5 Simple Steps to Integrate More Movement Into Your Day (Without Stepping Foot Into A Gym!)

Are you looking to get more movement and exercise in your life and yet you have no idea how to incorporate it into your super jam packed schedule? Do you think that exercise has to be done at the gym and has to be crazy intense to gain any benefit? The truth is, moving your body in some way every day is a consistent marker for greater health throughout your lifespan. It does not have to be fancy, time consuming, painful or boring! With all of the modern conveniences like elevators, escalators, or working from home, we have less daily activity and movement naturally integrated into the day.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, many people I work with share their frustration of not having the time to go to the gym or exercise. When they feel defeated by putting it off and putting it off, that only increases their stress levels. One way to get in more movement and exercise is to integrate physical activity throughout the day rather than worrying about making it to the gym.

Exercise has many known health benefits including improved sleep, improved mood, lower risk for most illnesses, improved cognitive functioning, greater energy throughout the day and balanced blood sugar levels. Most people that integrate movement in some form consistently feel more confident and have a more positive body image. These are all elements that most people desire in their lives. If these benefits all sound great, but you are still overwhelmed by where to begin, start integrating these 5 simple steps to get more active today!

1.    Start the day with marching in place or jumping jacks for one to five minutes and twenty squats. You can do these while waiting for the water in your shower to get warm, brushing your teeth or waiting for your coffee to brew! This movement will get your blood pumping, build strength and create energy.

2.    Every time you have the option, always take the stairs. The first few times you might huff and puff, but over time you will increase your lung capacity and strengthen your muscles and bones. 

3.    Use the technology you have at your fingertips! Set a reminder on your phone each hour to stand up, stretch and find a reason to get in some extra steps. 

4.    Take a walk during your lunch break. Even if it’s just a quick five to ten minute brisk walk, five minutes is always better than zero!

5.    What song gets you moving like nothing else, you hear it and you just have to dance? Find that track. Play that track. Dance and find pleasure in movement!

It’s best to begin slowly, try to integrate just one step at a time. Once you feel as though you are being consistent with one step, move on and add in the next. Before you know it, you will be searching for other clever and simple ways to create more movement in your day. Typically, the more you move, the better you feel. As you use these five steps to integrate more movement, you will notice the mental, physical and emotional benefits. Go ahead, get moving today!

6 Steps to Break Free From Emotional Eating

Are you ready to break free from emotional eating? If so, you are not alone. So many struggle with a complicated, dysfunctional, and unsettling relationship with food. This arduous relationship with food triggers a food-focused-stress-inducing internal dialogue constantly running through the mind. Thoughts such as: “What should I eat?” “I shouldn’t have eaten that.” “What is the best diet to lose weight?” “Should I log my food on an app?” “Should I count calories?” “I can’t believe I ate that.” “Do I need to skip lunch to make up for the cake I had last night?” “Is bread good or bad?” “Low-fat or low-carb or neither or both…?” Sound familiar?

This internal dialogue goes on and on and creates anxiety, stress, and feeling, well, just generally bad about yourself. These negative emotions then cause even more discomfort internally and a sense of being overwhelmed. These uncomfortable emotions likely result in mindless, stress, and emotional eating. The negative cycle then continues: food is the problem and yet food is the solution. If this sounds familiar, I assure you, there is hope to finally break free from the vicious cycle of emotional eating.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, I primarily work with women who struggle with an emotional attachment to food and consider themselves to be stress-eaters. These six steps are always where we begin to embark on the process of healing from the deepest roots. As you heal your relationship with food, inevitably, you heal your relationship with yourself. These six powerful steps create the opportunity to make peace with food, once and for all. This approach takes you directly to the root, clears it out, and allows the opportunity to plant new seeds of a renewed vision for your life, inner strength, empowerment, self-awareness, and resiliency. Begin to follow these six steps to break free from emotional eating today.

Step 1: Create your vision and set specific goals

Creating your vision is determining what you want your relationship with food to become. Once you create your vision, you will set goals with action steps. These action steps are the specific steps you take in order to meet the goal. They set you up for success as action is the only way to move forward, to change, to align with your vision in order to reach your goals.

Step 2: Stop dieting and eat REAL food!

Diets are restrictive and often set you up for a binge because there is always an endpoint to a diet. Diets that focus on weight loss alone are not sustainable throughout your life. The changes need to be sustainable and eating REAL food is just that. When you focus on balanced, whole food nutrition, you naturally focus on what to eat, not what not to eat. The more whole and healthy your food, the healthier and happier you will become. Having balanced nutrition in a non-restrictive manner ends the deprivation-over indulgence cycle.

Step 3: Become emotionally aware

Emotional eating is driven by just that, emotions! Emotions are information about how you are experiencing your life. When you shift to become emotionally intelligent and aware, you will no longer fear experiencing your emotions. A tool that can help is journaling. Keeping an emotions journal gives you a place to express the emotion and explore why you are experiencing the emotion. For example, if you feel angry, you might write: I am angry because I am not ok with how (someone) treated me. This allows you to be present with your feeling and respond to it accordingly rather than avoid it, which will only send you back into the emotional eating cycle. Learning to identify the emotions, understand their purpose, and be present with them creates emotional awareness, freedom and peace internally.

Step 4: Get exercise and movement into your life

Movement and exercise are powerful mood lifters. If you are struggling with overwhelming emotions, exercising-- or any movement will significantly impact your process of breaking free from emotional eating. Find what exercise/movement you enjoy, that you don’t view as a chore, and do it today. Even 10 minutes of moving your body can significantly impact how you feel.

