mindful eating Archives - Page 14 of 15 - Diet Free Radiant Me | Intuitive Eating | Emotional Eating

Rejection of Perfection

In our culture, the word perfect is rarely seen as anything other than a compliment. Despite it being quite possibly the highest form of flattery, you still tell your children something to the effect, “There is no such thing as being perfect. You always have to strive for the best you can be, and that is all anyone can ask of you.” Yet somewhere in adulthood you lose that sentiment, and go back to striving to this ideal of “perfect”—especially when it comes to the way you look and the way you eat.

Thanks to the strong prevalence of the media in your day to day life, you are constantly being exposed to people you deem “perfect.” You start creating this “alpha-body” by choosing which celebrity or public figure has the, “perfect arms” and “perfect legs” and piece together your ideal look. You then start striving for this look, no matter how realistic it is, because you want to achieve such “perfection.”

I want you to think about two things:

1) Remember what you say or said to your children, there is no such thing as perfection, just be the best you can be. Instead of reaching for what could be unattainable because of the way your body is structured or the amount of time you have to devote to healthy eating and exercise, try thinking about how to feel your best and be your best. Have goals, but don’t let perfection be one of them because there is no such thing!

2) The second thing I want you to remember is that the things we deem “perfect” can often be a ruse. For example the celebrity you want to look like may in fact be photo-shopped and not be exactly who you think. Also, a lot of these people aren’t juggling as much as you may juggle. Their full time job could be working out 8 hours a day, and they have private chefs preparing their meals. Again, do your best to achieve a healthy lifestyle. Don’t think about someone else’s.

When it comes to the healthy lifestyle you lead, it can be easy to fall into the “perfect” trap. You go to bed at night and think, “today I ate perfect” or “my exercise routine this week was perfect.” Labeling a certain day or week which such lofty praise can set the bar at an unrealistic level, making a day that you deem not so “perfect” seem that much more daunting. It is better to focus on all the healthy choices you make as achievements, but not necessarily a measure of how “good” you were on that particular day or week. As you know from mindful eating, there is no such thing as what you are “supposed” to eat and what is “off limits”; this idea of the “perfect” day doesn’t really work.

Instead of striving for perfection, strive for your best. Your best self is all anyone, including you can ask for! As long as you stay motivated to be healthy, and celebrate daily achievements and goals that you accomplish, you will get better every day—and getting better every day means there is no such things as perfect, just your best!

Your turn to take action: Try not to use the word “perfect” this week and focus on being your best instead! Let me know how it goes!

Family and Food…Roadblocks to Success?

It is a time of year for family. While that should mean love and gratefulness to be with loved ones during the holidays, family time can often bring about a lot of stress. Along with the stress come plates, upon platters, upon trays of traditional holiday foods that are served. Between these two things, it can make the mindful eater want to hop a ride to the North Pole and wait out the food and stress storm until New Year’s Day.

First I want to address the food traditions that come with the holidays. You made it through Thanksgiving with flying colors, and you are still here working on moving forward on your intuitive eating journey. Please take a moment to take pride in that and tell yourself “good job”.

I know you don’t want to fear the holidays and the “once a year” foods it may bring. Remember to exercise your ability to enjoy the flavors you wait for all year, and savor each bite. Most of the foods surrounding you during the holidays can be associated with a memory. Let that memory have its moment as you practice your mindful eating techniques. It will both warm your heart and tingle your taste buds.

We all know that family, on a normal day, can be a difficult roadblock on your healthy eating path, but during the holidays, the number of family members critiquing your body and your food choices seem to multiply. You don’t want to let that stress get the better of you and lead you into making choices that you don’t want to make. I’ve mentioned before, while support is a wonderful thing, this is your journey, not anyone else’s. Perhaps take this opportunity to educate them on how this lifestyle has helped you. Who knows, they might want to know more about it so they can begin their own journey!

An obstacle you might face is a family member or host making you feel bad if you don’t partake in enough of the food they made. This might be your grandmother who worked hours cooking and baking and doesn’t understand why you don’t want a bigger slice of her famous pie. Or, another family member telling you to, “Eat more! It’s the holidays!”

Remember, how much food you eat and what you choose to eat does not equate to the love you feel for your family or the person who prepared the food. Explain to them that you love them, and you love their food, but that is all you want to eat. Having this confidence and ability to stay true to your decisions about food empowers you and will be another victory on your road to a body you love.

This is a great time of year and it does not have to throw you off because of the stress that family can bring. At the end of the day, your family truly wants to see you happy. If you are confident in yourself and what you have accomplished so far, you are sure to have an awesome 2014.

Your turn to take action: What is a family food stress you typically encounter during the holiday season?

