https://youtu.be/6hVYAbTGKkY

You know that feeling when winter seems to drag on forever and you’re just tired all the time. Like the kind of tired that even making a nice healthy meal in the evening feels overwhelming. I get it. And that’s exactly why I’m creating the Spring Reset Challenge. It’s going to be a four week journey that’s about to change how you show up for yourself this season. Because here’s the thing, this isn’t another restrictive program that leaves you feeling depleted. Instead, we’re focusing on what your body actually needs right now in the thick of winter. Think about it. What if you could wake up feeling energized instead of dragging yourself out of bed? What if meal prep became something you actually looked forward to? Okay, maybe you don’t have to look forward to, but you did it and your family eats it. And what if your workouts leave you feeling stronger instead of exhausted? The Spring Reset Challenge is gonna bring everything together that you need right now. Strength training that fits your life. Yep, even from your living room.

Simple meal plans that won’t have you cooking three different dinners in the evening and the exact guidance you need to balance those hormones that have been making you feel not quite like yourself. And here’s the best part, everything’s designed to slide right into your busy life. The workouts on your phone, the recipes right to your inbox and the support, it’s there when you need it without overwhelming you with another complicated system to learn. So make sure to head to the show notes and sign up for the spring challenge today.

You get to start the challenge as soon as you join.

Hey guys, welcome to this week’s episode where we’re gonna talk about the winter slump. And you just heard me talk about the spring reset challenge. And so now in this episode, I’m gonna go a little bit deeper into why we feel the way we do at this time of year and what we’re gonna do instead or what you can do instead from this episode. Because I don’t know about you, but I look outside the window and I see another gray day. Or perhaps I even go outside and the air hurts my face.

And my bed calls my name louder than ever before, especially when I’m supposed to get out of my warm bed and into the cold to go work out. Or when I’m staring at a salad and my mind is screaming, just make some mac and cheese. Yeah, we’re deep into the winter slump and it has us feeling like we’re moving through molasses. And it also feels like time is like molasses right now because it’s like we’ve been in winter forever and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.

So in today’s episode, we’re gonna dive deep into why you’re feeling this way and what you can actually do about it. We’re gonna explore some of the science as to why winter’s impact on your body and the hormones leave you feeling the way that you do. And then also I wanna talk about dehydration, which might be secretly sabotaging your energy and triggering those sugar cravings. And I’m gonna share why progress might feel slow right now, but why it’s completely normal. So make sure to grab your nice warm tea and get cozy and let’s turn this winter slump into an opportunity for understanding your body and making some actual progress, even when we don’t want to. So the winter slump, it feels like it’s been cold forever. And it also feels like it’s going to be cold forever at this time of year. I really struggle in February and March with just the winter slump, the winter blues. I wouldn’t say I have seasonal depression per se, it’s just that I just don’t like it. I don’t like winter, I don’t like to be cold, I want to be outside, I want to feel the sun on my skin. And it’s in South Dakota where I live, it’s going to be a while before that happens and I want it right now. And so when we are in this like just like the muck of winter, it can just feel like we don’t have any motivation. We don’t want to do anything that is good for us.

We don’t want to do anything that actually feels hard to do in the beginning because just the day-to-day experience, all of that already feels hard. And we also start to let things slip, like things that worked really well before, we start to kind of let that slip through our fingers because when day-to-day life feels hard and mucky because of the intense cold and because of the lack of sunshine and being outdoors, We tend to start seeking a lot of dopamine in order to feel good. And that also looks like letting the hard stuff that you do upfront in order for a reward later. like meal prepping when you don’t want to do it, getting up and doing your workout when you don’t want to do it, those kinds of things, they start to slip because then we start to look for dopamine through day-to-day things. So I can speak for myself that one of the ways I know I’m in a dopamine seeking behavior is that I will skip my morning walk. Usually I get up right away and I go straight down to my treadmill and I do my 30 minute walk. But if I am in a very deep dopamine seeking behavior, I skip my walk and I have my coffee first. And I know that this is not in my best interest because once I sit down to have my coffee in the morning, no matter what time it is, I tend to sit there for way too long. And then I push off one thing and then another thing, and then I’m just moving very slow all morning. Whereas if I can get up and I get my walk in, and then I have my coffee, I’m just so much more productive and efficient in the mornings and I get the things done that needs to be done. The other thing is, besides letting things slip, is that we tend to get sick at this time of year, not only ourselves, but also our kids. And so when we get sick, we have to take time off from you know, preparing foods, we have to take time off from the gym or our workouts and from work. Then we get behind on work and then we have to go back to work and we have to catch up on what we were behind on because we were sick. And that leaves the less time and energy for the day to day things you were doing before. So meal prepping and getting your workout in. And then also when we tend to take extended breaks, that were intentional or not intentional, it feels like a big hill to walk up when we just need to go for that initial workout back. really start to make it be a bigger thing than what it’s going to be. We talk to ourselves and we’re like, it’s gonna be so much harder, because I haven’t been to the gym in the week.

