Health Benefits

Improves: Cardiovascular function, blood glucose regulation, dyslipidemia (high cholesterol), and HDL cholesterol.

Reduces:  Blood pressure, risk of certain cancers, mortality rate, medications, dementia risk, pain, depression

Knowing How Much Physical Activity Is Enough 

General health benefit: Moderate aerobic exercise 150 min/week

Prevention of weight gain: 150-250 minutes per week

Stay out of calories in calories out mentality.  Stay out of weight loss thinking with exercise.  We can’t exercise our way out of an unhealthy diet.  

Write Your Own Exercise Prescription

According to the 2018 PA Guidelines for Americans, 80% of US adults and adolescents are insufficiently active.  

By Sunday of this week, you will be able to write your own Exercise prescription made up of the CORE Components: FITTE

1. Frequency
2. Intensity
3. Time
4. Type
5. Enjoyment

Physical Activity and Energy Expenditure

What is Energy Expenditure?  The amount of energy a person needs to carry out a physical function is known as energy expenditure.  

Energy expenditure is made up of resting metabolic rate (energy expended at rest), physical activity, and dietary thermogenesis (our energy from food). The biggest difference in energy expenditure among individuals is physical activity.  There are different ways to measure energy expenditure.

A rule of thumb breakdown formula for components of total energy expenditure:

70% resting metabolic rate + 20% physical activity + 10% diet-induced thermogenesis = TEE 

Energy Expenditure Definitions:

EAT (Exercise Activity Thermogenesis): Planned, structured and repetitive physical activity with the goal to improve health.

NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis):  Not all physical activity is exercise.  Did you know that not all Physical Activity is Exercise:  NEAT (Non- Exercise Activity Thermogenesis): includes common daily activities such as walking, standing, and climbing stairs and can result in up to 150-500 kcal/day of energy expenditure per day. 

Get started with low or no-impact activities and make modifications as needed; Balance training; and Strength training

Work in rest days to restore.  Your body may need days off to heal and rejuvenate.  Listen to your body.  There’s no timeline or summit.  It’s just daily intentional practice and showing up for yourself.  Practice self-compassion and don’t mobilize that inner critic, self-judging shaming, negative self-talk when you need to take a break.  Set realistic goals for yourself.  Create self-trust.  Remember, you are worthy of your health goals.  You can’t hate yourself to a weight goal or a fitness goal.  

Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge Week 5 Plan

Movement Monday: Your body was made to move!  7- day FITTE challenge.  What’s your why?  Don’t make it about calories in calories out.  Stay out of all or nothing thinking.  Stay out of waiting for motivation to come to you.  All movement counts. You are an exerciser.   

• Physical Activity History (remember your past self is only your thoughts about your past self):
• Success and/or failure (it’s all learning) of previous physical activity/exercise efforts
• If no longer doing routine physical activity/exercise regimen:
• When? Date of change
• What? Cause of change
• Why? Identify barriers to re-engagement
• Current physical activity?
• Current fitness level, endurance capacity, and mobility?
• Access to locations for increased physical activity/exercise (e.g. gym, workplace, exercise facilities, bike paths and walkways or trails, urban or rural home setting)?
• Actual and perceived barriers to increased physical activity? 

Tracking Tuesday:  Know yourself.  Accountability partner needed?  Don’t count calories burned unless you are already doing this or if you have managed your mind.  Are you working towards a goal like walking a marathon a week?  Getting your steps in on the daily? Create self-trust by documenting the evidence that you are moving! 

Tracking Progress: 

• Daily activity logs (written or electronic)
• Pedometer/accelerometer logs
• Dynamic training metrics (miles run, laps swum, etc.)
• Resistance training metrics (i.e., muscle-circumference measurements, reps, sets, etc.)
• Percent body fat measurements 

Wednesday Wisdom:  Let’s nerd out.  What’s your target heart rate?  Check your resting heart rate which is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you’re at rest.  A good time to check is in the morning.  

Your maximum HR is about 220 minus your age.  

AHA (American Heart Association) has a table that shows Target HR zone during moderate intensity activities is around 50-70% of your maximum HR.  So, for a 20 year-old your Target Heart Rate is 100-170.  If you are just starting out, aim for the lower range of your target heart zone (50 percent) and gradually build up.  

Thursday Thoughts:  Time for a Thursday belief upgrade? There’s nothing going wrong if you are uncomfortable when you are exercising.  You can take a break when you need to. Practice self-compassion.  Don’t make it mean anything about you or start believing what your brain will be offering up, thoughts like, “See, you are not meant for this!” I put this in quotes because this is an actual quote from my inner critic.   