Relax…and Enjoy Your Food

Given my profession, I spend a lot of time speaking and thinking about food and how it relates to the lives of my clients. However, what I have noticed when meeting with new clients who are coming to me from a place of chronic dieting, they too speak and think about food all the time, but they do it from a place of worry. “What did I eat yesterday, what am I eating today, what will I eat tomorrow”.

This is exhausting, don’t you think? Balancing life and responsibilities such as family, friends and work is often difficult and stressful in and of itself. Food should not add to that stress. Eating should be pleasurable.

As a reader of my iEat Mindfully™ blog, you are likely coming from a history of dieting. A past littered with carefully laid out menu plans with just the “right” amount of carbohydrates, protein and fat. A history that includes feelings of panic when you are in a restaurant or at a family gathering where the food served is not on your “plan”. The amount of grief you give yourself in these situations takes away from all the pleasure you could be getting from your food.

By employing all the techniques I have been writing about such as slowing down, listening to your hunger and fullness cues, and using all your senses to enjoy your food, you are hopefully seeing that there is a place for enjoyment in food, even foods that were previously deemed “bad” in your mind. And you know what? It is okay to get excited about a specific dish at your favorite restaurant that you will be having tonight for dinner because you now know how to go about enjoying it. You will enjoy to the max and achieve full satisfaction without feelings of guilt.

When it comes to repairing your relationship with food, this is such an important step to learn. Ask yourself what you really want to eat, use all your senses to enjoy and really taste it, and savor the moment. You don’t have time to waste on food worry. Focus on the positive aspects of the food, how it nourishes you and makes you feel, the memories from your childhood and recapture the pleasure of eating once again.

Your turn to take action: Did you enjoy your meals this week? What senses did you use to improve your satisfaction? Please let me know in the comments section below.

Am I Always So Bubbly and Happy?

As I sat down today to write my post for the iEat Mindfully™ blog, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to write about. But then it came to me. Earlier today, I was told for about the 10^th time this week, how bubbly and happy I am. “Am I always like that, my client asked me?” And I realized, yes, when I am teaching my clients about intuitive eating, I absolutely am giddy, bubbly and oh, so happy.

You see, for years when clients came to me for help in losing weight, I would create a healthy eating plan that fit into their lifestyle. It included foods they liked, times they should eat, and even recipes. My clients did very well…when they “followed” the meal plan. But what happened when they didn’t “follow” the meal plan? Or when a life event, stress, or bad day at the office had them dipping into the cookie jar. Out went that healthy meal plan.

I dreaded the sessions when I would weigh a client and the rest of the session revolved around why they only lost 1 pound, or why they gained ½ pound. I got so burnt out….I just wasn’t enjoying my work any longer. This is when I knew I had to find another solution for my clients who struggled with chronic dieting and overweight/obesity, which I believed would in turn bring the passion back into my work.

That is when I found intuitive eating. After spending time researching, studying, learning, and applying the principles of intuitive eating into my own life, I slowly worked it up into a program that would help transform my client’s lives. It wasn’t easy at first. Trying to get people to trust me that they should give up the “diet” or the “meal plan” wasn’t easy.

I quickly realized it really was more a matter of whether they could trust themselves. After years and years of dieting and listening and following what other people/diet programs told them to eat, when to eat and how much to eat, well I guess it’s only natural that one would lose trust in themselves.

Fast forward to today…I am helping many people learn to regain that trust in themselves; to shift their mindset away from a diet mentality; to listen to their internal hunger and satiety signals. The light bulbs that go on in their heads in our sessions are truly inspiring to me. The “aha” moments are like no other.

So, yes, I am always bubbly, giddy and happy when I am working with my intuitive eating clients. That’s what happens when I am doing what I love to do…when I am passionate about the transformation that I help my clients achieve. Thank you to my wonderful clients. I absolutely love working with you!

Your turn to take action: If you would like the light bulbs to go on for you, head on over to http://www.talkwithbonnie.com and we will schedule a time to talk.

Cooking and Intuitive Eating

Do you love to cook? Do you take the time to prepare what you love? As a past dieter (I’m hoping by now you are on your way to saying that!), consider how you decided what you were going to cook for dinner. More than likely it was what the “diet menu” dictated for the night. If you didn’t like the choice, I bet you still made it because to deviate from the menu would mean you “broke your diet”.

So think about it. When you were dieting, and you cooked what you were told to cook, did you really enjoy it? Did you derive great satisfaction from it? I have many clients who are wonderful cooks, and unfortunately stopped cooking when they were on the diet rollercoaster. It was too tempting to cook “something really good” and not be able to eat it.

Now think about the last yummy meal you cooked as an intuitive eater. You took the time to figure out what you really wanted to eat, you pulled out a favorite family recipe or opened up a new cookbook, and took the time to prepare what you wanted. How did you feel?

