Miracle Weight Loss

Diet Myths, emotional eating, Stress Diet

Miracle Weight Loss Diet

Every day, you’ve probably seen some new “miracle weight loss diet” replete with before and after photos. But what you’re NOT seeing is “after” the “after” photos. That’s because for most people losing weight is not an issue. Sure you’ll get to a “plateau” – the place where your metabolism has slowed down so significantly that even the miracle weight loss diet is not working anymore. What you have to do at this point is eat even less, and they’ll also tell you in most cases that you need to exercise more.

The photo you are seeing is the BEFORE photo from a woman who is on an extreme miracle weight loss diet where she has limited her diet to meat and water. GAG ME! Can you imagine a life where every meal is meat and water? It sounds like some new Guantanamo eating plan.

Here’s her blog: I discovered Zero Carb/no plants diet…meat and water. Can’t say I love it, but I like it enough to continue. Cravings gone, no raging hunger every 2 hours, no bloating, no gas/farting, no craziness to create three ‘balanced’ meals a day…plus snacks, because meals weren’t enough. High blood pressure…gone. Temps staying up in normal high range without thyroid or any supplements. Excess fat loss is a breeze, edema I could not get rid of (it was getting scary)…gone. If I had a time lapse camera I could see how my body is changing daily from a lumpy 100 pounds overweight old lady to having a shape even with 80 pounds more to go. My pants fit better (down a size) than the last time I wore them when this weight/size. I can’t remember the weight I was exactly…it’s been a few years, but it almost seems I weighed less and was fluffier. No matter

After the after picture - when you regain the weight you lost

Guilt From Regaining Weight

You struggled and followed that diet EXACTLY. And maybe you reached your goal weight. You went into a maintenance diet mode- still “watching” what you ate. For 95% of dieters this can happen during your diet or 2 months to 2+ years after you finished the diet, the weight started creeping back. In the beginning you might have ignored it, being exhausted from the strict diet you were on. But at a certain point you realized that the weight WAS coming back! The fear and guilt is overwhelming!

Embarrassed To Show What Happened

You might have shown your before and after pictures on Facebook, Instagram and other social media and gotten so many positive comments and requests for what you did to lose the weight. But at this point you won’t answer anyone. You feel guilty and like a failure. And the diet industry is happy that you feel like that because they know that you blame yourself for the diet failure. They know that you’ll be back trying another diet.

Diet Revolving Door

Revolving-Door-of dieting causes disordered eating The bad news is if you try another diet after each diet failure, you will regain the weight, just like before. But the worst part is that each time you rebound and add additional weight from your starting point. And it’s NOT YOUR FAULT. In fact, it’s the sign of a healthy body following its primary directive to prevent you from starving by slowing your metabolism.

Unfortunately for us who have gained weight, the likelihood of losing and maintaining that weight loss is very small. Only 5% of dieters maintain their weight loss.

But there is a way that may increase your possibility of getting into that group. It’s by dealing with STRESS. Read more about it and figure out if you are a stress eater, or have body image issues that are stressful and damage your metabolism.

Stress Causes Weight Gain Two Ways

Much of the reason that diets fail has to do with Emotional Eating. That’s when you are eating from stress. But the other invisible way that stress causes weight gain is from actually changing your metabolism. Your body is responding to stress as though you were under attack. But you can learn how to turn off both ways that stress is affecting your weight.

Get control of stress now and prevent your weight from getting any higher. The other benefit is that this training affects all aspects of your life and makes you more resilient to stress and calm.

Contact me if you have any questions-

Learn to love yourself like your dog does- (even if you don’t have a dog, you’ve heard of unconditional love? that’s it!)

unconditional love from a dog whether you are skinny or fat

Please share YOUR experiences with dieting- were you able to maintain your weight loss?

Addicted to Sugar?

Stress Diet

There is a great fear that people now have:

Am I Addicted to SUGAR??

Diet fads come and go. The most recent fads are being gluten free, and breaking “addiction” to sugar.

I’m here to tell you that you are just as addicted to sugar as you are addicted to BREATHING! NO, you are not addicted to sugar! If you were TRULY addicted to sugar, why don’t you just go eat it straight out of a sugar bowl? Sure, it tastes good, and you enjoy eating things that are sweet. But those same things are generally in a package or combined with fat, and sometimes ALSO with salt. Hence the new fad of eating pretzels that are covered in chocolate- or salted chocolate products.

