Tiny Buddha

Category: healthy habits

  • Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    “Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself.” ~Rob Lowe

    I tried and failed to have a fabulous relationship with alcohol for many years.

    When my children were tiny, I drank far more than was good for me, thinking I was relaxing, unwinding, socializing, and having fun. I’d seen my life shrink down from a world with lots of freedom and vibrancy to a socially restricted void, and I wanted to feel normal. I wanted to join in with everyone else.

    All my birthday cards had bottles of gin or glasses of fizz on them, all the Friday afternoon memes on social media were about “wine o’clock,” and I wanted to be part of that world.

    The opening of a bottle in the evening had me thinking I was changing gear, moving from stressed to relaxed, and treating myself to some self-care. Nothing could have been further from the truth; the alcohol made me wake during the night and gave me low-level anxiety and an almost permanent brain fog.

    I’m not proud of the drinking I did when the kids were small. I now feel a deep sense of shame about that time. I’d created such a happy life for myself—lovely husband and kids, nice house in a great town, wonderful friends. What was I drinking to escape from?

    On the outside I looked like I had it all, but I didn’t—I had overwhelm.

    I was a wife and family member, a mum to two small children, an employee, and a freelancer… I had all the roles I’d longed for, and yet it was all too much.

    I didn’t know how to let go of some of my responsibilities, and I didn’t know how to cope with everything that was going on in my life. Alcohol felt like the treat I deserved. It took me a while to figure out that alcohol was the common theme in my rubbish decision-making, tiredness, and grumpiness.

    I’d spent a long time feeling trapped and stuck. I knew I wanted to stop drinking, but I was worried about what others would think of me, how I would feel at parties without a drink in my hand, and whether I’d be able to relax properly at the weekends.

    I kept going back and forth, deciding I’d stop, then changing my mind, thinking I wouldn’t or couldn’t. It was a hellish merry-go-round. When I was forty-one, I finally made the decision to quit alcohol for a year as a little life experiment. I wanted to see how I would feel without it for an extended period of time.

    I decided to take a bold action in autumn 2019. I told a group of online friends that I was not going to drink alcohol for the whole of 2020, and once I had said it out loud, I knew I would have to do it.

    This step toward accountability really helped me to move forward with my sober mission. I started to count down to 2020 (still binge drinking), wondering how this experiment was going to go!

    Toward the end of 2019, my mindset began to shift. Instead of dreading the start of 2020, I started to look forward to it. I made plans that I knew would lead to a successful sober year. I read books about quitting, listened to inspiring podcasts, and watched films or documentaries that didn’t show alcohol consumption in a glamorous light. I followed people who were a few steps ahead of me on their sober journey. I asked questions and I followed advice.

    I had my last drink on Dec 8th, 2019—nothing monumental, out with a few friends and no hangover the next day. It was a total non-event!

    I wanted to have a year without alcohol to know if life would be stressful, lonely, or boring like I’d led myself to believe, or if it was possible to relax, connect with others, and have fun without a drink. The hangovers and brain fog were getting worse. In my late thirties and early forties, I just couldn’t get away with it like I had in my twenties.

    I wanted to be a more patient parent—no more selfishly rushing the kids through bedtime because I wanted to get back downstairs to my drink.

    I wanted hangover-free weekends to enjoy my time away from work.

    I wanted to maximize my nutritional choices—no more rubbish food choices dictated by low-level hangovers, or high-level ones for that matter.

    I wanted to sleep deeply and wake up feeling rested and ready for the day ahead.

    I wanted to know I was giving myself the best chance at not getting high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, dementia, or a compromised immune system.

    I went through the whole of 2020 without a drink. There were some tough days to navigate, some challenging events to negotiate, and awkward conversations to have with friends, but I did it all, and I did it all sober.

    When 2021 rolled around, I knew I wasn’t going to go back to how I’d drunk before. I had changed my relationship with alcohol for the better. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually a different person, and I didn’t want to go back to numbing my feelings.

    It’s easy to name all the benefits to our bodies and minds when we cut alcohol out—deeper sleep, clearer skin, better mood, more energy, and less anxiety, to name a few—but for me, the real shift has come a couple of years down the line. I feel more spiritually open than I’ve ever felt before, and I cannot wait to see what unfolds next for all of those of us on this sober-curious journey.

  • 181 Days Teetotal (And Counting): All I’ve Gained Since I Stopped Drinking

    181 Days Teetotal (And Counting): All I’ve Gained Since I Stopped Drinking

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post references an account of sexual assault and may be triggering to some. 

    “When you quit drinking you stop waiting.” ~Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

    I’m now at 181 days teetotal. I prefer teetotal to sober. I say sober sometimes, but teetotal feels lighter, airier, and I feel lighter and airier these days.

    For the life of me, I can’t remember when I took my first sip of alcohol. It probably came from a grownup’s glass.

    What I can remember is being sixteen or so, half waking up from a blackout with a friend’s hand down my pants.

    Or being eighteen, head in a toilet, while a guy I didn’t know followed me into the bathroom to “help me hold my hair back”—and instead helped himself to my body as I cried for help from a girlfriend who eventually came to my rescue, kitchen knife in hand, and forced him to leave.

    Or many a morning waking up with a blinding headache, ashamed of what I might have said, done, or was afraid I let happen the night before.

    I can remember that exposed, unsafe feeling, and thinking to myself, “Never again.”

    I can also remember (and well) the little voice that come late afternoon would say, “A drink will make this better.”

    And it did. And then (surprise!) it didn’t.

    Although this article isn’t about sexual assault, I want to mention that this has happened to me sober as well, and to acknowledge that a person letting their guard down doesn’t amount to an opportunity given. Seizing vulnerability and framing it as invitation is predatory, period.

    With that said, my adventures in drinking after I turned twenty-five tended to be less extreme. I became more careful about where I drank and who I drank with. Par for the course were physical and emotional hangovers, and those I learned to deal with. The tradeoff was worth it to me. Everyone drinks. It’s what we do when we get together! It’s fun and it’s fine, and you can always apologize the day after if things get out of hand, and maybe no one will remember anyways.

    And if you drink alone… well, that’s okay too! No need to apologize for anything.

    But something happened around three or four years ago. Friends I’d enthusiastically drank with, or who I knew cracked a bottle open to unwind at the end of the day, decided to go dry. Hand on my heart, I was happy for them, but hand on my heart… not for me.

    Booze, namely a glass (and then another, and then another) of very cold rose on a warm evening outside, or if I was feeling creative, was at the pinnacle of my pleasure pyramid. I loved chatting and drinking, playing music and drinking, writing and drinking, dancing and drinking, anything good and drinking, really.

    Give that up? I don’t think so.

    Last summer, I packed up my life of twenty years living in Brooklyn and moved, alone, to a hill near Florence, Italy. Don’t be fooled by the cliche of a thirty-something straight, white woman moving to Tuscany, though. It’s been a heavy and wild couple of years, and life on this cypress-peppered hilltop’s often been more Werner Herzog than Nancy Meyers.

    This chapter of my life, hugely marked by the choice to estrange from my mother and navigate the grief that’s come with that—not to mention in isolation, in what used to be a convent in the backwoods of a country I know no one in—has been, in one word, rough.

    They make wine here; did you know that?

    Really good wine. Really good, cheap wine too. The weather and setting are also great, so that pleasure pyramid pinnacle I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it beckons all the time, and being that I’m alone a lot and still know very few people, reaching for a bottle’s been a no-brainer and… a surefire ticket to the emotional rollercoaster from hell.

    On that morning 181 days ago, I woke up hungover with a body like a bucket filled to the brim with sadness, anxiety, fear, and nausea. Slosh, slosh, slosh. Nothing new.

    A few weeks earlier, one of my sober friends had come to see me, and what struck me most about her manner was that, far from being overwhelmed with emotion (which, as I understood, was one of the “costs” of sobriety: FEELING A LOT), she seemed so even kilter. So damn okay.

    It looked incredible.

    Around that time, it occurred to me the reason I’d made all these changes (the move, the estrangement, other things too) was to enter a new phase in my life. One that was more even kilter, more okay. I’d made all these moves, really hard ones, but I was still resorting to the coping mechanism I’d employed to tide me over in my previous life: Drinking. What throughout my twenties and into my thirties had been coupled with pleasure, relief and connection was actually keeping me stuck, sad and isolated.

    So there I was, in my front yard, actually weeping as the world spun, waiting for my dog to pee, when something welled up from inside me and said (and meant), “No more.”

    No more?

    No more, Melanie.

    And so it was, and here’s the most surprising but not surprising thing I’ve learned since.

    Empty calories, empty emotions.

    The hangovers and subsequent emotional manholes I’d have to crawl out of virtually weekly left me under the illusion of processing what felt like a bottomless well of despair. I was doing the work, right? That’s what it’s all about, feeling the discomfort. Feeling the trauma. Being in the hole. Grieving. Aching. Sticking with it. Right?

    Well…

    I’ve read that drinking doesn’t necessarily make you pack on weight, but your body burns the calories from alcohol first. So rather than using what you eat for fuel, when you give your body booze, it’s the booze it runs on and the real nourishment that gets stored.

    For me, it wasn’t just that way with the calories, but with the feelings too. Even a little alcohol (and it was rarely a little alcohol) created a synthetic emotional experience I had to overcome that took precedence over my very real emotional surplus and felt like labor. Like doing the work.

    But that wasn’t my real labor, my real pain, my real trauma, my real unmetabolized feelings. Turns out my real ones are of a completely different quality. Even when they’re hard, there’s an ease to them, a naturalness to them. Even when they’re heavy, they’re lighter. There’s a purity to them, a pulling up rather than down. An unburdening that registers fully, a clearing like the sky after a downpour. The relief of a healthy morning poo rather than being covered in shit.

    The work of healing has not only been a constant in my life; I made it my job. Oh, the humbling irony in realizing a good 70% of the emotional hellscape I was trying to overcome, not to mention my lack of clarity, energy, and zeal, was pure ethanol.

    Alas, all the positive feelings I’d tried to get through every avenue other than choosing water over wine have cropped up and grown robust in 181 days (that feel like 181 years considering how full they’ve been). Feelings like inner peace, inner safety, well-being, courage, honesty, efficiency, self-trust, joy, and resilience are finally setting in.

    Now we’re cooking with gas.

    In many ways, drinking became a way I kept myself from healing in the way I allegedly wanted to. A way to postpone the well-being I didn’t feel entitled to. A way to remain tethered to the drama I’d become so used to trying to overcome. A manifestation of my skepticism that what I was looking for might actually exist—in me, no less!

    I’m lucky. Every morning upon waking fresh as a button, especially on weekends or Mondays, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude at this inner leveling. Almost every day, I reach out or hear from my two teetotal close friends, and 99.9% of the time we don’t discuss how hard or boring life without alcohol is, but how much better, easier, brighter, richer, and solid we feel. How happy we are to have gotten out of that cul-de-sac.

    There’s a lot of shame and shaming stitched into the drinking dilemma, and I find it such a hindrance. For me, this hasn’t been a journey from shame to pride, and I’m completely convinced that had it been, it wouldn’t have stuck for more than a couple of weeks.

    Pride can be so brittle, so about the shame in the end, like the ‘after’ looking at the ‘before’ with a smug superiority. That doesn’t sit right with me.

    This has turned out to be tender, a pleasure, a streamlining of emotion, abundance, self-giving, taking, daring to receive, and giving from a full well. I sleep like a baby, say what I mean, mean what I say, know what I want, and know I have the energy to execute it. And as it happens, I have a personality that’s not bottle-of-wine adjacent, and I love her. 

    This isn’t a badge; how dead, how bland. This is a delight, alive and fluid and not for tomorrow—not to deserve something better now that I’ve quit that I didn’t deserve before, or to be better than people who haven’t quit. Hell no. This is my experiment, a treat from me to me.

    Have there been added bonuses? You bet. I’ve processed more trauma, melted more limiting beliefs, felt my nervous system unwind more, and even had bigger breakthroughs in my work in these past few virgin months than I did in decades before, and with far more ease.

    What changed for me that February morning wasn’t so much that I was done feeling those super low lows, but that for the first time in my adult life, I felt worthy of feeling myself. Just myself. And wow. Pretty cool.

    I won’t lie to you, sometimes around sunset, when the breeze is blowing and the crickets are singing and the company’s good or a favorite song comes on, I do think, “Dang, a cold glass of vino would make this even better.” But so far, the fresh mornings after, the healing that’s unfolded in this untampered space, and how much more present I feel for the sunset and the breeze and the crickets and the company and the song, has been kicking that thought’s ass.

    I’ve committed to a year of not touching the stuff, and I’m taking it a day at a time, but I don’t know, this is really good. It’s hard to imagine giving it up. Hah! Who’d have thought?

    Thank you for reading. Whatever relationship you have with alcohol, wherever you are with anything you’re struggling with, no judgment. Really, truly, no judgment. And to any person who’s experienced sexual assault, drunk or sober, you were never at fault.

  • Hungry and Panicked? The Link Between Food and Anxiety

    Hungry and Panicked? The Link Between Food and Anxiety

    “Take care of your mind, your body will thank you. Take care of your body, your mind will thank you.” ~Debbie Hampton

    4:00 p.m. I am suddenly aware of my heartbeat. It feels more insistent than normal. Is it faster? Is it jagged? Am I out of breath?

    I try to reason with myself: I’ve just done a brisk walk pushing the stroller over some hills.

    My anxiety responds: Those hills were awhile back… you wouldn’t be out of breath from that.

    Anxiety sufferers have a heightened sense of, well, a lot of things. For me, I am acutely aware of shifts in sensation in my body.

    Having practiced and taught yoga for most of my life contributes to this, and in many ways, it’s a great skill. I instinctively check in with my shoulders—are they up around my ears? Then my jaw—are my top teeth away from my bottom teeth? And perhaps the most important of all—am I holding my breath? I can’t help but observe when people walk with an imbalanced gait or sit with their spines slouched.

    But the heightened awareness is also pathological. A slight tingling in my hand instantly makes me think heart attack. Dizziness, which I ended up learning was caused by my vision changing, made me run to get screened for a brain tumor.

    4:30 p.m. I’m at the library with my two-year-old daughter. I still feel weird—“off.” I periodically place my hand on my chest—is my heart beating more intensely than normal? It seems normal. But what if it’s not normal?

    I press my hand into myself harder, searching for something to panic about. I find comfort in the two librarians a few feet away. I think, “If I have a heart attack, they’ll keep my daughter safe. They’ll call 911.” 

    I check in with my breath. It feels reassuring that I can take deep, unencumbered breaths.

    5:00 p.m. My eight-year-old son offers to look after his little sister. I feel like I need to lie down, to calm the strange rhythm of my heart. Something reminds me that I have leftovers from last night’s dinner.

    I made a really delicious Thai larb gai. It is a “safe” meal of ground turkey, vegetables, and rice. I hope my family didn’t notice that I avoided eating the rice last night.

    I reheat the leftovers, including a spoonful of rice. I am careful to avoid eating any rice—starch is bad, my disordered thinking will never let me forget. I take my first bite and burst into tears.

    —

    A few months ago, this pattern of crying started when I would finally eat after going too many hours without food. It would catch me by surprise because I hadn’t intentionally been avoiding food. I hadn’t intentionally been punishing myself. It would just happen.

    I’d miss breakfast because mornings are busy. A coffee would usually follow, masking my body’s ability to communicate its hunger—my hunger.

    I typically only have three hours to myself without any kids, three hours to do way more than is possible during that timeframe. I can’t possibly waste that time eating. And then once I reunite with my kids, my own needs all but get completely forgotten.

    On these types of days, when I would finally take a bite of something, almost always around 5:00 p.m., the tears would rush up and out.

    Why was I crying over a bite of chicken breast?

    —

    Eating my leftover larb gai, I wonder, when did I last eat? 9:00 a.m. with a friend. It is 5:00 p.m. now. An eight-hour window.

    “But I ate my daughter’s leftover applesauce!” I hear myself say. I instantly recognize this rationalization. The voice of the disorder.

    I realize I am once again inside the well-worn grooves of avoiding eating. I cry because my body is relieved it is getting sustenance. I cry because I am angry that I am still beholden.

    I try to work out what happened. It has been a busy day. But when is it not a busy day? This is not an excuse.

    At breakfast, I noticed that the person next to me was eating avocado toast, but she had scraped the avocado off the bread. Because bread is bad, my disordered thinking affirmed.

    I scanned the menu and noticed that the calories were listed next to each item. I don’t normally count calories. I try to focus on the description of each menu item and decide that Papa’s Breakfast Bowl sounds great: roasted potatoes, bourbon bacon jam, a sunny-side-up egg, and sliced avocado served with chipotle aioli. I would ask for no jam or aioli, obviously, but otherwise, this is a meal I would easily make myself.

