Pinterest Tag

How to Live a Healthy Life After the Holidays

How to Live a Healthy Life After the Holidays

Before you start doing detoxing and dieting in the new year, let me tell you that this is the worst thing you can do. Not only will it not work, but it could leave you feeling worse than when you started. A much more effective approach is to just get back to your normal lifestyle. This is really the best way to recover from the feasting. Trying to restrict or control your diet after relishing the freedoms of the past week will only make you feel stressed and anxious.

If you want to feel good in your body and excited about the year ahead, there are simple back-to-basics healthy routines that you can start doing right away which don’t involve dieting or detoxing but which will let you live a life of balance that you can enjoy.
 

How to Stop Feeding Your Emotions With Food

How to Stop Feeding Your Emotions With Food

There are many emotional associations we have with food- positive and negative. When we eat because we are bored, lonely or tired we are triggered by our feelings and not physical hunger. Learning to be mindful, to deal with our emotions and connect with food in a positive way to support our mood can break the cycle of feeding our emotions.

How to Practice Moderation

How to Practice Moderation

That expression “do everything in moderation” has been around forever, but how hard is it to actually live a life of moderation? For most of us who are trying overcome binge-eating or emotional eating, moderation seems nothing but elusive, right?

There is a constant cycle of excess then deprivation, then excess again. We will deprive ourselves of food we love, or cut our whole food groups which we worry will trigger us to binge, or embark on extreme exercise, or drink ourselves into oblivion. It seems we are trapped between two extremes where there is no middle ground- it is black or white, with no grey area where moderation exists.

Of course, living our lives on either end of the spectrum is unhealthy- not just for our body and mind, but for our souls. We should be able to eat comfort foods occasionally, and really enjoy those foods without any guilt. We should be able to have a couple of drinks a few times a week without becoming drunk. We should be able to exercise so that it feels good and allows our body enough to time to rest and recover and not be injured.

So, what’s the trick to being able to eat, drink and exercise in moderation most of the time rather than taking an all or nothing approach? Mastering motivation requires practicing these six things regularly. When you do, it becomes easier to avoid the extremes and excesses and it’s then possible to reach a state of equilibrium that is healthy as well as enjoyable. 

How to Know What to Eat and When to Stop

How to Know What to Eat and When to Stop

I don’t know whether to blame the media, or food companies and their propaganda, or the proliferation of fast food and junk foods, but an observation I have seen with my clients and people around me is that we have forgotten how to know what to eat.

There has become an over-reliance these days on diet books and crazy eating plans to tell us what to eat and when. If we are not following the advice of the latest fad diet, or trying to stick to a meal plan, it leads to mindlessly eating. This might mean stuffing food into our mouths while on the go or when engaged in some other kind of activity, just for the sake of eating.

The pleasure of eating and enjoying food seems to have disappeared, so that instead of slowing sown to enjoy all there is about the food we will eat, we eat without even taking note of a single taste, smell, texture or other sensation. This in turn leaves us feeling unsatisfied and then looking for more to eat to meet the craving that hasn’t yet been met.

Our instincts have faded and are hiding so deeply within us that we have lost the ability to know what to eat for our bodies to be balanced and healthy, and we are feeling more confused than ever.

Why you don’t need another diet (and what you do need instead!)

Why you don’t need another diet (and what you do need instead!)

The moment you start a new diet, then of course everything in your mind centers around food. How many calories or fat grams are you about to eat, and how will this affect your carb-protein-fat ratios? That is all such hard work! What you need is a mental chatter diet instead.  And rather than trim back on the food you eat, and going around feeling deprived and hungry, you could instead feel fulfilled, full and satisfied.

What I have come to learn is that the key to permanently changing your relationship with food all comes down to a paradigm shift in the way you live your life and think about your life. Read on for these mindset shifts.

How to Honour Your Hunger and Fullness

How to Honour Your Hunger and Fullness

Honouring your hunger is about recognizing what happens internally before you get hungry. Instead of waiting until you’re so hungry that you could eat an entire house, you start to tune in to the internal signals that your body is ready that it’s needing nourishment. Learning how to do this is key to successful intuitive eating.

How to Nourish Your Mind, Body and Soul

How to Nourish Your Mind, Body and Soul

What if there was more to losing weight, overcoming emotional eating and beating your cravings than worrying about food, calories, fat grams, macros and micro nutrients? Would that seem too good to be true?

The thing I have come to learn over the years of working with clients and in my own personal experience, is that our diet- the food we eat- plays only a very small part in losing weight and living a healthy life. It's our Soul Foods that we need to nourish rather than filling our bodies with junk food to fill the voids.