been keeping you from following through with getting your best body, getting and staying physically active and getting clearly focused on your long-term goals.

And when I say “focus,” I mean this more in terms of really connecting to these goals at an emotional level — knowing you’ll love how you’ll feel and really owning that joy so that you can almost taste it and feel it long before you’ve actually reached your goal weight. I don’t believe in that generic “just put your mind to it” advice on focus that doesn’t work for most of us. It’s too clinical to try to just “hunker down and focus” — think about how you’ll FEEL in a size 4/6/8/10 body (or choose the size that feels comfortable and unscary to you, but awesome nonetheless!), how much less you’ll worry about how you look, how much more energy you’ll have when the extra weight’s off. And getting there also means being willing to eliminate foods or activities that aren’t getting you closer to those goals.

And it might also mean eliminating actions like eating to placate other people’s feelings. You didn’t ask specifically about that last point, but I want to elaborate on it briefly because I find it to be so relevant to moms because we women often put ourselves last, and we also often put ourselves in social situations where others may pressure us to eat junk, to “indulge” because we’ve had such a rough time and so forth, even though that’s not what we really want for ourselves. I see that particularly in settings where kids are involved because “you don’t want to deprive your child.” If you’re sensitive to social pressure like that, sometimes it might mean that in order to feel balanced, you need to change your lifestyle a bit so that you go to fewer events or, even better, you can take the time to learn how to handle those situations more effectively so that you can press on with your new lifestyle even when others aren’t on board. We each have to live our lives in our own bodies, and it helps not to feel the need to succumb to pressure from others.

Now, that list of changes I just shared probably sounds like a lot to you, and it would FEEL like a lot too if you tried to tackle everything at once, which is why I’m ALL about the “ease in” scenario. And I’m going to be launching a new program really soon that helps you figure out these lifestyle changes one at a time in a way that actually works for folks like me who need a little more TLC as we work on weight loss. I’ve shared many times that I really struggled with weight loss for many years, and going “cold turkey” into a new lifestyle just plain did not work for me, so I developed a completely different scenario that led to me going from the depressed, ill, overweight “young old woman” I was to the Lean Green Mama I am today. :) I’ll be sharing lots more on the new program really soon, promise! And in the interim, bear in mind that everything I share in the Inner Circle is also based on these ideas too — and there’s a resource specifically on getting focused and motivated (my way, not the conventional, ineffective way bandied about far too much that makes us feel incapable if we can’t get it right — which is near impossible because the method itself doesn’t work!).

As for the right balance of improvement for YOU (or anyone reading this!), what seems right or manageable for you is the only right answer. Each of us has different needs, comes from a different background, has different family circumstances and different personal thresholds for what we can handle in the way of change at a time and over a period of time. When I work with clients one on one, we tackle individual changes at a time, and I work hard to gauge what is overwhelming for the client versus what is somewhat beyond the current comfort zone and yet still actually going to allow the client to grow. Because you can’t grow if you’re not mildly uncomfortable!

We have to step outside our comfort zones to get to new places, and if you’re doing that on a regular basis and yet are still doing OK, not feeling pushed or panicked and feel good about where things are going, you’ll get where you want to more quickly than it feels like right now. And even though it may be tempting at times to rush things, being the “tortoise” rather than the “hare” in this situation actually gets you to your goal sooner without stressing you unduly or setting you back if you’ve done too much at once.

Healthy Weight Loss Question: Do I have to eat beans and nuts to lose weight? It seems like I wouldn’t lose weight if I ate those items.

My Answer: As you may already know know, I recommend a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet for health and weight loss purposes based on Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s recommendations for healthy weight loss. And that includes greens, beans, fruit and healthy fats such as raw sunflower seeds and pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and raw nuts like cashews, walnuts and almonds, plus ground flaxseeds. This approach to weight loss is what I used myself and still follow to this day to maintain a healthy weight effortlessly. (In case you’re new to this blog, I want to note that I don’t advise trying to make every dietary change at once if you’ve struggled in the past with sticking to a weight loss program! Easing in really helps. But that’s another post for another time.)

Even though it seems as if eating nuts or seeds would be problematic for healthy weight loss, in reality, most women need to eat fat so that their bodies will actually release body fat instead of hoarding it for hard times. Plus, healthy fats serve several purposes vital to our health — assisting with brain function, digestion and much more. So while you don’t have to eat huge amounts of fat every day — just an ounce of raw nuts or seeds and half an avocado is all you need if you’re overweight — you do need to eat fat daily to lose weight healthfully.