    And then I saw the calories: 1100. 1100?! I panic.

    My friend arrived and asked what I was going to have. I casually said, “I’ll probably just have an omelet.”

    This friend is one of those women who pops out babies and bounces back. I don’t know how she does it—maybe it’s just genetic—but her body holds no visible remnants of having made babies. She was wearing skinny jeans and a fitted sweater; there are no rolls, her arms are firm and slender.

    I held my arms across my stubbornly squishy stomach. I calculated that her baby is younger than mine, but she is in much better shape. I didn’t know that I was doing it, but I chastised myself for being bigger than I used to be, than I should be. I deserved some sort of punishment for this failing, my evident gluttony and certain laziness. 

    I didn’t register when she told me, “You look amazing. What workouts are you doing these days?” My disordered, dysmorphic brain told me, “She’s just saying that to be nice because she feels sorry for how horrible you actually look.”

    —

    Another friend has unwittingly become my eating disorder sponsor. I send her a confessional text: “Dang it. I ate at 9 a.m. And then I didn’t eat for eight hours. I didn’t even realize how long it had been until I took my first bite and teared up.”

    We’ve talked about what the crying signifies. We both know it’s meaningful, pointing to some lesson.

    It is in talking to her that I put it all together. The 1100 calories. The scraped avocado toast. My slender friend.

    I also realize I had been triggered by another friend who had recently stayed with us. She does intermittent fasting, and she is an example that it works because she is an enviable (to me) size 0. My ED brain is so eager to jump on any restrictive, rule-based eating regimen. “See? She avoids eating and look at the result! Don’t you want to be a size 0 again?”

    But I also have an inner voice of wisdom. This is the voice that reminded me that nourishing myself so I could breastfeed was more important than losing the baby weight quickly. This is also the voice that instantaneously gets silenced when my eating disorder asserts itself.

    My visiting friend touted the benefits of intermittent fasting, “Our bodies aren’t meant to eat constantly. When we were cavemen, we didn’t have refrigerators and pantries.” She claimed, “My organs function better when they are free from having to digest food.” (Sounds ideal, but how does she know this is true?) She reasoned, “And when I do eat, I eat anything! Of course I always eat healthy foods, but I don’t avoid bread, as long as it’s good, artisanal bread, and I’ll have a pudding if I feel like it.”

    My eating disorder: You need to do this too.

    My inner wisdom: Any controlled eating is a slippery slope to starvation for you. Focus on three meals of day, that’s it. That’s your work. 

    —

    After I connect the dots of all these triggers and finish my leftovers, I promptly pass out on the couch, still sitting upright. I am relieved I (probably) am not having a heart attack and I need a minute to absorb it all.

    They say that you never recover from an eating disorder. You are in recovery. It is an active state that requires your conscious awareness and participation.

    In that sense, it seems no different to being an alcoholic. An alcoholic can’t just have one drink. They may struggle if they’re around people who are drinking. It may feel like an invisible force is pulling them to that ice cold beer or elegant glass of wine.

    I feel this invisible force, too. Except for me, it is pulling me toward starvation, deprivation, urging me to shrink into nothingness, to zero.

    But the cost is simply too high. I do not want to forgo my mental steadiness and inner ease for a smaller number on the scale or on my clothes. I’ve been there before, and it was not worth it.

    And for me, there is a clear correlation between starving myself and anxiety. I’ve learned that anxiety is actually the voice of wisdom, my inner child, piping up to grab my attention, reminding me to take care of myself.

    No, it’s not a heart attack, it’s not even a panic attack, it’s just—you’re hungry! You forgot about you. You’ve been criticizing yourself for being too big, for looking different to how you looked pre-motherhood or when you were eighteen. You’re not eighteen! And what a gift that is, to be given this opportunity to live, to age. To have children. 

    And they, my children, really are a huge motivation for me. I see how they take everything in, especially from us, their parents. I know how much I unconsciously absorbed from my mother. Babies are not born hating their thighs; you learn to hate your thighs.

    I know I cannot control everything in my children’s lives and psyches but my actions, my behavior, the way I talk about myself—these things I can control.

    I want my children to experience joy and gratefulness in the food we are all lucky enough to eat. I want them to get to know flavors, to have fun cooking, and to revel in shared meals with loved ones. I love when I make something that they love that they know their mommy made for them. Even if it’s just mac and cheese out of a box; I’ll take it when my son exclaims that nobody makes better mac and cheese than his mom does. (I do sometimes add toppings!)

    I do not want to be at the whim of my weight. I do not want to fear food. I most certainly do not want to pass any of this on to my children.

    So I will keep fighting for freedom. Freedom to eat—and enjoy!—three meals a day. Freedom to eat the damn bread (I ate the rice that was with my leftovers, by the way). Freedom, even, to make mistakes because these habits are deeply embedded, and the freedom to then celebrate the remembering, realizing, and resetting.

    I don’t know if this is the case for other people with anxiety, but I would invite you to take a look at any possible connections between your eating habits and symptoms of anxiety, particularly if you are prone to dieting.

    If you restrict your eating by skipping meals or by enforcing a tight eating window and you happen to find yourself experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depletion, zoom out and consider the bigger picture. Are you truly taking care of yourself?

    We are complex, layered beings and all the different facets of who we are intermingle and influence each other. It’s not just segregated compartments of well-being. Physical health and mental health are inextricably linked.

    Anxiety makes me feel untethered, shaky, uncertain, and afraid. Having that on empty exacerbates it all. I have no body or brain fuel to process it.

    Those tears that erupt with that first bite of food after denying myself—they ground me in relief, offer release, and ultimately, are a practice of compassion for myself. I wish good health and food freedom for us all. Because we are worth being fed, nourished, and sustained.

  • How Toast Changed My Life and Helped Me Stop Bingeing

    How Toast Changed My Life and Helped Me Stop Bingeing

    One day, toast changed my life.

    It was many years ago, when I was working as a personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach.

    I spent my days helping people “get fit” and “eat healthy,” so of course I was always preaching about lifestyle changes, “healthy” eating, and “whole, clean, nutritious” food, while demonizing “processed” foods, as most others in those worlds do.

    Toast, at the time, was a big no-no. Especially toast made with white bread.

    That’s basically blasphemy in the “healthy eating” world, with two strikes against it. First, bread has carbs, which I learned, from Atkins in the nineties, were trying to kill me and making me gain weight. Second, it’s processed, and I learned from the “clean eating” world that processed food was also trying to kill me and making me gain weight.

    So I wasn’t allowed to eat toast for breakfast. Toast was bad. Especially if I paired it with butter and didn’t at least have protein with it.

    And there I was on this particular morning, standing at the counter buttering two pieces of *gasp, shock, horror* white bread toast for breakfast. With no protein.

    Because despite vowing to “get back on track” that day, a mere hour earlier when I woke up, I had already decided I’d start the next day instead because I didn’t want to eat what was on “the plan.” I wanted to have toast instead.

    You see, like many in the fitness and nutrition world, while I was preaching about clean, healthy, balanced meals to my clients, and trying so hard to stick to those rules myself, I was also a raging bulimic/binge eater.

    In fact, within four days of my first attempt at “clean eating,” I was a full-on bulimic.

    It got so bad that I was once hospitalized for a week and often went to bed feeling like I might die in my sleep because I’d eaten so much.

    I lived in what I call “on track” vs “off track” mode for many years. Many, many years.

    When I was “on track,” I ate meticulously “clean” and healthy.

    When I was “off track” I was bingeing and completely out of control around food.

    I could easily have concluded that I’d fallen “off track” that morning with the toast.

    But at that point, I had started working on understanding how my thoughts were contributing to my suffering, so I was in the very beginning stages of awareness.

    And there I was, standing at the counter, buttering toast and listening to my thoughts as I did so.

    They were horribly abusive, judgmental, and berating.

    “What kind of loser eats bread for breakfast? And white bread, even. It’s so bad. You’re such a screw-up. What’s the matter with you? You’re gonna be so bloated and gross. This isn’t going to build any muscle. You trained hard yesterday; you should be eating protein. God, you’re an idiot. You just promised you were going to be good today, and you’re screwing up again already. All you ever do is screw up.”

    Then the voice started planning a trip to the grocery store for all the things we would buy to binge on the rest of the day—yanno, because “I’m such a stupid screw up already; may as well just eat everything today because I won’t be able to have any of it when I get back on track tomorrow.”

    The voice had our entire day of bingeing planned out, and then it started getting all judgy again.

    “You’re supposed to be having oats, eggs, and six blueberries. That’s a good breakfast. You’re never going to be able to stick to anything. Loser. Why are you broken? You’re going to get fat. What’s everyone going to think of you then?”

    (Yes, I used to actually have meal plans from my own coach with six blueberries in a meal—this is me rolling my eyes into oblivion.)

    Then, like magic, something switched in my brain, and another voice came charging in like a knight on a white horse and said, in a lighter, more compassionate tone, “Uhhm, dude. It’s just toast.”

    The first voice stopped in its tracks and was like… “Wait, what did you just say?”

    White knight voice: “I mean, it’s just f*cking toast. You don’t want oats and eggs this morning. You just want a couple of pieces of toast. Normal people eat toast for breakfast sometimes. Why have you decided you’re a horrible human just because you feel like a couple of pieces of toast for breakfast? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

    It was like someone in my head threw me a life raft of sanity.

    The first voice was a little taken aback for a second and needed to sit with that information before replying, ”Holy sh*t, you’re right!!”

    Instantly, all abusive thoughts were gone. And all thoughts about bingeing during the rest of the day were gone.

    I ate and enjoyed my two pieces of toast and went about my day in peace.

    A few hours later it was lunchtime. I realized I was starting to get hungry, which made me realize that not only had I not thought about food since breakfast, but I had forgotten that before breakfast I had been planning to go to buy binge foods.

    I forgot to binge.

    What?! How did I do that!?!

    It felt like a miracle. Normally, I was consumed with thoughts of food non-stop, and nothing in the world could stop a binge.

    So I wondered, hmm… can I use this new skill of just having what I want for lunch too? *Gasp.* Dare I?

    I asked myself what I wanted and felt like a sandwich.

    *Gasp again.* But that would be bread… twice …in one day. *The horror.*

    The white knight rolled in with the reminder: It’s okay to eat what you feel like eating.

    So I had and enjoyed a sandwich.

    A few hours later, the same thing—I noticed I was getting hungry and, again, I hadn’t thought about food since lunchtime.

    I don’t remember what I had for supper that night, but I just ate something normal, went to bed feeling fine, and contemplated the fact that I hadn’t wanted to binge after all.

    What was almost another day of bingeing on things that made me feel like garbage turned into a normal day of eating in peace and enjoying food.

    Because I took my power back.

    I shut down the voice in my head that had been programmed by our insane diet and healthy eating cultures. I reconnected with myself, trusted myself to decide what I wanted to eat, and allowed myself to eat whatever it was without shame or fear.

    That was the beginning of freedom, peace, and getting my sanity back.

    It was the beginning of healing not only my relationships with food and my body, but also with myself.

    It was the beginning of healing and creating truly healthy eating habits—habits that are rooted in love and trust rather than fear and restrictions.

    Before I’d be scared to buy bread because I didn’t trust myself with it.

    “Don’t keep the bad food in your house,” right?

    Back then, if I did have bread in the house, I’d eat the entire loaf in a day.

    Now, I can’t remember the last time I bought a loaf of bread, not because I’m scared of it, but because I simply don’t care about eating it anymore. The last couple of times I bought bread, I threw it away because it got moldy before I could eat it all.

    Obviously, complete recovery required more work than the one day with the toast, but it was definitely a pivotal moment.

    Because from that moment on, I stopped fearing and trying to control my food intake.

    Instead, I practiced connecting with myself, recognizing what I wanted to eat and, more importantly, understanding why I wanted it.

    If I was about to make a choice that I knew wasn’t in my best interest, I’d ask myself, why? Why was I making the self-destructive choices I was making?

    One of the biggest reasons I was stuck in those patterns with food was because I kept trying to “be good.”

    The fear and restrictions I’d learned were required to “eat healthy” were, in large part, causing the bingeing and feeling out of control around food.

    That’s why after I simply allowed myself to eat and enjoy the toast for breakfast, I didn’t binge and wasn’t consumed with thoughts of food the rest of the day.

    Here’s the thing: I’m not here to argue about what’s the healthiest or the best way for you or anyone else to eat (anymore).

    Because I know very well what a sh*tshow the world of nutrition science is, and I also know that our beautiful bodies are natural healers and communicators. They know what they need to feel their best, and they know how to communicate those needs to us.

    We just get so disconnected from them that we cannot hear (or trust) them anymore.

    And it doesn’t matter how perfectly healthy and “clean” you think you’re eating part of the time if the rest of the time is a complete train wreck—because you’ve been trying so hard to “be good” that you end up falling “off track” and start eating everything you can’t have when you start “being good” again.

    And carrying fear, shame, self-judgment, and criticism over the way you eat is a lot less healthy than just having a cookie or two when you feel like it.

    It’s incredibly harmful and unhealthy, in fact.

    Especially because when you start allowing yourself the cookies while working on uncovering why you want them in the first place, you eventually naturally stop caring about the cookies so much, in the same way I have with bread.

    The healthiest way for you to eat is whatever way best nurtures and supports not only your unique body, but also your mental and emotional health and your relationships with yourself, your body, and food. Nobody knows what that looks like for you better than you and your own body.

    And you can be trusted to decide.

    There is no binary, one-size fits all answer to “healthy” eating, and it’s not rooted in rules and restrictions.

    It’s rooted in love. Trust. And wholehearted being—being fully grounded in the knowledge of our own worthiness exactly as we are, while also being present, connected, curious, and intentional about our choices.

  • How I Embraced Alcohol-Free Living: 4 Things That Made It Easier

    How I Embraced Alcohol-Free Living: 4 Things That Made It Easier

    “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.” ~Abraham Maslow

    A few years ago I decided to take a break from alcohol, and I also decided I would probably be lonely, miserable, and boring for the duration of my break.

    I’d allowed a lot of social conditioning to affect me, and I was sure people who didn’t drink either had no friends, had hit a drastic rock bottom, or had no fun. I didn’t know if I was going to find happiness or even contentment on the other side of my drinking career, and this worried me.

    I began to examine those thoughts and feelings around my drinking and brought my behaviors into a sharper focus. It led me to…

    Awareness (of my drinking habits)

    I look back and can now clearly see that I was, for a very long time, a gray area drinker.

    A gray area drinker is someone who falls into the bracket between never drinking and physical alcohol dependency.

    Society tends to view problematic drinking in black and white terms. “You’re an alcoholic and you need to be fixed, or you’re not an alcoholic and are therefore okay.” Well, I think it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a spectrum between the extremes of rock bottom and every now and again drinking, and it’s a long spectrum.

    A gray area drinker could be consuming a couple of glasses of wine each evening or could be someone who binge drinks on the weekend or someone who can abstain for a month at a time to prove they haven’t got a problem.

    I was capable of any of those behaviors, and, looking back, I fit the description of a gray area drinker very neatly. I wasn’t physically dependent on alcohol, but I might have been emotionally dependent. I used it to help me alter my state of mind into relaxation/fun on a regular basis.

    This can be a confusing place to be when you first start to see alcohol for what it is. I’d say, “But I’m not doing anyone any harm. I’m sinking a couple of glasses of wine on the sofa, and then I’m going to bed—what’s the problem with that?”

    In the past I moved along the gray scale; different ages, different friendship groups, different jobs, different circumstances, different seasons, and different living arrangements all led to different drinking patterns. Apart from the periods in my life where I was pregnant or breastfeeding, I didn’t ever choose to have a really extended time (more than thirty days) away from alcohol.

    Acceptance (that I wanted something different)

    I came to realize that the more I moved along the grayscale, the more or less colorful other areas of my life became. If my joy was a rainbow, the vibrancy of that rainbow either faded or shone brightly depending on how much I was drinking.

    I stopped myself from making a change around my drinking for a long time because I didn’t want anyone to define me as “having a problem.”

    The movies would have you believe that the end of your drinking career needs to be very dramatic, with a family intervention and a massive rock bottom, but this doesn’t need to be the case.

    What if you chose for your drinking days to end with a quiet fizzle out instead of a big firework or massive drama? That’s how it was for me.

    My gray area drinking changed shades of gray over a couple of years, and by the time I was ready to try my alcohol-free life experiment, I was moderating my drinking and never drinking more than two drinks at one time. However, the shades of gray no longer felt good, and I wanted a full-on technicolor rainbow, and I knew that to get one I had to do away with the other—so I did.

