Featured Video: This Is What Happens To Your Brain and Body When You Check Your Phone Before Bed

Most of us know we don't get enough sleep. We stay up too late, eat too much too late, and get sucked into screens when we should be turning them off. 

This 2 minute video from Dr. Dan Seigel at UCLA sums up the damage done when we don't shut everything down and prioritize sleep. On the list of many things that suffer: memory, focus, creativity, impulse control (DOUGHNUTS!), and insulin/metabolism.

In other words, you can be smarter, faster, stronger and slimmer if you turn your screens off an hour earlier every night - and the world will not stop spinning.

This Is What Happens To Your Brain and Body When You Check Your Phone Before Bed

Featured Article: Walk Hard. Walk Easy. Repeat.

I've been preaching the benefits of interval training to my clients for many years, and evidence has been steadily mounting that working with intervals is the most effective way to increase cardiovascular health and sustain long-term calorie burn. In other words, it can help you lose weight more easily and takes much less time than most of us spend at the gym when trying to drop pounds.

I get push back on this when people are afraid to run or push harder. They assume the difficult intervals must be punishing in order to be effective. We now know that this is not the case. Intervals can be effective when limited entirely to walking... slow, then fast, slow and fast again.

An article came out in the New York Times this week, Walk Hard. Walk Easy. Repeat. by Gretchen Reynolds, detailing the results of a study out of Japan by Dr. Hiroshi Nose. The study shows that walkers who stuck with gentle interval workouts achieved significantly "improved aerobic fitness, leg strength, and blood pressure readings."

Workouts don't have to hurt to be helpful, but they should be at least a little bit challenging if you want to see measurable health benefits. Just pick up the pace now and then. Take a walk!

Take a Load Off: Rising Above Weight Loss Mind Games

(The following article appeared in the Nashville Scene on January 15, 2015)

I've been a personal trainer for more than a decade, but I never felt the need to maintain a trainer's stereotypically muscle-bound physique. In fact, I carried a little extra weight around as a badge of honor, 20 subversive pounds that proved my commitment to quality of life over superficial concerns. That was my story, and I was sticking to it.

My clients didn't seem to care one way or another. They work and play too much, just like me, and we try to focus on health and balance over inches lost. But the "quality of life" I so proudly defended for myself wasn't the result of eating freely and joyfully with people I loved. Instead, it was the product of excessive midnight snacks that took the edge off my anxiety as I drifted off to sleep.

I felt heavy, not liberated, and as I sat in a wooden pew at my grandmother's funeral last summer, I took a hard look at how I wanted to feel walking around on planet Earth while I still had the chance. I didn't want to be weighed down anymore.

Physically, I knew what to do. Eat better. Move more. It doesn't take a Ph.D. But mentally and emotionally, sticking to that path — for real this time — was a comedy of errors, a pageant of psychological acrobatics. I decided to make a study of it, not only to document my progress, but to examine with surgical precision what had interrupted my weight-loss attempts in the past. I wanted to understand what forces were hijacking my own best efforts and those of my clients just when we were starting to make progress.

As the weight came off, the difference in how I felt physically was breathtaking, but I could have predicted that. What I didn't anticipate was how difficult it would be for my brain to adjust to living in this exhilarating yet unfamiliar new body. My confidence grew and collapsed unpredictably, leaving me constantly in search of stability, but the only stability I knew would involve regaining the weight.

When I lost the first five pounds, I began to feel out of sorts. I was awkward in conversation and prodded by nagging self-doubt, which didn't make sense. I should have felt great, but I had grown accustomed to my body being a certain way in the world — wearing clothes, sitting at my desk, walking to the hardware store. Just because I didn't like tugging at my waistband on a daily basis didn't mean I wasn't used to it. When we're used to something, it's decidedly weird to let it go. As my shape shifted, my identity came loose a bit, and it threw me.

I had to get OK with being awkward for a little while. I felt like a teenage girl growing into oversized boobs — uncomfortable, but hopeful that the payoff would be good. If I could recognize that my foibles were fleeting and not nearly as bad as I imagined them, I could avoid medicating my discomfort with food.

After hitting my goal weight and landing in a new body, I was haunted by a desire to look over my shoulder, as if the lost pounds were lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to rejoin me. It was victory punctuated by fear. I was terrified I'd be unable to hang onto the weight loss, and that fear brought with it the impulse to deprive myself of all things fun. After deprivation came rebellion and indulgence, echoes of the habits that kept me heavy in the first place.

When panic set in, instead of depriving or demeaning myself, I had to actively reach for the food and physical motion that had healed me months earlier. I had to identify which tangible actions reliably calmed my mind and strengthened my body.

Months after the weight was lost, periodically I would become convinced that I had gained it back. My clothes no longer felt effortlessly loose. The number on the scale was as low as ever, but I was still living in the same body. I had the same old lumps and bumps as always; they were just smaller.

Eventually, my new size stopped feeling otherworldly, magical, and came to feel just plain normal. That feeling of normalcy — which felt like a letdown — is actually a remarkable accomplishment. It means I redefined my comfort zone. The weight range where I feel "average" is now lower, which might seem mundane but is in fact extraordinary.

Even better than losing the weight, I found my way off of the psychological seesaw I'd been on for two decades, and I learned how to better help my clients do the same. Weight loss is a mind game more than a battle of the bulge. It should have been obvious to me that "success" would be a weird amalgam of awkwardness and triumph. It's been that way every other time I've succeeded at something new. Why should I expect weight loss to be any different? It feels nice to be at home in my own skin. And strange ... really, very strange.