Tag Archive for: eating habits

3 Strategies to Help You Nourish Your Body (While Eating Intuitively)

Are you finding it challenging to nourish yourself well these days? The pandemic is certainly bringing up food challenges for people and the result is a lack of structured meals and haphazard eating.

Now that you are home all the time, you might be waking up later, or earlier, finding yourself skipping meals, or have a decreased appetite. Now more than ever, it’s important to nourish your body and protect your immune system with nourishing foods.

3 Strategies to Help You Nourish Your Body During the Pandemic

  1. Plan ahead and Shop Wisely

With social distancing as the new normal, we know it’s best to stay home and go outside as little as possible. So figure out in advance what meals you would like to cook for the week ahead. Look up new recipes online or flip through your favorite cookbooks- like mine😊, Enjoying Food Peace: Recipes and Intuitive Eating Wisdom to Nourish Your Body and Mind, available on Amazon.

Once you have your menu, create a shopping list of all the ingredients you will need so you can get everything you need during one trip. And, don’t forget to take advantage of online grocery shopping!

  1. Prep your meals in advance

If you are working from home, it involves a lot of time and dedication, which makes cooking and eating balanced meals a challenge. Make one day, such as Saturday or Sunday, the day you cook all your meals for the week so you can ensure you will be nourishing your body consistently. Package the meals up in small sectioned containers, label them and freeze!

  1. Create a flexible eating schedule

Being stuck at home all day may feel like there is a lack of structure to your day. Each day seems to blend into the next and your appetite might be fluctuating. Consider setting up an eating schedule that is flexible, so you can make sure your body is getting the nutrition it needs while honoring your inner hunger and satiety signals. Yes, you can still eat intuitively when you have structure in place. The key is to make it flexible, and not rigid (which is what dieting is!)

Please know that it’s totally understandable if you are struggling with food and your eating right now. I hope these strategies can help you.

If there is anything you’d like to share with me, or if I can support you in any way, just click HERE to contact me!

Keep Your Eye Out For…

A brand-new training to help you end emotional eating.

I recently sent out a survey about your biggest food and eating challenges. If you haven’t yet completed the survey, you can do so here for one more day, until April 30, 2020! I’ll be sharing the results of a survey along with info on a new free training, so check back here in a few days so you don’t miss it!

National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Eating disorders affect everyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or background.  With today’s media and advertisements showing stick-thin models as the “right” way to look, it makes sense why so many people may develop an eating disorder. A negative body image can lead to serious eating disorder.

 

National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDAwareness) Week starts this Sunday, February 26th and runs through March 4th.  The theme of this year’s NEDAawareness Week is It’s Time to Talk About It. The National Eating Disorder Association wants to encourage you and everyone else to talk about eating disorders.

 

The two most commonly talked about eating disorders are bulimia and anorexia nervosa.

 

Bulimia is the act of bingeing and purging.  A person with bulimia will often consume more calories in one sitting than they would in a normal day.  This bingeing leads to guilt and self-shaming which turns into purging.  People with bulimia are often a healthy weight but are struggling on the inside.

 

Anorexia nervosa is a disease that tricks your mind into seeing a distorted, often larger, version of yourself.  A person with anorexia starves themselves, forfeiting calories as well as many vitamins and minerals that are necessary to keep their body running.  People with anorexia typically appear thin and fragile, but that isn’t always the case.

 

Although these may be the two disorders that you are familiar with, there are other disordered eating behaviors that you should be aware of.

 

Binge-eating disorder is very similar to bulimia, but without the purging.  A person with binge-eating disorder engages in uncontrollable, continuous eating past the point of fullness.  This is the most common eating disorder in the United States.

 

Orthorexia is an “unhealthy obsession” with healthy eating.  A person with orthorexia nervosa has a fixation on righteous eating and it usually starts as an innocent attempt to eat more healthfully.

 

Regardless of which eating disorder is exhibited, those who are struggling with one seek ways to change their body.  Today’s media makes it hard to find happiness and peace in your own body, so it is important to promote your own body positivity.

 

In order to break free from the daunting stress and pressure from the media, I encourage you to embrace intuitive eating where you can begin to trust your inner body wisdom to guide your eating. Intuitive eating can help you love your body again and change your relationship with food.  This takes time, patience and support.

 

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please share this information and seek help immediately. The sooner you do, the sooner you will find peace with your body.

 

If I can help, please email me at Bonnie@DietFreeRadiantMe.com.

 

The Most Important Step in Losing Weight

It's all about your mindset-no logoI’m going to keep today’s blog short. It’s a quick message for you, although I realize it might not be so easy or quick for you to internalize.

 

I was asked a very interesting question yesterday. The question went like this:

 

“What is the most important thing I can do to lose weight besides changing my eating?”

 

I imagine what comes to your mind, besides food, would be….exercise. But that’s not what I answered her.

 

The very first and most important thing you need to do if you want to lose weight and never gain it back is to CHANGE YOUR MINDSET!  That’s right. It has nothing to do with food.

 

You’ve tried changing your food and exercise before. You’ve been on multiple diets, on and off. You’ve gained weight, you’ve lost weight, and you’ve gained the weight back again.

 

You’ve exercised at the gym, at home, you’ve done boot camps, you hired a trainer, you tried Zumba and even spinning.

 

And, you are right back where you started from. Trying to lose the weight again.

 

This is because you have been starting at the end, not at the beginning. You have been so focused on what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat as dictated by the diet plans and what is “healthy”, that you aren’t understanding the big WHY– why you choose what you choose, when you choose it. You are stuck in a diet mentality and are afraid to let it go.

 

It is most important to start by changing your mindset around food, around dieting, around your body and your life. As a dieter, you must move past your dieting mentality and the idea that you need to deprive yourself and/or restrict yourself of your favorite foods in order to lose weight. You must move past the thought that you must “follow” what someone else tells you to eat because you no longer trust yourself to make those decisions.

 

The sooner you can do this, the sooner you can develop a healthier relationship with food and allow yourself to be guided by your inner body wisdom to know when to start eating and when to stop. However, if you say in the cycle of food worry, you will continue to think it’s the food that’s at the core of the problem, and that’s just not so.

 

There’s a lot more I can say on this topic. We are discussing it in our online private Facebook community.

 

Come and join the discussion.