    Those gray clouds parted, and one by one all the other areas in my life that had, up until then, been a bit less than joyful started to shine a bit brighter.

    Action (taking steps toward what was next)

    Once I had made the decision to have a break from alcohol for one year, I took action steps to make it more likely to happen.

    I set myself up for success by choosing a time frame I wanted to work toward, educating myself on the harm alcohol does, downloading an app to help me to stay focused, looking for other inspiring people who were already doing what I wanted, and asking for support where I needed it.

    I had assumed that once I made the decision to have a break from drinking, it would be easy to execute, but I was surprised to find it wasn’t. I realize now that this is one of the reasons there are so many amazing sober communities out there—we need each other, and we want to look out for those who we can serve.

    I used to joke that the early days of sobriety constituted a full-time job because I got very focused on a morning routine that supported my needs, I read more than I ever have, I listened to podcasts, and I used distraction techniques in the early days. But actually it wasn’t a full-time job; it was simply learning a new way of being.

    Alignment (and a feeling of contentment or peace)

    Now that I don’t drink, I’ve had to face some truths. Some of them have been uncomfortable. Some have become less uncomfortable over time, and some, well, they are still uncomfortable.

    Deciding to have an alcohol-free year threw me into a bit of an identity crisis. I was mostly okay about changing my home drinking identity but really struggled with my social identity. Shared boozy experiences were a big part of my life and of who I was, or who I thought I was.

    I’ve ended up piecing together a bit of a new identity over time. I’ve reflected not only on who I had been but also on who I wanted to be in the future. I took time to explore what I enjoyed and also consciously began to move away from activities I had stopped enjoying.

    I also looked more closely at my relationships. Who did I want to see more of, and who did I need to move away from a bit? Some of the most surprising support came from the least expected places.

    I discovered that chaos had been a default position for so long that calmness was too unfamiliar. To start with, I had to move slowly toward the identity that I wanted. I’ve accepted that some friendships have changed and some have stayed the same. I’ve also made new friends since becoming sober and a business owner.

    Who am I sober? I’m just someone who chooses not to drink alcohol. I want that to be the least interesting thing about me.

    Who am I sober? I am an improved version of myself, more relaxed, more peaceful, more patient, kinder, and more content. These were not words I would have used to describe myself when I was drinking. Internal chaos reigned.

    Who am I sober? Well, probably the most surprising thing for me is to find myself working as a coach. I spent twelve years as a youth worker, and a large portion of my time was spent talking to young people about their substance use without ever considering my own. When I had gotten sober and completed my coach trainings and certifications, I couldn’t believe what I had achieved. None of this seemed possible a short time ago.

    I recognize now that a large part of the “woohoo, let me lead the charge to the pub/bar/dance floor” part of my personality looked like an extrovert but was indeed an introvert using alcohol as a coping mechanism in situations where I didn’t feel comfortable.

    I’m really happy to lay claim to my more introvert nature now—let me have all the fun, but please can it be in pairs or small groups, please can it be in the morning or afternoon, and please can I go home and have a lie-down afterward? Thank you!

    If you’re struggling to visualize/think about who the sober version of you might be, then follow good role models to get ideas—read books, listen to podcasts, and take action. If you’re thinking of taking someone’s advice, consider if they are currently where you might like to be. Have they been in a similar place to you now, and have you seen them act with care and kindness toward others they are helping?

    Sobriety hasn’t been a ‘one and done’ experience for me; it’s been a process over the last few years, and I’m so grateful to acknowledge that I’m still a work in progress, as I believe we all are.

    Bring awareness, acceptance, action, and alignment into focus as you go, and it might just make things a little bit easier for you.

  • How Getting Sober Healed My Dating Life (When I Thought It Would Ruin It)

    How Getting Sober Healed My Dating Life (When I Thought It Would Ruin It)

    “Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don’t ever want to be again.” ~Shane Niemeyer

    When I faced the prospect of no longer drinking anymore (at age twenty-one!), after eight years of heavy boozing, I had so many questions about my dating life.

    Will I be fun anymore? Will I have FOMO? How will I cope with stress? What will I drink on dates? Will anyone want to be with me? What will sober sex be like? Omg!

    These questions paralyzed me, as I couldn’t imagine my life without alcohol, yet I couldn’t imagine my life with it either. I put down the drink and with it, I thought I surrendered my desirability and compatibility as a potential partner.

    That couldn’t have been further from the truth.

    Over time, I’ve realized plenty of people don’t mind that I’m sober; some even like it or are sober too. Ultimately, I found I didn’t really care what others thought because I was okay with myself.

    The reality was, slowly but surely, getting sober healed my dating, sex, and love life for good. Here’s how.

    Feeling My Feelings

    Gosh, alcohol seemed to solve everything. Stressed? Drink. Excited? Drink. Sad? Drink.

    I’m face-to-face with reality without picking up the bottle every time I have a feeling. I don’t get to check out. It’s a good thing, honestly. It means I feel the spectrum of feelings and am present with them, which helps me work through those feelings in a healthy way.

    I recently went through a breakup, and it destroyed me emotionally. Even though I was the initiator, I felt so many feelings.

    I spent the first few weeks running from my feelings by trying to meet people on dating apps (what a joke that was at such a raw point!), but I quickly realized this wouldn’t serve me. I had to face my feelings head-on.

    Now, it’s been almost two months, and I’m still sad, but I’m feeling the sadness. I’m leaning in to let the sadness visit, then leaning out when I’ve let it visit for long enough. I know now that the best way to move through sadness is to let it unfold within me, not fight it.

    Owning and Releasing My Stuff

    Alcoholism stunted my growth as a human. I think when I got sober, mentally, I was like sixteen instead of twenty-one. What sobriety has given me is a chance to catch up with that emotional maturity.

    I can take responsibility for my actions, knowing when something is my fault and when I owe someone an apology. For example, if I raised my voice at my ex-partner, I owed him amends or an “I’m sorry,” and I apologized promptly.

    I can also own when I don’t have a part in things and, instead, have to figure out what isn’t mine to carry. For example, I felt some guilt and shame about the traumatic aspects of my childhood, but this is not my stuff. I’ve learned that I need to let that go.

    Emotional maturity teaches me to make sense of what to own and what to reject as not mine.

    Becoming Okay with Being Alone

    When I was drinking, I was terrified of being alone. I was cheating on my partner because I couldn’t be with him but couldn’t be without him either.

    Once I got sober, I spent many years practicing being by myself. I took myself on dates to beaches and bookstores, learned proper self-care through relaxation and gentle but necessary productivity like doing my laundry, and learned that I’d be okay no matter what happened.

    I realized I was a lovable human being and that I could love myself.

    I’m alone again a few years later, and although I don’t love it, I’m thriving in solitude. I’m rediscovering my passions, such as yoga, writing, and spending time with loved ones. I’m embracing myself because I’m realizing I’m worth it.

    I can’t be with another person until I’m whole again, and I’m just not there yet. Today, I try not to use other people to escape my feelings through rebounding. So alone time it is.

    Engaging in More Communicative Sex

    When drinking excessively, it can be challenging to have consistent consent. I was assaulted several times during my drinking days, and although I never deserved that, I put myself at risk by blacking out and drinking to excess.

    Now, I have incredibly communicative sex. I don’t settle for anything less than enthusiastic consent.

    When I sleep with someone, we talk about it before it happens and make sure we know each other’s boundaries and needs. We communicate clearly during and even after. It’s magical! Sure, you don’t need sobriety for this, but with my drinking habits, I did.

    Getting Additional Support

    Getting sober in an alcohol twelve-step program made me realize I needed another twelve-step program for sex and love. I came to find out that, although getting sober did a lot for my sex and love life, more healing was necessary to level up. So I joined Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, where they taught me self-love and how to date in a healthy way.

    They taught me how to avoid behaviors that harmed me, like having sex with randos and chasing unavailable people. In the evolved part of my life with my ex-partner, they taught me how to set boundaries and accept love. Now that I’m alone, I’m learning again how to face it.

    Final Thoughts for Others

    I have nothing against alcohol; it just didn’t work for me anymore. I was binge drinking, blacking out, cheating when I got too drunk, waking up in strange places, and just generally making an ass of myself. I was most definitely ruining my relationships!

    If you think you have a problem with alcohol, there are many resources for the non-drinker. I personally found Alcoholics Anonymous to be the most helpful, but whatever works for you is what you should do. It might just heal you and your relationships.

  • One Missing Ingredient in My Recovery and Why I Relapsed

    One Missing Ingredient in My Recovery and Why I Relapsed

    “The Phoenix must burn to emerge.” ~Janet Fitch

    Many people were shocked when I relapsed after twenty-three years of recovery. After all, I was the model of doing it right. I did everything I was told: went to treatment, followed instructions, prayed for help, and completed the assignments.

    After returning home from treatment, I joined a recovery program and went to therapy. Once again, I followed all the suggestions, which worked when it came to staying sober. I had no desire to drink or do drugs—well, at least for a long while.

    When I went to treatment, I was an emotional wreck. I would have done anything to get rid of the pain. But substances only intensified the pain and prevented healing.

    The worse I felt, the more I needed to medicate those emotions, but it was only causing the ache in my heart to be prolonged, driving me to suicidal thoughts. The moment I stopped using substances, the pain immediately subsided. I’d gone from struggling to get out of bed to engaging in my life fully.

    But going to treatment was only the tip of the iceberg. There was something much deeper underneath my addiction that I wrongly thought a relationship could fix. There was an underlying malaise and sense of shame I couldn’t identify. I knew something was wrong, so I kept searching for answers but couldn’t find the magic formula.

    Without the solution, relapse was inevitable.

    Most recovery programs address a single addiction, but I had many. After two years of sobriety, I stopped smoking but then started compulsive exercising. I didn’t eat right, spent too much, was codependent with needy people, and went from one addictive relationship to the next, never healthy enough to attract someone who could problem solve with me.

    I didn’t realize I was still substituting addictions for love.

    I wanted to make up for my troubled childhood, and I thought getting married and having kids would fix the problem, but after several attempts, it only made me feel more inadequate. Worse, I was a therapist and felt like a hypocrite. It wasn’t like I didn’t work at getting better; self-help was like a part-time job

    I spent decades in different kinds of therapy, not only as a patient but expanding my education in other modalities. I attended dozens of workshops and seminars doing inner-child work. I fully immersed myself in over twenty years of therapy, including psychoanalysis. My toolbox was overflowing, but I still felt disconnected for some reason.

    I didn’t realize those tools weren’t teaching me how to love myself.

    My journey took me on a lifelong spiritual quest. I found a higher power in recovery. I attended various churches and did some mission work in Haiti. I went to Brazil to be healed by John of God (later convicted of multiple cases of sexual abuse), on to a spiritual quest in Peru, on a visit to the Holy Land in Israel, and to Fiji to find my destiny but still felt something was missing.

    I read every spirituality book I could get my hands on and studied A Course in Miracles, but I was still disconnected from myself and others.

    Discouraged, I began to drift further away from all sources of help. I resigned myself to being an unhealed healer.

    I didn’t realize that all the therapy and spirituality were simply another form of addiction for me.

    Relapse began when I got breast cancer and was prescribed opiates after surgery. I got a taste of that forgotten high and made sure I took all the pills, whether I needed them or not. I also forgot how mood-altering substances affected my judgment.

    Instead of facing my fears about being ill and moving forward with my life, I reconciled with my ex-husband. I had little to no regard for how this affected my children. Like a piece of dust suctioned into a vacuum, despite feeling uncomfortable, I allowed my thoughts to suck me back into unhealthy choices—all the while in therapy.

    The next seven years were dark. Another divorce was followed by my former husband’s death, though I was grateful to bring him to our home and care for him until he passed. Then, a fire turned our newly renovated home into a mass of black and burnt-out walls, forcing another relocation for myself and youngest. Soon after, one of my businesses suffered severe damage from another fire resulting in six months of work and restoration.

    Three devastating hurricanes over two years damaged our home and business. One caused the foyer ceiling to cave in, another landed a large tree on our roof, and the third made our yard look like it had been run through a giant blender. One of my businesses was twice flooded and everything had to be thrown away.

    Soon after, our home was ransacked and burglarized. The stress of managing repairs, insurance claims, child-rearing, and working full-time felt like I was repeatedly set on fire and drowned.

    I kept trying to get better but felt emotionally shredded from the struggle. Desperate for support, poor decisions kept me in a whirlwind of insanity—more bad relationships. I was tired of trying, sick of hurting, and anger brewed within me.

    I stopped therapy, recovery meetings, and my spiritual quest, and decided to throw it all away. I went on a rebellious rampage. I’d been married at age sixteen and had a child, and now I was entirely alone. I decided to return to my pre-recovery lifestyle and live it up.

    Looking back, I lived a dual life of selfishness and a thirty-year career of helping others. I was self-will run riot but couldn’t see myself. I’d lived a life of making things happen and simultaneously wondered why my higher power didn’t deliver everything I wanted.

    Spirituality is a tricky thing. It’s so easy to think that God or some higher power is in control, but I believe, with free will, it’s a collaborative effort. Do the footwork and wait… if only I’d waited; impatience was my Achilles heel.

    My party life added a new heap of problems: disappointed children, bad judgment, and wrecked relationships. It didn’t take long to wind up in the same place that took me to treatment twenty-three years earlier, an emotional bottom. But this time, I was ready for the miracle of change.

    I finally found the missing ingredient to a happy life.

    The night was pitch black as I drove around emotionally deranged from grief and substances. After a near accident, I pulled into a parking lot and sobbed uncontrollably. I railed, “Whatever you are out there, why did you abandon me? Why haven’t you helped me? Why don’t you love me?”

    Immediately, a thought shot through my brain like an arrow through a cloud. “It’s not me that doesn’t love you. You don’t love yourself.” And for the first time in my life, I realized two things: I didn’t love myself and didn’t know what loving myself even meant.

    How would I learn to love myself? It never occurred to me that I didn’t. But now, I was armed with the missing ingredient to my happiness, and I intended to figure it out.

    Psychoanalysts are taught the importance of an infant’s basic needs for nurturing and bonding, but I’d never applied any of those concepts to myself. There were some missing parts in my childhood, so I had to learn how to provide for my physical, emotional, and spiritual needs,  as well as get proper nutrition, rest, and activity, in addition to responsibilities, play time, creative and quiet time, gratitude and appreciation, and loss of tolerance for unkind behavior (to and from others), all of which places I started the journey to self-love.

    I let go of what I wanted and focused on doing the next right thing for myself and others. The results were miraculous; peace engulfed me for the first time. By being the love I’d always wanted, I felt loved.

    I was always a doer and thought that spirituality was like getting a degree. Follow the steps, and everything will be okay. Whether or not that’s true, there’s a lot more to staying sober than following a set of directions. It’s important to find a higher power, clean up our act, apologize to those we’ve hurt, and stop using, but that won’t keep us sober if we don’t know how to love ourselves. My higher power became love.

    Correct behavior and self-love are not the same. Loving oneself starts with giving thanks to the sunrise and the sunset, cuddling with your pillow and those you love, acknowledging a universal intelligence and trusting guidance from your conscience, discovering and loving your mission, and nourishing your body, mind, and soul.

    Feed your body with nontoxic food; feed your mind with positive, stimulating information; and feed your soul with nature, good friends, healthy partners, and a higher power (of your own understanding) that inspires and uplifts you.

    If you’ve struggled with staying sober, you probably haven’t learned to love yourself. It’s never too late to start. When I started loving myself like a small child, I lost all substitutes for that godly love, and I finally began to blossom and grow.

    It took decades of failure to discover the missing ingredient to staying sober. I had to learn that love isn’t something I get. Love is an action I give to myself and others.

    Through being the love that I want, I then receive love. There’s a difference between staying sober and recovering. For all like me, who failed to stay sober, learn how to love yourself and then you will recover from the lack of self-love at the root of this tragic disease.

    It’s not enough to just stay sober, and life without happiness makes no sense. You were meant to have a life of love and joy. If you’ve tried everything and something’s still missing, try learning how to love.

  • Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    “Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~Martha Beck

    I have so many women around me right now—friends, mothers, clients that are on a diet—constantly talking about their weight and how their bodies look, struggling with body image.

    I am profoundly sad about the frequency and theme of those discussions.

    At the same time, I deeply get it; it is hard to detach from our conditioning.

    I too struggled with body image at one point in my life, and for a very long time. I suffered from anorexia in my late teens and early twenties. I was skinny as a rail and thought I was not thin enough. I hated the way I looked. I was never perfect enough.