Several years ago when I was in the process of losing weight myself, I hit a plateau or set point within about 10 lbs. of my ideal weight, and I tried multiple things to get past it. At that point, because I’d become more physically active, my body began requiring more healthy fats, and literally within a day of adding in more fat, the scale began moving again. This is really common as you near your ideal weight, though certainly there is very occasionally someone who needs less fat rather than more (but there’s never a reason to eliminate healthy fats from your diet entirely, which can be risky for your health!).

Likewise, we need beans in our diet for our health because they provide a wonderfully healthy protein source and plenty of staying power in our bodies so that our meals last in our systems longer. If you follow the basic eating plan outlined by Dr. Fuhrman in Eat to Live and ensure that you’re not overeating on nuts, seeds, dried fruit or regular fruit for that matter (7-8 pieces of fruit a day for an average woman who works out 3-4 times a week for 45 minutes would certainly be too much in most cases), then it might be time to consider eating 1/2 cup of beans a day rather than the minimum 1 cup that’s part of the regular plan.

Remember, healthy weight loss means, among other things, treating your body kindly and giving it the nutrients it needs not only to survive (we can, after all, survive on junk food for a good long while, but that still leads long-term to illness, fatigue and also — yes! — premature aging! and who wants that?!), but to THRIVE!

At first glance, the film might not look like it’s your thing — 2 old guys talking about disease and healthy eating doesn’t necessarily sound all that exciting, right? But what you may not know is that Campbell is a researcher who found a powerful connection between diet and long-term health while heading up the largest nutritional/health study ever performed — and the results, published in his book The China Study, are incredible (and I’ve been recommending everyone read this for years! See my Recommended Resources for a link). Dr. Esselstyn is known for getting near-perfect results for his heart patients who followed his dietary recommendations — meaning they never had serious heart problems again if they followed his recommendations.

Now, you may be wondering what diseases like heart disease have to do with healthy weight loss for moms, which is the main subject of this blog — and the answer is that these diseases have everything to do with healthy weight loss! Because, you see, how I recommend you eat is based on these same studies and results (among many, many others)! If you eat healthfully, you naturally lose weight *and* you also happen to pretty much ensure you’ll never have to worry about the most common diseases most Westerners die of too. Odd, perhaps, but very true. Healthy eating really does matter — and to more than just your waistline (though let’s face it — that part’s awesome too!).

So you can look great, feel great and be a true Lean Green Mama :) and also be healthier than 90% of the rest of the population to boot! No small feat!

And now, without anymore ado, here’s the trailer for Forks and Knives:

The call’s FREE for Inner Circle members. If you’re not a member, there’s still time to get on board before tonight’s call — which will also be available as an MP3 download for you to listen to at your convenience on the Inner Circle members-only site. Join the Inner Circle now.

I still don’t like making mistakes. (Does anyone really like making mistakes?) I would prefer it if I could get everything right the first time, and no one out there ever had to see me at my weakest and most vulnerable. But you know what? Every time I’ve held back on trying new things, which inevitably brings with it ample opportunities to make mistakes, I’ve felt sad and restricted and hopeless. And honestly, how does that help anyone?

If I had chosen not to give healthy eating a shot, I’d never have had the amazing life transformation that made it possible for me to have my beautiful little boy. If I let this fear hold me back from helping other moms with their weight loss, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet and work with so many wonderful women who are now doing great and losing weight painlessly for the first time in their lives.

Both of these are sources of tremendous joy for me, and I did have to risk making mistakes in order to go after them. Still do have to deal with risk every single day in some form or fashion — after all, I’m taking a chance just by sharing my advice with you. Someone out there reading this may absolutely hate what I’m saying, hate my writing style, not want to have anything to do with me. That’s OK. That’s the risk I take because truly, I’m here in hopes of helping as many of you out there reading as possible because I’ve been where you may be right this very minute, struggling to lose weight, wishing it could be easier, wishing that the scale already looked more promising.

If we don’t let ourselves make mistakes along the way, we’re likely not giving our all to anything we’re doing, much less trying to lose weight healthfully — instead we’re just doing “damage control” from the get-go, which means we’re not giving our effort toward our big goal, our big dream for ourselves our all. Who can get things done really well when they’re terrified? Not me!

