Ep 153 Are You Too Busy Being Healthy to Enjoy Your Life?

What if your health was never meant to be the main event of your life, but the thing that makes your life possible?

Carly shares a Wonder Walk that turned into sea shanties, a pirate ship tour and a local play, none of it planned, and what it revealed about availability. Then a client story about the chocolate eaten in the car before walking through the front door, and what happened when the food noise finally quietened.

A gentle content note: this episode touches on a difficult relationship with food, including restriction and overeating. Nothing graphic, discussed sensitively.

If you'd like some help finding your next step, that's exactly what the Embodied Strength Profile is for. 

Unhurried time together, one connected picture, and a next step you can trust rather than a list of everything you should be doing. 

In person at Still Space Hull or online, wherever you are Enquire HERE.

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📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
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Transcript

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0:47

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence. I'm Carly, your curious midlife guide and founder of Still Space Hull, and I'm joining you today with episode 153. Just a small heads-up before we start, later in the episode today, I'm going to share a client's story that touches on a bit of a difficult relationship with food, including some periods of restriction and overeating. Nothing graphic, and of course, I'm holding all this sensitively. But if that's tender for you right now, please take care of yourself, and feel free to come back to this episode another time. Okay. I want to start this episode today talking to you about a walk I took recently. So this week I went on one of my wonder walks. And if you're new here, a wonder walk is a slow, intentional walk that we take in the area around Hull, where my studio is, and the whole point is not to get anywhere particular or achieve anything, but we just take that time to notice. And something that people are often surprised by is I tend to walk the same route, more or less the same one every time, which sounds like it kind of defeats the object, doesn't it? Surely a walk about noticing should maybe take us somewhere new. But that's kind of my point, because it was never about finding new things, but more about noticing what's already there. And when the scenery stops becoming the novelty, you can start to see things differently. The same route shows up differently every single time, and that's been my experience so far and those that have joined me. But we can notice different lights, different weather, maybe a different version of you. The same corner you've turned 100 times has something in it that maybe you've never even registered before. So that's what I set off to do this week, the usual route, no particular agenda. And what actually happened was, well, it was interesting. We, uh, saw many things as we usually do, lovely flowers, bits of grass, the odd little insect or two, and we also walked straight into a bit of a sea shanty demonstration, which I had no idea was going on. And we were then invited to go below deck on a pirate ship, and we were given a lovely tour, which was not at all how I'd expected the morning to go. And then we bumped into some friends and ending up staying to watch a local play, which was being performed. None of that was planned either. I've never done that before on a wonder walk, and definitely not something that I was looking for. So walking home afterwards, I found myself thinking about why did all of that happen because, well, it wasn't exactly luck, maybe a bit of a synchronicity, but it certainly wasn't because I'd gone hunting to try and make the day more interesting. Ultimately, all of this happened because I was available. I wasn't rushing anywhere. I wasn't running a list in my head. I wasn't trying to keep to an exact time. I wasn't so busy getting to the end of the walk that I couldn't stop for a pirate ship. My attention wasn't spoken for, and because of that, when life offered something, I had the capacity to say yes to it. And of course, those that had joined me on the walk also decided to join me too. And I think this is a much more useful idea than that first sounds to be fair. Because so often I think when life feels flat or small or a bit beige, we can sometimes assume the answer is to go and find something new, a change of scene, a big trip, something novel, maybe another holiday. But yeah, sometimes it is the hunt, and of course, variety is the spice of life and all of that. But often, I think so many of the interesting things are already there. The sea shanties are happening. There's friends around perhaps. There's a random play on, and we just walk past it because our attention is entirely spoken for by something else. You know, the shopping list, the things to do at work, the conversation we've just had. But when we look at availability, that's not something you just go and get. It's what's left over when your attention isn't already consumed So this is where it connects with the work that I do, and it's been coming up a lot with clients lately, to be fair, particularly around food and their strength training. So people come to me quite often wanting to lose weight or get stronger or sort their energy out, and those are real and very valid goals. They have big impacts on the lives of the people that are coming to me. But when we sit with it properly and get underneath it all, what almost everybody is actually describing is something a little bit different. Essentially, one of my clients said that they don't want to live meal to meal. They don't want their whole focus consumed by what they can eat, or whether they can train, or whether they have the energy to say yes to something that they want to do. They want food to nourish them, they want the training to support their body, and they want both of these things to just tick along quietly in the background like that little hum you barely notice, so that the actual main events can be their actual life. So that's what they want, not to be completely excellent at health, although sometimes they start off feeling that way. But what they really want underneath it all is to be available for their life, and I think that's a really important reframe. I think that makes a big difference because it changes what success even looks like. If your health is the main event, taking up all your thinking and all your energy, then even when it's going well, it's costing you the very thing that you wanted it for So let me tell you about one of the women that I've worked with who kindly gave me permission to share this with the details kept private as always and of course. So when she came to me, her whole life was consumed by food, not in an obvious way that anyone around her would've