    I controlled my food intake as a way to regain control over my life, as a way to maybe one day be perfect enough that I might feel loved. I almost ended up in the hospital, as my weight impacted my health, physically and mentally. I had no period, no healthy bowel movement. I was so unhappy and depressed. I had no energy.

    The messed-up thing is that the skinnier I looked, the more compliments I received from a lot of people, from family to friends: “You are so slim and gorgeous.” To me, this just validated the way I treated my body—and myself—with control, self-criticism, and harshness.

    Then there were the magazines, showing skinny models, getting so much positive attention. I was obsessed. The more my body looked like those magazine pictures, the better; though I could never quite get to a point where I looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw. It was an endless circle of judgment, control, and unhappiness. 

    It took me many years to change the way I saw my body and debunk the standards created by “society” for women.

    For many years I bit my tongue each time I would hear other women around me comparing and judging their body size and shape, repeating the same narrative of needing to lose weight. These conversations felt like an unbearable ringing in my ears, a knot in my stomach, the story in my head of “I am not good enough.”

    I was in the process of creating a new set of standards for myself, of what it was to be a woman in this world, but the old stories were hard to escape and easier to follow because they were the gold standard. I did not have any role models of women out there, younger or older, loving their body just the way it was.

    There was a point, though, when it was just too draining. I noticed that it was not the striving to get to a perfect body that brought me love. What brought me love was being vulnerable, authentic, sharing my inner life, supporting others, having deep talks, being kind with myself and others, and doing the things I loved.

    From then on, I started to soften and release all those standards that had been gifted to me. I allowed myself to be okay with how my body looked, to enjoy food, to enjoy movement, to enjoy my body. I learned to truly love my body, and with that came a different type of respect: I learned to rest when my body was tired. I learned to eat really nourishing food. I learned to move every day in a way that was respectful to my body and that I enjoyed.

    Thinner is not better. Healthy, connected, and happy is.

    Practicing yoga helped me so much in embodying this new belief, and studying neuro-linguistic programming as well.

    The truth is we are “society”—all of us, women and men—which means we are the agents of change. So let’s pause, reflect, and choose new standards. Is this constant need to lose weight healthy or serving anyone?

    There are a few different things to separate and highlight here.

    If your weight negatively impacts your health or your life, if you feel heavy in an unhealthy way and can’t do the activities you’d like to do, that is a different story; and yes, please, take care of your body, through what you think will work best for you: exercise, nutrition, mindset, support.

    Your body is your vessel to experience life, so finding your way to a healthy body is a worthwhile investment. And daily movement and good nutrition will have such a positive impact on your vitality and health, physical and mental, so yes, go for it, with love, softness and kindness—no control, judgment, or harshness.

    But if you feel that your body is strong and healthy, but you don’t like the way it looks… I feel you. I was there. I felt the shame, the discomfort, the sadness, the feeling of not being good enough. Allow yourself to feel this pain. It is okay, and human nature, to feel concerned about your appearance. We all want to be part of the tribe, to be loved and admired.

    But then, ask yourself, is it me that does not like the way my body looks, or is it because of society’s beauty standards? Is it because of all the noise from my friends, constantly talking about weight and looks? Do I want to transmit those standards to the next generation? To my sons? To my daughters? Is it really the most important thing for us women, to look thin and good? Is this story serving us all? Is it love?

    No, it is not love, and it serves no one. Not the women suffering in silence because they believe their body is not slim enough. Not the partners of those women who can’t appreciate their true beauty and fullness. Not the daughters that will believe the same messages and suffer as well. Not the sons that will not know how to recognize beauty in its diverse shapes and forms. Not society as a whole, which will be robbed of having a happy, compassionate, loving, self-confident population.

    So let’s choose differently. Let’s celebrate our different body shapes and weights and strength. Let’s feel good and enjoy life, movement, and food without counting and restricting and denying love to our bodies and selves.

    Let’s stop talking about our weight constantly and find other ways to connect.

    Some might say that I am too slim to really speak about this subject, that I have it easy. This is not quite true. My body has changed so much throughout the years. I went from an ultra-skinny teenager and twenty-year-old with anorexia, to a healthy weight in my thirties, to ups and downs with weight throughout my two pregnancies and breastfeeding journeys. I have seen my body change quite a lot and have been judged for how I looked oh so many times. I have been judged for being skinny, or envied for being slim, and I have been judged for gaining weight.

    Today I am forty-three. My body is not as slim as it used to be. I have a bit of fat around my belly, and my breasts are not as round and firm as they once were, but I feel strong and healthy. And I am SO grateful for my body for enabling me to experience life so far, and for creating life and feeding life, that I don’t want to ever criticize or shame my body again.

    I have learned to love every scar, my stretch marks, my extra skin, because they are the witness of my life, my loves, my years.

    So thank you, body, for everything you allow me to experience.

    The alternative to loving my body—the constant internal criticism and self-doubt—is too draining.

    We, as humans, are society, so let’s change this conditioning. Let’s never transmit this idea of what a woman’s body should look like to our daughters, to our sons. Let’s invent a world where it does not matter what you weigh as long as you feel healthy and good within. Let’s change the chattering from what diet we are on to how our heart is feeling.

    Let’s celebrate bodies, in their diverse beauty and forms.

  • Growing Old Gratefully: How to See Each Year as a Gift

    Growing Old Gratefully: How to See Each Year as a Gift

    Growing old gratefully. Yes, you read that right. Gratefully. Why on earth would I be grateful for getting older, less youthful, and more wrinkly with every passing year?? I hear you cry. Let me tell you why I’m trying hard to do just that.

    One bright Saturday afternoon some years back, while chatting with my uncle, he reminded me that my fortieth birthday was fast approaching. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yes, Uncle, thanks for the reminder.”

    He looked at me for a minute and then said, “You know, you should be grateful for every year of life you get. Some people don’t get to see their fortieth birthday.” That remark was quite sobering, and I felt humbled.

    That conversation made me think. Why do we have such a fear about getting older? Why the almost shameful stigma attached to it?

    Apart from the obvious slowing down, loss of vitality, and general “nearer to deathness,” I realized that much of our fear of aging is set in vanity. We equate youth with beauty, desirability, and happiness. We attach the opposite traits to old age; in fact, we fear that as we get older, we become almost obsolete.

    In a society that worships beauty and vitality, it’s little wonder that we are all panic-buying anti-aging serums, trying anti-aging diets, following anti-aging fitness regimes, and generally trying our utmost to stave off any sign that we are getting older.

    The problem with all of this is, well, we age. It’s a fact of life and it will happen whether you fight it or just allow it. This leads me to wonder… what if I just stop fighting and fearing the inevitable?

    Does that mean I will retire myself to Dr. Scholl’s sandals and elasticated waists? Never!! But what if I just accepted, embraced, or even, dare I say it, was grateful to still be here, enjoying life on our beautiful planet? I mean, really, who—apart from greedy, capitalist, big business—benefits from our aging phobia anyway?

    It’s funny that we use the word anti-aging too. We use that word for things that are considered unacceptable in society like anti-bullying or anti-social, as if we had any control over getting older. Using that small, four-lettered word subtly feeds us the message that aging is not only unwanted, it’s down right unacceptable. How ridiculous!!

    I propose that we change our own narrative. That we embrace aging as a privilege not granted to everyone. To see it as a gift.

    In Japanese culture, the mindset is quite different. Japanese conceptions of aging are rooted in Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist philosophical traditions that characterize aging as maturity. Old age is thus understood as a socially valuable part of life, even a time of “spring” or “rebirth” after a busy period of working and raising children” (Karasawa et al., 2011).

    That really appeals to me. See each year as it is—a celebration that we are still here, still enjoying life, still with our loved ones, still with a future, in another phase of our beautiful existence with new and exciting opportunities still ahead.

    I believe that grateful and positive aging is all about the mindset, which is true of so many things that affect our attitudes.

    If we cultivate a mindset where we grow older with a grateful heart, living each day to its fullest in our natural bodies and our natural skin, happy that we still get to watch the sunset and feel the warm embrace of those we love and are still a living breathing part of our wonderful universe; then I believe we stand a chance of drowning out the negative messages put out into society that getting older is something to be ashamed of. That we should go and find a rock to crawl under until we die unless we can claw back some semblance of youth, or at least die trying.

    I propose that with a healthy mindset towards growing older, we give ourselves the right to grow old gratefully.

  • How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

    How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

    “Your body is precious. It is your vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.” ~Buddha

    When I went on my first diet in my teens (low-carb, it was back in the Atkins days), I wasn’t even overweight. I weighed less than 120 pounds, but my jeans had started to get a little tight, so I thought I needed to lose five pounds or so. At the time, I didn’t have a bad relationship with food; I just ate like a typical teenager—not the best choices.

    About two hours in, I remember starting to obsess over the things I couldn’t eat and being desperate to be skinny ASAP so I could eat them again.

    By mid day, I “failed.”

    I caved and ate…. *gasp, shock, horror*… carbs.

    And something weird happened. Instantly, I felt like I was bad.

    It’s not just that I thought I had made a bad choice.

    I thought, “You idiot, you can’t do anything right. Look at you, one meal in and you screwed up already. You may as well just eat whatever you want the rest of the day and start again tomorrow.”

    I think I gained about five pounds from that attempt.

    And I continued slowly gaining more and more weight every year after that—and feeling guiltier and guiltier every time I ate something “bad.”

    Atkins low-carb miracle cure had failed me horribly and began a decades-long battle with food and my weight.

    See, it wasn’t that I thought my choice was bad and then I just made a better choice next time; it was that I felt like I, as a person, was bad.

    And what happens when we’re bad?

    We get punished.

    I didn’t realize until many years later, but those degrading thoughts and overeating the rest of the day were, in part, my way of punishing myself for being bad and eating the bad things.

    The harder I tried to control what was going in, the worse it got and the more out of control I felt.

    In my thirties I hit bottom, as they say, as a result of trying to follow a “clean eating meal plan.”

    Four days into my first attempt to “eat clean” and strictly adhere to what someone else told me I should eat, I had my first-ever binge.

    Prior to that, I had some minor food issues. I ate kind of crummy, had slowly been gaining weight, and felt guilty when I ate carbs (thanks, Atkins).

    But a few days into “clean eating,” I was in the middle of a full-blown eating disorder.

    The clean eating miracle craze may have made me look and feel amazing, but emotionally, it failed me horribly and began my years-long battle to recover from bulimia and binge eating.

    But I thought it was just me. I was such a screw up, why couldn’t I just eat like a normal person?

    I saw how much better I looked and felt when I was managing to “be good” and “eat clean,” but within a few days or weeks of “being good,” no matter how great I felt from eating that way, I always caved and ended up bingeing again.

    And every time, I thought it was me. I told myself I was broken and weak and pathetic.

    Even later, when I started training other people, my message was “If it’s not on your plan, it doesn’t go in your mouth” and “You can’t expect to get the body you want by eating the things that gave you the body you have.”

    I wanted clients to feel amazing and get the best results possible, so I gave them what I knew would accomplish those two things.

    But, at the time, I didn’t know that it was actually those messages and rules that had created all my own issues with food, and I most definitely didn’t know they would have that affect on anyone else.

    I thought everyone else was “normal.” I was just broken and weak and stupid—that’s why I struggled so hard to just “be good” and “stop screwing up.”  Normal people would see how much better they felt when they ate that way, and they’d automatically change and live happily ever after.

    Ha. No.

    The more people I trained, the more I became acutely aware that food is the thing most people struggle with the most, and I started recognizing the exact same thoughts and behaviors I’d experienced, in the majority of my clients.

    And almost every single one of them also had a looong history of failed diets.

    Hmmm. Maybe it wasn’t just me.

    Not everyone goes to the extreme of bulimia, but the more I spoke with other people about their struggles with food and shared my own with them, the more I realized how shockingly pervasive disordered eating and eating disorders have become.

    Binge eating is an eating disorder—one that more people struggle with than I ever imagined. Though, most people are horrified to admit it, and many may not even be willing to admit to themselves that they do.

    I get that because it’s associated with lack of self-control and gluttony, and there’s a great deal of shame related to both of those things. But it actually has little to do with either, and you can’t change anything until you admit you’re struggling.

    And disordered eating in general is even more pervasive.

    Feeling guilt after eating is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Restricting entire food groups is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Severely restricting food in general in not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Beating yourself up for eating something “bad” is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Starting and stopping a new diet every few weeks or months is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

    Diet culture has us so screwed up that we spend most of our lives doing these things without ever realizing they’re not normal. And they’re negatively affecting our whole lives.

    As I was working on my own recovery, I dove into hundreds of hours of research into dieting, habits, motivation, and disordered eating—anything I could get my hands on to help not only myself but my clients better stick to their plans.

    It’s so easy, I used to think; there must be some trick to make us just eat what we’re supposed to eat!

    But I learned the exact opposite.

    I learned that trying to “stick to the plan” was actually the problem.

    The solution wasn’t in finding some magic trick to help people follow their meal plans; the solution lay in not telling people what to eat in the first place.

    There are many reasons behind why we eat what we eat, when we eat, and even the quantities we choose to eat; it just doesn’t work to tell someone to stop everything they know and just eat this much of this at this time of day, because at some later date it’ll make them skinny and happy.

    Our brains don’t work that way.

    Our brains actually work exactly the opposite.

    As soon as we place restrictions on what we’re allowed or not allowed to eat, our brains start creating compulsions and obsessive thoughts that drive us to “cave.”

    Have you ever noticed that as soon as you “can’t” have something, you automatically want it even more?

    That’s a survival instinct that’s literally been hard-wired into our brains since the beginning of time.

    In November 1944, post-WW II, physiologist Ancel Keys, PhD and psychologist Josef Brozek PhD began a nearly yearlong experiment on the psychological and physiological effects of starvation on thirty-six mentally and physically healthy young men.

    The men were expected to lose one-quarter of their body weight. They spent the first three months eating a normal diet of 3,200 calories a day followed by six months of semi-starvation at approximately 1,600 calories a day (though 1,600 calories isn’t even all that low). The semi-starvation period was followed by three months of rehabilitation (2,000-3,200 calories a day) and finally an eight-week period of unrestricted rehabilitation, during which time there was no limitations on caloric intake.

    Researchers closely monitored the physiological and psychological changes brought on by calorie restriction.

    During the most restricted phase the changes were dramatic. Physically, the men became gaunt in appearance, and there were significant decreases in their strength, stamina, body temperature, heart rate, and even sex drive.

    Psychologically, the effects were even more dramatic and mirror those almost anyone with any history of dieting can relate to.

    They became obsessed with food. Any chance they had to get access to more food resulted in the men binge eating thousands of calories in a sitting.

    Before the restriction period, the men were a lively bunch, discussing politics, current events, and more. During the restriction period, this quickly changed. They dreamt, read, fantasized, and talked about food all the time.

    They became withdrawn, irritable, fatigued, and apathic. Depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking (especially about food) were also observed.

    For some men, the study proved too difficult—they were excluded as a result of breaking the diet or not meeting their weight loss goals.

    We don’t struggle to follow diets and food rules because we lack willpower. It’s literally the way our brains are wired.

    Why? Because from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re not designed to restrict food. Coded into our DNA is the overwhelming urge to survive, so when food (either over-all calories or food groups) is restricted, our brains begin to create urgency, compulsions, and strong desires that force us to fill its needs—and often, even more than its needs (binges).

    We cave because our brains are hardwired to. Then the act of caving actually gets wired into our brains as a habit that we continue to repeat on autopilot every time we restrict food or food groups.

    And it triggers the punish mode that I spoke of earlier, which only compounds the problem and slowly degrades our self-worth.

    So every year millions of people are spending tens of billions of dollars on diets that are making the majority of us heavier, depressed, anxious, food-obsessed binge eaters, and destroying our self-worth.

    Now I know all that sounds pretty bleak, but there is a way out. I know because I’ve found it.

    It sounds like the opposite of what we should do, but it saved my life.

    I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and stopped trying to restrict. The scarier that sounds, the more you need to do it.

    As soon as nothing is off limits, we can begin to slowly move away from the scarcity mindset and break the habits and obsessions created by dieting.

    When we give ourselves unconditional permission to eat whatever we want, without guilt or judgment, we give ourselves the space to get mindful about our choices.

    We give ourselves the opportunity to explore why we’re making the choices we’re making and the power to freely make different ones because we begin to value ourselves again.

    When we remove the guilt and judgment, start to value ourselves again, and work on being mindful, we can begin to notice how the foods we’re eating make us feel and make choices from a place of love and kindness rather than fear, guilt, and punishment.

    It sounds too simple to work, but it saved my life.

    Rather than telling people what they should and shouldn’t eat, or trying to listen to someone who’s telling us what we should or shouldn’t eat, we have to build a connection with our bodies.