A belief is a powerful thought on a loop in your brain that you most likely haven’t challenged.  Remember, thoughts are optional and you are not your thoughts.  Same with beliefs.  My beliefs about myself and fitness? Now, do a belief upgrade.  Here’s an example of a belief upgrade I worked on with my fitness coach.  

1.) I’m not an athlete.  Upgrade: My body was created to move.  I am an active person.  

Friday Fitness Fun:  Try something new and challenge yourself. You won’t know unless you try.  You may love it.  You get to choose what is fun for you.  Find a friend and try new things.  You can keep it simple like a new walking route, going to a new park, trying Zumba or boxing.  

Saturday Success:  Increase your NEAT! Let’s focus on activities around your house and yard and running errands.  Make sure you are moving throughout the day.  What’s NEAT? It’s Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Not all physical activity is exercise.  NEAT is energy expenditure not typically considered physical exercise (standing, walking, stair climbing, fidgeting, cleaning, singing, and other activities or daily living).  Increase your NEAT: Take stairs instead of elevators; park further from a destination, monitor number of steps per day with a pedometer. 

Sunday Strategy:  Write your own FITTE Exercise Prescription:

IME Community Exercise Rx:

 

Aerobic Activity 

 

Type: Walk Jog Swim Bike Elliptical 

 

Frequency (days/week):   1 2 3 4 5 6 7

 

Intensity: Light Moderate Vigorous

 

Time (minutes/day): 10 20 30 45 60

 

Make It Fun:  Music Buddy   Dance Class_______

 

Strength Training:

• Do muscle strengthening exercises of moderate intensity at least two days per week
• Not all activities require going to a gym.  You can use resistance bands or do body-weight exercises (e.g., push-ups, lunges, planks, squats, jumping jacks as you are able).
  

NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Time):

• Park farther away from entrances.
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator/escalator.
• Stand instead of sit.
• Set a steps/day goal:___________
• Other:  ______________________________________________

 

Signature of Commitment: Dr. Karla/______________________________

 

Get ready to feel your emotions for week 5 of the reverse your insulin resistance challenge!

Watch the Video Replay

Up Next: Week 5 – Social Media Weight Stigma and Friend Drama

Previous: Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge Table of Contents

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Why Do We Overeat?

Week 3: Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

Week 4: How Much Physical Activity Is Enough?

Week 5: Social Media Friend Drama

Week 6: Get to Your Natural Weight Set Point

Week 7: Your Metabolic Health

Week 8: Positive Body Image

Week 9: Diffusing Low Carb Confusion

Week 10: Self Love Superpower

Week 11: Stress Less, Sleep More

Week 12: Final Challenge – You Are Lovable, Always

We all know, way too well, what urges and cravings are.  We all have them, especially when we try to strike a balance with our eating.  Coping with food cravings is something very achievable. Any change can make us have increased urges and cravings.  It’s like I remember wanting to chew my left arm off or bite someone’s head off as I was making changes with my eating.  That’s because I had been giving so much power for so long to the urges.  The good news is, even though I still have urges and cravings, I have learned how to allow urges instead of buffering all my emotions with food. 

When we have an urge or craving, there’s nothing going wrong.  Just take things super slow and create self-awareness.  Be curious.  Let me help you get unstuck from the urges and cravings.  I know, especially with pandemic weight gain and then being home during the summer, that there’s a lot of mindless eating and snacking.  Again, nothing going wrong.  Let’s talk about how you can create a healthier way forward and get some freedom from urges, cravings, stress eating and buffering with emotional eating. 

How to Get Started Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

We’re going to focus on how to allow urges and I’ll tell you right now, you are not broken.  We are all in the same boat when it comes to urges and cravings. It’s truly a process of learning and creating self-awareness and when you know that urges and cravings don’t go away, but you have the skills to allow them and be in the moment of feeling the emotions that are coming up, that lead us to buffering with food, then that’s all you need.  

It’s not like a switch.  It’s like a dissipation or a process.  Remember, progress not perfection.  Perfect doesn’t exist.  Perfection is a lie.  It’s a waste of our time and our lives to pursue it. 

Our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our actions or behaviors.  Urges are feelings created by our thoughts.  I look at urges as habit thoughts that create what we perceive as negative or painful feelings.  

Urges and cravings are also habituated or conditioned pathways in our brain.  It’s brain science.  We have a ton of added sugar to our foods and we get an immediate dopamine zing when we eat a sugary food.  It’s a short-term false pleasure.  