I have been working on writing my next cookbook which, although is not yet titled, will incorporate the principles of intuitive eating. I have had so much fun creating and testing new recipes. As an intuitive eater, it has opened my mind and my meal options to so many delicious foods that as a past dieter, I would not have eaten.

By taking the time to ask yourself what you want to eat, and taking the time to prepare that food, you will feel more satisfied, more in tune with your internal signals and more nourished.

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It can be a simple sandwich, a plate of vegetable crudité with hummus, or if you are feeling adventurous, a three-course meal. The key is to approach it from an intuitive eating standpoint and find ways to make cooking an enjoyable part of your life.

Your turn to take action: Ask yourself what you really want to eat for dinner tonight. Take the time to prepare and enjoy it. Let me know how this experience was for you.

Eating as a Part of Your Life—Not Letting it Consume Your Life

When you want to get into a routine and build something into your life, one way to do it is to schedule and plan. For some, this is also true when it comes to dieting. You schedule the number of meals you will eat that day based on when the plan tells you to and you restructure your life around that plan. You are always thinking about what you are supposed to be eating next, will you be eating it “on time” and if you didn’t pack it with you, will you be able to find something comparable. You find the only thing you are thinking about is food.
I want you to remember a time, if such a period existed, where you weren’t worrying about your weight or your food. You lived your life and when you were hungry you ate, you stopped when you were full and you weren’t frantically wondering if a food fell into your plan if you wanted to have it. For many of you trying to get back to this memory, it might take you all the way back to your childhood days—and that’s OK.

When you are younger and there is less to worry about, that carefree attitude translates easier to food. Eating is just something you have to do in between all the other fun things you look forward to doing every day. Now that you are older, sometimes food is the fun part of your day, and sometimes it is something to worry about. Whatever end of the spectrum you fall on you still shouldn’t be living for or living in fear of it. Accepting food as part of your day rather than something your entire world has to stop for makes it easier to accept a healthier non-diet lifestyle rather than a diet mentality.

If you weren’t so hungry and you didn’t eat as much lunch as you normally do, or if you waited an hour later than usual to eat it, that’s OK! You are listening to your body. Maybe one day you had a very intense work-out and your body told you to eat a little more at lunch time than you’re used to—listen to it! Pardon the pun but go with your gut and listen to what it says rather than restricting it to a pre-determined schedule that might not fit into your day. Eating is a necessary part of life, but it doesn’t have to be your life.

Your Turn to Take Action: Try and focus on the things in life you enjoy that are not related to food this week. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Evaluate and Feel Great!

When you have a diet mentality, there are a lot of things that can take away from you feeling positive about yourself. Remember those days you didn’t follow “the plan” and you felt that you had failed? Feeling like you needed to hide to eat something you wanted to eat because that would make it less of a disgrace to your “diet,” or feeling pressure to order food you don’t even want because the people around you know you’re dieting and you can’t let them see you “cheat.” Not to mention the only way of evaluating yourself on a diet is by weighing yourself, which as you know, is not a true testament to success in a healthy lifestyle.

The beauty of intuitive eating is it opens up a world that wants you to feel good about yourself. If you have been progressing on a mindful eating journey, now is a great time to step back and look at all the positive progress you have made. I want you to evaluate where you are at in the following:

Have you been able to look in the mirror and start finding more things that you like about yourself?
Do you find yourself eating foods you previously deemed “evil” and being able to enjoy them?
Have you tuned out negative self-talk and started to focus on positive aspects of the lifestyle you are living?
Have you asked your loved ones around you for their support in this healthy journey?
Is your scale collecting dust in your home somewhere because it is no longer a symbol of success in your mind?
Are you exercising because of how it makes you feel rather than to negate calories?
Are you stopping when you’re full and eating when you’re hungry?

If you said yes to any of these questions then you should feel proud. These are huge hurdles to jump over when overcoming the diet mentality and to clear any of them is a great accomplishment. The more of these questions you can answer as “yes,” the better you will continue to feel about your healthy lifestyle and your relationship with the food you eat.

Your turn to take action: How do you feel about your intuitive eating progress so far?

Changes in Life Should Not Change Your Eating Plan

While it is an inevitable part of life, for most of us, change is never easy. When our normal routine is threatened by things like career moves (good or bad), family crisis, a change in our children’s schedule or any number of other unforeseen circumstances, often the eating plan you have laid out can suffer. But it is important to remember that just because something is changing in your life, it does not mean that the healthy lifestyle you have been working on needs to be altered as well.

There are different ways change tends to affect people’s eating. If the change has been brought on by stress, eating to handle the added pressure can sometimes follow. Or you got that long awaited promotion or a new job and your schedule has changed. All of the hard work in fitting healthy eating into your old schedule now goes out the window. What I want you to know is change does not have to set you back to the beginning.