Maybe, you know, if you had a respiratory infection, it’s still kind of hard to breathe. And so we tend to talk ourselves out of it for longer than what we really should be. Because once your energy is back, you want to get right back into your workouts.

And then the same thing with your kids getting sick, right? You have to stay home from work or you’re a lot busier taking care of them. Other things kind of fall to the wayside. I know when my kids are sick or my little one is sick now, my 16 year old doesn’t really need me to cuddle with him anymore. But my eight year old wants me to cuddle when he’s sick. And so I end up spending a lot of time on the couch, which I…

is good, you know, that’s time that I will always want to, that’s time well invested in my book. But then other things don’t get done that maybe need to be done. So maybe it’s work, I’ve rescheduled meetings.

Maybe I have, you know, skipped making dinner and we’re just gonna, everyone fends for themselves because I’m busy taking care of the other kid, whatever it is, right? So we just tend to get behind on our day-to-day things. And then when we get back into it, now it feels like, I’ve got to catch up. And so we still delay making the healthy food.

getting our workouts in, and then we make it out to be a bigger deal than what it really is when we finally get back into it or when we try to get back into it. And so we just really delay things. We make them take longer than what they need to take. We also lack sunlight at this time of year. Obviously, we’re not spending time outdoors because the air hurts our face. And the air hurts our face a lot today. As I’m recording this, I think it’s negative 18 outside. And this is like.

I don’t know, day number five of the negatives and I’m just over it. But you know, I’m not getting a whole lot of sunlight besides the sun that maybe comes through my window when I’m working or when I’m taking my puppy out to potty 35 times a day. But trust me, we are outside and then we come right back in. There’s not a whole lot of vitamin D that’s accessing my skin because I’m bundled up like an Eskimo.

And we also, so we lack the sunlight. It’s the daylight is a lot shorter this time of year, although we’re getting more daylight. So that’s exciting. I noticed when we were sitting down for dinner the other day that the sun was still up. So we’re making progress. It’s coming, spring is coming, but we’re still in the thick of it, right? And so we also start to, when we have a lack of sunlight exposure, we have a lack of vitamin D. Vitamin D is

one of the ways we create energy. And so when we have low vitamin D, we’re also going to have low energy, which will then make it feel harder to do the things we should be doing because we just don’t have the energy to do it. But sometimes we need to be the creator of our energy versus relying on energy to just be there.

If you’re somebody who is naturally fatigued or you get tired very easily, I want you to always think, how can I create my energy? What does my body actually need to have energy? We tend to look at ourselves and just be like, I’m tired. And then that just becomes our entire being. We are just like the tired person walking around all day long and it becomes our identity, but you can create energy.

How can you create energy? One, if you suspect your vitamin D is low, which many of us are when we are in the Northern Hemisphere in the United States, but any Northern Hemisphere is lacking sunlight right now, just go get your vitamin D tested. I think most labs actually do it without a doctor’s order now. You can just go to the walk-in lab and ask for vitamin D. They draw it. You get it back to your medical chart and then you know, am I low or am I high? Probably nobody’s high. So are you low or are you normal? And then if you’re low, just get a vitamin D supplement. It’s super easy. But I do encourage you to always check your vitamin D before you decide to supplement. Reason being is that vitamin D is not a water-soluble vitamin. So that just means that you take the vitamin and if it’s water-soluble, your body just gets rid of excess. But with vitamin D, it’s fat-soluble, so your body isn’t able to get rid of excess. And so you can actually become toxic in vitamin D if you over do it. If you’re supplementing a lot and you’re outdoors a lot, like in the summer, um, you just want to make sure you like, you actually need it because otherwise also if you don’t need it, then it’s just a waste of money.

