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Chapter 3:

Follow Instructions - An Owner’s Manual Made by You for You

“Taking care of yourself doesn’t mean me first, it means me too.”

– L.R. Knost

You will be tuning in, experimenting, evaluating, trying things on, and learning a whole lot about yourself and what works best for your body and your life. By following the system in this book and capturing your key learnings as you go, you will create an Owner’s Manual for yourself. A collection of operating or handling instructions unique to you that you can refer to and build out over time as you grow and change.

Think for a minute about the Owner’s Manual for your blender. You might find basic operating instructions, a quick start guide, a maintenance manual, warnings and safety precautions, and probably a troubleshooting guide of some sort. The whole purpose of the Owner’s Manual is to give you handling instructions for your blender so you can keep it functioning well. Follow the instructions and you have the best chance of it working beautifully. Ignore the instructions, skip the maintenance, and don’t heed the safety precautions, and it should be no surprise that it won’t perform optimally or at all as you expect. It will probably breakdown sooner than the lifespan it was designed to have. If you read the Manual for another blender (or a version of that same blender from five years ago) and try to apply those instructions to the blender in front of you, that likely won’t work well either. Makes sense, right?

Let’s apply the same concepts to your Owner’s Manual. Basic operating instructions will give you clear steps to follow each day to make you a well-functioning human. These might be daily routines or setting your environment up best to serve you. You may have warnings and safety precautions for the places you know you are most likely to get into trouble. These might look like personal guidelines or guardrails or unique dos and don’ts that you’ve learned from experimenting. Perhaps you have quick start guidelines to get you going again when you’ve fallen off track or you’re stuck in the grind. A maintenance manual will include essential self-care practices that keep you functioning at your best. You’d have a troubleshooting guide to turn to when you don’t know what is going on but you know something is off.

The objective of writing your Owner’s Manual is to give you handling instructions to be consistent and persistent at taking actions that are best for your body and your life. Just like it’s essential to use the right Manual for the blender that is in front of you, you want to be using the right Manual for you. Not the Manual for your neighbor, or your colleague at work who lost thirty pounds, or some Instagram guru, or your mother, or the twenty-year-old version of you (unless you are twenty, of course). It’s therefore essential as you go through this process of creating your Manual, that you think about creating it as honestly as you can in the context of your current life as it is, right now.

In order to truly do that, you’ll be asked to be open to seeing things about yourself that you may have missed before. To be open to trying new things and evaluating what really works for you (not what you really want to work for you) and what doesn’t. It ain’t going to be comfy. It can’t be. I’ll be here with you along the way. If you get stuck reach out to me.

This process asks you to push through fears and make mistakes. It asks you to challenge stories and beliefs you have about yourself and what is right for you. Some of these narratives will have been with you for a long time. You will learn tools to tap into patience and compassion to help you along the way. This process requires you to fall down, so you can know what trips you up, and then get back up so you know how to do that too.

Setbacks and challenges are expected, normal, and even necessary. That doesn’t make them easy, but it can help you re-frame them to be useful instead of discouraging. You will have exhilarating wins and ah-ha moments, and get to know the bravery it takes to face challenges head-on and the thrill of figuring it out. You learn a lot about yourself when you experience both of these. Experiencing what doesn’t work is an essential step on your journey to find what does.

Once you discover those things that work for you, it’s time to put them into action. Tune into what helps you to be more consistent and persistent and do more of that. Look at what gets in the way of being consistent and persistent and clear those things out. You learn to automate as many tasks as you can and set your environment up to support that.

As you work through the steps in this book, how you record your Manual is totally up to you. But writing it somewhere is essential. Remember that inconvenience of being human thing? Yeah that. If you don’t record what you do here, you will forget it. The act of recording in and of itself is also a key part of the process. Recording allows you the opportunity to reflect and see patterns emerge that you may otherwise miss. A journal, notebook, or binder are the most common ways my clients keep their Owner’s Manual (I use a notebook). Use an electronic method if you prefer (like Word, Pages, or Evernote) or you can even get creative and scrapbook it if that’s your style. Don’t let how your record become a big make-work project but do pick something that will allow you to capture data and learnings as you go.

Consider it a living document; add to and revise it as your body and your life change and as you learn and discover new things about yourself. You will have one central place to capture the cyclical patterns around when the trouble spots come up for you. It could be seasonal: it could be related to extra busy time at work or for family things or maybe even holidays that affect you in a certain way.

Paying attention to, reflecting on, and recording will help you see patterns and better prepare and navigate when the same or similar challenges come up in the future. If you approach difficult times as an opportunity to build out your Owner’s Manual, it can be a powerful re-frame where you focus on the thrill of growth and discovery that comes on the other side of the hard stuff.

The chapters in Eat Like You Teach are organized into four main sections. They’re not steps that need to be followed in any particular order but principles and a framework to navigate from. The first time you read through this book, it will be easiest to follow if you read in the order it is presented. After that, the headings used throughout allow you to skim along the surface and find the section that is most pertinent to you in the moment. Pop in and out of the book for reference as needed.

Part I: Reality

I share with you the piece of my story that got me here, the solution I discovered along the way and how I am going to teach you my system to find your own way through this.

Chapter 2: Be Human - Like You Have a Choice

Chapter 3: Follow Instructions - An Owner’s Manual Made by You for You

Part II: Reboot

This is the system and principles that you will use in creating your Owner’s Manual.

Chapter 4: Start Here - Make Your Expectations Work for You

Chapter 5: Get Curious - Awareness, Curiosity and Compassion

Chapter 6: Try Stuff - Experiment and Evaluate

Part III: Reset

You will learn how to apply the principles from Part II to figure out what works best for your body and your life and build that into your Owner’s Manual.

Chapter 7: Eat Better - Five Steps to Reset Your Eating

Chapter 8: Boost Energy - Move and Sleep Like Your Life Depends On It

Chapter 9: Cultivate Environment - Create an Operating Space that Supports You

Part IV: Reclaim

In this section you will learn tools and strategies to put the handling instructions in your Owner’s Manual into action.

Chapter 10: Take Action - Turn Knowing into Doing

Chapter 11: Steer Dynamically - Navigate Common Obstacles

Chapter 12: Own It - You Got This

I’m excited to bring you the system and principles that helped me through when I needed a reset. They continue to be the principles and systems I live by today.

By learning the process, you will have powerful tools that can serve you into the future because when your life and your body change, it will be time to update your Manual and you will know exactly how to do that.