Sugar is a Stress Relief Food!

When you’re under stress, that’s the time when you reach for something sweet. It makes you feel good – it’s a treat. In fact, the first food that you eat as an infant is “mother’s milk”. The combination of sugar, fat and protein in human breast milk is very close to another food that women in particular have a hard time saying “no” to: ice cream!

Diet gurus are again into another one of their Diet Industry Lies scheme to make you feel powerless and out of control by telling you that you are an addict! Actual addiction is characterized by a continuous or an increased dependence for a particular substance in the body. Furthermore, it is accompanied by the experience of a physical withdrawl when someone stops using that substance.

This again shows you that you are not addicted to sugar. Yes, there is an emotional pleasure that is derived by eating sweet food. But there is not a physical addiction to sugar. You don’t go holding up banks because you need money for sugar!! Physically you may detect that you feel more lethargic when you stop eating sugar, but that’s probably because of a drop in your blood sugar which will level off over time.

Sugar is Brain Food

Your brain would not be fed adequately without glucose. In fact, thinking uses a higher amount of glucose than any other body part:

Glucose is virtually the sole fuel for the human brain, except during prolonged starvation. The brain lacks fuel stores and hence requires a continuous supply of glucose. It consumes about 120 g daily, which corresponds to an energy input of about 420 kcal (1760 kJ), accounting for some 60% of the utilization of glucose by the whole body in the resting state.

This is the opposite of your muscles which actually store glycogen. And glucose is the preferred fuel when you need burst of activity. In fact, your brain’s need will over ride the body’s need for glycogen. If you are walking up a steep hill and doing complicated mathematical computations, you will have to stop one or the other activity.

Restrictions Cause Cravings

The food you think you should eliminate because it’s a “bad food” according to the Diet Industry, is the very one you reach for when you’re stressed out. And this can actually be for a few reasons. Your body NEEDS more sugar when you are stressed. It’s Mother Nature’s method to give a surge of energy to your muscles to escape a predator that could eat you. That means, if you are craving sugar, you are probably feeling stressed, and may not even be aware of it! Do stress relief immediately!

Another reason that you are craving sugar specifically is – because you restricted it. You only reach for the things that we don’t allow yourself – If you “allowed” yourself to eat sugar when you want it, it won’t be your food of choice when you inhibition is lowered.

All Things In Moderation

Bottom line: you DO need sugars and carbs, just as you need protein and fat. If you want to be healthy and happy take the middle road- balance in all things. Don’t over do, don’t under-do. Do just enough – in all things.

When you are stressed and feel like you are out of control because you “need” a sugar fix it’s time for stress relief. I have a great program that helps you deal with stress eating so that you don’t feel the need to stuff your feelings with food! You become more resilient and able to handle situations that would ordinarily make you reach for a candy bar or ice cream. Read about it, and see if it’s for you!

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Clean Your Plate Club? Are you a member?

Stress Diet

a dinner plate after the meal was completely eaten.

Were you taught to “clean your plate” at meals?

Were you taught to clean your plate by your parents when you were a child? Those lessons, learned even before the age of 6 become part of your subconscious mindset. You may be over-eating in your present life because of your subconscious programming from your early childhood created by your parents.

When I saw this really funny Youtube video, I thought immediately about how this well-meaning father was conditioning a potential weight problem in his adorable son. Think about how so many parents do the same thing! REALLY: Do you think a baby would starve themselves to death by denying themselves food when they are hungry?

By forcing children to eat food, you are teaching them NOT to trust their own body’s signals of hunger/thirst/satiation/need for sleep. I know that as parents, you think that your child “needs” more food- but THEIR body knows best! It’s important for parents to realize (in most cases) that this is damaging, and not helping their young child. (The exception is when a child has developed an eating disorder- but that’s a different story – probably the result of a very stressful, humiliating event that you may not even know about.)

This video also points out the effect of multi-tasking that adults routinely do while eating a meal. Put on the TV, and you are mesmerized into eating everything in front of you. You forget that your stomach is sending you a message: “STOP EATING – You’ve had enough!”

I recently had a comment from a reader who watched this Youtube video.

