HHS-3 Bare Minimums

[00:00:00] Alright, let me guess. You started November with the best of intentions. You told yourself that you would stay on top of things this year. You’d eat your vegetables, get your steps in, maybe even get enough sleep, and then the holidays happened. Now you’re running on caffeine and leftover pie snapping at your partner and thinking if I can just make it through the next few weeks, then I can get it back on track.

Does that sound familiar? Now, here’s the problem with that. When you come to a dead stop, when you drop all the habits that make you feel good, it’s 10 times harder to get started again in January. But what if you didn’t have to? now in this third episode of the Holiday Health series on the podcast, I’m going to show you how to stay steady.

Even when life gets hectic by creating what I call your bare minimum holiday plan. Now, don’t worry. It’s not [00:01:00] another diet or detox. It’s the secret to enjoying the holidays without feeling like you’ve fallen off the wagon. If you’ve ever wished that there was a way to do the holidays differently with less guilt, more calm, and a lot more sanity, this episode is the way.

Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don’t have to fight with.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Total Health and Midlife Podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so super glad that you are here Now, I have been in the health space for about 20 years now, and I can’t tell you how many times I have seen. The same exact pattern play out around the holidays with all of my clients.

Across the board. A client will work hard all year long to build healthy habits. She’ll be feeling strong, maybe [00:02:00] even a little proud of herself, and then the holidays hit. Suddenly it’s like all of her progress gets washed away in a flood of late night stress cookies and chaos. And then by January she’s frustrated, exhausted, and back to square one.

And honestly, it used to break my heart because it’s not that she didn’t care or wasn’t committed, it’s that no one ever gave her a plan for this season of the year. The messy one where there are so many demands on your time. The busy one,

the one where you’re pulled in a million different directions and your health gets shoved onto the back burner. That’s why I created the holiday health series here on the podcast. I wanted to give you the tools and the mindset shifts that you need so that the holidays don’t derail you and your health.

I want you to have more peace, more calm, and more energy, and most importantly, I want you [00:03:00] to go into January feeling steady instead of desperate for a do-over. This episode is part three in the series, so you don’t need to listen to them in order. Each one stands on its own, but when you put them together, they build a foundation that makes this season just so much easier.

We started a couple weeks ago. We’ve got today’s episode, and then next week we’ll wrap it up with the final piece. So today we are talking about your bare minimum holiday plan. And now I know that sounds like a phrase that sounds a little weird because most of us have been taught that bare minimum is bad, right?

That we are slacking off by doing the bare minimum. But here’s the truth. When you’re in the thick of the holidays, when sleep is short, when emotions are high and the demands are endless, the bare minimum is exactly what will save you. Now I teach this topic from experience. I’ve been there. You probably have too, that stretch of [00:04:00] time where it feels like every minute of your day belongs to someone else.

You’re juggling work deadlines, grocery lists, travel plans, family text threads, and the mental catalog of who’s allergic to what. Which niece or nephew has a new trendy diet this year? It’s like your brain becomes a 47 tab browser window, and none of them are allowed to close until January. And so you tell yourself you’ll go for a walk tomorrow.

Or that next week you’ll get back to your normal meals or finally get to sleep in. You never really do catch up. You keep pushing because you think that you’re being proactive. like if you can just cross one more thing off your list, you will earn your rest.

What’s actually happening is this, you’re stealing from your future self. You actually think that you’re helping her by keeping things moving, by staying on top of it all. But the truth [00:05:00] is you’re not. You’re actually making her life harder because the version of you who wakes up tomorrow or next week is even more tired, more irritable.

Less able to problem solve or get creative when things go sideways. And she’s more likely to say, screw it when faced with the plate of cookies or the pile of laundry, and then the guilt starts to creep in. You think I know better? Why can’t I just stick with it? But it’s not about willpower, it’s about capacity.

You have simply run out of it during the holidays. That’s what the holidays do to so many of us, especially women. We carry this invisible load, the remembering, the preparing, the keeping everyone else happy part, and it’s no wonder we end up running on caffeine, sugar, and resentment. The irony is that all [00:06:00] of that pushing doesn’t actually save you time.

It just drains the energy that you’d need to do the things that would truly help. Like the walk, like the meal, the bedtime, and the pause, and sometimes taking a breath, doing something good for yourself will help you to actually be more productive later. You think that you’re helping by doing more now, but you’re not.