The Science Behind Food Cravings

Ready for more science?  Most likely, you have a thought that is permissive or judging or shaming yourself when an urge comes up.  Again, I am the Queen, probably the King of both types of thoughts.  No shame.  Just learning.  

So, a permissive thought is one that’s like, “I deserve this.  I’ve worked hard all day.  It’s been a really stressful day. I’ve earned eating this.”  

A shaming thought is one that’s like, “Might as well eat this because I never stick with anything. It doesn’t matter. Screw it!” 

Believe me, I have lived and continue to live this.  I’ve been talking about learning to feel our emotions, in a way that we respond by recognizing, creating a pause and then a shift, instead of reacting, avoiding or resisting our natural human emotions.  We haven’t been taught this skill in our families or our society.  In fact, we’ve been taught the opposite, to suppress, not talk about, and to buffer our emotions with food, social media, online shopping, overworking, perfectionism.  All the things.

When a natural human emotion comes up that we sense is negative, we believe something is wrong and we need to fix it.  What better way to get out of what we believe is a negative emotion and pain than getting a quick dopamine zing from sugary food?  

There Is No Shame in Having Food Cravings and Urges

No shame here.  It’s just learning.  I’m the Queen of buffering and emotional reactivity.  That’s been the amazing power of showing up every day to learn the life coaching skills that help me to be more intentional about allowing all of my human emotions which helps me to allow urges and not go to food for a quick sugary fix.  

Remember, self-love superpower, so lots of self-compassion.  Our brains are conditioned by the food we have in our society and a lack of vulnerability in feeling our emotions.  I’m not saying we have to be all Kumbaya and sit around singing and holding hands. This isn’t wacky.  I promise.  

Take Back Your Power

So, what is buffering? This is the definition from the Life Coach School which is where I trained.  Buffering is when we use external things to change how we feel emotionally. We buffer when we don’t want to experience any type of emotion.  Our brains are wired to seek pleasure and avoid discomfort and keep us in the status quo and we are constantly bombarded with ways to feel pleasure.  

The more power we give to these pathways in our brain, the more powerful the pathways become.  What we focus on, we create more of.  

Children and teens have been seen as commodities for food companies, so it makes sense that we are stuck in this pleasure seeking, emotion avoidant, buffering with foods that don’t serve us, society.  

We become entitled to feeling happy and pleasure all the time.  But, the truth of life is that we aren’t happy or feeling pleasure all the time.  In fact, these are short term false rewards or pleasures and life can be way better without false pleasures and by creating true pleasures and showing up as our true self for our true lives.  

The Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge: Week 3

Ready for Week 3 of the Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge?  Let’s go!

Monday Motivation:  What are the ways you buffer?  Food, social media, shopping, sleeping, procrastination?  All of the above? 

What are the negative consequences of buffering in your life? Poor health, weight gain, not achieving your goals, not getting the grade you want, feeling a lot of negativity? 

How will you manage your urges to give in to buffering? Start recognizing when you have an urge and think about stimulus control and contingency management that I talked about last week.  You can create an environment and a plan to help decrease your urges and cravings that lead you to buffering.  

Tuesday Tracking:  What times of day do you have urges and cravings and tend to buffer with food?  Write it down.  What are some of the trigger foods for you that once you start eating them you get in kind of a fog?  It’s okay.  You can learn to eat those in moderation. 

Get foods on your plan that serve you if you are hungry and have an urge, craving or desire to buffer.

Wednesday Wisdom:  After you allow about 100 urges, the urges will start to dissipate. Allowing an urge means feeling your emotions that are coming up instead of looking to an external source like food to fix your feelings.  Since buffering with food is what you do to avoid pain, when you stop buffering, you will feel pain.  The emotion is still there even when you buffer with food.  You can handle it.  You can learn the skill to allow your human emotions.  

I really like the book, “LiveWired” by David Eagleman a neuroscientist, researcher and writer at Stanford.  It’s so interesting.  His research shows that our brains are malleable and adaptable if we challenge our brains.  What we focus on we create more of.  Keep giving all your power away to urges, you will keep buffering and stay stuck!  Start challenging your brain and start allowing your emotions and you will be well on your way to break the cycle! You can unstuck (is this a word) your brain! So cool and nerdy!

Thursday Thoughts: What emotions are you attempting to avoid when you buffer?

What are your thoughts that cause your emotions you are trying to avoid when you buffer? Take some time and get curious. You are creating self-awareness.  You are not your thoughts and thoughts are optional.  