OMG yes- I am a card carrying member of the clean plate club.And hate it.
It is almost impossible for me not to finish food put in front of me, so the only way I ever lose weight was to size down the portions. But that was okay, my family’s portions were much too large! …Plus the way I coped with this as a kid was to leave the very tastiest bits for last, so I WANTED to finish all of it, even if I was full. I still have to consciously remind myself at every meal to eat the best bites first!

Learn from these examples:

Don’t multi-task while eating
Consider if you too, are a member of the “clean your plate” group – try to break through that conditioning with conscious eating
Don’t force food on others – especially if you are a parent!

You’ll feel so much better when you pay attention to and trust your body!

Are YOU a member of the Clean Your Plate Group? How has that effected your present weight? Please help others by sharing your comment below!

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How My Negative Body Image and Dieting Made Me Overweight

body image

How I Got Myself Overweight WithDieting

Twenty-three years old, and I must have been insane, to try to lose weight on a healthy, slender body (5’6 – 126 pounds- with a rounded backside). As a teenager, I remember that my waist was so thin that I had to learn how to tailor my pants to take in the
waistband and still have a size long enough for my extra long legs. Instead of a reputable doctor telling me I need psychiatric help to see and believe that my body was fine, I was encouraged to go on one diet after another. Each time I’d lose weight, after I went back to “normal” eating (I was never a binger), the weight crept back on; and added additional weight.

I’d go back to the doctors swearing that I wasn’t cheating, and insisting something was “wrong with my body”. But the doctors kept repeating the same ignorant line to me:

“EVERYONE loses weight if they eat less and exercise more”.

But I knew I wasn’t cheating, even though they insisted. Doctors were Gods when I was young, and contrasting what they said with my actual results made me feel even worse. I was caught in the yo-yo syndrome, eating a chronically small amount of food, skipping meals, exercising and frightened to eat more. I got to a point where I had very little appetite; and thought my stomach inside my body had “shrunk” while my belly fat increased!

No diet every made a difference; vegetarian, vegan, raw food, gluten free, dairy free, elimination diets, probiotics, exercise regimes, cleansing fasts, Jon Gabriel’s program, diets proposed by Naturopathic doctors, vitamins, Paleo…. I had the same results to each diet. I’d start by losing a little weight, and then it would practically stop; until I gave up in misery, went back to my basic under-eating, skipping meals, and gained back the weight + extra padding pounds.

Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of INSANITY and a diet.

It wasn’t until decades of chronic under-eating, feeling ashamed of, and hating my body, that I realized that I had unknowingly created my own problem. I developed Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, suffering from low body temperature, thinning hair, and a myriad of other symptoms. My HDL, LDL, triglycerides were not looking good. I wasn’t young anymore (in my 50s at that point), and I knew that what was happening to me at this point could shorten my life! I was getting scared, but didn’t want to start taking statins! I had read enough to know that these pharmaceuticals are dangerous and don’t even do what they claim!

Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease of the thyroid gland where the body mistakes the gland as an invader and attacks it. It is particularly sensitive to stress. So when I was stressed (from what was going on in my life- divorce, loss of a job, children sick – OR from going on another diet), the symptoms would be very pronounced. When things were better, the symptoms lessened.

Mind/Emotion/Body Medicine to the Rescue

Are you having trouble believing that I caused my own dis-ease, or that you have unknowingly created your own illnesses? That’s what Mind/Body Medicine is about. It’s not something that you do to get yourself sick deliberately, but it’s a physical reaction to your thoughts and emotions. An obvious symptom of how this works is by observing the direct correlation between anger, and physiological changes: your heart pounding, changes in your blood pressure, etc. in your body. When your negative thoughts and emotions are chronic, it causes continuous stress inside your body, that can cause or exacerbate any illness.

After years of dieting, and actually studying nutrition, reading hundreds of books, thousands of articles, taking to different experts, and making myself a guinea pig by trying all of these diet plans, I heard Matt Stone from 180Degree Health, interviewed on the Paleo Summit. I must admit I thought “what is with this guy? – and why is he on this program when he disagrees with what they are teaching?” But because the Paleo diet had ALSO failed me, I decided to learn more about Matt and what he was saying. I read his books, and scheduled sessions to speak to him directly.