So let me share with you the quotation that got me thinking about this issue of trying to do things perfectly right from the start:

Whenever you fall, pick something up.

This little gem by Oswald Avery really nails the real reason why making mistakes is so valuable: we can always learn from them. There is, quite literally, ALWAYS something to be gained from falling, from making mistakes, from overeating when you were planning on eating healthful amounts of food, you name it. The lesson to be gained is NEVER that YOU’RE a failure for messing up, though, to be sure! More likely, it’s that you need to plan ahead, anticipate challenges, have ideas for what to do if the urge to overeat strikes, etc.

Do you generally learn from your mistakes? If so, congratulations. And if so, do you then take different action the next time?

If not, it’s time to start. Forget about what other people might think. What do you want? What do you stand to learn from trying something new, even if it doesn’t go 100% perfectly at the beginning?

Now … if you’ve been reading my posts at all, you know I’m a huge fan of delicious produce, and my local health food stores know that I’ll be leaving their doors with bag after bag full of healthy greens, beans, veggies and fruits. The cashiers hate to see me coming, knowing how many different produce codes they’ll have to look up to check us out so that I can feed my family the good stuff.

And don’t get me wrong — we get good produce here too, often great quality, in fact. But not as good as what I had access to in San Francisco! When I saw the produce aisle at the SF health food store I frequented during our trip, I literally left with twice as much produce as I initially intended to buy, and we had higher-maintenance meals because I just couldn’t leave without extra bunches of the shiniest, greenest, most delicate Swiss chard I’ve ever seen, along with a bunch of other equally beautiful items too numerous to expound upon. (Due to food allergies, it is immensely safer for my household to eat home-cooked meals, even on the road.  We always get hotels or apartments with a kitchen, and I always pack either my Vita-Mix or my mini-food chopper. But I typically try to keep food prep very simple on the road!)

It really does make a difference to buy local produce in terms of taste, freshness, etc. (not to mention the carbon footprint!), and of course San Francisco’s health food stores are chock full of insanely beautiful organic produce grown just a handful of miles away in the California sun. So my household was fed particularly well last week, and it was a good thing!

The good doctor at Whole Foods

On another note, it was exciting to see one of the newest additions to the displays at Whole Foods — Dr. Fuhrman’s ANDI scores. These scores are the Aggregate Nutrient Density Index of the individual foods, with kale and collards on top with a score of 1000 as the most nutrient-dense and therefore healthiest foods, and pretzels coming in at a low, low 13, and lots of others in between. (Most colorful veggies are over 200, for example.)

I know that this scoring system can appear a bit tedious, particularly if you’re new to nutrient-dense eating, and I don’t follow it rigidly myself so long as my household sticks mainly to plant-based whole foods and eats plenty of beans and greens. For my own needs and what I recommend for the vast majority of my clients, following a healthy lifestyle that’s sustainable and manageable in a busy life caring for kids means, among other things, NO calorie counting, no routine analyzing of ANDI scores (just doing so now and then to see if you’re getting in enough of the good stuff) and getting in touch with your appetite so that you don’t eat when you’re not physically hungry. If it adds stress to your life as a mom, it’s probably not a great idea, but at the same time, having a few handy “rules to live by” can free your mind up for the other important matters you have to deal with in your day.

But it’s nice to see that there are simple ways to calculate how healthful your meals are, and I know some of you out there really like having simple “numbered” guidelines to follow. Just keep in mind that ANDI scores aren’t the end-all, be-all of nutrition (and Dr. F says this himself to be sure). We do need healthy fat in our diet every single day, even though from an ANDI perspective, walnuts are a “mere” 34 — and yet they are full of healthy fatty acids that we need for brain health and more.

There’s a lot, no, a plethora of absolute and total junk floating around out there in the media and the world at large about nutrition. More junk than help, in fact. And much of what’s out there either caters to the idea of moderation (which only very rarely is “moderate” at all in our culture where highly processed foods are seen as the norm and folks like me who eat actual nourishment for our meals are the weird ones) and often tells you it’s fine to eat stuff I wouldn’t feed my worst enemy, or, even worse, the articles are geared to make you feel less bad for eating unhealthy foods but touted as featuring “facts on healthy eating.”

