Wow, where did the summer go? It seems like just yesterday I was rushing around getting ready to go to Nashville and that was really over 3 months ago! I must admit after this crazy summer with the wildfires and other assorted drama I’m excited to welcome the fall season.
I had an interesting experience the other day. An attendee from one of my past Am I Hungry? classes called to talk to me about coaching. She had gone to Weight Watchers to see if she could find some success there. This is really normal, many people who learn about Intuitive Eating will go back to some kind of dieting before fully embracing the non-diet approach. As she found out, it’s usually very hard to follow a diet after practicing IE for a while. She told me that after a day or two she couldn’t deal with counting points anymore.
I usually warn clients and class participants that once they learn and practice IE for any length of time, it’s really hard to go back to dieting. You become very aware of why you are eating, how overeating makes you feel, how awful the restriction of dieting is, and you just don’t want to go there again. Put simply, learning Intuitive Eating usually makes it hard to diet again. You miss the freedom and the peace that IE brings.
Awareness is a powerful gift. So many of us go through life mindlessly, just following a routine or stuck in habits. Do you ever stop to look at the trees in your neighborhood or a picture you hung in your house a long time ago? We forget to appreciate all the beautiful things around us while we are stressing out about the future or being sucked in by our own or other people’s drama.
A coach shared with me a game that was just amazing and brought me more awareness of my surroundings. She said to spend some time one day counting all the red things I saw. I went through my house and yard doing this and I was thrilled to notice many things I hadn’t looked at in ages. Who knew I had so many red things? I actually looked at decorations I had in my house that I love but haven’t noticed in a long time. And it’s surprising how many things out in nature are red. It really helped me see that staying present and mindful is a wonderful thing and that I didn’t want to miss out on everything happening now or let life pass me by while stuck in my routine and “have to-do’s”.
Try it for yourself. How many red things can you find? Have fun with this and let me know how many you find and any experiences you have doing this. Send me an email about it and if I get enough responses, I’ll share them in an upcoming newsletter.
Have a good month, stay aware and be present! :)
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I’ve had several requests for intuitive eating-related book reviews. I love the idea but I thought rather than having me review the book, I would prefer hearing from you! If you have a book you would like to review that is about intuitive eating, mindful eating, body image, self-esteem and related subjects, let me know, maybe you can be the next person to share your insight with everyone else.
This month my former client and friend AJ Linton has written a review for us on a book that she really connected to. I hope you enjoy it!
Book Review by A J Schmideler-Linton
The Mastery of Love - A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship
By Don Miguel Ruiz
Amber-Allen Publishing
Intuitive eating is not just about developing a healthier relationship with food but also about our relationship with our self and others. Since starting intuitive eating in May 2007, I have been on a bumpy road learning to love and accept my body, mind and soul - just as it is. Through this journey I have also developed more compassion and acceptance of others. I love finding a book that I can apply to an area of intuitive eating, especially one that I want to share with the world.
The Mastery of Love is an amazing book that gives us tools to help us learn how to unconditionally love and accept our selves and others. Through marvelous Toltec and Greek mythological stories and analogies, Don Miguel helps us to first understand why we behave the way we do. He helps us to overcome the negative messages we have been bombarded with by our society and sometimes our family. We then learn how to deal with the emotional pain, suffering, shame, fear and guilt that overpowers us and often keeps us stuck, repeating the same hurtful patterns. He encourages us to step into a new reality and accept responsibility for our dramas. After all, we learned our suffering patterns as a way to cope with fear instead of love, now we get to choose whether we want to change or keep living a life we really don't like.
We all have absorbed messages and ideas which trigger feelings and emotions that we internalize as messages that there is something wrong with us. We beat ourselves up and treat ourselves inappropriately. We end up blaming ourselves and others for these feelings of imperfection and worthlessness. We create our own hell of fear, pain, grief, sadness and suffering.
The Mastery of Love tells us how we can change this, take off our masks and return to reality by replacing it with love. It all seems so simple and begins with learning to first love ourselves. By loving ourselves we learn that we are perfect, just the way we are. We don't need to be something that we are not. Once we learn to unconditionally love ourselves we can then accept others unconditionally. We don't need to change and neither does anyone else. We are perfect! So becomes our partner, mother, father, sons, daughters, friends and co-workers. We just need to embrace this perfection and treat ourselves and others accordingly.
I highly recommend this book if you are tired of living in fear, tired of abusing yourself or your loved ones and you are ready to take off the mask you've been hiding behind and move towards unconditional love and acceptance of all.
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I just wanted to take a moment to let you know about a contest at the Donate Your Weight forums that you might be interested in. There are lots of other prizes to win and it's pretty easy and fun to do. Donate Your Weight is a place to get resources for healthy, diet-free living. To join the contest and find out more, go to www.donateyourweight.com/bbs and click on "register".