That’s when the lightbulb went on over my head, and I finally realized that I was causing my own weight issues by chronic under-eating and depriving myself. It was like I was punishing myself for being overweight and causing the overweight problem by that very behavior. DUH!

But under-eating was only part of the problem. I had to understand the mindset that I had that created my need to do this to myself. I had to remove society’s conditioning that made me think that unless I was super skinny, I was unloveable. And I had to change the blame I had for my body with gratitude and appreciation. I had to re-establish a nurturing, positive relationship with my body and my mind to heal.

From speaking to so many other women, I learned that this pattern of chronic under-eating, over-exercising, stress eating and binging, body shame was a common problem and that their story was the same as mine.

The Stop Stress Eating Program was created to help women (and of course men) discover “your story” that started your weight gain, and re-write it. It’s a program to reconnect you back to using only your body’s cues to decide when, what and how much to eat. It’s a program to learn how to be your best friend and love yourself like your dog does: Unconditionally. And what could be better than that?

There’s no better way than to have a personal coach take you through this program. It will be a life changing event to reboot your relationship with your body, and food. It’s the key out of your self-imposed diet prison. Read about it, and start with the questionnaire to see if you’re a candidate.

Lianda saying Be Yourself, everyone else is taken

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Fat shaming response

body image, Stress

Comments About Your Weight

photo from TheConversation.com

Why is it that people feel entitled to make fat shaming comments about your weight? You don’t even know them? You’re eating at a restaurant, walking down the street, shopping for groceries. Maybe you have become hypersensitive to other’s eyes on you, their laughter after looking in your direction. You can feel their judgment of your personality as a cause for your weight- they think you must be lazy and can’t control yourself.

Can it be that others are so insensitive and mean that they feel alright to fat shame another person? Unfortunately, the answer is often “yes”. They are lying if they tell you that they’re just trying to help you. “Oh really? I NEVER thought about your diet suggestion before! I’ll definitely have to try that out so I can get thin like you!” N O T !!!!

Insensitive Comments

So many women (in particular) have fallen for the notion that they have to be thinner, that they are totally oblivious when they discuss that they were “bad” when they ate a cookie or cookies at an event in front other women who weighed a LOT more than them. This happens to me practically every day! Women are always talking about their body and what “bad” food they ate. They are so self-absorbed, lacking self confidence about their own appearance that they probably don’t even realize that you’re standing there and they are essentially fat shaming you!

Women have been taught to find fault in their bodies and that they NEED to be thin in order to be attractive. This brainwashing from a young age really does make us crazy! It’s so stressful to have to “watch your weight”! Thin women don’t watch their weight! It take so much time and effort to clear it out that conditioning. So in some ways, you can feel sorry for a person who is judging herself and making her own life miserable with “watching her weight” and judging herself because she actually eats food! She may not yet have realized that all the lies from Dr. Oz, Oprah and the Diet Industry is only going to make her gain weight after each bout of dieting. YOU might actually be able to help her and relieve her stress about her body! She’s actually fat shaming herself!

AWARENESS and Assertiveness

For the person who is just uninformed about the futility of dieting, you could gently try to educate them. You could also let that person know that what they say can be hurtful to those around her.. even if it doesn’t hurt you! (I sure hope that is so!). But there is another flavor of the insensitive comment. It’s MEANT to be hurtful and it is mean and degrading – but that works only if you let it be so.

Only an opinion

The most important thing you can possibly do for yourself as a human being is to understand that ANYTHING that some utters is simply their opinion! YOU have opinions, and so does everyone else. Why get upset about a differing opinion from yours? If you do respond with anger or sadness you are giving your power away to another person.

Your opinion about me in none of my business.

Keep repeating that until it takes hold in your brain. There are few people on this planet who I believe in more than I believe myself- and those people are not going to be mean and shallow and want to be hurtful. If the people you listen to and believe are hurtful intentionally, it’s time to DUMP THEM!

How to be Assertive

confident woman leaning forward For the rest, you must learn to be assertive and make them realize that it’s NOT OK to belittle or judge other people because of their appearance. That goes for their color, their age, their weight or any other characteristic. Only when there is awareness brought to bear will there be change.

