Get out of the kitchen fast

Do you ever find yourself at the end of a good healthy meal, no longer hungry but wanting to eat something else?

Here is one idea to help you break the habit of eating more than you need.

GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN AS FAST AS YOU CAN! Go do something that entices your mind in a different, but encompassing way.

If your mind is refusing to leave, then take a small amount of what you are craving, put the rest away, make a deal with yourself that you can eat it when you get to another room and then leave the kitchen and eat it just before you get involved in something else that occupies your mind and feeds your soul.

P.S. This works best if you do as much as you can of your kitchen clean-up before you sit down to eat your meal.

Try it and let me know how it works for you, or what challenges you run into.

Survive vs. Thrive

In the work that I do with clients, we spend chunks of time identifying and re-establishing their beliefs. The entire process is beyond the bounds of this blog, but I want to tempt the palate of your mind by inviting you to pay attention to your perceptions. Perceptions offer you insight into what you believe and give you a vantage point for changing them.

Why bother you might ask?

Beliefs, and the perceptions that belie them, are what drive the thoughts, feeling and actions that ultimately determine the outcome of our lives.

Recognizing that we have choice in how we perceive empowers us into possibilities that we may not have considered before.

There are endless perspectives through which you can view yourself, others or a situation.

However, I have categorized perspectives as being ones that either help you just survive or a position that helps you thrive. Lets take a look at the difference between survive and thrive.

Survive is about endurance and perseverance under extreme circumstances. It is a good thing to have skills that allow us to survive but as a state of mind it is not an ideal way to live our daily life. It leaves us with a sense of having little or no choice.

Thrive on the other hand is about prospering, flourishing. A healthy and light body and mind depend on perspectives that thrive. In thrive we have an abundance of choice.

Consider what it is like to look through the lens of survive vs. thrive.

Viewing Thru the Lens of Survive vs. Thru the Lens of Thrive
Blame vs. Self-responsibility
Defensive vs. Receptive
Opinionated vs. Open
Arrogant vs. Humble
Fearful vs. Trusting
Resistant vs. Willing
Perfection vs. Excellence
Self-doubt vs. Confidence
Hatred vs. Forgiveness
Rigid vs. Flexible
Anxious vs. Calm

Shifting perspectives is an experiment in viewing differently.
Identify the survival perspective that you are viewing a situation through. Then try viewing it through the lens of its opposite, or another thrive perspective.
Look at it strictly as an experiment in viewing differently. What do you experience?

Get out of the kitchen fast

Do you ever find yourself at the end of a good healthy meal, no longer hungry but wanting to eat something else?

Here is one idea to help you break the habit of eating more than you need.

GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN AS FAST AS YOU CAN! Go do something that entices your mind in a different, but encompassing way.

If your mind is refusing to leave, then take a small amount of what you are craving, put the rest away, make a deal with yourself that you can eat it when you get to another room and then leave the kitchen and eat it just before you get involved in something else that occupies your mind.

P.S. This works best if you do as much as you can of your kitchen clean-up before you sit down to eat your meal.

Try it and let me know how it works for you, or what challenges you run into.

Creativity for Emotional Release

The other night, I was feeling that dull anti-climactic boredom of having completed a huge project, in this case my new website. In the past, boredom, along with avoidance, were my biggest catalysts to eating when I wasn’t hungry. But with years of practice of recognizing what is going on, I sat still long enough to figure out that I needed to get this feeling out, and I thought about what would be the best way to do that.

I pulled out a flipchart size pad of paper, my markers, a magazine that I saved for collaging purposes and a glue stick. I sat on the living room floor, armed my non-dominant hand with a marker and let it rip. This was not about artistry. It was about expression. For the next 15 minutes, I made whatever frenetic markings I felt like. I used varied markers, ripped three colourful magazine pages up into little pieces, glued, scribbled and then wrote the words that came to me in big letters BOREDOM TRANSFORMS TO CALM FRENETIC EXPRESSION. When I was finished that picture, I did another, this time with lighter colours, eventually etching out the words as they popped into my mind JOY EXPRESS, ONWARD HO, PARIS IN SPRINGTIME, I LOVE YOU TZABIA. Logical no, informative of my feelings, yes.
I felt satisfied and free of the heavy feelings I had 30 minutes earlier. I cleaned up and went to bed.

i wanted to share this with you as an example of how honouring our feelings with creative expression can inform you of what is really going on, and then leave you transformed.

CREATIVE EXPRESSION = INFORM + TRANSFORM