We also lack fresh fruits and vegetables at this time of year because it’s not grown near us. So any fruits and vegetables that we’re eating right now are coming from miles and miles and miles away. So it’s being shipped here from somewhere warm, which is not near us. And so although we have access to fruits and vegetables at our grocery store, the quality of nutrients isn’t as high as when it’s seasonal. Because when it’s seasonal, it’s been grown near us. So that means when it’s picked, like we are eating it a lot quicker from the pick date versus when it’s being shipped to us from far away, we’re eating it a lot later from its pick date. So that means that the nutrients have started to die off and we’ve lost some minerals and vitamins as well.

That being said, still eat the fresh fruits and vegetables at your grocery store. But that can be one of the reasons too why we start to lack some of that energy. And sometimes in this time of year, like I said before, those healthy, fresh foods don’t always seem appetizing or comforting because we want warm comfort heavy. And then we tend to do things like, or eat things like mac and cheese or like some pizza, something warm and heavy and carby and that just fulfills a comfort that we’re looking for because we’re cold. And those fresh fruits and vegetables don’t have the warmth to them that we’re actually craving. So if you’re noticing that like, yeah, I am like steering towards a lot of carby foods in order to feel warm, you can do warm soups that are like pureed from a vegetable, right? So think that there are other ways to get vegetables in that are warm and you don’t always have to have cold vegetables. And remember the lack of quality energy in is always going to lack quality energy out.

You are the creator of your energy always. And so if your energy is low and as garbage right now, look at what the energy in is. Is it high quality? Is it enough energy? Are you sleeping? Are you getting as much light exposure as you can throughout the day? Are you maybe needing, should you add a light therapy lamp in the morning? I have many of my clients do this when we do their Dutch test, which shows us their cortisol, what time they’re creating it, when they’re creating it and how much.

If I see that they’re barely creating enough cortisol when they should be waking up and producing the awakening response of cortisol where you have a nice boost in it, then we’ll add a light therapy lamp right after they wake up for 10 to 20 minutes. And that just is a natural signal to your brain to, that’s a natural signal to create hormones, to create cortisol. So looking at other ways that you can kind of increase your energy this time of year. Because it is normal to not feel motivated. It’s normal to feel like blah. It’s the season, right? We are in the fourth. are in, I don’t know, if seasons had a number, what number would winter be? It would be a terrible number, if you ask me. But maybe it’s, I don’t know, season. I like to think about it like season one or four. I feel like it would be a one or four. Anyway.

We are in the winter season and the winter season really is a season of going inward, not both like physically we’re inward, we’re inside of our house, but also inward to yourself and to your soul and to explore. It is a time to actually conserve more energy and to not be in a high fat burning state. Right? If you think about ancestors or ancestors, we’re not far off from our ancestors is that we, were, in the winter they had to conserve energy because they didn’t have a lot of access to food and they didn’t have a lot of access to heat and warmth. And so they had to find ways to keep themselves warm. And so they conserved energy by doing that, right? Staying close together, generating heat, probably eating as much as they could when they had the opportunity to eat, when they had food. And so a lot of it was conserving, conserving, conserving. And that’s why we’re still wired to the stay. But remember that, yeah, we can use that to understand ourselves better, but we live in a vastly different world. And sometimes that isn’t going to serve us anymore because we have an abundant amount of resources to create our energy, we can still create our energy. The thing is that you just may not feel motivated to do it and that’s actually not a problem.

If you didn’t listen to last week’s episode where I talked about using your mind to create your goals and a lot of your mind is finding problems and it’s going to be very easy to find your lack of motivation to be a problem and it’s not a problem. It’s actually very normal and part of the process. You’re not going to be motivated 365 days a year, you’re actually not going to be motivated the majority of like the far minority of the amount of time like maybe 20 % of your life you’re motivated to do something and the rest of it 80 % is you’re relying on discipline you’re relying on your mindset and you’re relying on you creating your goal putting in the hard work to create that goal so it is normal to feel this way but you don’t have to stay here.

You can choose to find a way to create your energy. You don’t have to love the winter, but you can love your actions in the winter while you patiently wait for spring, sunshine, and outdoor walks again. I took my kids to Florida for a long weekend a couple of weekends ago, and it feels like forever ago already. But we walked. I was so proud of them because they were willing to go walk everywhere with me.

