Episode #128: How to Navigate Recovery During “Real” Life, Work, Travel, and Obligations

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair podcast, where today, as we approach the holidays, or as we are in full swing of the holidays, it can feel really frustrating to feel like we’re always starting over. If you’ve ever had that feeling, you’re going to love today’s episode. Let’s dive in.

First of all, I have had this feeling many times. I really felt it this summer because I feel like… Well, I don’t feel like. We actually were almost gone every other week or had some big thing going on every other week. I would get home and I would get back into my workout routine, and then we would be gone again. I would try to do things on the go, but it wasn’t my normal routine. It’s one thing to be in your normal routine, and then one week you’re on the go. Instead of doing your normal lifting, cardio combinations and recoveries and all of that, you’re just doing more walking or more whatever equipment or lack of equipment exercises that you can do. When you’re doing that almost every other week for the entire summer, by the end of the summer, I felt like everything that I had worked really hard on during the previous year, working with some specific trainers and things to work on some specific movements as well as some specific improvements of muscle strength, I felt like they had disappeared.

I felt really discouraged, but also felt very intrigued as, How can I do a better job in the future, not just with my exercise, but with my nutrition, with my sleep, with all the aspects of my PCOS and caring for my body, even when life seems to be throwing those curveballs or during travel or busy weeks or any of those things that throw us for a loop or even being sick. Now we’re heading into cold season or maybe you’re full into cold season and you’ve already had a cold a couple of times and all of a sudden, actually right now at the time of this recording, I’m just getting my voice back and having still some good post-cold reactive airway and coughing a lot and things like that and that can make it very difficult, especially in the cooler weather, to get out and do some cardio. Although I have found for myself that when I do, I feel like it actually expands my lungs and gets the oxygen flowing and helps. It can, in the short term, exacerbate the cough and slow down the healing of my voice recovering. Those are things where life gets in the way of all of the hard work that we’re doing for our healthy endeavors.

This can become a real mindset block because it can be hard enough to make these lifestyle changes as it is. It can be hard enough to get out and get exercising on a routine. Maybe that’s three days a week for you, maybe that’s seven days of something during the week. However that looks to you, if you are in a rhythm and that rhythm gets disrupted, it can be very frustrating. It can have a real mindset block to getting started again, especially when you see something else coming down your calendar that’s going to, again, disrupt it. As we head into the holidays, the week of thanksgiving can be very difficult, whether you’re traveling or you’re hosting or you’re thinking about all the food that’s going to derail your healthy eating. These are all ways that we can start thinking like, Oh, crap. I am going to be thrown off my routine this week, and everything that I’m working really hard is going to be difficult to continue and then right around the corner with Christmas, it’s like, well, why even try to drag myself back into my normal routine?

Here’s some things that I want to look at when we start thinking about these ways. First of all, here we’ve looked at all the different scenarios. It could be summer traveling, it could be cold season, it could be holidays, it could be busy seasons at work, so many different things that can stack on themselves to have us feel like life is creating a real block when it comes to our PCOS health. How do we handle that? Well, first of all, I like to think about my PCOS health as being in one of two phases. I’m either in a healing phase where I’m really focusing that energy on making this my time. This is going to be about me doing all the things to the best of my ability. I’m not aiming for perfection here. Perfection is never the goal because perfection is that thing that’s just out of reach. That’s not the goal, but the goal is to be as close to that as possible, to really aim for that. That’s when I feel like maybe my hormones are a little imbalanced. Maybe I feel like I’ve been low energy or I have a few pounds to lose or I have been off my normal routine over the summer and I need to spend a month diving back into and reestablishing my habits.

Just thinking there, I’m looking at, did I have a symptom that came up, fatigue week? Did I feel tired? Do I need to improve my energy? Do I feel like I’ve maybe been a little off my normal routine and a few pounds crept in? Because for me, at least with PCOS, if I am not diligent about that, that happens pretty easily for me. I can very easily and effortlessly manage my weight but if I start to indulge a little too much or take my focus away from my health, then those pounds will creep back in and so I may have 4, 5, 10 pounds that I need to lose after a couple of months of being a little less focused on my health and for me, that’s really important because maybe some of you have also seen this, I have a sticky point at which from this pound to this pound, like a five-pound range, and it varies based on my physical fitness because it varies a little bit based on my body composition but I do find that there is body composition range for me where my lifestyle becomes quite effortless and then there’s a range at which no matter what I do, it feels like nothing works.

And that’s being a little dramatic because it just means I need to be a little more strict. I need to really dive into that healing phase of my PCOS lifestyle and get that spiral going in the right direction but there is, for me, a really big indicator of how my health is doing based on my body composition, and that has to do with the fact that I have a very, very, very significant insulin effect root cause. Different people will find that to be a little different. The other one that we look at is the phase of lifestyle. This phase is where instead of the goal being aiming towards as close to perfection as possible, this phase is almost the opposite and not to be too cavalier or too tongue in cheek with this, you’re almost looking at this as, How much can I get away with? The reason for this is you’re trying to find that sweet spot of being able to actually enjoy your life while maintaining the health results that you want. We don’t want our cycle to suffer, we don’t want our fertility to suffer, we don’t want our body composition to suffer. We don’t want to undo all the hard work that we’ve done, we don’t want our energy to dip, we want to live in a place of thriving in our health, thriving in our body, thriving in our ability, and do it in a way where we get to enjoy all the things that we love with all of the events and activities and situations that we really love with a very healthy and clean mental mindset.

