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Diet & Exercise or Wellness? Where to focus to get the best results.

Published: · Last Modified: by · This post may contain affiliate links

I think about this a lot in the context of this blog.  While we all want to be healthier and live better lives, when you get down to brass tacks, for most of my readers that translate to weight loss.  So when I write about home workouts or share a healthy recipe, I’m always thinking about how this will help you get what you want - better health and a leaner physique.

best results from diet, exercise or wellness?

But here’s the thing - if I limit the conversation to diet and exercise, then I’m doing you a huge disservice.  For even though both are critical to good health and weight loss, they alone will not give you the great health and figure you’re going after, especially as you get older, as your hormones change and you enter the most demanding years of your life.  Worse yet, I find that fitness professionals tend to over-index on these things, constantly driving their clients to eat cleaner and cleaner while exercising more and more.  Sometimes that works but other times it doesn’t.

So why is that?  What else do women over 35 need to focus on to be healthy and lean?

While there are a number of health markers you can improve, the four main areas that will give you the best bang for your healthy buck in addition to diet and exercise are sleep hygiene and stress management/happiness (<-let’s call this SMH for short).  I lump stress management and happiness together because we can do all the things to manage our stress and still live a life that’s devoid of any joy, which can cause even more stress.

Why are sleep and stress management/happiness so important?  Not only do they play a key role in managing hormones (which is a HUGE part of maintaining a healthy weight), they also impact gut health, mental health, and longevity.  Interestingly, sleep and stress management/happiness also influence diet and exercise.  When you’re stressed out, you’re more likely to eat poorly.  When you’re under-slept you crave junk food and have zero energy to workout.  These four markers are incredibly interrelated but also independently have the most influence over your health and weight.

So now you might be thinkings - oh great, now I’ve got two more massive undertakings I need to control in order to be lean and healthy, meanwhile, I’m barely making any progress in the first two areas.  I give up!

Not at all. Perfection is not the goal here. Balance is.  Think about these 4 areas (diet, exercise, sleep and stress management/happiness) as your health levers to work with and accept that at any given time none of them will be perfect and some will have to compensate for others based on what’s going on in your life.

Here are some examples of how this works:

  • You have a newborn baby (congrats!) and guess what - sleep is not an option.  You’re up every two hours to feed and you’re a walking zombie.  So what do you do when your sleep lever is out of whack?  Dial up the levers you can control, like your nutrition and maybe even a long walk outside every day which covers exercise and stress management.  Hopefully, happiness is covered because, hello, you’ve got a baby!
  • What if you’re at a stressful job and working crazy hours?  No time for workouts, so what can you do?  Dial in your nutrition by getting your groceries delivered or hitting up the Whole Foods salad bar after work every night and making 7 to 8 hours of sleep a non-negotiable.
  • Say you’re traveling on vacation and you want to enjoy the local food and not worry about eating healthy.  No problem!  Enjoy your food and just make sure you’re staying active (walking counts), getting plenty of sleep and enjoying the experience of being unplugged from your life back home so your SMH levels are elevated.  You might even find that your desire to over-indulge is gone because you’re so happy and chill from all the great rest you’re getting on vaykay.

You see?  It’s not about being perfect at all. the. things., it’s about understanding what the right balance of healthy habits is going to best serve you based on what you’re going through in your life (good or bad).

exercise, diet or wellness to get best results?

My Own Journey to Wellness Over Weight Loss

In truth, I still struggle with this but I’m getting better.  Being healthy is my highest priority because I lost both my parents to cancer way too early.  In fact, longevity is not prevalent on either side of my family, so I work really hard at being healthy.  But, I’m also very susceptible to all the messages we receive about how perfect women should look all the time, so I also stress about my weight. Even as I get close to 50, I still care about looking good in a pair of skinny jeans.  Maybe I’ll eventually mature out of that streak of vanity, but for now, that’s just how it is.
Given this, I’ve always over-indexed on fitness and diet.  When my clothes get tighter I immediately start to “stress and obsess” about my weight, which immediately pulls my SMH lever way down.  I overcompensate by working out harder and more often which makes me hungrier, so diet becomes a struggle too.  Then suddenly, my levers start looking like this…..
Fortunately, sleep is something I have always had good habits and control around.

But as I’ve let this idea of holistic wellness roll around in my brain, I start to see evidence of how powerful it is.  I think back to the times I was the leanest and it's generally when my wellness was most in balance.

Also, at the risk of being captain obvious, focusing on wellness rather than obsessing over calories eaten and burned keeps your attention on appreciating life more.  When we think of “the good life”, we don’t think about 6-pack abs, we think about happiness and a sense of peace.  These things don’t come from counting macros or doing fasted cardio, they come from being in a good mood, handling the stress life throws at you like a champ and being mentally and physically strong.  So much of this is driven by sleep and SMH, so it’s so important that we don’t underestimate how much they impact our quality of life (as well as our waistlines).

How to Change Your Focus to Wellness

I think awareness is the first step here, and hopefully, I’ve gotten you that far in this article.  How you implement your next steps depends on where your individual needs.  Take stock of your sleep, stress, happiness as well as your diet and movement.  Where do you need to start focusing more attention?  If you’ve been struggling on the diet front, why not practice good sleep hygiene for a while and see if that doesn’t help with cravings and hunger (it will).  Maybe you need to take a hard look at your stress and happiness levels and make changes there first.  Everyone will be different, but the common element across all situations is that perfection is not the goal - it’s balance.

Next Steps

Want a great resource for digging deeper into this idea?  I loved this book.  It's packed with actionable steps and scientific evidence that taking a balanced, realistic approach to each of these areas of wellness is far more effective than trying to be perfect at one or two.

Enjoy, good luck and let me know if you have questions!
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