And I think we went on about three long walks a day. We probably walked like seven miles a day just from our hotel down the beach, down the boardwalk place. was like, we just walked, walked, walked. And it was great because also when we were walking, they were talking. So, know, teenagers don’t always tell you everything, but it’s like, once you start to walk enough steps and enough miles with those kiddos, they start talking. And then sometimes you’re like, okay, I think you should stop talking now. I don’t know that you want to go any further with your mother in this conversation, but it was great. And the feeling of being outside in the sunshine and just going for a walk is literally my, I think it is my favorite thing to do is to go for a walk outside. If that doesn’t scream 41 year old white woman in the Midwest, I don’t know what does.

So, but I’ll remember, like you don’t have to love this time of year, but the truth is that March and February, they will always be here every year they’re going to come. And so this doesn’t mean that you have to hit pause or end your striving to feel great. You can still feel, feel great and you can still push through and you’ll feel better when you do this instead of giving into the blah, the lack of motivation and the desire to do productive things.

Okay, let’s talk about one thing I wanted to bring into today’s episode is dehydration. We don’t realize we’re dehydrated in the winter because we just don’t feel that thirsty when it’s cold out. And we don’t wanna like actively drink water because we think it’s gonna make us feel more cold when actually it feels cold in your mouth but it doesn’t necessarily feel cold in your body.

And what water does is it naturally raises your internal body temperature because it has to warm the water. And so it’s actually better for your metabolism to drink water because your body warms it up. It’s an energetic process. So it doesn’t actually make your body cold. It’s just cold in your mouth. And it’s the thought of it being cold where we try to like steer away from it. Indoor heating also creates a really dry environment. Also outside is incredibly dry.

This increases moisture loss from our skin and our breath. And so you probably notice that your skin is a lot drier right now because of the air. And then on top of that, we’re not drinking enough water either. So dehydration just starts to compound. And one of the things that dehydration actually ends up doing is that it impacts your thyroid function and your metabolism, which if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re not drinking enough water, you can see those two things are pretty important to help you lose weight, mild dehydration which most of you are walking around mildly dehydrated if you were moderately or you know very dehydrated you would know that because you would feel ill but even minor or even mild dehydration will drop energy levels by 20 to 30 percent and then also it will increase your sugar cravings so remember to keep a warm water bottle or any sort of, you know, water bottle by you because it’s not going to be, you’re not going to think about it as much because you just don’t feel thirsty at this time of year. So if you have your water bottle by you, like I always have my trusty little guy here is that I see it and I’m visually like, you know, I visually see it and I visually get prompted to take a drink.

I’m gonna just drink more water if I have water here instead of waiting to be thirsty and then I have to get up and go get drink. That’s just, that’s gonna make a lot more, that’s a lot more friction between you and water. Just make it really easy. I also love to use the water app that will set you, send reminders to drink water. It’ll also keep track of how much water you’re drinking throughout the day. So you just create that awareness. I don’t think you have to track your water, but I do think that you should have a good awareness of how much water you are drinking a day. Because if you are not drinking enough water, and by enough, I think what you’ll often hear is half of your body weight in water ounces, that is not near enough for you. I don’t know who came up with that. I don’t really think, because if I drink half of my weight in water I would be so thirsty. would be so dehydrated. Like I drink a gallon of water a day. And there’s often days when I still feel dehydrated in between maybe chugging water for a while or something like that. So if I’ve gone two hours without water, I will feel dehydrated. So I can’t imagine drinking that much water and being hydrated. I have my clients generally a minimum of 90 ounces of water a day all the way up to about a gallon a day.

You can also add electrolytes to your water, don’t add a packet of element to every single water bottle you have. I generally think if you’re having a whole food diet, you can definitely supplement with electrolytes because they are helpful in keeping you hydrated. But sometimes we are overdoing it. And I don’t know if it’s just because on social media, I’m seeing more of it lately, where people have been overloading themselves with sodium and ending up with heart issues.

So you just need like one packet a day. One packet is fine. don’t need to have, for one, you don’t need to have flavored everything all day long. I know that some of you don’t love water, but the truth is not everything has to be flavored. You can let it be plain and let it be blah, and you can still do it. So one electrolyte packet a day is plenty. And then using soups and broths can help you stay hydrated and that will keep you nice and warm as well as maybe some warm lemon water or warm tea, those are gonna be counted as water intake. And so you get to count that towards your water and it’s nice and warm. So one thing with our thyroid, why it starts to lower function when we’re dehydrated is because when your blood becomes more concentrated from a lack of water, it will trigger your body to reduce blood flow and then have less essential functions.

