There’s nothing I love more than coaching women lawyers who are brilliant at what they do for their clients but struggle mightily when it comes to their own self care.
I know that within only a couple of coaching sessions, they’ll experience shifts in the way they perceive their bodies, their weight, and the food on their plate.
And when there are shifts, there is change.
Lawyers are a different breed, primarily because of the way we think. We can find the ambiguity in a story faster than a gamma-ray burst. We’re also quick to pick up on nuances, which is why I love coaching lawyers — they may not like when I point out the flaws in the way they think about their weight, but the ones with an open mind? Whoa, the places we go!
The ability to “think like a lawyer” is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to weight loss, which has little to do with logic and reason and almost everything to do with emotion and passion.
I can appreciate the struggle my fellow women lawyers experience as they juggle their law practice with family life. Evidence of that struggle is often found in the way women lawyers treat their bodies, or should I say, how they mistreat their bodies.
The old expression, “something’s gotta give,” makes it seem nearly impossible for a woman lawyer to practice self care with so many other responsibilities that push her to the bottom of her to-do list. As a result, many of these women turn to food and/or alcohol as a method of coping with the stress.
Weight Loss For Busy Lawyers
When it comes to losing the extra weight that the extra food and wine can so quickly pack on, many women eventually resign themselves to the extra weight. It’s a problem they realize they can’t “think” their way out of.
I can relate.
Stress eating wreaked havoc with my body. THEN… I blamed my body for letting me down. I took no responsibility for the way I was feeding and moving my ever faithful servant!
I’m embarrassed to say I had a sense of entitlement: I deserved a better body, I told myself. You can be sure that way of thinking did nothing to help me solve the problem. Because the problem wasn’t my weight on my body, it was the weight in my head.
You see, extra weight on your body is a reflection of extra weight in your head, and “thinking like a lawyer” is not going to help you; in fact, it might even work against you.
Why?
Because attempting to lose weight by using logic and reason (how we were trained to think in law school) is never going to work.
The weight wasn’t gained by using logic and reason and, similarly, it cannot be lost that way.
Our bodies, our weight, and the food we put on our plate is strongly tied to our emotions, and emotions are oftentimes unreasonable.
Why else would we eat chocolate chip cookies to relieve our stress?
How does it make sense that we have second helpings, even though we’re not hungry anymore?
Why do we ignore our bodies’ cries for our attention?
For the answers, go HERE.
Finally, we’re getting somewhere.
