This September, go EASY

Picture this: your alarm goes off before the sun rises. You hustle through the morning, preparing every detail for the day while guzzling caffeine and responding to the dings on your phone. You head to work, where you are bombarded with stress, don’t take time for lunch, and sit all day. After work, you hop in your car and head to more commitments, grab dinner out, and settle in at home with a glass of wine while responding to emails and doom scrolling, before turning in for the night to do it all over again.

Maybe bits and pieces of this scenario sound familiar?

It’s the American way.

Hustle, multitask, over-do, under-sleep, overeat, under-nourish, hustle some more, etc…

And often, when we decide that all of this has us feeling out of whack mentally and physically, we decide to “get healthy.” And believe me, the “wellness” industry is ready and waiting to hand us quick fixes. So, we look to things like diets that leave out entire macros, workouts that demand high intensity, and less sleep to fit it all in.

But we crave rest. We crave balance. Our body systems still don’t feel good or function properly.

Our bodies are wise and those cravings of rest and balance point to a better way. Do you know that to truly thrive, your body ACTUALLY needs REST? It needs sleep and moments of peace to reset itself. It needs regular meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables, lean protein, and greens. It needs short, gentle movements. These things create feelings of safety in the body. And when the body feels safe, it can focus on the behind the scenes work of things like digestion , detoxification, and healing instead of ignoring those things in a hyper vigilant state.

The constant hustle of day to day life combined with overfed yet undernourished and overworked bodies, leaves us diseased, short fused, and EXHAUSTED.

It’s not just you.

Story time:

I used to work as a health educator for a medically supervised weight management program. It was a prescribed diet that was quite restrictive and FULL of artificial sweeteners, food dyes, and processed foods. When a patient wasn’t losing weight, we (the behavioral and medical team) assumed the client was being “noncompliant.” That is, they must have been sneaking other foods not “on diet.”

I cringe today. Not only at the recommended foods and the way the disrupt hormones causing more weight gain and worse things like cancer, but at the way we had no idea how interconnected all the body systems were. When the nervous system is dysregulated (stress, trauma, etc), the endocrine system that controls all hormones (hunger, stress , sex and sleep hormones), is also dysregulated. Those things lead to deficiencies, unintentional weight gain and loss, poor sleep, inflammation, and disease. And we assumed patients were just not telling the truth. I wish I could take it back.

Our patients were not only dealing with the stress of life, but the diet itself and ESPECIALLY the intense workouts many of them did, were stressing their bodies to the point that cortisol (stress hormone) was out of whack. Out of control cortisol = all body systems out of control. The body thinks there is danger when the cortisol is high. Their bodies were imbalanced and were holding onto weight to protect themselves. Our bodies respond to the way they are treated.

We are the sickest, most stressed out nation on the planet earth and I, for one, think it’s time we slow down. Well rested bodies with managed stress WORK BETTER. They FEEL BETTER. Let’s treat out bodies better so they respond better.

We know that life is stressful enough, and that it’s important that our bodies are able to cope with that stress. So, our routines simply cannot put more of a load on the nervous system.

Thus, we created September Easy. 30 Days to better habits that support regulation.

Each day you will:

1. Drink 64 ounces of water

2. Rest for 8 hours

3. Take 30 minutes to do one thing YOU WANT to do

4. Say no to at least on thing you DON'T WANT to do

5. Eat regular, nourishing meals - no skipping!

6. Take 5 minutes to do yoga (deep breaths, meditation, and stretching in bed all count)

7. Move your body in a way that feels good

8. Do the self care tip of the week (texted and emailed every Thursday morning)

Bonus if you come to the studio and take a class as your 30 minutes of movement, because you get to put a sticker by your name every time you do all the things. And we found out last year that grown ups REALLY love sticker charts!

Everyone who completes the month gets a $10 Jax credit and the person with the most stickers gets $100 Jax credit!

This is TOTALLY FREE. What do you have to lose besides maybe a little stress? Are you in???

Sign up here: https://share.fitdegree.com/?share=630cd78e813af