How Mindfulness and the Creative Process Will Help You Heal Your Relationship With Food (and with Yourself!)

Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a non-judgmental awareness. The creative process is when you are fully immersed—in mind, body, and spirit—in the act of creating. Both states are healing and life enhancing, and offer direct access to the deepest roots of emotional eating. When truly engaged in the creative process, it’s an act of mindfulness, as well as an opening to become aware of the messages your emotions provide you.

Quieting your mind and engaging with a sense of flow allows for you to access creativity at the deepest (or highest) level. When truly connected to the creative process in a mindful state, everything else dissolves. This offers a sense of timelessness, a complete absorption that is truly powerful. This space of complete absorption, or flow, is where the healing happens. In this state you can connect with your true self and begin to have deeper, richer, and fuller emotional understanding and awareness.

Engaging with the creative process is not limited to making art! While art making is certainly a powerful faction of creativity, there are absolutely no limits to the creative process. The definition of creativity is: the ability to make new things or think of new ideas.

Making music, singing, writing, painting, drawing, working with clay, cooking, dancing, moving, digging in the earth, communing with nature, photography, how you decorate your home, how you express yourself through your personal style... -creativity really is limitless. When immersed in the creative process, you are connected to something beyond the realm of self. Mindfully engaging in the creative process allows you to become more comfortable and aware of your true self and your emotions rather than attempting to escape them with food.

The outcome of the creative process is not the focus. While the outcome may hold value for you, the process is where the healing occurs. Integrating the creative process with mindfulness, you can explore the challenge of emotional eating through your experience of the present moment, emotional awareness, and an expanded consciousness. Engaging with the creative process in a mindful manner will bring you in touch with your inner emotional world and offer a way to witness it, explore it, experience it and let it go. Often the driving force behind emotional eating is fear and avoidance. The creative process addresses those head on and mindfulness creates a renewed perspective on your emotions within the here and the now.

When you give yourself permission to tune into your emotions creatively, you free yourself from the fear and avoidance that drives you to soothe with food. Your personal process may be writing a poem, story, song, or in a journal where you can connect with and release your emotions. Creating an art piece with any art materials offers a space for the psyche to rest, where emotions can be held, witnessed and respected. A physical movement or dance can depict, express and physically relieve deep emotional experiences. Allowing yourself the opportunity to connect with the rich internal world of emotions helps to reduce fear surrounding facing emotions and is empowering.

Allow time and space for your mindful and creative process to unfold. Whatever emotion is present, let it flow freely from within. You will become more and more comfortable with your emotions over time while beginning to see more clearly what messages your emotions are there to provide. Engaging mindfully with your creative self is life affirming and powerful. No matter what creative medium you connect with, no matter how you express your internal experience, tap into the creative process and see what magic may unfold for you along your path to healing your relationship with food.

As you allow yourself the opportunity to know yourself through the inner-workings of your mind, heart and soul, you will live with a deep sense of peace and contentment. When you are at peace with yourself you are at peace with food.

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!