Friday Fun: Can you shift to other thoughts that serve you?  How can you enjoy food, keep it simple, and have an exciting life?  What are you doing for fun this weekend?  Focus on what’s fun instead of what is a short-term pleasure like a sugary dopamine zing.

Saturday Success:  Get an urge jar that creates evidence for yourself that you are figuring this out.  Only count the positives.  Put a bead or marble or $1 in every time you allow an urge instead of buffering.  Now, how will you celebrate your wins?  Of course, I’m going to suggest not using food as your main way to celebrate. 

Sunday Strategy:    What are the ways that you showed up as your Future Self this week?  What did you learn about yourself? Spend some time asking yourself these important questions: What are your true pleasures in life?  What’s meaningful?  If you’re a teen, maybe you don’t know yet, so you get to figure this out.  So fun!

Watch the Video Replay

Up Next: Week 4 – How Much Physical Activity Is Enough?

Previous: Week 2 – Why Do We Overeat?

Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge Table of Contents

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Why Do We Overeat?

Week 3: Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

Week 4: How Much Physical Activity Is Enough?

Week 5: Social Media Friend Drama

Week 6: Get to Your Natural Weight Set Point

Week 7: Your Metabolic Health

Week 8: Positive Body Image

Week 9: Diffusing Low Carb Confusion

Week 10: Self Love Superpower

Week 11: Stress Less, Sleep More

Week 12: Final Challenge – You Are Lovable, Always

Welcome to Week 2 of the Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge (RYIR challenge).

The focus for Week 2 is to stop overeating and the power of choice. It’s all about individual autonomy. Sounds redundant!

Everyone asks me and I get a lot of emails and requests for coaching for adults. I get to help everyone with reversing insulin resistance and reaching health goals on TikTok and IG, but coaching teens is my favorite. It’s why I started IME Community and it’s my dream and vision. So, if you’re a teen 12 to 18 or a parent of a teen, check out IME Community and Join the Community to get life and weight coaching for teens, on Zoom with me! It’s only $24.95 per month.

I also coach parents to help support your teen’s health independence.

Here’s Where You Are Now

If you’ve done week 1 of the Reverse Your Insulin Challenge, awesome, and if you are getting started now, then, great. You can catch up easily. I would encourage you to get do Week 1 of the challenge because it sets the stage for a lot of the important goal slaying!

Ready for week 2?

I’ve got your back this week. We are going to learn why we overeat, how to stop overeating, and level up with food with the power of choice.

We all come in different shapes and sizes. Let’s celebrate that. What a boring world we would be living in if we bought into our society’s messed up external standards. For many of us, we want to create a healthier and more fun life for ourselves.

Why We Overeat

We have to take a look at the root causes of overeating. One of the simplest ways I’ve heard we are overweight is because we overeat.

That sounds so simple and we’re talking reversing insulin resistance which is more complex. To say we are overweight because we overeat is kind of like the old calories in calories out mentality that I keep encouraging us to stay away from.

There is so much cool science behind hunger and appetite and the hormones and neurotransmitters that keep our bodies at our current weight set point. That doesn’t mean we’re stuck. Genetics, including what we’re learning about epigenetics, our environment, and behavior all contribute to our health.

But, the reality is we do overeat and overeating is one of the contributors to weight gain. Everyone overeats sometimes. There’s no shame in it. I’ve really had so much desire to overeat in my life. I still have it at times.

There are many factors that contribute to why we are overweight. We are not cause-and-effect machines. I’m going to talk about how to get to the root cause of our overeating and ask that you create some self-discovery and self-awareness, which is the most powerful thing ever we could do.

So why do we overeat? We overeat because we have over-desire. I did a few TikTok videos on this and specifically on what I think are the top three reasons we over-desire food. I want you to spend some time on this because I had many more than three reasons, but I picked out what I believe are all of our top three reasons.

Why do we over-desire food?

We are conditioned to over-desire and overeat food because of the added sugars in our foods and beverages and all of the marketing. This is brain science. Please have grace and compassion for yourself.
We haven’t been taught the skill or given permission to allow or feel our emotions. Instead, we are taught there is something wrong and we fix or numb out with food.

We are stuck in fixed and limited diet culture and thinking which drives a restriction and indulgence cycle and creates over-desire for foods our society tells us are “bad”.

One of the ways to get out of our over-desire for food that causes us to overeat is to recognize that you always have the power of choice. You get to own your power to make choices that serve you and your health goals. Individual autonomy means you are deciding for yourself and that means you are owning your choice.