You’re just digging the hole a little deeper and the woman who has to climb out of it in January, she’s you. So you know that saying that bodies in motion stay in motion. It’s true in physics, and it’s true in health too. Now, I have a water rower that I use for cardio in my workouts. Sometimes I use it for interval training, alternating between higher and lower speeds.

Other times I use it as my cardio interval between [00:07:00] strength sets. Now here’s what’s interesting. When I’m using it between strength sets, the paddle stops moving while I’m lifting weights, and every time I sit back down, I have to start building momentum again from zero. It’s hard to get going again.

There’s all that resistance until the flywheel starts to catch. But when I’m doing those high and low intensity intervals, when the paddle keeps moving, I’ll be up more slowly. It’s so much easier to ramp back up to the speed. That’s exactly how our health habits work when we go all in during the spring and fall, when our schedules are more reliable.

Then we come to a complete stop during the summer and the holidays. When we stop moving, we stop planning, we stop caring for ourselves. It’s like that paddle is coming to a dead stop and starting again in January feels like slogging [00:08:00] through the mud. You’re out of routine. You’re trying to get the flywheel going from zero, and that’s the trap that so many of us fall into.

We think that we have to be good or not bother at all,

That’s perfectionism disguised as productivity. If we can’t do it perfectly, we can’t get to the gym or prep all of our meals or track every bite, then we may as well not do anything at all. Typically, when we make a plan for our health, we plan for ideal conditions. The holidays are not ideal conditions.

There are lots of demands from all different areas on our time and attention. So because we didn’t make a plan for non-ideal conditions, we don’t have the capacity to maintain those habits, and as a result, the habits fall off. But that all or nothing thinking is the [00:09:00] very reason we end up in the same place every single January.

Tired, frustrated, and promising that this year it’ll be different. Here’s the truth, something that you’ve probably never thought of before. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Now I have a framework. I call it the bare minimum framework.

It’s the middle road. That gentle, steady pace that keeps the flywheel of your health. Moving. You may not be going fast, but you’re maintaining momentum, and not only is that what makes it so much easier to pick up speed again when life calms down, but you’re also helping yourself to manage your stress better and maintain some semblance of routine during this chaotic time.

So let’s talk about what I mean when I’m talking about the bare minimums. Your bare minimums are the simple, easy to do, non-negotiable things that keep you grounded [00:10:00] when life is busy. The habits that stop you from sliding all the way back into the chaos, think of them as anchors. They don’t necessarily move you forward towards your goals.

But they keep you from drifting so far off course that it feels impossible to get back, and this is important. Your bare minimums are not punishment. They’re not strict rules. They’re not another checklist of shoulds that make you feel bad when you don’t do them. They’re certainly not mine or anyone else’s.

They are yours. They’re the things that feel so easy, so doable, that even on your worst day, you can still pull ’em off. Now for me, I have a few every morning before I drink coffee, I drink a glass of water, and then I do the same between cups of coffee. The same thing goes for wine. I drink water in [00:11:00] between each glass.

That one simple thing helps me to feel human. Second, I protect my bedtime like it is sacred. I don’t mess with my sleep. It’s the foundation of everything else, my mood, my cravings, my energy, and then third, every day for lunch, I have a big salad. It’s not glamorous, but it’s predictable and it keeps me feeling steady.

Now those are my bare minimums. Yours might look completely different, and that’s okay. Maybe for you, it’s a 10 minute walk around the block to clear your head between zoom calls or sitting quietly in the car for three minutes before you even go into the house after work. Maybe it’s adding one more vegetable to your dinner plate, or drinking two bottles of water a day.

It could even be something as small as doing one deep breath every time [00:12:00] you use the bathroom just to reconnect with your body. The point isn’t what you choose. The point is that you choose something that helps you to feel normal in your body, something that tells your brain, even when life is messy, I can still take care of myself in small ways.

When you start to see the bare minimums as acts of support of love from yourself to yourself and not discipline, it changes everything. Instead of feeling like you’ve fallen off, you realize that you’re still on the path. You’ve just shifted into a lower gear until the road evens out again. Here’s why that works.