Think about all the strategies you have learned over the past year. These are all tools you have added to your mindful eating toolbox. Tools you can use to tackle problems like change. By maintaining the healthy lifestyle you have created, you add stability to your life that the change threatens. If you don’t alter your healthy habits, you will find the change seems less intimidating and just another part of life. By maintaining or taking control of your healthy lifestyle, you will exercise better control over handling this change as well.

A famous German spiritual author named Eckhart Tolle said, “Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.” Allow yourself to embrace whatever change comes your way, knowing that by maintaining the intuitive eating principles you have set for yourself, you emerge a stronger, healthier person, and become even more ready to face changes in the future.

Your turn to take action: How will you prepare to handle change in your life without changing your healthy lifestyle?

Are Workplace Woes Affecting Your Mindful Food Choices?

For some of us, it feels like we live at work. Monday through Friday our jobs can consume us and we find ourselves at the mercy of food available in vending machines, cafeteria’s conference rooms, or whatever nearby take-out or restaurant venues are in close proximity. Stressful workdays, bagel Wednesday and coworker celebration cakes can often seem like a regular occurrence that can threaten your healthy eating habits.

If you experience stress and worry at your job, that already threatens your health. Lets not allow the workplace to take away from the progress you have made in healthy eating. Though healthier options are starting to make themselves present in workplace cafeterias and vending machines, stress can sometimes gear your decision making instead of the healthy mindset and hunger cues that you know you can rely on.

Here are some strategies to stay on track at work:

Take Control: Though the thought of a brown-bag lunch may conjure up images of grade school, packing your own snacks and lunch to have throughout the day will keep you satiated and in control of what you are eating. If you are satisfied with the food you bring, you are less likely to head to the vending machine. Packing your own food doesn’t have to take long, and once you start doing it every day, it will become a part of your routine.
In-House Eating: If the time comes where you didn’t pack enough snacks or didn’t have time to make lunch, you are well equipped to make choices at the cafeteria and vending machines. Center your choices on whole grains, fruits, veggies and lean proteins. Check serving sizes on vending machine fare to make sure the packages are in fact one serving. If your healthy choices are limited, eat enough to feel you’ve satisfied your hunger and then stop. Everything can fit when moderating, so don’t feel like you have ruined your day if your cafeteria lunch is not as healthy as you had hoped for.
Out to Lunch: It is not uncommon to have lunch meetings at local eateries. Try and order a non-caloric beverage like seltzer, unsweetened tea or water with lemon to avoid excess lunch time calories from sweetened or alcoholic beverages. Check with yourself mid-meal and stop when you had enough. Have it wrapped up to go and bring it for lunch tomorrow.
Take a Breath: A stressful work day can cloud your judgment when it comes to healthy food choices. Remember to take a breath before taking a bite of that chocolate. Do you really want that piece of chocolate? Or are you just eating it because you got reprimanded by your boss? Let the answers to those questions guide your choices rather than impulse and stress.

Be proud of the work you do at your job as well as your ability to live a healthy lifestyle while you work!

Your turn to take action: What healthy habits will you practice during your workday?

Don’t Let Bad News Derail Your Efforts

Unfortunately we all are aware that bad news and difficult times are part of life. It is likely that during these periods there are few things that can make us feel better. It is at these points where you can make the mistake of using food to ease the pain. But even if this does the trick in the moment, in the long run your overindulgence or eating a food you didn’t really want will likely make you feel worse.

As you have been learning throughout this journey, food can be used to nourish you and make you feel healthy, but food cannot serve as a medicine to fix what is going on in your mind. If you get bad news, eating an ice cream sundae will not make whatever bad is going on go away. You might turn to it for the short-term increase in “feel-good” hormones that leave you a little more cheery post-indulging, but whatever caused the bad news or difficult circumstances will still be there once you come off that wave of “feel good” hormones. Not to mention you might feel even worse if you are too full from overindulging, or are lagging from too much sugar or fat which is usually found in the foods you turn to in order to make you feel better.

Instead of abandoning your healthy principles during a time of difficulty, it is better to adjust your mindset and use your healthy lifestyle to make you feel better. One of the more difficult aspects of bad news or difficult times is the feeling you do not have control. By succumbing to cravings, you are feeding into that out of control bad news spiral. By taking control of your healthy lifestyle and continuing to honor your hunger, respect your fullness and make healthy decisions, you stay in control of your health which will likely help you regain control of the situation that has you down.

Life can be difficult, but having to face life’s challenges in a body that is unhealthy is even more difficult. By staying true to the principles that you have been forming throughout this journey, you make yourself stronger and more likely to overcome the difficulties you are facing in your life.

Your turn to take action: Tell me some healthy ways you handle the trials in your life without using food.

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