    We have to learn to listen to them, to learn to distinguish the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. To stop eating when we’re not physically hungry, and to start feeling emotions instead of feeding them.

    We have to break the habits that drive autopilot eating. We have to be mindful, trust the wisdom of our own bodies, and make choices based on how they make our bodies feel rather than what some diet tells us is the answer to happiness and being skinny.

    UPDATE: Making the choice to not eat meat for ethical reasons and avoiding certain foods for allergy/medical purposes are not the same as restricting food groups for a diet. If you’re happy and feel great with whatever you’re currently doing, carry on! This is meant for people who are struggling with repeated diet attempts and overeating/bingeing, who feel out of control because they can never seem to “stay on track.”

  • Beyond Dry January: 5 Benefits of Extending Your Break from Alcohol

    Beyond Dry January: 5 Benefits of Extending Your Break from Alcohol

    “Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live.” ~Anne Sweeney

    So many people make the positive choice to have a sober start to the year in January, whether it’s a New Year’s resolution, a detox, another wellness goal, or part of a fresh start program, but perhaps it’s worth considering prolonging the benefits further into the year ahead.

    A break from alcohol is always a good thing, whether it’s a few days, a week, a month, or longer, and the bigger the break, the more you get a chance to reconsider whether alcohol is helping you to achieve your plans, intentions, or goals in life.

    There are many benefits of extending your sober break beyond thirty days.

    You’ll get more (and better quality) sleep, which will lead to you having more energy, both emotionally and physically.

    As you get into better sleep habits and patterns, with extended periods of REM sleep, you will likely find your mood improving, and you may also find that you have more time for hobbies or projects that you want to focus on. I used to enjoy reading but could never find the time to do it; now I have time in the evenings to read, and time in the early mornings before the rest of my household wakes.

    You’ll find it easier to stay focused on your other health and wellness goals.

    You will find it easier to get hydrated and eat in line with your nutrition plans when you’re not side-lined by a morning carb fest or caffeine overload. I no longer need to drink sugar-laden drinks to give me energy, and I find that I’m much more mindful about what my body needs during an average day to fuel it efficiently, while enjoying what I eat and drink.

    You might have more diverse, fun experiences with friends.

    You can plan and enjoy lots of alcohol-free activities together throughout the spring. I’ve found that some of my newer friendships are not based upon drinking activities at all. We walk, we go for brunches, coffees, movies, and day trips to new places. All social activities I wouldn’t have thought about instigating when I was still drinking.

    You’ll see progress across all areas of your life by spring or early summer.

    The habits that you formed through the first quarter of the year will really start to pay off by the time the days are longer. You will have found new and different ways to relax, to have fun, and to process your emotions, which can positively impact your work and relationships, and you will be so glad that you did.

    You may be inspired to develop a list of things you want to enjoy through the year now that you have the time, energy, and money.

    There may be simple pleasures such as watching the sunrise, hiking, baking, or creating, or more ambitious plans to execute. Perhaps you’ll discover a new hobby or direction that fills you with pride and purpose.

    Alcohol feeds your short-term rewards system (it gives you a dopamine hit) but ultimately acts as a depressant. Your brain wants immediate gratification for the least amount of effort, and alcohol can provide this, but I urge you to find some balance or a more sustainable way of living.

    I spent a considerable amount of time drinking very little alcohol before I decided to have an alcohol-free year as a little life experiment to see how I got on, and cutting down my alcohol consumption was a brilliant introduction to a sober lifestyle. I found new ways to spend my time that I never would have considered before and rekindled old hobbies.

    I now get an amazing sense of satisfaction from achieving my medium and long-term goals—these are the rewards I work toward.

    Achieving my intentions helps me develop and maintain the habits I want to keep. I work toward the long-term goals by ticking off the short term ones, which gives me immediate gratification while helping me develop my purpose on this planet. Alcohol made me act on impulse; now I act on carefully made plans, good intentions, and bold dreams.

    A sober month is a good thing at any time of the year, not just January, but please remember, we don’t have to stick to neat months or rules. We can choose whatever chunk of sober time we like to enhance our lives and find joy in the alcohol-free corners of our worlds whenever we want to.

    This year I’m choosing another year of sober living, and I cannot wait to see what I get to achieve by the end of it.

    How about you? If you started the year with a break from alcohol, can you consider extending your  intention into the spring or even into the year ahead?

  • How I Got Healthy & Overcame My Food/Body Issues by Ignoring Conventional Advice

    How I Got Healthy & Overcame My Food/Body Issues by Ignoring Conventional Advice

    I was an award-winning personal trainer and nutrition and wellness coach for over eight years.

    I also spent close to three decades struggling with my own weight and food issues—trying to “stick to” diets and/or healthy eating and lifestyle goals. And many years struggling with binge eating, bulimia, and (what I thought at the time was) an uncontrollable sugar addiction.

    During the years I was working in the fitness and nutrition industry, whenever I’d get new clients, I’d find out what their health and fitness goals were, and I’d give them the perfect plan to help them get there.

    And I made sure to remind them, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.

    I did that because it’s what I learned to do. It’s what everyone does.

    Because that’s what we’re taught—that eating, living, or being healthy requires us to make choices that others have told us are healthy and not do the things they’ve told us are unhealthy.

    You know… the perfect healthy lifestyle that constantly reminds you to:

    • Eat this, not that… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • Weigh this amount and not more…. or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • Move this amount each day, in these ways… or you’ll get sick, disease-ridden, and die early.
    • And… you’re not dieting. You’re just eating healthy. You’re creating a healthy lifestyle.

    The perfect healthy eating and living plans constantly remind you that you must always be fighting, resisting, ignoring, and controlling yourself, your body, your hunger, and your cravings.

    And always doing more, working harder, being disciplined, having motivation, building willpower, etc.

    There’s a predictable formula for this supposedly “healthy” eating and living culture.

    The formula insists that we conform to a socially acceptable, mythical, perfect body size and shape.

    The formula treats our health as though it’s a future goal or accomplishment that we can only achieve later if we’re “good” now.

    The formula must be followed with no excuses. When it’s not, the problem is you and your obedience, willpower, discipline, motivation, and commitment.

    The formula is primarily concerned with optics rather than actual health. As long as we portray the “picture of health” and the behaviors we’re engaging in appear healthy, it doesn’t matter if the pressure, fear, and shame created by trying to stick to them are actually destroying us behind the scenes.

    The formula requires us to trust the rules and advice of others over our own bodies.

    It’s a mass-marketed, templated, “easy” model that allows no room for our own inner knowing, logic, self-trust, or personal power.

    It’s easy to sell because it preys on fear and always sounds so shiny and tempting.

    And this is what we’re taught it takes to eat and live healthy lives.

    Multi-billion-dollar-a-year industries have taught us how to “get healthy.”

    “Lose weight, feel great. Gain confidence. Get fit. Be healthy and happy. Live your best life.” But the unspoken truth is that it’s only “…as long as you follow our rules.”

    But you’re not going to be able to stick to this plan, and when you can’t, you’re going to waste your entire life at war with yourself, promising to “get back on track.”

    “On track,” of course, meaning doing all the things they say you’re supposed to.

    It’s a paradigm that promotes constant fear and oppressive attempts to control ourselves and our bodies in order to follow one-size-fits-all, arbitrary prescriptions.

    Nothing proves this more than how we’ve become so completely conned into believing the lie that healthy eating is hard work that requires willpower, discipline, commitment, and constant vigilance.

    That’s horrible and not a healthy way to live at all!

    We’ve been sold this message because it’s highly profitable for us to believe that we cannot trust ourselves and our own bodies and we must rely on others to tell us what to do.

    And we’ve bought it—hook, line, and sinker.

    But it forces us to go through life literally fighting with ourselves and our bodies, trying to follow their rules.

    It forces us to live disembodied, detached, disconnected from, distrusting, and fully ignoring the wisdom of our own bodies and our own inner knowing.

    Living in all that fear, disconnection, and distrust is so harmful.

    For me, it resulted in bulimia, binge eating, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, chronic clinical depression, self-loathing, crippling shame, and what I was fully convinced was a sugar/food addiction so severe that I often went to bed at night afraid I would die in my sleep because I’d eaten so much.

    I lived in a constant state of being completely consumed by not only the number on my scale but also fear and shame every time I “screwed up” and ate something “bad.” For decades of my life.

    Eventually, my mental, emotional, and physical health deteriorated so badly that I recognized my only choice was to learn how to heal because I couldn’t keep living that way—it was killing me.

    I finally recognized that my suffering was in large part the result of everything I was taught to do to maintain this supposedly healthy eating and lifestyle plan.

    And all I really wanted was peace.

    So I turned my back on it all.

    I stopped exercising every day and started a little light, mindful walking and mobility work instead— whatever helped my body heal.

    I released the need for my body to look a certain way or be a certain size and worked on healing my relationship with it instead of fighting to shrink, change, or control it.

    I stopped trying to make myself “eat healthy” and allowed myself to not only eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but I even allowed myself to binge. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s truly the first step that helped me stop binge eating.

    I shut out every single message I’d ever gotten in my life about what it takes to eat or live “healthy,” and I started reconnecting with myself so I could figure out what actually helped me best support my overall well-being, right now, in this moment.

    I even eventually quit being a trainer and (traditional) nutrition and wellness coach.

    I tuned out everything I knew about what “healthy” eating and living looks like, and instead I turned inward and started connecting with myself. I started getting to know myself, understanding the patterns that were driving all those unhealthy choices in the first place and learning to change those.

    I started asking, how do I feel right now? How do I want to feel? What do I need (mentally, emotionally, or physically) in order to bridge the gap between the two, if there is one?

    It’s changed everything in the most glorious ways.

    I haven’t binged in many years. That’s a pattern that simply no longer exists in me.

    I’m not scared of and don’t feel addicted to or out of control around sugar (or any food) anymore.

    Food no longer controls me… not even sugar.

    I crave things that help me feel my best, including water, which I never used to drink before.

    I treat (and speak to) myself and my body with love and kindness.

    All of the “unhealthy” choices we make, all the unhealthy things we do to ourselves—even binge eating and supposed “sugar addictions”—it’s all merely the result of our conditioning. The stuff going on inside us.

    My external world, my lifestyle, my unhealthy choices, they were all symptoms of what was going on inside me—all the self-abuse I heaped on myself, ironically, because I couldn’t “stick to” a healthy living plan.

    When I changed that, when I stopped focusing on what I was doing and started changing my inner world, who I was being, my outer world (and the choices I was making for myself and my body) naturally changed.

    Healthy eating and living should never be the goal; they’re the result of how we’re being.

    Because here’s the thing: your body doesn’t care about the “health” goals you hope to meet in the future.

    It only knows what it needs right now, in this moment, and whether you’re making choices that help support that or not.

    If you’re trying to make yourself be consistent with some plan that’s supposed to help you reach some goal at a later date, you are, by definition, disconnected from your body and what it’s trying to tell you it actually needs right now.

    That’s a recipe for not making healthy choices and ignoring your body’s cues and messages.

    Supporting our health requires supporting our overall well-being, and we can only do that when we’re deeply connected to ourselves through what I call wholehearted being: being present, connected, curious, and intentional about our unique moment-to-moment needs and loving ourselves and our bodies enough to want to honor them.

    When you do that, making choices that best support yourself and your body right now becomes the natural result.

    Not some arbitrary goal that you can’t ever stay consistent enough to reach.

    If you’re reading this and can relate to any parts of my struggles with weight, overeating, binge eating, and sugar addiction, I want you to know that you, at your core, instinctively know what you and your body need to feel and live your best.

    You’ve just been conditioned out of that inner knowing after a lifetime of learning from everyone else that the only way to be healthy is to control yourself and your body and follow their advice instead of trusting your own inner knowing.

    With wholehearted being, I’ve gone from binge eating, bulimia, obsessive and compulsive thoughts and patterns around food and exercise, self and body hate and distrust…

    …to kindness, compassion, self and body love and trust, and learning to genuinely want to eat in ways that best support and nurture me.

    A New Path to Healthy Eating and Living

    Healthy eating and living through wholehearted being helps you build a foundation rooted firmly in your own self-love, trust, and worthiness because how we feel about ourselves impacts every aspect of our lives, including how we treat ourselves and our bodies.

    From there, you learn to make choices for yourself and your body through four main pillars of being:

    Present in this moment and in your body so you can break the conditioning that drives unhealthy behaviors

    Connected to your inner world—your thoughts, feelings, and communication from your body about what you need

    Curious about your inner experiences in this moment, with gentle awareness, self-compassion, and non-judgment

    Intentional with your thoughts, behaviors, and responses—intentionally choosing from kindness, gratitude, and love

    This process is incredibly powerful because it does two things that are required for lasting change:

    1.It helps you learn to love, trust, and value yourself enough to care how you treat your body.

    2. It allows you to put space between your triggers and the conditioned, autopilot behaviors that drive unhealthy choices in the first place. This allows you to get to know yourself, your patterns, and your needs and learn new tools and practices that better support your overall well-being. Tools and practices that also help you learn to better understand and nurture, not only your physical needs, but your mental and emotional needs as well. And that’s vital because our thoughts and emotions are major components of our overall well-being. They drive the choices we make.

    It’s a powerful and simple process but not an easy one. It takes courage to relearn to trust yourself with food, to learn new ways of being, and it takes a lot of practice, repetition, and support, but it’s so very worth it.

    After eight years in the fitness, nutrition, and wellness industry (and almost thirty years of dieting), I finally got healthy and broke my sugar addiction by choosing to start focusing on my life instead of my weight or food choices.

    By learning to tune out the external messages trying to tell me what I “should” eat or do and turn inward to start making choices for myself that best nurture my whole being, moment to moment—choices that are grounded in love, self and body trust, connection, and kindness.

    And it’s changed everything.

  • New Year’s Resolutions Simplified: It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3

    New Year’s Resolutions Simplified: It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3

    You and I will probably come across a hundred articles about New Year’s resolutions in 2023 … again. And, if you and I are like the majority—the well-intentioned, regular people who genuinely want change—we will aspire to big things and later get frustrated and give up on the list we made … again.

    But what if we kept it really simple this time? What if we didn’t have to make an endless list and be reminded, by looking at it, of all the things we may fail at again?

    What if we made it as easy as one, two, three?

    Let us do that instead, shall we?!

    1. Make “one” your magic number. Count to one each day, starting now, not from January 1st—NOW! What is the one thing you want and will do today?

    One email or paragraph you will write, or one chapter you will read, or one person you’ll reach out to. Who is the one lucky person you will text or call to tell them how you miss or appreciate them? Or how encouraged you feel by knowing them or how you want to ask forgiveness from them? Who is the one person you can write to or call to laugh about that one fun memory that you only share with them?

    I personally made a commitment to write or call or pray for a person whenever they cross my mind, that same day; I do not wait. There is a reason, I believe, we are reminded of people, and life is so fragile. I don’t want to miss an opportunity and regret not uplifting someone who could have been encouraged, or speaking kindness to someone who could have benefited from it.

    What’s one thing you will do today to move toward a healthier and happier you?

    Maybe it’s just one set of squats while you are washing the dishes; one jump rope you will order and one minute of jumping you’ll do when it arrives; one glass of beer or coke or a sweet drink you’ll replace with water or tea or decaf coffee just once today. Which one item will you change in your menu today for something that is better for your body?

    What is the one happy song you will listen to in the car or on a quick walk that you will take today? What is the one shop you will drive to, parking really far away, so you can get extra steps walking back and forth?

    2. Remember that there are two significant ways that your brilliant mind registers and remembers everything: through words and images.

    Paint clear, vivid, beautiful pictures for your mind of what it is that you want. Think backward; create an image of what your completed accomplishment looks like to you and make it as detailed and as exciting as you possibly can.

    See yourself having arrived at the healthy weight you want, you fitting into an outfit of your desires, hearing your friends and strangers complimenting you on how radiant and healthy and great you look, thinking about how you love taking care of your body inside and out.

    See yourself having completed your degree, project, letter, book, task, whatever. See yourself walking across the stage, people wanting to buy your product, welcoming your project, asking you to give your presentation again, asking you about and enjoying the summary of what you read or learned.

    Imagine yourself buying that house you have painted in your mind and furnishing it and having friends over and laughing and resting in your comfortable space every day!

    See yourself in a relationship you just repaired or found and are enjoying. See how good it is for you and the other person; see and hear the uplifting conversations you are having and the fun activities you are enjoying together. Dream in pictures!

    When talking to yourself, use words that are kind, uplifting, life-giving, generous—not the opposite. Speak in the same way you would to someone you love and care about; someone whose success would make you as happy as your own; someone you want to see happy, encouraged, loved. Talk to yourself in your mind and out loud like that each day and see what happens.