In week 2, I’m going to help you level up with food choices and you always get to decide! Let’s go!

The Week 2 Reverse Your Insulin Challenge Daily Planner

Monday Motivation: I would love for you to enjoy food and eat food that serves your body and your health goals. This all starts with self-love, which I believe is the only superpower you need. Self-love starts with full or unconditional self-acceptance.

I would love for you to check out the IME 5 steps to full self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is always available to you. It doesn’t even take action. Just take your warm self-acceptance blanket and wrap it around yourself whenever you need it. Say to yourself, I fully love and accept myself. I accept that I am worthy of my healthy life. I accept I have the power to choose what I want!

• What are the reasons I overeat?
• What relationship do I want with food?
• On a scale of 0 to 10, how important is it for me to make changes in how I am eating?
• On a scale of 0 to 10, how confident am I that I can make changes in how I am eating?
• What’s in my way?

Tuesday Tracking: Today is when you level up (gamer talk) with the power of choice! Woot! Woot!

All levels are taking massive action. Where are you on your stage of change and what makes sense to you?

• Level up with mindful eating- hunger scale pre and post meals
• Plan one day ahead of time, gather data, simple eating guidelines
• Level up to crush your sugary beverage habit and drink more water- replace with the positive and create SMART goals
• Level up to healthful balanced meals where you keep it simple-transition to eating complex carbohydrates (like vegetables and whole grains) instead of simple sugary carbs that keep us in craving mode and increase insulin resistance. Make sure you are eating protein and healthy fat whenever you eat.
• Want to level up to trend low-carb? At this level, you are ready to remove flour and sugar and create a low-carb lifestyle. Keep it really simple and take out flour and sugar from what you usually eat for meals. Don’t overconsume recipes. Instead, just think of low-carb substitutions.

Wednesday Wisdom: What to expect? Your brain is going to tell you to eat sugary foods. That’s what happens when we are conditioned or habituated to eating sugary foods. There’s nothing wrong. It’s okay. It’s transitional.

You may feel more emotional or irritable because your body and brain are used to numbing out and getting dopamine zings. This is an opportunity to create self-awareness. Go at your own pace. No timeline or urgency. It’s all learning.

Research shows practicing stimulus control and contingency management is helpful to keep you on track. That may mean removing sugary drinks at home, driving a different route home instead of by the fast food restaurant you go through after work, or recognizing the time of day when urges and cravings come up for you, and creating a pause and practicing self-compassion instead of resisting the urge and white-knuckling through it. Create plans A through G for your eating. You are making decisions ahead of time that will keep you on track.

Thursday Thoughts: Keep up with your daily thought downloads where you do a brain dump. Start noticing your three top feelings of the day. It’s our thoughts that create our feelings. What are your thoughts that are creating the top three feelings of the day? You may be judging yourself. Start creating awareness of self-judging and shaming. We have to bring this into the light to disrupt it.

Friday Fun: Do you have an active gratitude practice? Every day, write down three things you are grateful for in the morning and three amazing things that happened today before you go to bed. Cultivating an active gratitude practice creates a joyfully abundant life. We have to be intentional with the practice.

Saturday Success: You are worthy of your health goals. Some people I coach want to create a cheat day on the weekends. They spend a lot of the week creating more over-desire for the sugary foods they eat on the weekend and then end up binging. I would encourage you not to do this. When you make a decision and like your reasons and love your choice and it fits into your why and your future self, you can love your decision, have self-integrity, and create evidence that you can trust yourself to keep promises you make for yourself.

Sunday Strategy: Rest, relaxation, self-care, connect with nature. To set yourself up for success for week 3, I want you to calendarize (yes, this is a verb) self-care. My husband asked me if I wanted to get a massage and I said, “No, I’m really not into those.” Self-care for me is getting outside, writing, getting some time alone, eating yummy food, taking a shower. What does self-care mean to you? Get it on the calendar for week three.

Watch the Video Replay

Up Next: Week 3 – Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

Previous: Week 1 – Introduction

Reverse Your Insulin Resistance Challenge Table of Contents

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Why Do We Overeat?

Week 3: Coping with Food Cravings and Urges

Week 4: How Much Physical Activity Is Enough?

Week 5: Social Media Friend Drama

Week 6: Get to Your Natural Weight Set Point

Week 7: Your Metabolic Health

Week 8: Positive Body Image

Week 9: Diffusing Low Carb Confusion

Week 10: Self Love Superpower

Week 11: Stress Less, Sleep More

Week 12: Final Challenge – You Are Lovable, Always