Creating awareness is key it comes improving your to health and fitness. Here are three simple approaches to understanding your body’s needs. Here are three simple approaches to understanding your body’s needs.
First let’s stick to what I mean about awareness in general. Here are three simple ways to approach awareness so you can begin understanding your body’s needs:
1. You must recognize what your body is asking for. This involves slowing down and listening.
Is your body tired?
Are you hungry?
Do you need more nourishment?
Do you need healthier food?
Do you need to relax?
Do you need to start lifting weights regularly?
Do you need so stretch and open up?
Do you need to move more?
Do you need to fix your digestion?
Do you have some health issues that need to be addressed?
Like I said, there’s so much, but before you can start, you need to listen and take an honest look at what you need.
So many clients come to me saying they just need a meal plan to follow. But in reality they can’t eat well for long because they aren’t sleeping enough. So the issue is a hormonal imbalance that causes excessive cravings.
It’s also not unheard of for me to work with someone who says they need more cardio to see muscle tone when in reality they aren’t fueling their bodies in a way that even allows for fat loss because their deficit is too high.
You’ve got to really listen and allow your body to tell you what it needs, and I know that’s hard. Over decades we have taught ourselves to lose trust with our intuition, but it’s there.. we just have to allow it to be the primary source of our thoughts and beliefs.
2. Once you’ve started listening, now it’s about understanding, and often times, that’s where I come in.
One of the greatest parts of my job is when I have a client come to me and she shares her experiences and I get to put a plan together based on what she needs. Here are a couple of examples…
I just had a client start with me with the goal of losing belly fat. Well we talked and she doesn’t have belly fat.. she is bloated. She informed me of the issues she was experiencing with chronic fatigue, eczema and digestion and realized there’s a chance she has leaky gut. Of course, she’s working with a medical professional to diagnose this, but in the meantime taking an autoimmune approach to her diet has been really helpful in alleviating symptoms.
Then there was another client I just started working with that gets really hungry and has dramatic cravings right before her period begins. Rather than white knuckling her way through them we actually had her increase her calories preemptively on those days, and now she makes healthy choices all day and eats in alignment with her goals, rather than having binges.
So yes, it’s important to recognize what we are feeling, but it’s only helpful when we understand what our body is asking for, then giving it that.
3. The final step is to now listen to your body after you make the changes.
If you were really hungry and you started eating more, how do you feel now?
If you thought you needed more cardio to get that visible muscle tone, but you actually began lifting, what are you experiencing now?
Or let’s say you were struggling with belly fat but you realized you’re more stressed than anything. So you started meditating every night and getting more sleep, how are you feeling since you made these changes?
To make things really simple, you’ve got to recognize what you’re body is asking for. You’ve got to listen for the messages. Then you need to understand what they mean, so you’ve gotta do a bit of translating, then of course respond. And finally, you’ve got to keep listening.
If things aren’t feeling better then maybe you’ve gotta go back to the drawing board.
It may sound like a lot, but until you have this level of awareness, everything else is just a band aid. When you create this awareness you can truly understand your body’s needs.
If you would like to improve your health and fitness, sign up for online personal training at KyraWilliamsFitness.com/signup.
Your Coach,
Kyra