    3. Imagine yourself as a triangle.

    One side is your mind, connected to the second, your heart, connected to the third, your amazing body, with the entire space inside filled with who you really and most profoundly are—your spirit.

    All of you needs to be cared for, attended to, and nurtured. Pay attention to what each part needs and requires. How is it lacking? What is it missing? What one thing can you do today to nurture each part?

    I nourish my spirit through prayer and silence daily, which fills me with focus, strength, and insight, and I always pray for at least one person outside of my family as well. Walking is what helps care for my body during this season of life.

    —

    So there you have it: one, two, three.

    When you get to the end of your day today, be sure to congratulate yourself on that one thing you did, that step you took, and look forward to doing it again tomorrow. Be your cheerleader and encourager and then, over time, you’ll see that change you’ve been looking for.

  • How to Let Go of Your Need to Be Informed at all Times

    How to Let Go of Your Need to Be Informed at all Times

    “Don’t mistake being informed by trusting what you hear or read in the news. The most trusted information is what you feel in your gut.” ~Charles F Glassman

    I was in my kitchen enjoying breakfast when a report about a murder was mentioned as one of the headlines on the radio news.

    One of my boys started to ask me questions, none of which I could answer. They were questions about a detail of the murder, which I didn’t know, and also about bigger life issues, which at 7 a.m., I was struggling to get my head around.

    I chose to turn the radio off, told the boys that we would chat about it later, and then removed the radio from the kitchen. This was in 2019, and I haven’t missed the radio since.

    I’ve always had a radio in my kitchen and always listened to a talk-based radio station, so it felt a bit awkward for the first week or so, but over time, we began chatting more as a family in the mornings because we didn’t all have one ear tuned into the news.

    A mentor and friend of mine told me a while ago she no longer watches the news. This gave me the permission I felt I needed to embrace this no-news new way of living. I never questioned her decision or asked for more details about the choice she had made. I knew something in me had flipped; I was no longer going to consume the news. This was going to mean radio, television, paper, and social media for me.

    I had to form a few new habits around my news consumption. The next time I was driving my car I took a selection of my old CDs and a charger cable to plug my phone in so I could listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I always used to watch the 10:00 p.m. news headlines, but I decided to leave the sofa at 9:59 and hop straight up to bed at that time. I also stopped buying my weekend newspapers and turned off all news notifications on my phone.

    My husband will occasionally say, “Oh, did you hear such and such on the news?” And I reply, “Nope, remember, I don’t get the news anymore” and then we start talking about something else.

    I understand that the news highlights human interest stories, and part of the need to feel connected to each other might be fulfilled by taking in news stories, but I had to turn away when it all got too much.

    When COVID hit, I questioned my decision. Was I being willfully ignorant? Well, no, actually. I don’t think so.

    I was working in local government at the time, and all my work was face to face with very vulnerable people. My line manager was masterful at protecting his staff team and giving us all the information we needed to do our jobs as safely as possible. There was no way the media, local or national, could have helped me out on that one. I was aware of what was going on because, of course, people told me. Sometimes I was willing to listen to a bit of detail, but mostly not.

    I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not keeping up with the news. I’m acutely aware of what I can control in my life. And I know most of what I would see, hear, or read on the news wouldn’t directly affect me. I came to the conclusion that the news always made me feel worse than before I’d heard or seen it.

    I also recognized that I was not taking the time to see a variety of news sources or get differing viewpoints, so what I was getting was incredibly biased. It seemed to be debt, disaster, or some kind of controversy on repeat. I was not being uplifted in any way shape or form.

    I realized that my life is going to be short enough. I sometimes don’t have enough time for the stuff I really want. So why was I wasting a precious second on something I had no control or influence over?

    I spend a morning a week volunteering with refugees and asylum seekers who tell me their stories. I’d far rather hear first-hand realities from people who are in the same room as me.

    Since turning off all the news channels in my house I have been able to tune in to my intuition and gut feelings more. The less I have consumed other people’s opinions on world events, the more I can hear the whispers of my soul.

    If I need to know something, of course, I can go and look it up. My own research is tailored to what I want or need. I don’t feel like I’m missing out in any way. I feel like everything in my life is slightly better without consuming the news in the way that I used to. I save some money and time and experience far less anxiety. All good things in my opinion.

    I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to watching, listening to, or reading the news in the future. I haven’t missed it in three years (apparently a lot has happened), and I’m doing just fine without it.

    If you’re also considering giving up the news, it might help to start by asking yourself why you’ve felt the need to be informed at all times. Does it stem from fear and the desire to feel safe or in control? Or is it simply that you don’t want to be ignorant about something everyone else might know about and discuss? Then ask yourself what you’re really gaining and what you’re losing—time, energy, or peace, for example.

    Once you understand why you’re constantly tuning in it will be a lot easier to tune out.

    If the idea of eliminating all news feels too much at the moment, perhaps you could try reducing it in one area of your life. Go back to reading a novel instead of a paper on a Sunday. Watch the headlines at 6 p.m. but not the whole program. Listen to a podcast on a subject you feel passionate about and not on a topic you think you should know about.

    We’re bombarded with information these days, but we get to decide what we take in based on what feels best for us.

  • Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking

    Eating Too Much While Working from Home? How to Solve Emotional Snacking

    “We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.” ~Geneen Roth

    Sometimes I feel like asking me, a recovering overeater, to work from home is as unreasonable as hoping a sex addict will pen a report from the lobby of a brothel.

    Snarky email? Feel annoyed. Get Penguin bar from cupboard.

    Meeting over? Feel relief at no longer being on camera. Eat Wagon Wheel from cupboard.

    Worked hard today? Need a reward. Wait, who ate all the kids’ lunchbox treats? Never mind, people, all good: I found the cheese.

    This was me when my desk moved from an office full of doctoral researchers to the corner of my living room.

    Some people would say I was emotional eating, or “stress eating.”

    But I didn’t recognize myself in that description.

    Where was the stress? I worked for a university: plenty of holidays, flexible hours.

    And although I hated the way I ate, I didn’t feel anything dramatic about work.

    Looking back, yeah, I had the odd frustrating collaboration, a smidge of self-doubt, a bit of trying to make myself do a spreadsheet while believing “I’m not a spreadsheet person.”

    I treated these low-level doubts and insecurities as insignificant because, like we all are, I was a professional at ignoring them.

    What I couldn’t ignore, though, was a twenty pound weight gain.

    So I tried to eat better food.

    For instance, I banned chocolate from the house, put the kids on school lunches, and got the bread machine making wholemeal bread.

    Unfortunately, the problem didn’t vanish: After working my way through a whole fresh baked loaf with butter one rainy Zoomtastic Wednesday in November, I just felt gross and out of control.

    Then came the self-criticism. “I’m weak. I can’t stop.” That made me want to eat even more.

    I was stuck in a vicious circle. But my vicious circle was like a half-moon: I could only see the half that involved stuffing my face.

    Then one day, something happened in my work life that woke me up to what was really going on when I was eating.

    At my work, we had to complete an annual professional development review. It was like a form I had to fill out about my strengths, weaknesses, and progress goals that my line manager and I both signed off on.

    I put it off. For days, I ate dry granola standing up in the kitchen. I invented a weird mousse, made of creme fraiche stirred with tons of cocoa powder, honey, and lemon essence. I mixed and ate it multiple times a day.

    When I finally tried to fill the form out, I fell apart. I felt my weaknesses were so glaring, and that I was such a productivity lost cause, that I cried and cried.

    The unavoidable issue was, although I got results by throwing creativity and enthusiasm at my job, I was hopeless with time management and focus.

    I phoned my line manager and told him everything (except the food part) in one outpouring.

    He was a total star. Kind, receptive, unfazed.

    He proposed a new daily practice…

    Planning.

    Urgh!

    The idea was to plan my time every twenty-four hours, in my calendar.

    It was a complete disaster. Every day, I’d veer wildly off-plan.

    For instance, I’d aim to spend two hours producing slides for a presentation but end up reading research papers. Then I’d do my best work for the half hour before school pick up and arrive to the school gate late again.

    Luckily, writing on my daily schedule became my new favorite procrastination tool: Even if I’d done nothing, at least I could evaluate why.

    So I started noting, alongside my schedule, what I actually ended up spending my time on.

    And I didn’t just write down the activity, either; I went further. I wrote my rationale for getting sidetracked.

    Total. Game. Changer.

    For each sidetrack, I wrote down the exact words I’d been inwardly telling myself, to make whatever had overtaken the priority seem so important in that moment. (My manager never saw this part, so I could be really honest with myself).

    And there they were, in black and white! All the visits to the kitchen. All the thoughts and feelings behind the eating, made visible.

    Since this was about time management, it gave me some objectivity on the eating issue.

    This time-tracking activity was surfacing data about my eating behaviors, but unlike other attempts to track my eating, this time it wasn’t about my body, my weight, or my self-worth. Cold, hard info neutralized my outrageous, shameful eating habits just enough for me to be intrigued by what the hell was going on in my head.

    That information led me to these learnings that I’m about to share with you.

    Insights that completely revolutionized my emotional eating. I’m going to show you a perspective shift, an understanding, a tool, and a strategy.

    These four things completely took me by surprise but had been under my nose all along.

    Tools that help me to continue to unlearn my emotional eating as it relates to work.

    Simple techniques that have helped me get healthier and more productive, and waste less of my energy hating myself for having snacked randomly all day.

    So, if you’re feeling like food is calling you from the kitchen all day long, and you fear you’re just someone who needs to be in an office to function, think again.

    These discoveries are going to help you let go of your urges and make all working environments an option.

    Seriously, if working at the kitchen table can be safe and doable for me, it can be for you too.

    1. A perspective shift: People don’t make you feel things; your thoughts do.

    Some days, I blamed my boss for my eating.

    For instance, she’d pick holes in my idea… I’d feel discouraged… Damn, now I’d polished off half a loaf of banana bread.

    But she didn’t make me feel bad; my thoughts did.

    I was making her criticism mean something about me: “I’m useless at my job and I’ll never get recognition.”

    Until I wrote them down, those sentences ran all day beneath my awareness, so of course I felt inadequate and cheesed off!

    We don’t notice our thoughts until we externalize them by speaking them out loud, or writing them down.

    We swim around in them all day. It’s like being a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water.

    2. An understanding: Feelings are physical.

    When I felt tempted to go to the kitchen, it felt like a physical compulsion to walk there.

    Like my body was a puppet, and the food was a puppet master.

    I realized that feelings like urgency and self-doubt make my body especially restless. Jittery, insecure.

    With a feeling coursing through me, my body literally did not want to stay seated at my desk. It wanted me to walk, move, shake off the crawling feeling.

    That’s when the penny dropped that all emotions are bodily experiences.

    Not just the extreme emotions: butterflies in your tummy, needing the bathroom before appearing on stage, or feeling like you’ve had a double espresso when you’re in love.

    But also, low-level challenging emotions that normally reverberate in our bodies but are somewhat under our radar: boredom, confusion, slight overwhelm.

    3. A tool: Change your thoughts on paper.

    So now that I was noting my justifications for going to the fridge, I could see that my body’s restlessness was ramped up and my eating was given the go-ahead by the exact sentences I was running in my head.

    Let me show you an example.

    Thoughts about the task: “I don’t know where to start.” “This communications plan is just a formality; nobody will read it.” Feelings: Daunted. Hopeless. Draggy low energy. Justification for eating dark chocolate: “I’m tired, this’ll wake me up.”

    With this understanding, I was able to make changes before the urge to eat even arose.

    Instead of thinking downer thoughts and then believing food would pick me up, I could purposely say more encouraging sentences to myself to create motivated and confident feelings.

    Except how? How could I think a new thought? Um, just think it?

    Since writing things down was working for me, that’s what I kept doing.

    I remembered revising for exams, when writing things over and over was my go-to revision method.

    “Getting this done now will make my future life simpler.”

    “I’m phenomenal at coping with my workload.”

    Try writing it down right now!

    “My work is a valuable contribution to the world.”

    Imagine believing that was true.

    When I discovered that, I was like: Mwah ha ha ha! I have the power to control my feelings!

    4. A strategy: Surf your urges.

    Journaling helped me nip some of my triggers in the bud.

    But what about when I was already in the kitchen, or boiling the kettle, and the urge to browse the cupboard was already upon me?

    Once an urge had hit me, I felt like eating was the only way to quiet it.

    But now I had a new perspective on emotions as being physical, and I realized that urges are the same. Urges are just emotional desire. Restless desire in the body.

    I also realized that I already let urges and desires come and go every day without acting on them.

    For instance, I hadn’t acted on the urge to send a sweary, irate email to management for making me repeat an onerous online training I had done twelve months earlier. No brainer: Being rude would cost me my livelihood.

    I just composed it in my head, had a rant to my husband, and then it passed. My body was inflamed with it for a bit, but after a while the sensation subsided.

    So I wondered: What’s the equivalent for the urge to eat?

    I noticed: When I have the urge to eat, my neck feels tight. I feel unsettled. Graspy.

    It’s laughable really. When I feel compelled to satisfy an urge to go eat peanut butter on toast, I really just want to dissipate a fleeting tension in my neck?

    Try it. Two minutes.

    The even better news is, after a few days of letting urges come and go, they stopped coming so thick and fast.

    So, friend, you don’t need to go back to the office to escape your compulsions.

    And there’s nothing wrong with you for having them.

    Our brains form habits to help us get through the day. They are just learned ways of coping with the emotional terrain of working life, and if I can learn better ways of coping, guaranteed you can too.

    We put a lot of ourselves into our work lives, and work requires more of us emotionally than we give ourselves credit for.

    It takes intentionality to not use food, Netflix, checking Facebook, and anything else that’s easy and mind-numbing to take the edge off the tougher feelings, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

    It takes a willingness to feel our feelings bodily, which is a skill we can cultivate.

    So please go easy on your lovely, hard-working soul. Be patient. You’re doing a great job of being you.

    And next time you’re staring vacantly into the cupboard while the kettle boils, remember you’re not alone. I’m learning this too.

  • The Best Approach to Self-Care: How to Attend to Your Unmet Needs

    The Best Approach to Self-Care: How to Attend to Your Unmet Needs

    “Caring for your body, mind, and spirit is your greatest and grandest responsibility. It’s about listening to the needs of your soul and then honoring them.” ~Kristi Ling 

    There’s something I haven’t told many people. I kept it to myself because it clashed with my “identity” and the image I hoped to project (hello, ego!).

    I’ve been creating content and working in the spirituality and personal development fields for a number of years. Although I don’t strive to become like Buddha, there’s a part of me (call it my spiritual ego) that expects certain things of me, such as to remain at peace, content, and emotionally well-regulated most of the time. After all, isn’t it what meditating daily is supposed to do?

    Well, last year, I did not feel that content or peaceful. I felt quite depressed, and rarely did meditation make me feel better.

    So I turned to wine. Most evenings, I had a couple of glasses of wine (sometimes three or even four) to forget how bored and unhappy I was.

    “I’m a fraud,” I kept thinking while sipping on the red liquid.

    I tried other things (besides wine) to feel better that helped, like gratitude journaling and spending more time in nature. Although these things did improve my mood, there was still a void within me that even gratitude didn’t manage to fill.

    It was when I read an article about humanistic psychology and the use of Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs in therapy that I became aware of the real cause of my “wine habit”: unmet needs.

    “What do I really need?” I started asking myself every time the impulse to pour a glass of wine arose.

    At first, I’d still give in to the wine, probably out of habit. But eventually, using Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs as a guiding tool, I was able to identify which of my needs weren’t satisfied and what actions I needed to take to fulfill them.

    “That’s true self-care,” I thought.

    I realized that a self-care plan requires more than a checklist downloaded from Pinterest. It demands a life inventory, identifying our unmet needs, and taking the right actions to fulfill them.

    Simply put, a bubble bath isn’t the best solution for everyone or any issue.

    I’d like to share with you my new approach to self-care that aims to satisfy our deepest needs rather than providing short-lived comfort.

    Step 1: Become aware of your unmet needs.

    The first step is awareness. Although it’s not necessary to use Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs to identify what we want, it provides a helpful framework to guide our reflections.

    I recommend going through each level of the pyramid and taking the time to reflect on your life. A good way to do this is through journaling.

    Below are a few reflection questions for each category of needs to help you identify what’s missing in your life and may be preventing you from thriving.

    Physiological Needs

    These include basic physical needs like eating, drinking water, and sleeping. Self-care at this level comprises rest and giving our bodies the proper fuel and nutrients to function optimally. You could ask yourself:

    • Am I eating enough whole and nutritious food to nourish my body?
    • Do I feel rested when I wake up in the morning?
    • On a scale of 0-10, what’s my energy level most of the time?