When life gets chaotic and the holidays are the very definition of chaos, your brain craves rhythm, not control. Not perfection, but rhythm. The familiar [00:13:00] patterns that remind your body, Hey, we’re okay. We’ve got this. Air minimums give you that rhythm. They’re like a metronome in the background. Steady, reliable, keeping the beat while everything else around you speeds up or slows down, and you don’t need to track macros.

Follow a plan or force a routine that doesn’t fit this season of life. You just need something to come back to, and that’s the beauty of it. You’re no longer swinging between extremes. You’re not white knuckling your way through December, eating nothing but salad and chicken breasts to be good, right? And you’re not saying, well screw it either, and polishing off the peppermint bark because, well, it’s the holidays instead, you’re in the middle.

The grounded place, the place where you can enjoy the cookie and also drink your water where you can skip a [00:14:00] workout because you’re tired, but still take that walk after dinner. When you have your bare minimums in place, you stop abandoning yourself because that’s what most of us do. When we’re overwhelmed, we drop ourselves from the priority list.

We think I’ll get back to me later. But later, never magically appears either later just turns into more exhaustion, more guilt, more starting over from scratch. Your bare minimums are your safety net. They catch you when everything else starts to unravel. And here’s the reframe that I really want you to hold onto.

Lowering the bar doesn’t mean failure. It signals wisdom. It means that you are mature enough. To know that sustainability beats intensity every single time. It’s the awareness and the knowing of your own personal capacity. [00:15:00] So when you choose your bare minimums this season, don’t think of it as giving up.

Think of it as giving yourself the grace to stay in motion just at a pace that’s kind to you. And if you’re listening to all this and thinking, okay, Elizabeth, that sounds great, but I don’t even know where to start. I have something for you that will walk you through all of it. I created the feel good holiday playbook.

It’s the structure that brings all of this together in a step-by-step guide that helps you to decide what your bare minimums are, how to keep your rhythm through the season, and what to do when things inevitably go sideways, because let’s be honest. They will, they always do. Now, inside the playbook, I will walk you through how to make a plan that feels flexible and doable, not rigid or restrictive.

There are videos that help you to think things through, like, how [00:16:00] do I wanna feel come January 2nd, and what does good enough look like for me right now? And my clients who’ve used this framework, they’ve gone through the holidays feeling calm in control, and believe it or not, some of them have even lost weight, even though that was never the goal.

The point isn’t weight loss, it’s that they entered January feeling proud of how they handled themselves instead of starting the year feeling behind. The playbook gives you that same path so that you don’t have to keep white knuckling your way through December, hoping for the best. You’ll know what to do, when to do it, and how to recover when life inevitably happens.

Here’s what I want you to take away from today. You don’t have to choose between being the woman who white knuckles her way through December saying no to every cookie or glass of wine, or be the woman who throws up her hands and [00:17:00] says, screw it. I’m Shonda Rhimes and I’m doing the year of yes. I will start over in January.

There is a middle ground, and that middle ground is where your sanity lives. When you know your bare minimums, when you give yourself permission to do less, but stay connected, you stop the cycle of guilt, exhaustion, and regret. You start feeling like you are in charge again, not at the mercy of your calendar or your cravings.

So here’s my question for you. What would your holidays feel like if you gave yourself permission to find your bare minimums? What if you entered January? Not feeling behind, but proud because you handled the season with more grace and less chaos. Now if that sounds like the kind of December that you want, grab your copy of the Feel Good holiday playbook.

Go to elizabeth sherman.com/feel-good-playbook to get your copy. [00:18:00] It’s your guide to doing the holidays differently this year with more calm, with more confidence and more trust in yourself because you deserve to enjoy the season and feel good in your body while you do it. That’s all I have for you today.

Have an amazing week. Go grab your copy of the Feel Good Holiday Playbook by going to elizabeth sherman.com/feelgood-playbook and make sure that you tune in next week for the last installment of the Holiday Health series. That’s all I have for you. Bye-bye.

The holidays can bring up a lot old patterns, food, noise, stress, expectations. Look, I’m not here to tell you to skip the stuffing or say no to cookies, but if you want to feel good come January and not bloated, burned out, and full of regret, you are going to want the feel good holiday playbook if you’re craving something different this year, something that feels more intentional, more peaceful, [00:19:00] more you.

I want you to go check out the Feelgood Holiday playbook. It’s not a plan, it’s a lifeline. Get your copy at elizabeth sherman.com/feelgood-playbook and let’s make this season different.