For the record, I for one don’t believe anyone should EVER feel bad for eating bad food because beating yourself up for eating poorly is just kicking you when you’re already down. Bad food = feeling bad and a body that’s at its less than ideal health, for certain, but I also know that for many women — I used to fall into this category! — you tend to view yourself as a bad person when you eat something less than optimal, and that often leads to emotional eating to compensate for the emotional pain, which feeds the cycle. It is a bad thing for your body to eat the junk, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by eating unhealthfully, but I think you’re a swell gal even if you eat M&Ms 3 meals a day. (But if that describes you and you’re overweight or dealing with pretty much any health problem, we should talk!)

As a curmudgeonly reader of all things related to nutrition, I’ve come to expect not to agree with most of what I read — not out of a sense of superiority, but because I sincerely wish it was more popular to just tell the truth — eat mainly plant-based whole foods, skip the processed stuff, and your waistline and your health will benefit. But just today I was pleasantly surprised and had to pass on what I found. It’s an excellent blog post from a physician (who appears to be an, ahem, lean green mama!) who shared a number of really important facts on healthy eating, namely on why you shouldn’t eat added salt.

One of the quotes I have to share with you even if you don’t take the time to read the full article:

A new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine used computer models to predict the effect of relatively small reductions in salt intake on Americans’ health and found that if everyone consumed half a teaspoon less salt per day, there would be between 54,000 and 99,000 fewer heart attacks each year, between 32,000 and 66,000 fewer strokes and between 44,000 and 92,000 fewer deaths. This small change could save from $10 billion to $24 billion in health care costs annually!

That alone is so powerful, and it’s just one killer reason to skip the salt!

Finding this post did my soul some good. :) It’s so hard to find good sources on nutrition, and I’m not in 100% agreement on everything the blogger above writes in this and her other articles, but I am very happy to see that there are others out there sharing REAL facts on healthy eating that can save your health and change your life so immensely for the better. We moms feed the world, and the more we incorporate these healthy habits into our lives, the healthier our whole families are — and the better we feel.

Other important facts on healthy eating to keep in mind regarding salt intake:

1. Most of us in the Western world consume far too much salt, and our tastes are accustomed to having the salt. That’s why when you eat something unsalted after eating lots of high-sodium foods, it tastes bland. But go a week or more without added salt in your diet, and you’ll find that natural, unsalted whole foods taste much more delicious than you remembered. It’s amazing how this works, and all it takes is a little time to put it into practice!

2. One of the best ways to put water weight gain to an end is avoid added sodium in your diet. Prior to changing my lifestyle now several years back, I wasn’t aware at all of how potent salt was or how much water weight I dealt with.  However, when I eliminated added salt from my diet, suddenly my rings were too big all the time (I’m talking before I lost a significant amount of weight!), and I never dealt with bloating again except on the rare occasions when I ate salty foods. Reducing or eliminating added salt is one of the easiest ways to lose a couple pounds that I know of very quickly and easily for most of us. Certainly, it’s not the same as losing bodyfat, but it is a good way to get the scales moving in the right direction so that you follow through long enough to lose more weight, which motivates you even further!

I’m always on the lookout for good references for facts on healthy eating that help you feel better, look better and get really, incredibly healthy (even to the point of being perky like me!) — so email me if you come across other resources your fellow LeanGreenMama readers may benefit from. I promise I’ll try to read with a kind, non-curmudgeonly eye. :)

“When Joel Fuhrman Speaks, the VIPs at Whole Foods Listen”

In case you don’t know Dr. Fuhrman yet, my favorites of his are:

Eat to Live: This is his basic program for healthy weight loss, with over 1,500 studies to back up his nutritional recommendations.

Eat for Health (2-book set): Here he outlines his ANDI and MANDI food scoring scales, which let you see how well you’re really eating and taking care of your health.

Disease-Proof Your Child: This is a really helpful reference for raising healthy children, complete with kid-friendly recipes.

Now, I’m the first to note that there’s more to healthy weight loss than knowing what to eat, but getting the nutritional side of things right certainly is a huge part of it, and Dr. F’s nutritional guidelines changed my life and the life of everyone in my family — and they’re what I recommend to the women I coach too because eating this way impacts your health and weight so powerfully. I’m thrilled that big influencers in the corporate world are finally beginning to see the incredible promise of nutrient-dense eating from Dr. Fuhrman; it’s the best way to care for your body and get thin and fabulous to boot!