Step 5: Create a Positive Nourishment List

A Positive Nourishment List is a list of things you enjoy, you view as a treat, and that bring you a sense of fulfillment, calm, joy, and nourishment that DO NOT include food. When feeling stressed or experiencing an uncomfortable emotion, access your list and do something to help divert your energy away from emotional eating. This list will help you cope more effectively with your emotions.

Step 6: Mindful Eating

When you are present with your food you are less likely to overeat and more likely to feel satisfied. Mindful eating is just that, being present with your food without judgment or distraction; no phone, TV or social media. This allows you the opportunity to taste your food, to take in the aromas, textures, and sensations. When you are eating mindfully, you are not judging your food, not concerned about the calories, and not overthinking about what you are eating. This creates the opportunity to notice your hunger and full cues more intently, which allows you listen to your body. Emotional eating distracts attention away from the body, mindful eating allows you to be present in your body. Try challenging yourself to eat one meal or snack mindfully every day and notice what happens!

Follow these 6 steps to begin
finding freedom from emotional eating and
make peace with food today!

Want to learn more? I will be offering a 6-week online course that guides you through these steps and enhances the process of making peace with food. You can also check out my book: Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food. As you implement these 6 steps to freedom from emotional eating, I look forward to hearing about your progress!

Yoga Beyond the Postures: Healing Through the 8-Limbed Path

Yoga is often portrayed as a physical, body focused practice, but it is SO much more. Yoga is a practice. It is an 8-limbed path that allows you to connect deeply with the present moment, your highest self, with the divine. Yoga offers the opportunity to peel back the layers of mental, emotional, environmental, and social conditioning. Yoga is an opportunity to tune into your limiting, self-defeating thought patterns that cause discomfort, pain, and unnecessary suffering while at the same time offering growth and healing on the very deepest levels.

When I incorporate yoga therapy into the work I do as an integrative therapist, it typically has very little to do with the physical postures. The focus on the yogic elements is a process of creating a connection with your own internal guidance, inner knowing, inner wisdom and inner truth. The mind/body are intimately interconnected, really—they are just one thing—so addressing the physical body is absolutely a necessary part of the process, however, it is just one limb along the 8-limbed path to freedom.

When engaging with the 8-limbs of yoga there is time to set an intention, contemplate, and integrate the five Yamas and five Niyamas; which together create the first two limbs of yoga. These simple yet powerful concepts (such as the first Yama, Ahimsa: non-harming or kindness) allows a connection and renewed intention with how to approach your internal interaction, your external and environmental interactions with more kindness and love. Ultimately contemplating and integrating these ten concepts leads to emotional balance, internal balance and well-being.

The third limb, Asana, or the physical postures, address the physical body. The postures create freedom and comfort in the physical body by reducing tension, increasing flexibility and developing strength. When engaging with and practicing an Asana it is useful to abandon all attachment to any particular outcome (what the posture looks like). This can be a challenge as your ego may have its own agenda. Practicing a posture offers an opportunity to once again return to contemplating the Yamas and Niyamas. The physical postures, or the Asanas, are meant to combine steadiness and ease in your physical body, promoting and offering steadiness and ease in the mind.

The fourth limb of yoga is Pranayama. This limb offers a dedicated time to breathe and connect with the present moment. When you breathe you draw in prana which is our healing life force and life enhancing energy. Pranayama offers a time to release what does not serve you, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Breath work creates a sense of grounding, preparation and training for the nervous system to be calm and quiet.

As your body becomes steady and at ease, the breathing practices create a calm and serene internal experience, the body/mind is then ready to move into the fifth limb of yoga, or Pratyahara. This is an experience of true relaxation by withdrawing your senses. This limb is all about deep relaxation. The process of surrendering to true deep relaxation is tremendously powerful and allows the possibility to feel, to experience, to open to the expansiveness of your being. The process of deep relaxation is the bridge to the inner limbs of yoga.

The inner limbs begin with the sixth limb, or Dharana, where you create a concentrated point of focus. To create this focus you might use a mantra (word or phrase), your breath, an image, a chant, a candle flame, or anything that is useful for you and assists in the process of creating a one-pointed focus of your mind. Concentration requires effort. The mind will wander, there may be physical sensations that distract you, noises in your environment, emotions that arise and impact the mind/body. The practice is all about returning to your point of focus and maintaining effort to concentrate on your single point of focus.

This practice of concentration can directly lead you into the seventh limb, Dhyana, or meditation. This limb offers the opportunity and ability to completely absorb with the present moment: the only moment. Dhyana offers the opportunity to dive into the space between the fluctuations of your mind. Meditation offers precious moments of complete stillness, complete connection to your point of focus without effort, complete peace. Essentially, yoga IS complete absorption with the present moment. Yoga IS the present moment.

When you experience this deep, timeless connection with the present moment through concentration and meditation you may experience the eighth limb, or Samadhi. Samadhi is sustaining the complete absorption and allowing a connection with your highest self, the divine.

As you embark on your yoga journey, know that yoga is always available. When you set an intention, reflect inward, take a breath, calm your mind/body, you are engaged in the practice of yoga. Samadhi is an opportunity, not a goal. It may be an outcome but not the driving purpose of the practice. When you practice without attachment to outcome, without expectation, you create a deeper freedom and complete surrender. There is no quick path to reach it. In life, you get good at what you practice. With yoga, that is all that is needed: practicing with dedication, consistency and effort. Practice being present, and you are practicing yoga. Practice yoga and can come home to yourself and find true peace, the divine, and a deep connection to all beings.