Category Archives: Lifestyle

Picture Perfect…or not

I received a Christmas card this week from a dear friend and the picture was so beautiful it literally stopped me in my tracks. She and her husband and their two gorgeous little girls were perfectly arranged on a blanket, smiling into the camera, with a fence and a host of trees in full autumn glory behind them. I sat with that card for a good long while just loving them! Then, setting aside my twinge of envy, I decided to send her an email telling her how beautiful they all were and what a lovely picture they’d taken which they’d be sure to treasure for years.


She responded with this.
Subject: It’s a farce!

“Perfect picture – Ha!  The funny part is our 4 year old was completely misbehaving, the 1 year old cried almost the entire time and my husband and I were both VERY frustrated.  The photographer somehow got a few good pics and I was ready for Moe’s and a margarita afterward to calm down a bit! Anyway…thanks!”
I loved how honest she was with me; the scene she described was exactly what I’ve experienced in photo sessions and it made me feel better to know I was not alone! She got a great result despite the chaos it took to get there, but I was only viewing the end result.

How often do we do this to ourselves? We judge our own chaotic process against everyone else’s picture-perfect result. It’s crazy-making. How much kinder it would be if we’d all own up to the days when the kitchen isn’t clean or the laundry isn’t done or the workout never happened or the lunch wasn’t so healthy. Our friends might realize they are not alone…and maybe we’d all be just a little more gentle with ourselves, especially during this incredibly busy season. 

Try it. Own up to the little imperfections in your own life. Let someone peek behind the curtain of your own “perfect picture” – the honesty just may be a relief to you both.
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A Thanksgiving Mindset

This Thursday most of us will find our way to the homes of family and friends (or they to ours). We will roast turkeys and mash potatoes and ladle gravy and pour wine and slice pies. We will toast to our blessings. We will reminisce. 

Thanksgiving comes with high expectations of a Norman Rockwell meal around a perfect table with a perfect meal and a perfect family. It can be riddled with challenges when those expectations aren’t quite met. It’s also a holiday almost entirely about food, which makes it my very favorite holiday, but poses challenges of its own. For some of us, family conflicts, absent loved ones, and opportunities to overindulge at every turn can be a recipe for a very stressful day. Ideally, though, Thanksgiving is a day for simple abundance and for counting our blessings. 

I’m often asked for tips to avoid diet disaster at Thanksgiving and I do, of course, have some. But the most important thing to me is to preserve a Thanksgiving mindset. To be thankful. To set aside the conflicts, competitions, and long-standing grudges and simply to be with whomever you’ve chosen to be with on this special day.You are blessed. This is a day to honor that.

If you’re still itching for those practical tips, here are just a few:

1) Eat the things you dream about all year.
No one will tell you that stuffing is health food, but how many times a year do you actually EAT stuffing? So enjoy it’s annual appearance on the Thanksgiving table and savor every morsel. Skip the things that you eat routinely (dinner rolls, perhaps) in favor of the special dishes.

2) Remember, it’s just dinner!
Exercise a little portion control; build a dinner plate instead of a mashed potato mountain and you’ll leave the table feeling pleasantly satisfied, rather than dealing with impending food coma. 

3) When it comes to dessert, have a bite.
Be choosy about desserts – have a bite or two of your favorites but save the slice of super-colossal-triple-decadent-whatever cake for a day when you haven’t just eaten Thanksgiving dinner. Ending a meal with something sweet is delightful; and the first few bites are always the best.

4) Find the “uppers.”
Spend your time on Thursday with the people who lift you up and make you feel great! Avoid the people who bring you down or make you feel small. You know who they are – so seek out the uppers and invest your time with them. It’s a day for feeling good; don’t complicate this. Emotional stress will just make you want to eat more.

5) Move it.
Just because it’s Thanksgiving doesn’t mean you have to sit all day. Find a local 5K or 10K to run (Cincinnati readers: the Cincinnati Thanksgiving Day Race is a GREAT one and you can register on race day at Paul Brown Stadium.) or go for a walk before the day swings into motion. Or, organize a post-dinner walk or game of touch football. You’ll return refreshed, energized, and ready for planning your day of Black Friday shopping! 


So with those few tips and a commitment to preserve a positive Thanksgiving mindset, may you have a delightful and truly satisfying holiday!

This entry was posted in All blog posts, Food, Lifestyle and tagged , on by .

Mix it Up

Today is my 10 year wedding anniversary (!) and to celebrate, my husband and I went to Asheville, NC earlier this week for a brief getaway. It was, as you might expect, completely delightful.  We did things we can’t often do with our three small children, like sleep in, linger in bookstores, have uninterrupted conversations, savor long dinners, sip cocktails, watch the sunset over the mountains, and work out without a baby monitor in the room! It was an escape from the ordinary. It’s so easy to get into a rut at home where we barely notice each other;  getting away always helps us remember why we’re married in the first place!

While in Asheville, we stayed at the amazing Grove Park Inn (where we also stayed right after we got married ten years and three children ago). The sports club at the Inn offers a daily roster of exercise classes, and the 8AM BodySculpt class fell at just the right time for us. However, we’d never actually taken a BodySculpt class before. No matter, we thought. This will be fun!  And it was! It was also an incredibly challenging workout, complete with about 4 million pushups which are by FAR my least favorite exercise in the world. We left that class sweaty, exhausted, invigorated, and laughing together about the whole experience.

But here’s a little secret. Several years ago, I would not have even considered taking this class. And what a shame that would have been! See, I used to be a one-trick pony when it came to exercise. I ran. Period. For years and years that was my only form of real exercise. Sure, it burned calories, but if I’m completely honest with myself, it wasn’t as effective as I would have liked.

Nevertheless, I carried on with my disciplined running routine until my knees begged me to mix in some days on the elliptical trainer. Quite by accident, I discovered the magic of interval training on that no-impact cardio machine. Better results in less time – yay! I didn’t realize it yet, but I’d begun my journey toward a far less monotonous and far more effective exercise habit.

Then, several years ago, I took another step on that journey when I attended a seminar at the Human Performance Institute and re-learned how important strength training was for overall fitness. After that course, I began strength training with free weights and bands in our little home gym and started to see muscles I didn’t know I had!

After my second child, I took up Pilates and absolutely fell in love with it – the core-focused moves delivered fast results and I loved working out on the reformer (even if it looked scary at first!). More recently, I’ve started to dabble in yoga…and I’m loving that too, especially the Hot Vinyasa Flow Power Yoga class I’ve been taking. I’ve even put myself through two phases so far of the super-challenging P90X videos of infomercial fame.

Have I given up running? Not a chance. I love it and it’s still my favorite form of cardio workout. But I’ve learned how much fun it is to MIX IT UP when it comes to exercise. Doing the same thing every day is easy and comfortable but it just doesn’t deliver the same kind of results that a variety of exercises can. And mixing it up keeps my brain fresh too; the weeks fly by without falling into a monotonous drone.

Exercise is something you’ll hopefully be doing for the rest of your life. So mix it up! Try that new exercise video, take a new class, run a new route. Push yourself out of any rut you may have settled into. Escape the ordinary. 

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