#1 Diet Resolution : The Best Revenge

The #1 way to know you will be your healthy weight in 2013 is resolve to Be Good To Yourself. You will look good and you will feel good.

Because life is unpredictable, you cannot know what eating challenges lie ahead. Whether you're an emotional eater, a stress eater, a lonely eater or just a food lover, resolving to be good to yourself will keep you happy with your body. Here's how to do it:

• Tune-in to what's pushing your buttons. Eating will never satisfy emotions, beat stress or be your best friend. Instead, when buttons are pushed try this:
• Wait for 3 minutes to see if the urge to eat passes, which it probably will.
• Plan an alternate activity to use to diffuse these feelings.
• Call your mother/cousin/friend to see how s/he's doing. Everyone gets lonely.
• Take a brisk walk around the block to diffuse anger. Focus on what is essential for you and adjust accordingly. If someone is making you angry, it's their problem, and the way to deal with it is to honor yourself.

• Don't let eating be a habit. Volunteer to help others and discover how lucky you are. Helping others is cool. You will make new friends by being good to yourself and end mindless eating.

• Check in with how your body feels for clues when you eat. 
• Notice personal changes and respond to them.
• Notice how smelling and tasting what you eat makes you feel.
• Notice when you're no longer hungry.

• Feed social and emotional hunger as often as you feed your body.
• Talk more, eat less.
• Share portions.
• Feed others. 

Being good to yourself is choosing to deal with the changes happening around you by going with the flow, but not compromising your priorities. You don't need permission to trust yourself, because you know what feels good and what doesn't. Trust yourself.

Intuitive tools will always protect you, as long as you use them. So, for 2013, here's how to be the #1 star in your life all year long. 

• Be curious before you eat.
• Use foresight as self-defense to think about how you'll feel tomorrow if you binge today.
• Connect with dignity when someone or something pushes your button. It takes energy to take the high road, and that burns calories. It has been said  "Looking good is the best revenge". Be determined to look good!

Feeling good and looking good go together. Take time to know your body. Share the pleasure of enjoying tastes and the comforts of relaxing with someone you love. Have a Happy New Year and remember, you are #1.

Eating Habits & Emotional Eating

Eating habits don't help you lose weight.

Eating habits are a rut you get in from letting someone else dictate what your body needs to be a healthy weight. In fact, you gain weight because habits are not a response to your body.

Habits cause emotional eating, which is you rebelling against what doesn't feel right.

So for the New Year, make a resolution to Be Your Own Boss. It takes time and energy, but so does everything worth having. The cool thing is the energy burns calories.

The way to do it is by paying attention with your senses and your mind.

Here's how:

• Think with your senses. Do this by checking the way your body feels before and while you're eating. If you see a huge piece of cake in front of you and check-in with your body, your brain may put up a red flag saying: cut it in 1/2 & put what's okay to eat on separate plate. Or your body may already be full. This means you are free to leave the table. 
• Feel with your mind.  Do this by using intuitive tools like foresight, courage, dignity and curiosity. Before you eat ask, "How will I feel about myself if I eat this?" It's intuitive to respect and protect yourself, but if it's not your habit, you won't do it. Once you use your intuition to do this, you will feel liberated because you will be in control.

Using your senses makes you feel fresh, while mindless habits make you feel old and trapped.  Open up your life by thinking with your senses. Feel with your mind.  You'll look younger because you will be happier. Don't be in a rut.

Here's the bottom line about eating habits that cause emotional eating:

•  Eating Habits limit choices and kill spontaneity, which makes you look drawn and wrinkly, even if you're overweight.
• Habits Avoid letting the moment unfold in the present, which means you stay in the past, which is full of emotional hot-spots.
• Bully & bluster often justify habits that age & delude you into eating when you're full.  
• Habits Ignore problems and inhibit the truth, which - like doing drugs  - is a temporary fix. It wears off; then you get the nudge, the gut feeling, the inability to sleep. Ignoring self-control doesn’t mean abandoning self-respect.  
• Habits are Traitors to your soul. Habits turn a blind eye to possibilities and ignore problems. 
• Stuck is how habits make you feel, and that feeling creates anger, frustration, loneliness and emotional eating. 

Take a breath and take the time and energy to give yourself a chance. Stay in the present and don't let anyone tell you that you can't do it - because you absolutely can! By this time next year, you'll look at holiday parties and yourself in a whole new way. 

Food Plan That Works

The perfect plan is at your fingertips and tattooed on your DNA. Use your senses to connect with your body and watch it work!

How To Start:  Learn from your past. Take time to see yourself and live in your potential.