And the statements that they make about their own weight being unattractive are not lost on those around them who are heavier than them! Let them know that words have power to hurt. And actually, those attacking words stay a lifetime. Is that how they want to be remembered??

Our strong memory of mean words are designed to stick for the purpose of preserving our lives! The people who say things like that are dangerous and to be avoided! That’s why those words have such staying power.

Try it yourself: think about the nasty things people have said to you that you remember from your past. Count them.. Then think about the nice things that people have said to you. I’ll bet you remember the negative ones more often than the nice ones?!

Assertive Template

So many times you walk away from an uneasy situation saying: “I SHOULD have said…..” and feeling even worse about yourself for not standing up. That’s why I encourage you to use my assertive template, where you always know what you want to say. This method gives the other person an “out” where you kind of let them off the hook. Because most time, people don’t want to hurt your feelings. They’re just not aware- and it’s your job to make them so!

You start with something like: I guess you didn’t realize ________________ but when you said (or did) ____________________ I felt ____________. So I’d like to request that you do this __________________ instead.

This really works. I fact it opens the lines of communication between people and can improve relationships.

Assertiveness helps you feel better about yourself. But just remember, you’re not always going to get a response that you want from the other person. Many people become defensive, or even attacking. But just stick to your statement, and remember that what comes out of their mouth is about THEM not you!

You can do it- and you start changing the world, one person at a time.

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Diet Researchers Lie-

Diet Myths

Researchers Lying With Statistics

The headline in a newspaper at the check out counter in the grocery store about how to lose 10 pounds in a week could capture your attention. But if you read that “Eating Ice-cream Increases Your Risk of Dying by Drowning”, it could make you wonder if you should stop eating ice-cream before going to the beach or a pool. This is the perfect example of lying with statistics and poorly designed research.

How Statistics can “Prove” that Eating Ice-cream causes death by drowning

Let me explain: Just because two things occur at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other.
Summer is a time when it’s hot outside. More people eat ice-cream in the hot summer weather, and more people ALSO go into the water to cool down, so more people drown. A flawed study would report that eating ice-cream causes drowning because they both increased at the same time! Now you realize that it isn’t true that ice-cream causes drowning! They just occurred at the same time of year. But a combination of factors that seem linked because they occur at the same time is the example of poor research, and yet still becomes something that most people believe.

That’s how you lie with statistics – you leave out other important factors.The research left out the important considerations and jumped to the conclusion that eating ice-cream causes drowning. This is the same kind of poor research that many people read and believe.

Many people become so attached to believing this type of flawed study that they fight against findings that dispute their BELIEFS. Perhaps you’ve fallen for the study and joined the groups of people who now believe that eating butter, and saturated animal fat is causing heart disease. Yes, this too, is an “Ice-cream Causes Drowning” type of study. And finally, the media and medical doctors are starting to say, “oh, we were wrong”…. but that doesn’t help the people who died from cardiovascular disease caused by eating VEGETABLE OILS INSTEAD OF BUTTER!!

Eat Less and Exercise More: Another Statistical Lie

Another fervently held misconception is that eating less and exercising more will cause weight loss that is lasting. The fact that the Diet Industry doesn’t want you to know is that 95-98% of all diets fail to keep the weight off for more than a few months to a couple of years.

It’s next to impossible for something to fail for all of those people, unless there is something flawed with the process of dieting. But most people tell you: the common knowledge is the only way to lose weight is to “eat less & exercise more”. You’d be amazed at the things people call you when you challenge their beliefs! It’s not pretty, I can assure you!

Mother Nature Wants To Keep You Alive

The problem with dieting is it goes against everything that Mother Nature has designed to keep you alive. Dieting, by cutting calories slows your metabolism, as does excessive exercise. And when your metabolism is lowered by 30% UNDER what you are eating as diet food, and you are miserable and stressed, the weight will start coming back on its own. That’s only one part of Mother Nature’s plan to keep you alive!

But people who don’t have weight challenges want overweight people to believe they must continue this battle to lose weight for the rest of their lives– or they are lazy, and undisciplined. Yes, it’s easy for them to say: YOU have to make a “lifestyle” change!

From all the interviews I’ve done, I’ve found that the thinnest people eat the most. In fact, a few of my thin friends are trying to GAIN weight, and are unable to do so! Being 5 pounds underweight is actually more dangerous than being 75 pounds overweight according to actuary tables that insurance companies use. Why isn’t the country coming down on these people for being thin??

