Brush Up On Mindful Eating

As we come to the end of the first month in 2012, I felt this would be a good time for a refresher on Mindful Eating. It seems to have come up a lot this month in our sessions so I hope this helps solidify further what we have talked about in our meetings this month: 

The 5th Key in Creating Peace with Food  

The last of the 5 Keys to Creating Peace with Food is Mindful Eating. I’m sure you’ve heard of it during the health segments on your local news station or read about it in one of the many popular books (such as Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating (http://www.mindlesseating.org/).

 To me, Mindful Eating can be defined as:

Honor meal times :
Set meal times for yourself every 3 hours. Plan to eat at those times by making the necessary adjustments in your schedule. Eating isn’t an option-we have to eat to survive. So make it a priority.

Acknowledge hunger levels and taking action on what your body is telling you:
Rate how hungry you are on a scale of 1-10. (See scale below.) If you are feeling physical hunger, eat-no matter where you are, who you are with, what you are doing. Stop and eat something. When you are no longer feeling hungry, stop eating and wait 20 minutes before deciding if you would like more.

Seek joy in your food:
Ellyn Satter says, “When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.” And I couldn’t agree more! To illustrate the point imagine this: you are at a local farmer’s market and it is the first week for fresh peaches. A vendor hands you a slice. The smell of the fruit fills your nose as the juices run down your hand. The soft ripe flesh is giving under your pinch as you place the slice on your tongue. It is cool and sweet in your mouth and evokes memories of your childhood.  This is seeking joy in your food.

Make providing nourishing food to yourself a priority:
All things eat to survive. For such an important survival tool, we take it for granted and often undervalue the art of providing ourselves with life giving food. Don’t fall victim to society’s de-valuation. Take ownership of your right to eat. Plan your meals, have emergency back-ups ready when plans change unexpectedly, and choose your foods wisely. Using the meal planning process can be very helpful in achieving this.

Weekly Challenge: Choose two of the 4 mindful eating strategies above to put into practice this week.

Creating Peace with Food- Our Core Values

We thought a good way to start the New Year would be to share more with you about our practice and the philosophies that drive our work. Our purpose is to give you greater understanding of why we do what we do. These are the values that drive us to be the best care providers we can be for each of you, our clients and future clients as well.

The values that reached our top five most important values are:

• Adaptability
• Faith
• Discipline/Purposefulness
• Teamwork
• Love

With the challenging experiences Creating Peace with food has experienced lately along with many positive shifts during this past year, we feel we have had ample opportunity to grow and practice in these areas. They have risen to the top because they have helped us thrive through it all.

In Brandi leading this company and Kimberly as part of the team, we have values that are vitally important to us as leaders. Our top three values are: faith, love, and adaptability. We are grounded and fulfilled by these values as human persons. This helps us to be the most we can be for those we care for.

As far as what we feel is needed to make our business succeed, we would choose faith, discipline, and competence.

And for you our clients we also consider what we feel is most important to you. These areas would be that we offer you dependability, embrace you with compassion, and fill you with a sense of security. What do you think?

And lastly, as a team at Creating Peace with Food, we center on faith, teamwork, and balance.

As we continue to strive to meet and live through our value system, we hope and pray that your lives continue to be positively impacted. We value the tough work that you put into this process of change for your health, wellness, and life balance. We are encouraged by each step you take and each step you take again to get back and move forward on your path to Creating Peace with Food. 

Thank you for your thoughts, prayers, and flexibility during this transition time.

Office Fire

Hi Everyone,

Our office building caught on fire Monday and is considered a total loss. We will be postponing new blogs until our new office is all set up. Please follow the updates on Facebook and Twitter as we will be keeping everyone posted on our next steps.

Have a Happy New Year!
Sincerely,
Brandi & Kimberly
Creating Peace with Food

The Touchy Subject of Handling Your Child's Weight

IDEAS OF ACCEPTABLE WEIGHT FORM EARLY (UPI Health News Article)

This article is only one of many illustrating the research being done on the prevention of obesity. And to me, these articles represent a double edged sword.

As a dietitian working with pediatrics and eating disorders, parts of me cringe at how well-meaning parents may interpret this information and impart fearful and damaging messages to their very young children. And also as a dietitian with 2 advanced certifications and many years of experience working with individuals to realize their weight management goals, I feel proud of how far the research has come emphasizing proper nutrition and physical activity for health and well-being.

So often I work with wonderful and intelligent adults, who received messages from their parents/role models at fragile ages telling them that they were too fat or were put on a diet. The literature has spoken on several occasions noting 3 year olds, 6 year olds, 8 year olds, complaining they were too fat and can't eat certain foods because of that. I can't imagine my little girl, who is 3, telling me she thinks she's fat!

Any adult who has children in their lives on some level (nieces, god-children, working in the church nursery, neighbors) are automatically a role-model for those kids. In this role, we hold a responsibility to model appropriate boundaries in regards to how we treat each other and ourselves regarding health, food, body image, manners, etc.

Here are my Top 10 Ways to Role Model Healthy Behaviors to the Kids in Our Lives:

1.      Set daily meal and snack times for yourself, not just your family

2.      Eat with your kid, not just feed them

3.      Acknowledge your own food preferences and attitudes and how that influences your family’s meals

4.      Stop talking about how much was or was not eaten at meals-including your own

5.      Do not comment about weight (yours, theirs, or anyone else, even if joking or you think your kids aren’t listening)

6.      Reward yourself with NON-FOOD rewards like “you time” or a spa treatment instead of food

7.      Share what passions you do have about cooking and healthful eating with your family

8.      When no longer hungry, stop eating. (This is a shift in focus. We are used to asking ourselves if we are full versus asking ourselves if we are no longer hungry. This will lead to a big difference in calorie intake at the end of the day.)

9.      Set boundaries at the table: what you prepared is the meal, do not make special food or become a short order cook when food is refused.

10.     Forgive yourself for not being perfect and be okay with trying again and again. Practice makes perfect!

Holiday Challenges- Opportunities to Address Emotional Eating

This is a great time of the year to revisit developing strength over emotional eating (EE).

Food is personal. It is what we are given in infancy when we cry, what many are bribed with to “be good” as children, and what many turn to for comfort as teenagers and adults. The holidays are especially a time where turning to food for comfort is a primary source of coping for many.

Developing a healthy relationship with food beyond EE is something many of us hope for. And in all our hope, we seem to still rely on our old "friend" of food in times of need-over and over again.  You CAN get to a place where you do not go to food. It is hard work and it is well worth it if you are looking to overcome EE.

The most powerful places to develop change in EE are actually our heated moments when we usually turn to food in search of comfort. In our heated moments, when rational thoughts are overtaken by ritual and vulnerability, we hold the most power. Power to alter our behavior, change our thoughts, and have different outcomes.  The biggest challenge is letting ourselves truly experience these heated moments and working to change ourselves before, after, between, and during.

To get started, begin a log of your EE. Write down the what, when, where, and why’s in your log to help you gain more insight into your personal food and emotion relationship. (Even if you think you already know!)

Example:

• What Happened   
• When Did I EE   
•  Where Was I    
• Why (What did I tell myself)

For your next steps to conquer emotional eating, follow our blog posts:

• Plan Your Different Outcome
• Reminder Systems and Alternative Coping Strategies

• The Only Way Around is Through