• Live with your weight goal. Remember what matters to you. If you're happy but could lose a few pounds, post a reminder where you will see it on your computer/refrigerator/bathroom mirror. If you need to lose 20 pounds, go out and buy 20, 16 oz cans of soup. Carry it around to be clear about what you want to lose. When you lose the 20 pounds, give the bag of canned soup to a homeless shelter.
• Losing or maintaining weight is not a choice; it's a decision. Balance what you eat with what you need. Do this by tuning-in to your body, not emotions around food. Tasting food more with every mouthful guarantees that you eat less. To drop weight effectively, give up regular desserts and drink more unsweetened drinks. 
• Don't be ruled by ideas or emotions when you eat. Overeating is psychological hunger. Your senses are your natural physical inner guidance system. This includes your 6th sense which we often call common sense. Respecting your body is how you are in control - by taking control.

How To Stick With It:  Respect your soul because only you can understand it.

• Focus with your intuition, not your mind. Intuition is physical, so you feel it, you don't think it. **Be curious about how the food you're eating will impact your body. Curiosity is intuitive; you feel it. **Connect with dignity before eating a plate of food - How much feels dignified, and how much feels like a pig? You know your answers. **Use the 3-minute rule when you feel the urge to binge.  For 3 minutes: Notice your state of mind, notice what's triggering your urge and use your 6 senses to notice if you are physically hungry. 
• Feed your social appetites to maintain your weight. As often as possible, change the topic away from food! If the topic is food, use conversation to talk about how good it tastes. Everyone likes to share ideas and experiences about pleasure.
• Don't compromise because of social pressure to eat. People respect a person who respects herself. Don't make a fuss, but be firm. 

What About Calories, Exercise, Food Choices?  Thinking with your senses and feeling with your mind is the food plan that works. Am I Really Hungry has the eating plan for this. 

• All calories are not equal. Think about quantity, not calorie count. 
• Exercise is personal. If you move as little as possible and find you're watching TV a lot, chances are you have some personal pounds of fat that would melt off if you gave yourself a chance. Exercise doesn't have to mean sweating or going to a gym. Take 5 minutes to focus on enjoying every day by taking a 5-minute walk. This will exercise your mind and your body.
• Food choices that are common sense plus convenient, are intuitive. Choose for energy and health. Don't eat what doesn't look or smell good, or when you're not hungry. Beware of portions that put on pounds. Take control by asking for a second plate or container to remove half of the portion from your plate; then either put it away for another meal or give it away.  

Addicted to Food

You may think you're addicted to food, but you're not!

• Food isn't addictive, emotions are. 
• Fear and doubt are sharks that devour inner grace and cause bad choices.
• Don't eat when you feel emotional. 
• Emotional food addiction happens when you eat to soothe, hide or vent.

It's time to stop letting your emotions rule your life.   

Use intuition instead, to take back self-control.

Make social and personal pleasure a priority at mealtime.

Addiction doesn't happen if you focus on enjoying food as a way of nourishing your body and getting the most out of living. It's intuitive to enjoy eating. Eat for the pleasure of taste, touch, smell and physical comfort. That's how to love your body. Thinking about food as love makes fear and doubt small.

•  Food is love, when it's shared and when it's savored. 
• You eat less, when you talk about how your food tastes. 
• You don't gorge, when you share eye contact during a meal. 
• Take time to breathe between bites, and you'll discover your body is responding to the food.

Because eating brings physical satisfaction and takes the edge off the anxiety of starving to death, you may confuse eating with love. It's natural to be addicted to love because real love brings out the best of who you are. 

"Just as food is needed for the body, Love is needed for the soul." Osho

 

Knowing why you're hungry and what you're hungry for, is as important as realizing when you're hungry. Then you know what you need.

• Feed your soul with music, eye contact, conversation and laughter.
• Be grateful for little things and you will eat less. That's a promise.

"Life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be." Grandma Moses

Beat Emotional Holiday Eating

Do the holidays push your eating button and make you wanna gorge? You're not alone. Because of diets, we use food as a reward, a consolation, a weapon, an obsession and even a place to hide. 

Don't let it happen this year!

Media urges us to gratify every craving, without gaining weight.  Media blows life out of proportion and we become addicted to the myths it creates. 

Get help before being sabotaged by holiday eating by tuning-in to your intuition .

 Holidays are coming. Why not learn to connect with your body now so you can enjoy the parties?

The point of holidays is to celebrate living.  

It's intuitive to celebrate life!

Our senses provide physical cues  24/7. These cues are for protection. What you sense connects with your heart, your mind and your body. Protecting yourself is intuitive.

