One shift in my life that has made a tremendous difference in my PCOS healing journey is starting to recognize that I am creating reasons that are really just excuses for why I’m not taking the positive action that I know I need to take. So in today’s episode, we are going to dive into recognizing those reasons, reframing those reasons, acknowledging the excuse that we’re making so that we can start to embrace the journey that we need in order to see the improvement that we want in our PCOS. So with that, love to dive in.

You’re listening to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset, and our environment and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today I’m going to be dishing out a little bit of tough love that I give to myself on a daily basis. I know this is typically not a huge tough love person. I always feel a little cringey about giving tough love to people but the thing is, if I give this tough love to myself every day and I find it hugely valuable, I have to share it with you. With that, let’s go ahead and dive into understanding what do I even mean about reasons that are excuses in disguise.

How many times have we said things like, Oh, I don’t have time to exercise, or, I just am so busy, I don’t have time to cook. Now, those are really common ones that I hear, but let’s use them as examples. Now, these can be happening across the board. It can just be that you don’t like a certain type of exercise or you don’t like a certain food that you’ve heard you have to eat but whatever the case, when we tell ourselves these reasons, we almost, because we justified it to ourselves, think, Okay, now I’m off the hook because I don’t have time to exercise. Recently, I completed this mental toughness challenge, and my husband was telling me about it. He wanted to do it. He was dragging his feet about it. In a moment of insanity, I said, Well, let’s just do it together. It was basically committing for 75 days to exercise 45 minutes twice a day. One had to be outside, the other one could be inside or outside. I just completed this. I’m going to tell you it was amazing how creative I could get about getting two 45-minute exercise segments into my day. Every day for 75 days, I didn’t miss one day. This included days where I was traveling with my kids. This included days that we were on vacation. This included days where we were traveling, on airplanes and things and so how do you get 45 minutes in twice throughout the day? Now, I’m not saying that you need to get that much exercise in but my point is that when we tell ourselves this is my priority, we can usually figure out how to make it happen, even with just 24 hours in our day.

Now that I’m done with that, I am struggling again with the fact that I’m like, Oh, I have other things I need to be doing and, Oh, but maybe this is enough time to be doing to that but the thing is that I liked the transformation that I was beginning to see and the results that I was getting and I actually really loved how much energy I got from all of that good exercise and I paced myself. Some of them were yoga, some of them were walking. It wasn’t like I was just hitting it hard 45 minutes twice a day. I would have burned myself out but the point is that I want that result that I was getting, but even a few days after having created that habit for 75 days, I’m already coming up with reasons why, oh, well, today I’m going to fill in blank, excuses, excuses, excuses and so I’m having to right now give myself the tough love of saying, look, is this a priority to me or not? Because if this is a priority to me, then I need to make time for it. Now, this goes with things like, Oh, I can’t afford a certain health food, or I can’t do a certain exercise move, it’s too hard for me, I have an injury. Some of these things are actual reasons. I want to talk about that too, because sometimes we have an actual reason. Sometimes we just don’t feel good if we’re not eating carbohydrates. I’ve had clients I’ve worked with where their stomach starts to hurt if they’re not eating carbohydrates and the thing is that we’ve trained our body to work the way that we have taught it to eat and so if all of a sudden we drastically change things and it’s not working for us, that doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing for us necessarily.

Now, again, we have to look at every situation in a unique sense but we may need to go slower. We might need to make a small adjustment, get used to it, a small adjustment, get used to it, and slowly work our way towards where we want to be instead of jumping all the way there overnight. Maybe you have an old sports injury in one of your joints and certain workouts just are very difficult for you. Couple of things. When I was doing heavier and heavier lifting throughout this challenge that I was doing, I found that my left elbow was bothering me. I actually got some advice from someone who does a lot of really heavy weightlifting and trains people, and this is their thing. They’re not a PT, but they work really closely with a lot of PTs and do a lot of training of individuals and so he was able to suggest just some posture changes and how I was holding my weights and completely and totally took away the problem. Now, I noticed that the problem was still there. If I didn’t hold my weight the way I was supposed to, so it wasn’t like it healed my elbow completely, but with proper training, with proper posture, I was able to avoid aggravating a previous injury that I think I got when I was in high school playing tennis.

We need to sometimes think outside the box. So if we’re having a problem, it doesn’t necessarily mean just go, Oh, this isn’t for me. I can’t do this. It’d be great to have those results. In fact, I’m jealous of everyone that has those results, but I have this thing and I just can’t. So before we get to that point, what is it that is our hiccup and what are some ways we can address it? One way was get some professional advice. So I had a trainer help me. I didn’t train with him all the time. It was literally like a consult, a one time session to get some advice, and then I could go back to doing my individual training. But I now have a contact for if I need additional help, maybe if you’re completely new to training, like I’m not. I took the classes to be a fitness trainer back in college, so I’m not completely new to all of this but sometimes we can’t see on ourselves and someone else we could be like, Oh, your posture is a little off but we can’t see ourselves working out. Even in a mirror, we have a one-angled view. So getting someone else, especially if we have an injury or something’s bothering us and hurting, getting somebody else’s outside opinion.