An example of that would be being able to go on vacation and not feel like you’re in diet mode, but also not kill your healthy lifestyle. In our minds, we’re not feeling deprived. In our minds, we’re not thinking in diet mode, but we’re also able to determine, Okay, how many drinks do I want to have on this vacation? How many times am I going to order dessert? How often am I going to get some exercise in? How am I going to do that in a way that feels really good and I feel really proud of myself? I’m also maintaining the health that I want to maintain, and I’m also not feeling overly chained to this health and fitness and nutrition that it’s getting in the way of me enjoying my vacation.

The difference on, say, that same vacation, if you were in more of a healing phase, is you would take the mindset of, this vacation fell during my healing phase. This is a phase where I go all in, I’m going to be going all in even while I’m on this vacation, you’re going to plan out on your vacation how you’re going to get your workouts in, how you’re going to eat, how you’re going to do things, you’re going to bring extra things in your suitcase that you can eat when the restaurant is not quite accommodating what you need, you’re not going to stay out super late, you’re going to do the things that your body needs for that healing phase, even while you’re on vacation with the mindset of there are other vacations to enjoy that type of vacation. Right now, I’m in my healing phase, and this is going to get me so much further down my PCOS health path that it’s totally worth being a little bit more strict on my vacation than I normally would. At some point, I will transition to my lifestyle phase and we’ll be good to go. When we have a shift between the two like that, it’s easier to know when we’re letting life derail you a little bit versus keep it really strict.

Also, when we feel like life is derailing us, that thought of I’m being derailed, what we really need to look at is, how come this is blocking me and how can I better work with the flow of my life? How do I need to adjust my workouts? Or how can I come up with What are some workouts that I could do on the go that would fit in with the ones that I do normally at home? What are some of the nutrition things that I could easily order out or pack with me or where I can buy the grocery store while I’m on the road? These are all ways of decreasing the impact that the Curve Balls of life have on our PCOS health.

Then with that, that’s the big picture of what we’re trying to do as we narrow in a little bit more, how do we actually do that? That’s where building the habits, stacking the habits, and creating organization of the habits for a healthy lifestyle really come into play. Building a habit is a step-by-step process. Baby steps one at a time, really narrowing in on one thing at a time is so beneficial.

If you listen to a podcast or you’re taking one of my programs and you realize, Oh, these are all the things I need to do to improve my PCOS health, and you try to do them all starting tomorrow, it’s going to feel overwhelming. Your life is going to feel like you turned your entire life upside down, and you’re not even going to recognize your day. You’re not going to recognize what you’re eating, you’re not going to recognize your bedtime, you’re not going to recognize all You thought you had so many hours in the day. It’s not going to feel like you have any of that because you’re rushing around trying to figure out these new habits that you’re trying to incorporate. If instead, you look at one new habit, maybe adding a certain amount of minutes of exercise into your day every day this week. Some of those days might be more of a recovery-based exercise, depending on how intense the other days are but those are all things that you work into your habits. You pick one habit, you create that habit once you have it a little bit established, so maybe a week or two in. Maybe you do that for a whole week and then you’re like, Okay, next week I’m also going to add, making sure that I’m drinking that extra bottle of water. I’m already drinking some water, I’m going to add that extra amount to top off my water consumption. Then you get that one underway, and then you can add another one. That’s both forming the habits, but then also stacking those habits. You’re doing it in a systemized way. If you start to feel like some of your first ones are beginning to crumble, you back off on adding more. Maybe you remove the last one that you added but the other part comes in organizing your habits. When we think about how we’re trying to accomplish all these new things, how do we set up our entire system so that it works? Do we have a specific bag that we put the things that we need in so we always know where they are? In the morning, when we’re trying to get out to the gym and then to work, we know where our bag is that we packed with our clothes, with our shoes, with any snacks that we needed, with our water bottle, with our headphones, and it all just goes right there. We know right where it is. We know right where to put the things back when we’re done. Perhaps we bought a second pair of headphones so that our ear buds that we use when we’re around the house aren’t missing somewhere or not charged. When we head to the gym, we have our equipment to have nothing get in our way to make an excuse to not go today.

Then I mentioned this one before, but having just go-to options for what you’re going to do, what your expectations are going to be when you’re on the go, and what resources you would have when you’re on the go. If there are restaurants that you take some time to just research the menu and come up with better options of how could you be in more of a healing phase and still go to that restaurant. You may use those resources even when you’re not in the healing phase, because even in your lifestyle phase, you’re still eating healthy. You’re picking more days where you’re allowed to indulge, but maybe you don’t want to indulge on a day that you’re going to a restaurant with a friend or you need to go for a work meeting or something like that, and to have those options at your disposal without having having to spend time in that moment.

In other words, work says you’re doing a lunch meeting, you’re going to this particular spot, or you’re meeting for an event here on a specific date, and you don’t have time to go through and research but you already have because you know your company uses that place frequently and so you know what you’re going to order, you know what they have available. Those are all ways that are really, really, really helpful to set you up for success and then the final one is just having a way that you return to your “normal”. So in your… This summer, if I had more quickly transitioned every time that we got home, instead of, Oh my gosh, the laundry is piled high. I’m going to do the laundry first, and then I will get to the exercise, or then I will go and make my lunch and all of a sudden, it’s like, Oh, wait, that didn’t happen because I put other things first that seemed daunting because I had just gotten home from a vacation. If If you have a way that you transition, maybe you don’t do the laundry the first day because the first day is more about getting back into your routine and then once you’re back into your routine, you do the other things that are part of your routine but you find your own rhythm on how do you transition back to your own normal as quickly as possible.

With that, I hope that helps you navigate both this busy holiday season as well as just all of those curveballs and honestly, oftentimes, wonderful parts of life, but how they can help to enrich your life as compared to throw you off your PCOS health path. With that, as always, I welcome your questions over on Instagram. You can find me @nourishedtohealthy. I’d love to continue the conversations over there. Until next time, bye for now.