The reason why diets don't work is because your intuition is more powerful than any diet.

Diets demand rigid eating. Life is unpredictable and healthy eating is flexible. Instead of rules, use intuitive tools like curiosity and self-respect to stay aware of messages from your body.  Trusting your body and your intuitive values tunes you in to your healthy weight.

No matter how hard a program tries to make you ignore your body's messages,

your intuition - with your senses, always guides you to recognize your unique needs.

• A big limit of dieting is that it's generic. You and your best friend - who have totally different body issues - may decide to do a certain program together. Does this really make sense? Do you have identical physical and emotional needs?
• Holidays are the perfect time to respect and celebrate your body. Overeating or starving causes dissatisfaction that leads to binging. 
• When you share the taste of pleasure with family and friends, you fill the void of emotional and social hunger.  When you talk about how food tastes, you connect your mind with your body and your emotions and you will discover satisfaction. Guaranteed!

Prepare for holiday party challenges this year by keeping aware of your senses to stay in control of your choices. Be loyal to you at holiday parties. It takes courage.  Fortunately, courage is intuitive. That'ss why people surprise themselves when they are brave.

Holiday help is in your mouth and comes through your nose and eyes. Courage comes from your heart. Don't let your holidays be sabotaged by rigid mental attitudes. Be flexible. Tune-in to your attitude and intuition and Have Fun!

Stop thinking about food.

Get rid of fat from the inside out. Stop thinking about food. Instead of focusing on what you're putting into your body, think about how your body feels when you eat.

Learning to respect your body is part of the rite of passage from dieting to intuitive eating. Rites of passage are life changing. Change your life by changing your eating habits.

Getting rid of old habits gets rid of old fat.
Your body is more important than what you eat.
Start connecting with your body when you eat - instead of thinking about food. 

When you tune-in to how your body feels, it's automatic to make food choices that keep you feeling comfortable. As a result you will:

• Stay clear about your priorities. 
• Respect and protect your body by acknowledging it when you eat.  
• Develop healthy eating habits.

Lose fat from the inside out with these simple intuitive tricks:

•  Eat less by chewing more. Chewing burns calories. It helps you get more benefit from what you eat because digestive enzymes in your mouth prepare food for your stomach. The result is you feel full sooner.
• Make it a point to put down your fork or spoon between bites. This gives you time to chew. It also makes it natural to talk to the person you're eating with. Talk about how good the food tastes. It's a sexy topic for everyone. You will eat less.
• After you tune-in to your body, only eat what you really want. Check in with how you feel between bites. Notice if your food tastes good because this helps you stay in tune with your body. You will discover you are not always that hungry. Stop when you feel full. Soon, you will notice old eating habits that ignore your body, and now you can stop them.

When you do these simple tricks, your clothes won't feel as tight.
You'll have less indigestion and less insomnia.

Being overweight is often the result of stress and the self-defeating habits it creates. Intuitive eating  guides you beyond the diet mentality to experience a common sense way of eating and body awareness. It's common sense that if eating habits are making you fat, it's time to get rid of them.

Feel Good Food Connection

You want to have a certain look. You need to eat, too! 

What's the connection?  It's you!

When you feel good about yourself, it's easier to have patience with your eating choice. Feeling good tunes you into being kind to yourself.
 
Intuitive eating is all about you. Being unhappy with the way you look means it's time to change the way you treat yourself.

• Binging is a way of beating yourself up.  It's like banging your head against the wall.
• Rushing through a meal is like inhaling calories. When you rush, your body doesn't have time to feel full.
• Sneaking a bag of cookies is like poisoning yourself. It's doing to yourself the opposite of what will make you feel good.

You deserve respect. The first person you need to get it from is you!

• Eat for energy or do not eat.  This is different from eating just because you're hungry. Try it!
• Share the pleasure of eating. When you really like what you're eating, pause to taste it better. Then, talk about the satisfaction you feel.
• At parties, put something you don't like on your plate. Instead of eating, carry it around and talk to people. BUT don't talk about food or eating. Parties are for feeding social hunger. Don't let food get in the way of finding social satisfaction.

Still not happy with what you see in the mirror? 

• Wear a different color.
• Smile at yourself.
• Vow to respect your body and your heart at the same time. Since your body is the home of your heart, this makes a lot of sense.

If you feel like you've gained weight, you can be sure you're gained some bad habits. Bad habits are often created by stress.  Take the pressure off by giving yourself a chance to eat intuitively. Time is your tool. Take time to notice what makes you feel good about yourself.

• Eat less, chew more.
• Take control by being kind to yourself.
• Recognize self-defeating eating habits and decide you've had enough!