Another option is to do a different exercise. You know, when you think about a muscle group, there are so many different ways that we can train a muscle group and so if one type of training is not working for you, there are many, many others to try, play around with them, explore. There’s definitely no only this will work way. If you’re not someone who enjoys doing core, there’s a lot of really great core stability type workouts, situps and crunches, they work our core, they create the stability that we need from our core, but they’re not just doing a bunch of typical ab workouts. As we identify some of these excuses and we begin to transform how we approach them, I think that it’s just so empowering. As much as it’s like a tough love, and this is why this is a tough love, where when I give this to myself every single day, when I start thinking like, oh, I can’t eat healthy tonight, I don’t have time to cook. Okay, well, I have a challenge now. I need to have a few recipes or a few, not even recipes, a few meal options that I can come up with and have on the table within five minutes of getting home from my kid’s soccer game and needing to have dinner on the table so I can get everybody to bed on time and still get homework done and get the day started the next day and we all have our own lives and our own things but we all have days like that where I have a five-minute window to put something healthy on the table and eat it. I need something that’s going to work for that.

For me, a lot of times, since I buy a rotisserie chicken, I buy things that are pretty much already ready, like bagged lettuce, a healthy dressing from Primal Kitchen, and maybe a couple of vegetables that are either already cut. I’ll buy the bag of already-cut carrots. You can buy either shredded carrots or they have these chip carrots that are my kids like because they have ridges on them. Sometimes I will cut a cucumber or an avocado. I have my favorite salad, olive, and you mix all that together. It’s a really nice dinner salad. It has the protein and everything, sometimes I’ll have a soup that I can throw together, sometimes it’s something that I can make ahead and freeze and have it on TimeBake but I think outside the box because when I realize the excuse of I don’t have time to cook a healthy dinner tonight, then I immediately, instead of saying, Oh, well, there’s just going to be nights that are like that because I have this reason because I have to be at this thing, I started to look at it like, Oh, there’s a challenge here. Challenge accepted. I am going to find a way to get a healthy dinner on the table when I only have five minutes.

Those are things where when we can transform that reason, or basically that excuse to disguise a reason, that we can create a solution for it. The better our health journey will go, the more confident we will feel about it, the more intentional and engaged we will be in it, which we talked about in previous episodes. When we are showing up with this can-do attitude, whether or not it all goes as planned is actually so secondary but having this can-do attitude of nothing’s going to stand in my way, I’m going to figure this out, that mindset shift is incredible and it will take you so far towards your goals and the results that you’re looking for with your PCOS and don’t forget, okay, this is a really important step, and it’s one that I typically forget. I’m really good at giving myself the tough love. I don’t always stop to celebrate the win of the success. I tend to just move on to the next challenge and when you figure out that recipe that helps you put dinner on the table in five minutes, when you figure out how to do the exercise move that you want to do, because weighted squats were really important to me, that was the one that was actually really bothering my elbow because holding weights up high on my shoulders was bothering my elbow and so I had my elbows pointed out too far, I needed to rotate them in. That made all the difference for my elbow. You may have your own issues with different exercises, but it allowed me to really increase and challenge myself with my weighted squats and that’s been a huge improvement in one of the really important workouts that I want to incorporate in my strength training. I need to stop and celebrate that win that now I have increased over the last couple of weeks, I’ve increased my weight that I’m squatting with by 10 pounds, which is a big deal. I need to celebrate that. I need to stop, recognize it, soak it in, be proud of myself, and remember it each and every time I do my leg workout. I’m going to take that one with me here from this episode but really, truly stop, celebrate those wins, acknowledge them to yourself, pat yourself on the back. Remember when things get tough that you have the ability to transform those reasons and excuses into a solution so that you’re able to continue marching along on your health journey to your PCOS goals and this allows you to help stay consistent, because I think so many times we make these excuses of time, of time to cook, time to work out, time to get enough sleep, time to drink enough water, time to all the things. It’s really easy to stop and start, stop and start, stop and start and when we start to address these excuses that we are making up, we’re so much more likely to stay consistent, and consistency ultimately wins out. Perfection does not. Perfection just trips us up every time but when we can stay consistent with pretty good, that’s when we’re going to start to see the results.

As we wrap up today, I hope that this tough love has helped you to break free from some of the limiting beliefs, and you’ll have your own. Take a few minutes, think about what limiting beliefs, what excuses and reasons you are coming up with in your life that are keeping you stuck. I would love to hear from you in my direct messages over on Instagram, you can find me @Nourishedtohealthy. I would love to hear what are some of the excuses and reasons that you are going to let go of, even better if you share what is a solution is and I can’t wait to hear from you over there.

If you found this episode helpful, I hope you hit the Subscribe button so that you get notified each and every week when a new episode of PCOS Health becomes available and until next time, I can’t wait to hear from you in my DMs. And bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.