    Although most of us have no issue feeding ourselves, a deficiency in rest and nutrients is fairly common. For example, after running a few blood tests, I discovered that my iron levels were too low, which explained my low energy. After supplementing for a few weeks, I started feeling better.

    Security and Safety Needs

    Safety includes income and job security, health, and the environment in which we live. Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I have sufficient financial resources to sustain myself and feel comfortable?
    • Do I often feel stressed and anxious? Do I have tools to help me relax?
    • What’s the state of my physical, mental, and emotional health?
    • Overall, do I feel safe?

    Social Needs

    These are the needs for love, acceptance, and belonging, which include friendships, romantic love and intimacy, and family life.

    The void I felt in the past two or three years mostly came from unmet needs in this category. Several people I knew moved away, and my relationship with a partner ended. Plus, after a year of isolation, I forgot how to connect with people, and the idea of socializing almost gave me anxiety (even though that’s what I needed the most).

    Here are a few questions you could ask yourself to uncover unfulfilled needs in this category:

    • Are there people around me whom I can count on?
    • Do I feel accepted and supported by the people around me?
    • Do I regularly interact and bond with people, or do I often feel lonely?
    • Overall, are my relationships satisfying to me?

    Esteem Needs

    These are the needs for appreciation and respect, which include having a healthy sense of self-worth and feeling valued.

    I worked hard in my twenties and early thirties on improving my self-esteem, but I can still remember the destructive impact of low self-worth on my quality of life when I was younger. Self-esteem needs are foundational for having healthy relationships, taking care of our bodies, and pursuing our goals and dreams.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I feel appreciated at work, at home, and within my group of friends?
    • Is my self-talk mainly positive or negative?
    • Do I believe I have good qualities? Do others appreciate those qualities?
    • Overall, do I feel good about myself at work, at home, and in social circles?

    Self-Actualization Needs

    Maslow defined self-actualization as “fulfilling our potential.” It includes feeling a sense of purpose and growing and evolving as a person.

    For most of my life, I had “purpose anxiety.” Nowadays, living my purpose is one of the most important aspects of my life and what sustains me in difficult times.

    Doing what we love and using our gifts toward a vision that matters to us gives us fuel to move through challenges.

    You could ask yourself:

    • Do I feel like my life is meaningful and has a purpose?
    • Does the work I do fulfill me?
    • Am I using my skills and natural strengths in ways that are enjoyable to me?
    • Am I constantly growing and evolving?

    Self-Transcendence Needs

    Self-transcendence is about feeling connected to others and all life and acting accordingly. At this level, we have a desire for contribution, service, and impact. The need for a spiritual practice and connecting to a higher power are also part of self-transcendence.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Am I making a positive impact on others and the world?
    • Do I feel connected to others, nature, and perhaps a higher power?
    • Am I satisfied with my spiritual practice and/or the legacy I’m leaving?

    Leisure Needs

    I’ve added this category to the list because I believe play is another important contributing aspect to our well-being.

    A lack of fun and laughter can negatively impact our mental health—at least, that’s been my experience in the past few years. Along with unmet social needs, a lack of play was my biggest source of dissatisfaction. I had become overly serious and forgot how to have fun. I couldn’t even remember that last time I had laughed.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I have fun at work, at home, and in my free time?
    • How often do I laugh?

    Step 2: Identify what requires your immediate attention.

    After going through these questions, I rated each category of needs on a scale of 0 to 10, assigning 10 to the areas that most required my attention. For me, those areas were leisure and social needs.

    This meant that doubling down on my meditation practice or having a daily green smoothie would likely not be enough to break my “wine habit.” Or, better said, they weren’t what I truly needed.

    I needed to have more fun, laugh, and play. I needed to bond with people more, have deep and meaningful conversations, and expand my social circle.

    Once you’ve identified which of your needs aren’t fulfilled, you’re ready to brainstorm solutions.

    Step 3: Brainstorm ways to fulfill unmet needs.

    Once we know what’s “off,” we can think of ways to improve the situation.

    “How can I have more fun?” I asked myself.

    I reflected upon times when I had the most fun in the past and wrote those down. I also wrote any other ideas that came to mind, from watching funny dog videos to going to a comedy show. I made a list of ways to have more fun in my journal and made an effort to do at least a few of them every week.

    Step 4: Choose one small action and schedule it.

    After brainstorming, it’s time to take action. I recommend picking at least one idea on your list and scheduling it.

    A few weeks ago, I decided to attend a Kundalini yoga class followed by a dinner with the teacher and fellow students. It was an opportunity to meet new people.

    I knew that, as an introvert, the risk I would cancel at the last minute was high. Therefore, I immediately purchased the ticket and scheduled the class in my planner. I’m glad I did; I met new people, laughed, and had interesting conversations.

    Self-care activities are more likely to happen when we schedule them.

    . . .

    I could summarize this article with one question: “What do you really need?”

    Taking the time to make a life inventory, identify our unfulfilled needs, and then take action to satisfy them—that’s proper self-care.

    The difficulty is that, sometimes, we don’t even know what we need! I find Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs a helpful tool to guide our self-reflection.

    I hope it can help you too.

  • How Embodiment Can Make You Feel More Alive (and 5 Ways to Do It)

    How Embodiment Can Make You Feel More Alive (and 5 Ways to Do It)

    “Embodiment is living within, being present within the internal space of the body.” ~Judith Blackstone

    When I was a little boy, I would dance whenever I heard a catchy pop song on the radio. There are photos of me throwing down dance moves, exuding joy and vitality. At some point, though, I lost my ability to dance.

    If I were to guess what happened, I would say that I stopped dancing when I became self-conscious. I was no longer just being; suddenly, I became aware of being someone with a body.

    So a long and complicated relationship with my body began. As a teenager, friends and family teased me for being unusually tall and gangly. As a young man struggling with my queer identity, I objectified my body; I felt ashamed of how ‘it’ strayed so far from the perceived masculine ideal. To make matters worse, one day my lungs spontaneously collapsed.

    Over the course of two years or so, I was in and out of hospitals as doctors struggled to fix my leaky lungs. Undergoing multiple painful surgical procedures, I experienced my body as a source of great emotional and physical pain.

    Life presented other challenges. In time, I concluded that being in a body in this world is inherently painful. I thought that in order to find peace, I had to become free of pain. To achieve this, my mind had to separate itself from bodily experience.

    Seeking a Way Out

    In my early twenties, I was already weary of life. Feeling alienated, I retreated into my inner world of ideas and concepts, where I could indulge in fantasy and philosophy through reading. Most of the time, I was just a head in front of a screen, browsing the internet—there was little sense of having a body.

    I also tried many things to minimize my exposure to pain and fear. Evading social interactions to evade the possibility of experiencing shame was a common strategy of mine. I was deathly afraid of feeling difficult emotions. Being a highly sensitive person, powerful emotions like shame would shut me down, leaving me incapacitated.

    Later, I embarked on a spiritual journey and became drawn to teachings that promised an end to suffering. I poured myself into meditation and became somewhat relieved by a growing sense of detachment. I thought it was a mark of progress, but actually, I was becoming more apathetic. Increasingly, I had difficulty engaging with life and other people.

    Recovering Authenticity and Aliveness

    Living inside my head, I became an observer of life—like an armchair anthropologist. Sure, I participated in the activities that society expected of me, but I always did so at a distance.

    We all come into this world as embodied consciousness. With our body we experience ourselves and contact our environment: we move, communicate, relate, and create worlds. We experience the world’s colors, melodies, temperatures, pulsations, and textures. And it is through our body that we feel joy, sadness, anger, fear, comfort, and love. Through tasting this smorgasbord of sensations, we also discover and bring out our unique expression into the world.

    Life with limited sensation and feeling is like experiencing the world in one dimension only. So, the work I had to do to find myself again involved coming home to my body.

    In a world that sometimes tries to erase or suppress our embodied, authentic expression, coming home to ourselves requires courage and a lot of support. By reclaiming our body, we can rediscover a sense of belonging in ourselves and in this world.

    5 Ways to Begin Coming Home to Your Body

    There are many approaches that can help us come home to our body and feel more alive. If you’ve experienced deep trauma, please find a trained somatic practitioner who can work with you. Here, I’ll just share a few simple things you can try doing more of to become a little more embodied. Make sure to listen to your body in order to discern whether these activities feel right for you.

    1. Breathe deeply.

    Proper breathing is essential to becoming more embodied.

    I learned from a bodyworker that I wasn’t breathing fully most of the time. My Zen practice taught me to breathe into my belly, but now, I wasn’t breathing into my chest much.

    To breathe more fully, breathe in deeply, filling the space in your abdomen as if you were pouring water into a jug. The air rises up to the chest as water rises up a jug. Breathing out, the air releases from the chest and from the belly.

    2. Touch the earth.

    Recently, my painting teacher offered to teach me how to garden. There’s something very healing about touching the soil with my hands. When we touch the earth, we connect with our larger body, which helps us recognize our individual small body.

    Today, so many of us, including myself, spend our days sitting in front of a computer. So I think it’s important to find activities where we can touch the earth. I remember the first time I walked on a beach with my bare feet, I thought to myself, “Wow! I can really feel my legs and feet… I feel so alive.”

    3. Nourish with quality food.

    One of the healers I worked with taught me that what we eat has enormous effects on our psychosomatic system on multiple levels. I’m not a specialist in this area, but from my experience, switching to a healthier diet was a game changer.

    It’s not just what we eat, but how we eat, too. By expressing gratitude for what I am eating and savoring the delicious sensations on my tongue, I celebrate the experience of being embodied.

    4. Move freely.

    Through practice, I’m becoming more aware of how I inhabit my body based on the way I respond to my environment. I may prop myself up to gain respect or walk briskly to keep up with the hustle. Giving ourselves space during our day to move more freely, in an uncontrived manner, can help us discover an authenticity that seems to flow with nature.

    5. Make art.

    When I reflect on the moments where I felt most alive, many of those moments involved expressing myself through art.

    Whether through painting, sculpting, playing an instrument, or dancing, we engage the whole of our being in the art-making process. It is not merely an intellectual exercise but a visceral engagement of our soul with the physical world. In artmaking, we allow our body to express its wisdom, a wisdom that moves us by touching the beauty that lies within.

    —

    Learning to become more embodied is a beautiful process of self-discovery. There never was any separation between mind and body—they are one. By reclaiming the space in my body, and reestablishing myself inside the temple of my soul, I’m learning to dance with life again.

  • How I Learned to Love My Body Instead of Hating Her

    How I Learned to Love My Body Instead of Hating Her

    “Your body does not need to be fixed, because your body is not a problem. Your body is a person.” ~Jamie Lee Finch

    I was thirty years old when I realized that I was completely dissociated from my body.

    I grew up in the height of the purity culture movement in American Evangelicalism. Purity culture was based on one primary concept: abstain from sex until marriage. But the messaging went further than this.

    I sat next to my peers in youth group while the male pastor stood on stage and told us young women to always cover our bodies. For example, two-piece bathing suits were completely out of the question for summer activities. Why?

    Our female bodies cause the young men to “stumble” and have impure thoughts. So out of love for the young men in our group, we must cover up and never do anything “suggestive.”

    The message was clear: My body caused others to sin. My body is bad.

    It would be impossible for me to accurately detail how many times and in how many different ways I received this message growing up.

    I didn’t know it was happening, but over time, I learned to dissociate from my body. My body was bad, and I was trying to be good, so I must distance myself from her.

    Thankfully, I listened to my body when she told me to leave this religious group and find my own way in the world. Yes, my body talks to me. More on that later.

    Recently, society has seen more acceptance of bodies. We see variety in body shapes represented in the media. While that’s a great sign that we are moving in a new direction, simply saying that we love our bodies isn’t enough.

    That feeling of positivity toward our body when we say that is momentary. We must take consistent action in order to make meaningful and lasting change.

    Here are the ways I was able to radically change my relationship with my body and learned to see her as my greatest ally and most prized possession.

    See Your Body as a Person

    A concept introduced to me by Jamie Lee Finch, seeing my body as a person changed everything.

    It allowed me to do one key thing: cultivate a relationship.

    Once I started referring to my body as “her,” I understood how far from her I really was. I didn’t know my own intuitive “yes” and “no.” I didn’t know what I really wanted in life.

    When was I safe? When was I in danger? These are questions that our bodies are designed to answer.

    So I learned to listen to her. And I talked back.

    A number of years ago, I noticed that I was constantly pushing people away. I really beat myself up about this, seeing myself as a cold, unloving person.

    Eventually I realized that this behavior started after a traumatic body violation that I had experienced. I understood that my body was resisting vulnerability and closeness in relationships as a way to protect me from further harm.

    I could see that my body had not been working against me, but for me. And I had the opportunity to say to her, “Thank you so much for trying to keep me safe, but I’m going to start trusting people again. I have learned from the experience and will trust my gut to alert me to danger.”

    I realized that things I thought of as “wrong with me” were in fact genius protective and defense mechanisms that my body wisely developed in order to keep me safe in my environment.

    I started talking lovingly to her, full of gratitude for all the ways she worked to keep me safe over the years. I started seeing past experiences through a different lens.

    About ten years ago, I was in a relationship with a man who wanted to marry me. I was in constant turmoil inside about the relationship, plagued with doubt and uncertainty, unsure if I should stay or go.

    I was so mad at myself for not having a clear “yes” or “no” about the situation. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I can see so clearly now that the anxious feeling in my gut was my body trying to tell me that this man was not my person.

    In truth, my body was always working for my best interests. No one looks out for me the way my body does. She has always been my most fierce protector.

    So I talk to my body and she talks to me. It’s the most important relationship I have.

    Write a Thank You Letter to Your Body

    There is a reason that gratitude practices have become so popular: they work.

    One I started to understand just how hard my body had been working to protect me, I wanted to show my gratitude.

    Writing a thank you letter can be the catalyst for a powerful mindset shift. It’s so easy to see all the things we hate about ourselves and our bodies.

    Write a letter to your body. Think about all the millions of ways your body has worked to keep you safe.

    How your body has alerted you when there’s danger, enabled you to speak truth by giving you gut feelings, and allowed you to experience the greatest pleasure.

    We can never know all the ways that our bodies tirelessly work for us. Gratitude allowed me to further cultivate a positive relationship with my body and work in partnership with her instead of against her.

    Gaze into Your Own Eyes

    If you’ve done eye gazing with another person, you know how powerful and bonding it can be. This is true when you eye gaze with yourself.

    I practice this by sitting on the floor in front of my closet doors that are large mirrors. I feel my body rooted into the ground before looking deeply into my own eyes.

    As a woman, I often look into my left eye, which is generally considered to be the feminine side. The masculine is the right side.

    This practice can bring intense emotions, so start with only a few minutes. You can grow your practice to twenty minutes or longer should you wish.

    See yourself. Really see. And feel the feelings that arise.

    It’s not uncommon for me to cry during this practice, reflecting on all the ways I’ve spoken negatively about my body and remembering how truly spectacular she is. She is beautiful, wise, and strong.

    Eye gazing will allow you to see and experience these truths. And when you embrace those truths, your relationship to your body will change.

    Try Mirror Work

    Remember when you were younger and a parent told you to say one nice thing about your sibling or friend that you were fighting with? There’s something about acknowledging the good in another person that regulates emotions and stirs positive feelings. The same can be said about your body.

    Mirror work is standing in front of the mirror and pointing out things you love about your body. This can be done clothed or unclothed depending on your comfort level.

    The thing you love can be as small as an eyebrow or as large as your torso. As you start to focus on one thing you love and sit with the positive emotions that arise, you will start to consistently feel more positive about your body.

    You’ll notice things you never saw before. Or see things as beautiful instead of ordinary.

    The sexy curve of your left thigh, the strong shape of your ankles, the color of that freckle on your shoulder. You are uniquely you and that is inherently valuable.

    Mirror work can be a ten-second practice or ten-minute practice. You can focus on the same part of your body every day or something different each time.

    I incorporate mirror work into my morning routine when I’m brushing my teeth. As I brush, I look at myself in the mirror and pick one thing I love about my body that morning. This way, it doesn’t feel like I’ve added another self-help practice, but rather I’m taking advantage of opportunities to multitask.

    When we take the time to see ourselves, what we really like about ourselves, we will learn to love what we see.

    Commit One Loving Action

    Similar to saying something nice about someone, doing a kind and loving action can also foster feelings of fondness and compassion.

    For a week, do one focused, loving action to your body. If you can’t think of anything, ask this question: What’s something I have been wanting to incorporate into my daily self-care or hygiene routine, but haven’t done?