And the thyroid gland is really sensitive to blood flow changes and reduced blood flow means there’s going to be less nutrients that reach the thyroid. And that will also impact the conversion of T4 to T3, which T3 is the thyroid hormone we actively use. We don’t use T4, T4 just gets converted into T3 and then we use T3. That process requires things to be pretty smooth going in your body, like less stress. Fluoride gets in the way, dehydration gets in the way, all of those things, and the process just becomes less efficient, which means then you don’t have active thyroid hanging around available to be used.

Dehydration also increases your cortisol levels, which can directly suppress your thyroid function. So if you ever notice that when you are dehydrated that you start to feel panicky or you maybe start to feel anxious and that’s creating a cortisol response because your body has a lack of hydration, which is an essential body function to have water and to have hydration.

So it’s gonna try to get your attention. If you’re not listening, it’s gonna get your attention another way.

Additionally, when we are having more sugar cravings because of dehydration, what happens is that it makes our heart have to work harder to pump the same amount of oxygen and nutrients to your cells. So that means your heart has to work harder because there’s less blood volume because you’re not drinking enough water. And then that means that there’s less sugar reaches the cells for energy. And then also less oxygen is reaching your cells.

And this will lead to low energy production. And when you have low energy production, it increases your hunger signals, right? Any sort of low energy, your body’s like, well, how can we find energy? We can find energy through carbohydrates. I’m going to cue you to start eating because I’m looking for a source of energy because of reduced blood flow, which means a lack of nutrients to your cells.

And also your body knows that if you eat food, if it can catch your attention by eating food, you’re also naturally gonna get water into your body when you eat food. Because there’s always some sort of hydration in the foods you eat as well. And also the hunger and thirst signals, they both come from the hypothalamus. And what should be a thirst signal can come across as a hunger signal. So ask yourself, am I really hungry? If I drank some water right now, would I be satisfied?

And if you haven’t been drinking water, I suggest starting with that, especially if you’ve recently had a meal and you really shouldn’t be hungry at that time.

So one of the things that I like to encourage you to do when it comes to this time of year and you’re feeling a lot of lack, lack of motivation, lack of anything interesting, you’re just noticing that you’re laying on the couch on the weekends, you have no drive to do anything, is to find some social connections. To go outside of your house, even if it’s cold and the air hurts your face. Search out your friends, find a friend group in Facebook, see if somebody will do a meetup.

Find a way to be social because regular social interaction, it will help regulate your oxytocin, which will then help you feel better throughout the day. Because isolation and just being by yourself and hibernating at this time of year, which I mean, hands up, hello, I’m an introvert. I’m like, yes, I love this time of year because nobody asks me to do anything. But social isolation can trigger a more stressful response and that is always going to disrupt your other hormone levels as well. So if you can occasionally at least have social interactions, get with your friends, ask your husband or your significant other to go out for dinner and just like changing your environment and exposing yourself to people and different kinds of foods or things like that or social events or like do something fun.

That is going to help you feel a little more motivated and in tune to your body in this time of year. So you don’t have to struggle until like April. And then in April comes along and you wish you would have done something different. You wish you would have done something better because now it’s going to be the summer months and you’re like, yay, it’s going to be the summer. I’m going to have to put on shorts and tank top and my kids are going to want to go swimming. And I wish I would have done something different this winter. I wish I would have tried harder.

So then April comes along and you’re like, I’m gonna try super hard for the next two months before I have to actually put on this bathing suit. And you put your metabolism into the tanker because you cut your calories and you try super hard. And then you end up regaining it all in June and July when you decide to have s’mores and a couple beers and you go on vacation, right? It’s the same cycle over and over again. So just let it feel hard and let it suck right now. And just love the actions that you do. and I promise that it will always pay off. The reward will always be greater than the sacrifice upfront.

All right, my friends, that’s all I have for today. Make sure to go to the show notes and sign up for the Spring Reset Challenge. This challenge is gonna help you get focused on what matters right now. It’s gonna help you re-regulate any hormones that might be off from the winter slump. You’re gonna get back into meal prepping, back into movement that energizes you, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun in this challenge. So make sure to head to the show notes and I will see you next week!