Once you sign in, you'll have a choice of entering under one of three categories. Submit your most delicious healthy recipe, share a valuable exercise tip or post a supportive or enlightening post and you could win. You can also win prizes for People's Choice favorite iPod playlist and best YouTube video. Contest starts September 25 and ends October 9. The more you participate, the greater your chances of winning. You can view all the details at www.donateyourweight.com/bbs.
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September 2008
 I’ve had so many people ask about my next Am I Hungry? teleworkshop that I decided to have one more for this year – and give a special discount, too. We’ve had so much fun in these classes, I hope you can join us!
In just 8 weeks, you will learn surprisingly easy techniques to help you take charge of your weight for life. You will:
- Rediscover the secret to eating what you want when you want
- Stop obsessing about food, eating, and your weight
- Free yourself to live the happy, healthy life you deserve
- Experience the pleasure of eating foods you love without guilt
- Learn the truth about nutrition without confusing, arbitrary rules
- Never again exercise to earn food or punish yourself for eating
- Boost your metabolism effortlessly and naturally
- Increase your energy and fitness levels easily and painlessly
- Nourish your body, mind, and spirit so you can enjoy excellent health and abundant energy
If you are ready to break out of diet prison and heal your relationship with food and your body once and for all, my next workshop may be just what you are looking for. Be sure to take advantage of the early bird opportunity to save $79. At the end of the class I would love to receive a testimonial like this one from my class in the spring:
"Gillian's workshops are amazing. The support is incredibly helpful and I've learned so much from her and the rest of the class. The workshops are helping me realize that my thought process is totally "normal" for people who have been stuck in the over-eating and restrictive eating cycles...and that I CAN overcome them and reach new goals. These workshops have increased my knowledge, my motivation, my hope, and my quality of life!! Thank you so much Gillian!"
Sign up now and get $79 off your registration!
Visit BreakOutofDietPrison.comfor full details and to sign up. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about the class or want to discuss if it is the right thing for you.
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Warning: There are no magic bullets, unrealistic promises, or outright lies in this article. The truth is, weight loss is only successful if you can maintain the loss for your entire life. The following strategies will allow you to keep weight off without any suffering, guilt, deprivation, or rigid rules. You don’t need to be miserable to lose weight! However, if you feel like you do, I’m sure those magazines at the checkout stands will have plenty of restrictive diets and low calorie recipes to make you as unhappy as you think you need to be.
If you’re ready to find health and happiness, and want to finally live your life fully, you’re in the right place. Too many women spend years trying to lose weight only to gain it back (or more)! After years of dieting and denying myself new clothes, outdoor activities and other fun things because I “needed to lose weight”, I finally woke up. What I will share are a few of the strategies that allow me to be in charge of my life, have fun, take care of myself, and as a result, maintain a healthy weight.
Don’t Diet
It’s probably not news to you that diets don’t work. In fact, diets have a sad 5.2% success rate. They also cause destructive physical changes in the body that lead to weight gain and health problems. Here are just a few of these changes:
- Decreased metabolism
- Fat storage becomes easier, especially in the abdominal area
- Increased risk of heart disease and premature death
- A slower rate of weight loss (if at all) with each diet
- Increased binging and cravings
Eat Foods You Enjoy, When You Are Hungry
One of the reasons diets fail is because of “Diet Deprivation Backlash”. Most diets restrict certain foods, often your favorites. The more you deprive yourself, the more you crave these foods. You may try to make the craving go away by eating so-called “good” foods. But by the end of the day, you will often have eaten more calories than necessary from “good” foods and still eat the forbidden food, usually more than if you had eaten it when the craving hit. This is not an effective weight loss strategy.
Eat food that you enjoy. Eating foods that are healthy or low-fat or for other reasons is just another diet, and you know where that leads.
In addition, eat when you are physically hungry – it makes those enjoyable foods taste even better. And, if you eat when you are hungry and stop when satisfied, you have a much better chance of losing and keeping off the weight.
Don’t Focus on Weight
How you feel when you get on the scale? My guess is it depends on the number!
Face it - the scale is just a piece of metal that has no power over you. So why do you let it tell you how to feel about yourself? The truth is that your body will fluctuate anywhere from 1 to 7 pounds throughout the month regardless of your weight loss efforts.
Research has shown that women who eat based on how their body feels rather than focusing on their weight actually have a lower body mass index (BMI) than those eating to try to lose weight. Toss the scale and listen to your body, it works better.
These strategies are part of a growing non-diet approach to eating and weight loss known as Intuitive Eating. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, in other words, experience successful weight loss, this is the only way to go. Along with weight loss, you can expect a new freedom from dieting, peace with food, and the opportunity to live a full life. Sure beats a magic bullet, don’t you think?
Gillian Hood-Gabrielson, MS, ACSM, is the president of Healthier Outcomes, a nationwide coaching practice specializing in intuitive eating and fitness coaching. For more information and to receive our special report, “6 Simple Steps to Guilt-Free Eating” visit www.HealthierOutcomes.com. Gillian can be reached at gillian@HealthierOutcomes.com or 866-650-6464.
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