    For me, this was moisturizing my feet. When I first did this practice, I had just moved to a new city with a much drier climate. My feet were so dry, but I wasn’t taking the time to moisturize them.

    So I committed to do this once a day for a week. It wasn’t long before I started seeing my feet in a new way.

    I was intentional when I sat on my bed and did this. I took my time rubbing the lotion in, observing new things about my feet I had never noticed before. Thinking about how hard my feet work and all the places they’ve stepped over my lifetime.

    After doing this for a week or so, moisturizing became a natural part of my daily routine. In fact, I consistently moisturize all of my skin now, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

    Some extra tender loving care will naturally grow your love for your body and cause you to care for them better.

  • How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    How to Protect Our Kids from a Lifetime of Food, Weight, and Body Image Issues

    I went on my first diet when I was around fourteen or so because, as they often do in growing teens, my jeans started getting tight.

    And because I grew up in the same anti-fat culture we all have, I hated myself for it.

    Around the same time, an adult in my life who was always obsessed with “eating healthy” gave me a copy of the new book she was reading outlining the healthiest way to eat.

    It was a book on the Atkins/low-carb diet.

    The author spent the bulk of the book demonizing carbs, explaining in convincing-sounding detail all the science he supposedly had about not only how harmful carbs were but how they were the cause of weight gain.

    Three things happened from reading that book.

    1. I became scared of eating carbs and started trying to eliminate them because, while of course I wanted to be healthy, I was terrified of gaining weight.

    2. Instead of losing the five pounds or so that I wanted to lose, I gained about five pounds and a slow progression of weight gain continued for years. Because the harder I tried to eliminate the carbs, the more I craved and obsessed over them; always eventually caving, eating them, and then hating myself for it and promising to start “being good tomorrow.

    Eventually the caving led to overeating them because “as long as I was being bad anyway, I may as well eat them all and get them out of the house so I won’t be tempted when I start being good again.”

    3. An almost three-decades-long war with my weight, my body, myself, and food began. A war that resulted in a hospitalization in my early thirties, after my first foray into the world of “it’s not a diet; it’s clean, healthy eating,” for bulimia so severe I often felt like I was going to eat myself to death.

    And the whole time, I blamed myself for it. I believed I was stupid, weak, pathetic, a pig who needed to try harder to control myself.

    So I kept trying. For more than half my life I tried, and it almost killed me.

    I’ve been working with women around the whole weight and food thing in one form or another for over fifteen years now. I started sharing my story because after listening to other women describe their histories with food and weight, I realized that my story is not unique.

    Varying degrees of my story are the norm, and they all start in basically the same seemingly innocent ways.

    We want to lose weight or “eat healthier,” so we do what we’re taught we’re supposed to.

    We start a diet or “healthy eating plan” of some sort that tells us what we “should” and “shouldn’t be” eating. This leads to a lifetime of trying to control our intake and our bodies, which results in disordered eating patterns, weight cycling, and self-loathing.

    I regularly hear from women in their seventies or eighties who have spent their entire lives fighting this losing battle with themselves to “eat right” and lose weight.

    In one survey of US women a few years ago, 75% reported disordered eating behaviors or symptoms consistent with eating disorders.

    My recovery didn’t start until I realized a few basic truths.

    First, if I had any hope of healing, I had to figure out what was causing my eating issues. Ultimately, it came down to my conditioning: patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that had developed over the course of my life as a result of many different things, not the least of which being:

    1. The stories I had learned to believe about bodies and the people in them: Big ones are bad, unhealthy, undisciplined, and lazy. Small ones are good, healthy, and disciplined, and they work hard.

    These misguided beliefs taught me not only to live in fear of weight gain and the harsh judgment of others if I gained weight, but also to judge myself and my body harshly when I did so. This contributed to not only the decades of weight gain and disordered eating but ultimately the eating disorder.

    2. The stories I’d learned about food: These are the good foods, the healthy foods, the foods you should be eating, and those are the bad foods, the unhealthy ones, the ones that cause all manner of disease, poor health, and weight gain. Those are the foods you have to give up forever, or only allow in moderation.

    These misguided beliefs taught me to live in fear of food and my body becoming unhealthy or fat if I dared to eat the “wrong” thing. This created the never-ending pattern of promising myself I was going to “be good” only to end up craving, caving, hating myself, and starting over that I felt trapped in for so many years.

    3. Disconnection with myself, my body, and my own needs: As long as I was trying to make myself eat or do the things I thought I “should” do in order to control my body and my food intake, I was stuck in my head. Stuck in fear. Disconnected from myself, my body, and even the decision-making part of my brain. Ruminating, promising, obsessing, hating.

    In that state, I had no ability to understand the messages my body was constantly sending me about what it needed, nor did I have any concept that my body was something that could be trusted to tell me that. I saw it as an enemy to be ruled over, controlled, and beaten into submission… rather than the ally, healer, and communicator that it is.

    4. Self-loathing: I didn’t like, love, trust, or value myself, so my entire self-worth and relationship with myself relied on what my body looked like and my need to control how others saw me.

    The second truth I had to realize: if I had any hope of recovering and making peace with myself, my body, and food, I had to change the things that were causing the war.

    That meant giving up the obsession with my weight and eating or looking perfect.

    I had to recognize those things for what they were—distractions that kept me from dealing with the issues that were causing the problems in the first place and were making matters worse.

    So I put all my energy into changing the causes.

    It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d engaged in compensatory behaviors. The binges were getting fewer and farther between.

    And then I couldn’t remember the last time I binged or even overate, and I couldn’t even imagine ever doing it again.

    It’s been many years since those things were my daily reality, and I’m thrilled to say they simply don’t exist in me anymore because I changed the conditioning that was causing them. I learned to reconnect with and trust my body when it tells me what it needs or wants, and I learned to value myself enough that I cannot imagine treating myself or my body poorly anymore.

    Recovery and peace are blessings that I don’t take for granted for a second and I’m still grateful for every minute of the day.

    But disordered eating and eating disorder recovery are unbelievably difficult, prone to multiple relapses, and many aren’t so lucky.

    This brings me to my main points because the simplest solution to disordered eating or eating disorder recovery is to prevent those things from ever starting in the first place.

    That’s my dream, to save future generations from growing up with the disordered eating patterns/eating disorders and horrible body/self-images that ours has grown up with.

    It starts with us, as parents.

    What I Wish Parents Understood

    Living with disordered eating patterns or an eating disorder is a special kind of hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

    It’s like living with the meanest, most self-destructive monster in your head one can imagine.

    You know the things you’re thinking and the choices you’re making are harming you, you know they’re making you miserable, you’re desperate to stop, and yet… no matter how hard you try, you can’t.

    You feel powerless. Hopeless. Helpless. Trapped.

    Recovery was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life—and I’ve not had an easy life, so that says a lot.

    Given this, it’s my view that in addition to helping those struggling recover, prevention at an early age needs to be a top priority.

    And parents, I’m not trying to place blame, but after fifteen years of hearing women talk about their struggles, I’ve come to realize that we are often a big part of the cause, although not purposely of course.

    We all have our kids’ best interests in mind.

    We want our kids to be the healthiest, most confident versions of themselves, and we’re all doing the best we can to help them get there.

    We want them to maintain healthy bodies and eat nutritious foods. Nobody doubts that we all want the best for our children and are doing our best.

    But the way we’re approaching it is almost guaranteeing that our kids are going to struggle with the same food issues, eating disorders, or a lifetime of disordered eating and failed diet attempts that so many in our generation have.

    They’re learning to fight the same wars we have in the same ways we learned to fight them.

    All the things we typically do to try to help encourage health (restricting “bad” foods, teaching them that some are “good” and some are “bad,” encouraging them to lose weight or even acknowledging their weight) are among the worst things we can do for the health of our children.

    It’s difficult to overstate the damage that weight and food shame does to adults, and that damage is worse in children.

    We also have to remember that they learn from us. If your kids watch you struggle with food and your weight, if they see you tie your mood and your self-worth to your scale, they are going to be at a significantly higher risk for developing an eating disorder or living with those same struggles themselves.

    So this is what I want parents everywhere to know: encouraging weight loss, labeling or restricting their food intake (good vs bad, allowed vs not allowed), discussing weight, restricting foods, and dieting yourself—all of those things that millions of us are doing every single day that diet and healthy eating cultures have taught us is expected or accepted—they’re putting our children at risk.

    Research has shown that the younger girls are when they go on their first diet, the more likely they are to engage in extreme weight control behaviors like vomiting and laxatives (that’s an eating disorder), abusing drugs and alcohol, and becoming overweight by the time they reach their thirties.

    One out of four dieters will develop some type of eating disorder. That’s a number that’s doubled in the last twenty years. And the majority of the rest develop very disordered eating patterns.

    Eating disorders are widely recognized to have the highest mortality rate of all mental illness, while also being among the most underdiagnosed and under/poorly treated.

    Not even to mention the levels of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that typically come from years of living with disordered eating and battling with our weight.

    There is a better way.

    Encouraging Healthy Choices Without the Risk

    DON’Ts

    Don’t discuss weight, size, or bodies—not yours, not theirs, not anyone else’s.

    Don’t let other people discuss their weight in front of them—not their doctor, not relatives, no one.

    Don’t label foods—no good, no bad, no healthy, no unhealthy… no food labels. At all. Binary food labels can cause shame, create self-punishing behaviors, destroy our relationship with food, and contribute to overeat/binge/restrict cycles that can take years to heal.

    Don’t tell them they are what they eat—our food choices don’t determine our worth.

    Don’t restrict foods—let them eat what they want. Restriction leads to guilt, shame, overeating, or bingeing and fuels disconnection.

    Don’t force exercise or “burning off calories”—encouraging exercise as a means of weight loss is setting them up for trouble.

    DOs

    Do encourage them to consider how their food choices make their body feel. How does that big mac and fries make their body feel when they’re done eating? What about the candy for breakfast? Do they feel good when they’re done eating? Or do they feel sick? Would they rather feel good, or sick? How does skipping a meal make their body feel? Do they want to feel that way? Do they really want to ignore their body’s most basic human needs with restriction? Why?

    Do encourage them to consider why they’re eating. Are they physically hungry? No? Are they emotionally hungry? Teach them the difference and help them learn to accept, honor, and express the emotions they’re trying to feed or soothe rather than ignore or numb them.

    Do teach them the value of understanding the why behind the choices they’re making and how their choices are often a result of their relationship with themselves.

    Do teach them that the relationships they have with themselves, food, and their bodies are the most important relationships they’ll ever have in their lives and to protect and nurture them.

    Do lift them up, teach them to value themselves exactly as they are, for who they are, not what they look like, weigh, or how they eat. Teach them to value and respect others, no matter what size they are.

    Do teach them about self-acceptance, kindness, authenticity, self-compassion, and the power of mindful living.

    Do teach them to appreciate the wonder and magic of their bodies, no matter what size they are. Teach them how to stay present in the moment and in their bodies, so they learn to listen to and trust their own bodies.

    Do teach them humans come in all shapes and sizes—and that no one shape or size is any better than another.

    Teach them that they are enough, exactly as they are, and that neither their bodies nor their food choices define their worth.

    And that will all be way easier if you learn it for yourself first.

  • 5 Ways to Use Movement (Not Exercise) to Support Your Mental Health

    5 Ways to Use Movement (Not Exercise) to Support Your Mental Health

    “Nothing is more revealing than movement.” ~Martha Graham

    It seems like only yesterday that I was at home with a newborn, a kindergartener, two dogs, and a husband who, just like me, was working from home, when we were thrown into the unthinkable COVID19 pandemic.

    It didn’t take long for the stress and tension to build in my body. The feeling of instability, uncertainty, and fear, not to mention the post-partum anxiety, took its toll on my body as it became more rigid, bound, immobile, and frozen.

    All the ways I had relied on movement as exercise were taken away, adapted to in-home and Zoom learning, which unfortunately did not work for my schedule or home life. It was the first time in a long time that I was not able to incorporate dance into my week.

    It seemed very hard to expand, stretch, even breathe, and that’s when it hit me. A little voice inside said, “You need to practice what you preach!” I needed to redefine movement and focus it on my mental health; connecting to movement for emotional well-being and not just for physical activity.

    When most of us think of movement we think of exercise. While all exercise is movement, not all movement is exercise.

    There are so many ways our bodies move, even involuntarily, that contribute to not only how we feel but what we think. Science tells us that molecules of emotion exist throughout the body, so wouldn’t it make sense that in order to manage those emotions, we need to tap into all the ways to move the body that houses them?

    First, let’s look at what movement is. Movement is anything that allows the body to change position or relocate. This can be something as grandiose as running a marathon, or a resting heartbeat, blood pumping, even breathing. All of these examples involve parts of the body or the whole body shifting its position.

    So, with this in mind, how are you moving right now? Now ask yourself, how is this movement impacting my mood in this moment? Is it supporting a healthy mindset or perpetuating a habit or behavior that contributes to a negative thought pattern?

    In my case, as mentioned above, my movement was very limited, confined, and rigid. It was often impeded by another person, my newborn, who through no fault of his own needed me for survival. I neglected my own body’s needs and it took a toll on my mental health.

    Changing the way you think or even feel actually comes down to changing how you move. So what can be done? Here are five ways you can use movement to support your mental health.

    1. Focus on your movement right now.

    When we focus on our movement in the present moment, we minimize the anticipation of what’s to come, which is often tied to fear or anxiety. We also mitigate dwelling on the past, which can harbor feelings of guilt and doubt.

    Every movement is an opportunity to be in the moment, because every moment is found in movement.

    Bring to mind one part of your body and simply become aware of its shape, how much space it takes up, if it has any rhythm, or even the lack of movement present. Begin to shift this part of the body in small ways and explore how this part moves.

    I began to recognize that my body was closed and tight. So I intentionally made an effort to check in with my posture, giving myself an opportunity to stretch and expand in my body to counter the negative effects I was experiencing.

    2. Cross the midline of your body.

    When we engage in any cross-lateral movement, like walking, marching, or giving ourselves an embrace, we encourage one hemisphere of the brain to talk with the other. This boosts neural activity across the corpus collosum, which increases neuralplasticity, otherwise known as the brain’s ability to change. This allows new pathways to develop which directly corresponds to our emotional resilience, ability to problem solve, and think critically.

    Begin by giving yourself a big hug or simply touching opposite hand to opposite knee. You could also try exercises or yoga poses that require you to cross your midline, like side bends, windmills, or bicycling while lying on your back.

    3. Move your spine.

    When you engage in movement of your spine, you tap into your self-awareness. This vertical plane of the body houses our core; beliefs, identity, moral compass. Bringing attention to the spine and any way it is able to move gives us the opportunity to become more aware of our inner world, how we feel, and what we need.

    Keep in mind that you do not have to be flexible, but gently explore all the ways you are able to move your spine, rib cage, and even hips.

    I like to start my day from the comfort of my bed, lying on my back, bringing my knees into my chest, and hugging my legs. As I tuck my chin, this allows my spine to curve as I attempt to connect head and tail.

    4. Play with timing and space.

    We move in familiar ways because we like comfort, even it that comes at a price for our mental health.

    Our bodies tend to stick to a certain timing, pace, and even shape as we move through our world. When we change up the timing and shape or the space our bodies take up, we begin to challenge our minds by moving out of our comfort zone. This can be uncomfortable, but done in small bouts and with ease, can increase our window of tolerance or ability to manage stress.

    Notice the natural pace of our movement (walk, gesture, etc.) and try speeding it up and/or slowing it down. Same thing with space, can you take up more space? How does that feel?

    5. Move more, not better!

    Increasing all the movements at our disposal makes us more resilient in our minds. When you only move in so many ways, then you can only think in so many ways.

    When we move our bodies more, in new and unfamiliar ways, building a robust movement vocabulary, we increase our ability to transition through life, manage challenges, or at the very least, begin to connect with ourselves in a different way. This can lead toward more self-compassion and empathy.

    When I began moving more throughout my daily life, I had more compassion for myself and my children, who were also struggling to make sense of the world, just like me. I could model my own need for regulation and safety in my body, and as a family we were better for it.

    Your body, and its movement, is your greatest resource for emotional well-being and mental wellness. It often starts with noticing all the ways your body currently moves and inviting in new ways of moving whenever possible.

    There is no wrong way to do this, as it is an individualized practice designed to harness your own mind-body connection. Furthermore, it’s not the movement alone that matters but the execution as well. Being mindful and intentional as you engage in this practice is vital.

    Integrating the aforementioned tips into your lifestyle is a guaranteed way to A.C.E. your mental health. By becoming more AWARE of our movement, we can CHALLENGE our current behaviors and EXPAND our minds in order to live more emotionally regulated lives.