I have just finished reading a book called ‘The Diamond in Your Pocket’ by Ganagaji. One statement she makes is “Wherever your attention is, this is what you love”. Whilst this is so true, it does not mean that it is a healthy love affair.

 In our obsessive love of food we lose sight of the one thing we should focus out minds on and love more than anything else – ourselves. When we love food so much that we place all our attention on it, the love can be an unhealthy one. We find ourselves driven by want, need, greed, desire and rebellion. The more we place our attention on food, the more (for most of us) we yo-yo diet and gradually gain weight.

Studies over the past 20 years in Finland support the belief of many experts, that the obsession with weight loss has disrupted our normal eating patterns and contributed to the parallel increase in obesity. (Underage and Overweight by Francis M Berg) When we diet we switch off most of the common sense skills of ‘Conscious Eating’. These are the normal eating patterns of people who live without dieting. 

(Read more at http://www.lifeshapers.co.uk/published_articles.htm)

Re-educating ourselves in the ways of normal eating patterns of behaviour is not about what we eat but how we eat. It is a process of re-learning the many and varied skills of ‘Conscious Eating’. This means a focus of attention on ourselves, how we think around food, actions we take around food and how to be in touch with our body’s feelings in relation to food.

Making a mind-shift away from food can be a scary thing for many people as they feel they will lose control and gain even more weight. The reality is that when you place your focus on ‘Conscious Eating’ you replace your unhealthy love affair with food through a new and loving set of controls. These are the controls that give you back your love affair with life…

·        Knowing when you have had just enough food and one more mouthful will spoil the enjoyment.

·        Focussing your attention on the things that bring you joy in life, not pain.

·        Focussing your attention on actions (with food and self) that increase your energy levels.

(More tips at http://www.lifeshapers.co.uk/consciouseating.aspx )

Today, the 21^st January is reported to be the day in the year when our motivation is at its lowest ebb. This is said to be because of the lack of sunshine, our worries about the debt we racked up over Christmas and the fact that our New Year resolutions are already slipping!

 So, I thought it a great time for a quick injection of self-motivation…

·        Re-visit the photos of last years vacation and lap up the memories of sunshine and happy days

·        Don’t go into hibernation mode. Raise your energy levels by getting more active each day. This is a great one for dispelling the blues

·        Make a new, New Year resolution that is focussed on happiness and not on food

·        Create an action every day that raises your happiness levels

·        Do one thing that will gain you the best support for your resolution achievement.

In fact, how about planning very small resolutions each week of this year. Make them achievable in the week and celebrate your success with others.

For most of us that make a New Year resolution to lose weight, the reality is that we will break our resolve by the end of March if not well before. Why is that? The answer is quite simple - we make the wrong resolution. Many of us also make it year after year, with the result being a feeling of failure.

Sustainable weight loss is rarely achieved by a focus on food or weight. It is achieved by the motivation for change, created through self-loving acts. These are actions that fill our lives with the people and moments that feed our soul and fill us with joy.

Self-loving actions include those of listening to our body by developing the long, lost art of ‘Conscious Eating’. These are habits, with food, used by people who have never dieted. They include the thoughtful, loving act of consuming food that fuels our body for health, happiness and energy.

Also required for these self-loving actions to be sustainable, are new sets of rules or boundaries around the way we view and use our minds as well as food. The act of taking control of our choices to focus on positive thoughts and beliefs is reflected back to us in the way our lives become happier and less stressful.

Managing our emotions without burying them with excess food is another of the self-loving acts that aid in reducing stress. By facing our feelings, acknowledging and releasing them appropriately, a self-loving process heals and dissipates the negative emotions. Then there is no need to use food as a comforter. It is replaced by the comfort of self-loving actions.

 When we love ourselves enough to demonstrate this daily, in the way we act and view our world and body, we make a paradigm shift that increases joy and reduces stress. This has a significant effect on the reduction of our comfort eating. A more effective New Year resolution, that brings sustainable weight loss, is therefore to love ourselves more than we have ever been loved before.

