“You give to your patients, your spouse, your children, and your church, and when all those positive energies are given away, you’re too exhausted to give back to yourself,” says Connie Kelly, RN, MS, CWOCN, a certified wound, ostomy, continence nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago. When nurses don’t take time for themselves, their health habits can suffer. Certainly inadequate self-care could be to blame for the Nurses Health Study results showing that healthy lifestyle behaviors had eluded 97% of the nurses studied.

Last year, Connie embarked on her own healthy lifestyle challenge as part of a Northwestern Memorial Hospital Wellness Institute weight loss study. “It was too convenient to pass up,” she said as she described gathering a small group of friends to take their first, collective step toward self-care. Unintentional weight gain is often a harsh reminder that it’s time to start taking better care of yourself.

Within five months, Connie had lost 30 pounds and gained positive compliments from friends, coworkers, and family. She attributes her success to being accountable to someone, overcoming her unhealthy eating and exercise patterns, becoming a regular breakfast eater, eating portion-controlled Lean Cuisine^® lunches, getting support from her family, and wearing a pedometer to track her steps taken daily.

Wellness Institute dietitian Dawn Jackson, RD, LD, led the study group, using a lifestyle patterns approach adapted from their medical director’s new weight loss book, Dr. Kushner’s Personality Type Diet. Instead of counting carbohydrate or fat grams, participants learned practical ways to convert their weight-gaining lifestyle patterns into weight-losing habits. Connie was able to take control of her “Mindless Muncher” and “Hearty Portioner” eating patterns and turn around her “No Time-to-Exercise” and “Hate-to-Move Struggler” exercise patterns.

“I’m eating for the rest of my life,” says Connie who offers this advice to nurses who want to lose weight and get healthier: “Pair up with somebody. Don’t set real big goals. Give up the magic. Do it slowly. One and one-half pounds here and .8 pounds there really do add up.”

If you’re wondering whether you have the willpower to stick to any self-care program, you may be surprised to hear one weight loss counselor dismiss willpower’s importance.

“Contrary to popular belief, people who follow healthy lifestyle behaviors are not born with a willpower gene. They just make it a priority,” says Brad Saks, PsyD, Wellness Institute health psychologist and Certified Lifestyle Counselor. “And once it’s a priority, you don’t have to work so hard at self-care.”

Saks, who likes the personalized nature of Dr. Kushner’s lifestyle patterns approach, says that when it comes to losing weight, many patients have one or two main scenarios that keep tripping them up. One of the most common, he says, is the person who is fine when she’s working in a structured environment but when she’s home at night and tired, she can’t stop eating (“Nighttime Nibbler” eating pattern). The other pattern that’s probably common for nurses, he says, is the nice, caring person who says yes to everyone else but herself, leaving little time for self-care (“Can’t-Say-No Pleaser” coping pattern).

A simple exercise in Dr. Kushner’s Personality Type Diet helps “Pleasers” to rethink their priorities.

You’re asked to complete a Life Passions Inventory by filling in the relationship, work, spiritual, and self-care activities that you’re passionate about and then correlating them with how you spend your time. Mismatches may signal it’s time to reprioritize your life activities.

Jacqueline A. Walcott-McQuigg, RN, PhD, an associate professor and director of nursing research at Purdue University, reprioritized her life activities so she could take a one–week course to become a Certified Lifestyle Counselor. This satisfied her passionate interests in weight management, stress and lifestyle enhancement that she now applies to her daily self-care routine and her research with low-income women. She suggests that nurses keep time diaries instead of food diaries because “people have more time for self-care than they think they have.”

Nancy Kushner, RN, MSN, is a freelance writer, nurse practitioner, and coauthor of Dr. Kushner’s Personality Type Diet, recently released in paperback.