67. Prioritizing Yourself—Making You a Priority in 2025

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger wraps up her goal-setting series by diving into the importance of making self-care a non-negotiable priority in 2025. Learn how prioritizing your wellness can fuel success in weight loss, fitness, personal growth, and professional goals. Discover practical tips for managing stress, setting boundaries, and scheduling self-care routines that align with your bigger goals. Whether you're looking to improve your health, boost productivity, or enhance your relationships, this episode will show you how mindful planning and self-care are key to achieving lasting results.

Tune in to explore how to create consistent habits that lead to a more focused, resilient, and unstoppable you in 2025!

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com

Transcript

Everybody, welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple. I want to wrap up sort of our goal-setting series with how to make yourself and your self-care a priority in your year. We have a tendency to put everyone else first, and I want to talk about putting yourself first and making that a non-negotiable priority. We’ve spent a lot of time setting goals, making them very actionable, very achievable, but if we do not find time for ourselves, it’s just not going to work. So really, making some self-care a priority is going to be a big piece of this.

It’s very easy to put others first. OK, we’ve got so much on our plate. We’re juggling family, work, friends, other commitments, but when you’re constantly putting others first, you are running on empty, and you can’t pour from no cup, right? We hear that all the time. I really think this is very much like setting 10 goals and not having the energy or focus to make any of them successful. For any of them to succeed, I feel like it’s the same way: if we put everyone else first and we’re constantly working on everyone else’s needs, if we run out of energy and focus, we have to give ourselves energy and focus first, and then it becomes very easy to give a little bit to everyone else.

Self-care is not bubble baths or spa days, although those things are amazing. OK, I want to kind of show you how they might fit into whatever goals you’ve set and how it might work in all different ways of your life. So, we’re going to go through the life spheres that I referenced last week, and I want you—I'm going to try and give you a couple of tips and tricks I’ve had to find some self-care in all of those things. Because self-care is going to improve our emotional well-being. It helps us handle stress more effectively, and we all know nothing can derail your plans faster than feeling super stressed, right? A super stressful day? I think it’s the number one reason we don’t follow our food plan or eat the dinner that we were supposed to or have that glass of wine when we said we weren’t going to, or yell at the kids when we didn’t want to, right?

I feel like handling stress more effectively might be the best life skill we can learn, because when it is not going well, when we are feeling overstressed and we are not managing it, it rolls over like an avalanche into every other part of our life in a really negative way that we usually do not want. So let’s break down some areas where we might’ve set some goals from last week, and I’m going to try and give you some practical self-care tips for all of them. So I hope this is a very action-tip, takeaway episode for you. OK, so if we’re talking about weight loss or fitness, something in the health and fitness realm, we need to start thinking of our body as a priority. So that’s an easy way to think about it.

Some things we might make our non-negotiables and feel like self-care because we’re really prioritizing how our body feels would be something like your meal prep. I always think of my meal prep as the best form of self-care, and it goes back to that stress I was talking about. When I’m stressed at the end of the day and— bam, nice Stacy has already made a delicious meal for me, and it’s there waiting. I am so thankful. It feels so loving and caring and just wonderful that someone has taken care of that for me, even though it was me probably just a few hours earlier. But when we’re sort of at the end of the day, it’s really nice. So I’d love to think of meal prep as a little bit of self-care.

Sleep is the other arena here. If we are not getting a good 7 to 8 hours of sleep, our weight loss is going to suffer. I’ve shared in a previous episode, when we are sleep-deprived, we have a tendency to crave higher sugar foods. We have a tendency to waste muscle preferentially when we go work out. Sleep is very, very important. So if I’m trying to get stronger, I’m trying to lose weight—sleep 100% self-care. Go to bed early. It is OK to just excuse yourself and go to bed. I know I’ve talked about that on episode... I do it all the time. People will be in my backyard, I will excuse myself, and I will go to bed. I don’t feel bad about it. It is self-care because I know this affects every other part of my life so much. Especially ladies, as we get older, it’s harder to get quality sleep, so we’ve got to start earlier and don’t apologize for it.

Movement might be self-care. OK, I love like a little stretch time, a little walk. Getting up from your desk and taking just a five-minute walk will clear your head. It’s so nice for your stress level and actually makes you more productive when you get back down to work. OK, so getting up—like I know my Apple Watch tells me to get up and stand and take a walk—just listen to that. That is a little self-care built in right there.

Let’s talk about personal growth. Maybe that was the run. We’re working on systems. Ways that might be self-care here: we’re talking about managing stress and mental clarity as being sort of our self-care items. Maybe it’s 10-minute journaling, finding that 10 minutes to yourself, reflect on your thoughts in the morning. Maybe it’s just clarifying your day, right? We can have a tendency to get overwhelmed with all the things we need to do. So just spending 10 minutes in the morning to clarify your vision for the day. Maybe at the end of the day, it’s just reflecting on how the day went, what our goals were, did we meet them, what stood in our way. Maybe it’s learning a new skill, right? So if we wanted to learn a new skill, if you want to learn a new language or something, we have to carve out time for that. So maybe instead of "learn Spanish" as our goal, it’s we’re going to practice for 15 minutes every morning. It makes it a few more manageable this way. It’s just 15 minutes, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 5 minutes. And then mindfulness is the other thing in personal growth that I really like: being present in the moment. So whether that’s taking a little time for meditation, doing one sun salutation if you’re doing yoga, doing one session of deep breathing exercises, this is really nice. Self-care can really help you stay focused and calm.

