Eat Like You Teach. Irene Pace, RD

on the planet). It’s about giving you every opportunity to actually live the real version of your happiest life. The version that includes moving through joy and bliss and dark and difficult, the version that includes happiness despite the ridiculous number of horrible things that happen in your life and everyone else’s all the time, from now until you die.

      As my mentor Angela Lauria so eloquently put it, “And that’s never ever going to change. No day in the future when it’s changing. There’s no amount of money, there’s no new husband, there’s no computer gadget. Fifty percent of being human is dealing with B.S. News flash.”

      An expectation of perpetual bliss creates additional, unnecessary struggle in a world that gives us enough. It gets in the way of being free to learn how to embrace and celebrate your normal life in all its mess and glory. Think about building your Owner’s Manual in the context of your real life, one that includes regular B.S. and stuff going sideways. If you build your Manual based on your perfect day – when all the stars align, the kids and dog and partner are happy, you hit all the green lights on the way to the office – you won’t be able to rely on it most of the time.

      Expect trade-offs and choose yours

      Getting back in alignment is a lot about trade-offs. Not trade-offs that others force you to make, trade-offs you get to make based on what matters most to you. Everything comes at the cost of something else: cost of time, opportunity cost because doing one thing means you are not doing something else. When you expect trade-offs, you give yourself the opportunity to be deliberate about choosing the trade-off you want to make. You get to choose to spend your energy and time in the places that matter most to you.

      When you allow yourself to expect to do all the things, you rob yourself of making that choice. When it comes to your health and fitness and nutrition, there are trade-offs just like everywhere else. Precision Nutrition created a fantastic infographic that shows different levels of leanness for Men and Women and gives guidelines about what it takes to get there. It’s titled The Cost of Getting Lean. Take a look:

       https://www.precisionnutrition.com/cost-of-getting-lean-infographic

      Based on this model, what would you have to do more of and what would you have to do less of based on where you want to be? It may be a sobering look at how your expectations align with the rest of your life. How much do you really want to focus on eating a specific way, and optimizing sleep and exercise as part of your life? What would you have to give up or trade-off in order to do that? Take a look and see where you are. There is no right or wrong answer; that’s the whole point. Take a look at the graphic, think about what level of fitness and leanness you want, and see if the steps needed to get there are in alignment with the other things that matter in your life right now.

      My goal in this book is to help you clear the path to health and nutrition alignment in your life. I can give you some clear and simple steps, but I can’t make them all easy even if I wanted to. You can change how your journey feels by practicing seeing and stepping into your reality and checking if the expectations you hold for yourself are helping you or hurting you. Build your Owner’s Manual based on the real life you are living now. Adjust your expectations to shrink the gap and tension between where you are and where you think you should be. Create a greater level of ownership and alignment by moving from external drivers and rules to internal values and guidelines around food and eating. Take action, and close that gap between what you know and what you do.

      Chapter 5:

      Get Curious - Awareness, Curiosity, and Compassion

      “To wonder is to begin to understand.”

      – José Ortega y Gasset

      After you’ve stepped into your reality and expectations, it’s time to pause and take a look around. Take stock of what life looks like for you. That look can bring you all kinds of valuable information that is essential for building your Owner’s Manual. Awareness and curiosity are key ingredients to make that happen. Self-compassion allows you to look with kindness versus judgment and therefore makes it more likely that you will look often and honestly. Honing these skills won’t happen all on its own; you’ve got to get deliberate about it. The good news is:

       •No matter where you are starting from, these skills can be built.

       •Big grand gestures are not needed. Small actions (whenever you can make them) make a difference.

       •It’s worth every ounce of effort you give it.

      Set Up Triggers To Practice

      Building a new skill of any kind requires that you do the behavior again and again and again – practice. Often the practice itself is not difficult but remembering to do it can be. That makes strategies and systems that prompt you to practice super valuable. Creating triggers to practice is a tool that has been instrumental in successful change for both my clients and me.

      By connecting your desired new practice with an event or action that already happens as part of your normal day, you create a trigger for the new action. The key is to pick a trigger that is specific and immediately actionable. Awareness, curiosity, and compassion can be practiced anywhere, anytime and need only take an instant, so there are endless opportunities to practice. Win!

      James Clear identifies five types of habit cues (or triggers): time, location, preceding event, emotional state, and other people (more here: https://jamesclear.com/habit-triggers