My experience with overweight people tells me exactly the opposite. Heavier people are unhappy with their appearance and have been chronically under-eating (dieting) and punishing themselves physically and emotionally for long periods of time. Their mindset has become chronically stressed from hating themselves, then giving in, and then again, being disgusted with themselves. In order to lose weight, most of them must stop dieting, and start nurturing themselves with food and LESS exercise, more sleep and forgive themselves for hating their body!

Negative Mindset Plays A Role in Weight

The Mindset of a dieter plays into the Law of Attraction, and Neuroscience – and not in a good way. It’s the mindset of deprivation, frustration, “can’t and should” that invites more misery, deprivation and frustration. And that’s just talking about their CONSCIOUS mindset. There’s the issue of unconscious and subconscious beliefs that are ALSO sabotaging their ability to lose weight and maintain it. While you are under the effects of your conscious thoughts and beliefs thirty percent of the time, you unconscious and subconscious mind is in the driver’s seat 70% of the time. It’s much harder to change that!

In order to lose weight, the focus of your mindset must change to appreciate, and nurture your body, as a beginning step. You must also break unconscious and subconscious belief patterns that are keeping you overweight.

Findings Prove Researchers are Morons

This study had me screaming at my computer screen as I read it! A long term study epidemiological study tracked 19,000 people for four years to see if eating the Mediterranean Diet would have a protective effect on developing heart disease. Their findings were very important. But their conclusions convinced me that the researchers were either morons or completely blind to what was right in front of them. They found that the Mediterranean Diet did have the ability to lower heart disease, but primarily only in one group of the subjects.

They found that the diet was more effective on college educated people who were economically well-off. The subjects were essentially eating the same diet, did the same amount of exercise, were not smoking cigarettes, and yet only the richer participants had less heart disease. What did the researchers conclude from this study you may ask? ….

The researcher concluded that these people bought more expensive wine and food. ARE THEY KIDDING??? They couldn’t figure out that the economically challenged people had MORE STRESS in their lives?? Even the exercise didn’t make that difference in developing heart disease in this study.

This exemplifies how the Diet Industry does research. Their bias to blame the dieter causes researchers to blame weight issues and health on ANYTHING other than the real cause: STRESS.

As Deepak Chopra once said: you can eat the healthiest foods, but under stress they turn to poison in your body.

Want to be healthy? Either you have to figure out a way to make a lot of money (in a job that’s not stressful), or work on stress relief.

How to Know if the Stress Relief You are Doing Works

If you want to live a happier, healthier and longer life, stress relief has to be a planned and practiced activity. But how do you know if what you’re doing is actually helping you? You need a way to watch your body and mind relax so you LEARN when the method you are doing is working – and when it’s not!

I found the research organization in the year 2000 when I was trying to find out why my resting heart rate was so high. Over the years, the HeartMath institute has studied the power of the heart to be able to calm the rest of the body. They developed the EmWave and the InnerBalance devices which are similar to biofeedback. They wanted people to be able to “learn” to effectively practice stress relief and then know their practice was working.

How The EmWave and Inner Balance Work

Using a sensor that send your heart beat to the device, either by bluetooth or wired, both devices are sending on your bio-information to these small devices (or your phone!). The devices send you an auditory and visual signal when you are changing your heart rate variability (not just slowing down your heart, but making the beat to beat changes more “organized”). This is one of the methods used in a lie-detector test to figure out if you are feeling stressed, and probably lying! When you are calm, as determined by your Heart Rate Variablility (not the speed, but the organization of the beats), your body systems are getting into alignment and out of stress.

If you want to KNOW that the stress relief practice you are doing is actually working, I recommend getting one of these terrific devices from HeartMath – I’ve been using mine for over ten years – and I rarely get sick. It’s even helped me to deal with some really scary news that could have stressed me out, and made me feel miserable – because I’ve become a lot more resilient to stress.

Lots of people are feeling stressed out from the news right now. One of the stress relief methods I recommend is not watching it and torturing yourself with things you can’t change. And when you practice with the Inner Balance (for your iPhone and Android) or the Emwave- (a small version), you WILL feel the weight lifting off you – but you just can’t do it when you’re feeling lousy…. set aside time – even 5 minutes can be a big help!