And I know I’ve worked with a client before about our yoga practice, and that was one of her goals: to get more consistent in her yoga practice. And so I asked her, "You know what counts for you?" And I was like, "You know, just one salutation counts." That’s more than enough yoga to be consistent. So I just think those little... I guess I say that to remind you that just a few minutes' break—adding up those small little minutes of self-care—can really add up.

Alright, so professional business goals. So I will say our self-care here is going to support our productivity. Like I said, just getting up and going for a little walk, standing up from your desk, doing a little stretching, doing a few squats—that little bit of self-care is going to make us more productive at work. I also really think boundaries here is the self-care mantra when you’re talking about setting balance in work life if you’ve got some big professional goals. So I would set clear boundaries for yourself—like, we’re not going to answer our email at 2 o’clock in the morning. We’re not going to answer our phones while putting our kids to bed. Maybe it’s skill development. Maybe it’s hiring out. Maybe it’s some other stress management. There’s a lot there.

Our relationships: our self-care might be scheduling a date night, maybe going and getting your hair done before your date night, maybe it’s a coffee date with a friend, right? Taking a small break from work, having coffee with a friend—tell me that wouldn’t change your day dramatically.

And our financial goals—maybe we meet with a financial planner, maybe we avoid financial stress by understanding what’s going on with our money. Maybe we become much more mindful in our spending. Maybe we stop using instant shopping. Maybe there’s all kinds of things we can do—maybe before we buy something, we have to go look and see if we already have that item. Decluttering might help with that, too.

I love this idea for under mental health and well-being—just doing an emotional check-in. I use the alarms on my phone a lot. I have clients that use it even more than me and like are super successful with them. But maybe we just set an alarm and do an emotional check-in every day at whatever, right? Maybe self-care in this arena is working with a coach or working with a therapist or working with whoever, getting some time away with a new perspective might be helpful.

I can’t overemphasize scheduling time for play. OK, scheduling time for your—scheduling time for play, scheduling time for creative expression. Schedule this time. Schedule time for volunteering if you have a community or give-back goal. Simplify, you know my love for things simple, right? Organize our workspace, organize our files, plan your day. I think it’s really rare. Self-care will get lost if we don’t do it. So, it is very easy to look at your day and start scheduling things, and then there’s no time left. What I would encourage you to do is reverse schedule, and I would look at those weekly goals or monthly goals, put them on your calendar, put your—actually, I will tell you the order in which I would do these things: I would put self-care first, my non-negotiables, whether that be my morning walk, my date night, my stretch time, my check-in, my 10-minute walk at lunch, whatever it is, meal prep time—self-care goes first. Then my goals, and whatever those goals that I had set, whatever tasks for that week line up with my goals, that goes next. And then the rest. And sometimes, there’s going to be things that squeeze out. But I think you should also be putting on your calendar some blank space. Every minute does not need to be scheduled. Some things are going to take longer than we thought, there’s going to be emergencies that come up, we’re going to have to flex and pivot.

So for all of you, like people looking at your calendar and scheduling stuff on your calendar, if there’s a blank space, put it in as a meeting. If you have a 30-minute meeting with yourself every day at 12:30 to 1:00, or 15-minute meeting with yourself every day from 2:00 to 2:15, put it in as a meeting. If your blank space gets swallowed up by people, if people have access to your schedule, then schedule the blank space. Schedule the overflow time.

If we do our schedule this way and we schedule our self-care and schedule our goals in there, this helps us be super consistent. And consistency really is the success. Right? If I set a goal and I don’t get all the way this year, if I stay consistent with that goal, I will get there eventually. Consistency builds momentum, and over time, the small steps that we’re doing will really turn into huge results. This self-care will help us better be able to manage our stress, will make us more resilient, will help us stay focused, will help us be more productive, will help with our time management—everything. Everything starts with self-care. Because it makes us more resilient, and resilience lets us stay focused, and if we are focused and we can be resilient and handle our stress... like ladies, seriously, there’s nothing you can’t do. Men too. Sorry, I didn’t mean to exclude everybody.

This is the key to success in our goal setting. You will reach your goal. If you stay consistent, you will stay consistent if you don’t let people stress you out, and you have some built-in resilience there and you can stay focused and you do all of that by starting with self-care, because when we’re taking care of ourselves—like it’s really hard for anyone to dim my glow when I have been taken care of myself. They’re just not gonna get in my way. It really does make you feel unstoppable, and that’s what we’re looking for because it’s much better to go through our day feeling unstoppable than feeling stressed out and icky, right?

And all this work we do, all these tips and tricks I teach you, just to make you feel better. We’re in charge of our feelings, and these tips and tricks I give you are to help you feel better, to help you make changes that you’re trying to make, to give you the steps, and set you up for success with really tested methods of goal setting and self-care and healthy tips and tricks. So, I just think this is going to be one of our best years yet. I can’t wait to hear all of your success stories, and if you thought this was at all helpful, please write and review the podcast. That would be super helpful for me. I would love that. Or share with a friend so I can keep working on my purpose, which is to help women know this information. I want to share this information with the world. That’s part of my purpose. So I would love it if you would help me fulfill my purpose by sharing this with your friends and rating and reviewing the podcast.

Until next week, I’m Stacy Heimburger, and I will talk to you then. Bye.