© Chrissie Webber 2008

Last night I watched a new BBC programme, The Extreme Pilgrim. On a journey to find spiritual enlightenment Peter Owen Jones visited a Buddhist

  Monastery in China to discover more about their philosophy. He immersed himself in the Buddhist way, in an endeavour to find inner peace and happiness – enlightenment.

Through the practice of non-attachment by keeping the mind clear of thought they work towards a life of enlightenment.

As I watched, I began to think about the importance of non-attachment to sustainable weight loss. For most of my life I have attached myself to a number of things that brought me nothing but pain and a battle with food and myself…

·        An unhealthy attachment to food – always thinking about it;

·        An attachment to destructive negative thoughts about myself and my body;

·        An attachment to beliefs that I was not good enough;

·        An attachment to comparisons of myself with others;

·        An attachment to the beliefs I had about my weight, size and looks.

It was no wonder I was so unhappy most of the time. The programme reinforced my belief that happiness and permanent weight loss for most people cannot be achieved when we are so attached to the negative.

How we see ourselves becomes our own reality.

I am not advocating us all becoming Buddhists, however I will say that regular meditation is a great way to keep stress levels at bay and so reduce comfort eating. The point I am making is that to find the happiness and peace we seek in life then maybe we need to change our attachments…

·        Attach to the joy of living, the beauty around us and the very essence of the present moment as much as possible;

·        Attach to positive thoughts, turning the negatives around and letting go of the things that you have no influence over;

·        Attach to beliefs and experiences that show you how much others believe you are definitely ‘Good Enough’ and start believing them yourself;

·        Attach to comparisons with others by highlight your own great attributes that they do not have;

·        Attach to the belief that right here and now in the moment you are a unique, special and wonderful person no matter what your weight, size or look are.

How about making 2008 a year where you attach to the things that will make you happy instead of the ones that cause you pain and a struggle with life?

If you missed the programme and are interested in seeing it then click on this link and you can watch it on BBC iPlayer. This is available for the next 7 days.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

Happy New Year!

I always feel that this is an exciting time. A new year is ahead of me with a myriad of possibilities. Christmas and its excesses are gone. And I admit to being human. I succumbed to the temptations of overeating. Not as much as in the past though, as I did three significant things…

1. I let go of the guilt and enjoyed the excesses
   
2. I refocused on my ‘Conscious Eating’ the day after Boxing Day
   
3. I did some internal and external clearing out

This final point was the most powerful one in terms of motivation. It started with a very strong desire to clear out my wardrobe. This was prompted by the fact that I had received, for Christmas, the book ‘The Body Shape Bible’ by Trinny and Susannah. That was the first of my external clear outs. The second one came with the decision that after years of dabbling with vegetarian food, I was going to take the plunge and go fully vegetarian. This lead to me clearing out my pantry.

Both these acts in themselves were extremely cathartic. Then, finally I spent a day clearing my office. This mammoth task ended with three bin bags of rubbish to be taken to the tip!

That was all well and good but I realised it was all external ‘stuff’. All very valuable but the internal ‘stuff’ would still remain unless I tackled some of that too. As I thought about it I realised there were two internal areas to tackle…

• My mindset

• My body

So I had a good look at some of my negative beliefs and thought processes. Yes, even after all this writing and personal development, there are some that remain! That was really useful in helping me focus on the positive and raise my self-motivation. It also helped me understand some of the ways I sabotage my New Year resolutions. (More of that in another Blog) Then I decided my body needed a good clear out too and a  3 day detox on a raw food diet was the answer for me.

This is something I have never done before. Already I feel full of energy and have discovered some wonderful new foods and a renewed interest in experimenting with what suits my body. If you are interested in eating raw food then try this great blog that I found from the Raw Food Coach http://www.karenknowler.typepad.com/

May 2008 be the start of a new and exciting chapter in your life with happiness and joy in the food you eat and the body you live in.