noticed, but she moved through periods of overeating, then intense restriction, then back to overeating again. And in between all that was the thoughts. She would find herself constantly distracted by thoughts of food while she was trying to be with the children, while she was trying to work And that one detail that she shared with me that's really stayed with me ever since. She used to find herself almost longing for her drive home because that was the bit of the day where she could sit in the car and eat the chocolate and the crisps on her own before she went into her family It was like a little piece of time just for her, something just for her in her life that she was giving away, you know, everything else to everyone else essentially. And I share that because I think a lot of people will recognize something in that, and hardly anyone ever talks about that. Yeah, that private moment in the car, the processing of the whole day with a chocolate bar before you walk through the door and become who everyone else needs you to be So yeah, we did the work, and I wanna be honest about what that work actually was, 'cause it wasn't a meal plan. So yes, we stayed grounded in the nutrition basics, those foundations. They matter. They still exist. But most of it was relationship work, her relationship with food, and underneath that, her relationship with herself. And yes, we used breathwork, too, to help her connect with what she really valued and what she genuinely wanted, and of course, to support her regulation in the moments where she'd otherwise have been swept away or perhaps struggled to muster some of the courage for some of those boundaries that she needed to learn to put in place to make all of this possible. But crucially, we worked out how to hold these nutrition basics whilst adapting to the actual nuance of her real life, which is what moved her out of that exhausting on-again, off-again mentality But the thing I would really love you to notice about this is more about how the story ends, because the wins aren't always what you'd expect. One of her biggest moments was going to a children's party and being able to be fully present with her child. Actually there, not running a silent, constant debate in her head about whether or not she should eat a biscuit or whether she could allow herself a slice of cake. She could eat some ice cream while watching a film and without that constant argument, you know, the one where, "Should I stop now?" or, "Have I already ruined it, so may as well finish the tub?" And that argument simply stopped needing to happen. And this is the bit that, you know, gets me half most of the time. She went for a promotion at work and, and got it, because she was handling work differently. Those things that happen in a day that she used to carry home with her or try to process in the car with a chocolate bar, became things she could just be present with in the moment. You know, they didn't need carrying home anymore, and so with that extra capacity, she chose to do something else with that. So just think about what actually happened there. The, the food noise quietened, and all that energy, all those arguments she'd been having with herself all day, every day, you know, eventually, you know, not suddenly, but eventually, they freed up, they loosened off, and it went back into her life. Into being present with her children, into socializing, into resting, into the career that she valued. Her life opened up not because she found more time or because she went looking for something new, but because her attention was no longer entirely spoken for by everybody else and all of those internal battles that she was fighting. And there's one more thing as well that I think, has really supported her here, and that's that we connected her to her values. She understood what she actually wanted rather than just chasing an old number from years ago, which meant she wasn't driving her body towards a place that it was never gonna be a healthy place for her in the first place. So I'm saying this gently here because realistically, you know, for some people, a difficult relationship with food needs proper clinical support alongside any coaching. And yes, as a qualified dietician, I can support in, with this. But I do like to have a multidisciplinary team alongside as well. And so if this extra support is needed, you know, there is absolutely no shame in that. And if any of this is sounding a bit close to home to you, then please do reach out to someone that can help. And if you're not sure who that is, feel free to reach out to me. And if I'm not that person, I can certainly signpost you. So as we start to wrap up, something I would like for you to take from today, your health is not supposed to be the main event of your life. It's supposed to be the thing that makes your life possible. When it's working well, it gets to hum along in the background. You eat in a way that nourishes you, you move in a way that supports your body, and then you get to get on with the actual business of living. Which for me, I believe, is the point of all of it. And when it's like that, you get to be available. You've got the capacity to notice what's in front of you, to be present at the party, to say yes to the odd pirate ship to genuinely be there in the conversation rather than half somewhere else running a calculation about what you ate for lunch Because surprises are out there and they get to be good. The sea shanties are happening, but you have to have enough attention spare to notice them and enough capacity to say yes So here's a question for you to sit with this week, should you wish to. What would you like to be available for? And not what you need to fix or what would you like to have the capacity for, but what's the life that's waiting for you on the other side of all that noise? And if part of what's taking up your attention right now is simply not knowing which step to take, if you're spread thinly across too many options and stuck in that awful indecision space about where to even begin, then that's exactly what my Embodied Strength Profile is for, So with the Embodied Strength Profile, we spend some proper unhurried times together joining the dots across food, across movement, across your breath, and how that all fits together and how it fits into your life so that you can leave knowing your next step and knowing it's the right one for you, Which means when it is time for taking action, you get to take that step with conviction, with compassion, rather than bracing and looking over your shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it gives you somewhere to return to, a center, especially for when life throws those curve balls So if you'd like to join me in that, we can do this in person at Still Space Hull or online wherever you are. You can find all the details at stillspacehull.com and in the show notes. So until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember, you already have everything you need