Bottom Line: Eat Well and Practice Stress Relief

Read “research” with a skeptical eye. Try to find out who funded it.

Love yourself like your dog loves you- thin/fat – tall/short – young/old….. it matters not. That’s the number one stress relief. Accepting and appreciating yourself as you are.

Nurture yourself with good food, AND do the stress relief!

AND: Don’t fall for the flawed research that makes you a victim. And enjoy that ice-cream especially in the summer time, because you deserve to nurture yourself, and you’re NOT going to drown!

8 Reasons Why Mindful Eating Fails

body image, Stress Diet

8 Reasons Mindful Eating Fails

Mindful eating is not easy to do if you’ve been on and off diets for a while. Many Mindful Eating “gurus” will tell you that you are failing because you are still restricting foods you eat. So, essentially, that’s having a mindset of still being on a diet. Mindful eating is NOT a diet. If you are learning this on your own from reading blogs, you’ll probably notice that most (if not all) of the gurus teaching this are thin, or relatively thin.

This raises reasonable assumptions in your mind. One of them being that these gurus were once fat and then did Mindful Eating (or intuitive eating) and lost weight. The other assumption can be that they were never heavy and are teaching you how to eat like them. Well, assumptions are not always correct.

Will I Lose Weight Eating Mindfully?

Let’s deals with the first assumption. Some people do lose weight using intuitive eating. Others gain weight, and still others stay the same weight. Think about a diet. There is almost a guarantee that after the suffering of going through a diet (any kind of restriction, or even “lifestyle change), you have a 95% chance of regaining the weight you lost, plus adding additional weight to your starting point. And it doesn’t matter if you exercise.

However, if you can maintain the practice of mindful eating, you will not be obsessive about what you eat, when you eat, or how much you eat. You will learn to trust your body, and pay attention to the natural signals of hunger and being full. Isn’t that a better way to go through life?

Rebuilding Trust In Your Body

To me, this is the most important issue with regard to the practice of mindfulness. It’s accepting that your body knows what the correct amount of food to eat is at any time.There’s never a once size fits all approach to how much to eat, like when you’ve been told to weigh your food, or make it fit into the palm of your hand size portion. This is totally worthless. And if you’ve been a chronic dieter, you’ve probably gotten used to being hungry, ignoring your feelings of hunger. There are times when you are going to be hungrier- like after doing some hard exercise. You NEED more food at those times, and not eating is harmful to your metabolism.

Self Hatred

You’ve also been, at least dissatisfied with how your body looks. That dissatisfaction can be minor, or very extreme to the point where you HATE your body. Those feelings causes a physical response of stress within your physiology which have been clearly researched. Those feelings raise your cortisol level – the stress hormone. Your body feels attacked, and it doesn’t matter if the attack is from outside you, or inside you. It’s all the same.

Women, in particular have been conditioned to focus on their appearance from a very young age. We’re told as little girls that we’re so pretty, our clothes are pretty…. and that becomes the way we know we are valued and accepted. It’s not the same for boys who are told they’re smart or strong. And you can see the effect in life. Females are always concerned about their body- what clothes we wear, wearing shoes with high heels that can break your back, putting on make-up, dieting…. on to plastic surgery to fit what society says is the way we “should” look.

I’m particularly disgusted with the way that women feel like they have to be sexy and show off their bodies practically everywhere they go! When I go to the beach, women are almost naked. Men are wearing appropriate swimming attire that won’t get pulled down or off in a wave! I love tennis, but to see the difference in sports attire between men and women is sickening. Shorter and shorter tops and bottoms for women, and men wearing sports appropriate clothing. It’s time to wake up women!

It’s time to jettison this conditioning, this brainwashing and stop focusing on how our bodies look. Get out of the YOUniverse, and see your amazing, unique qualities that make you special. Dieting is part of the brainwashing – and it’s the “cure” (of fat) that CAUSES the condition (fat).

Realize that mindful eating is only going to be effective when you have learned how to manage stress. Your stress reaction is both a psychological response as well as a physical response. It can be to an event, or to harassment. You pick the things that you allow to stress you. Please don’t add self-hatred of our body. Stop dieting!

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