Adventures In Feeding My Fam: SIMPLE Meal Prep, Non Diet Weight Loss, Family Table and Healthy Hacks for the Entire Family

You've set the intention to improve your eating habits.  Weather that's to lose weight, feel better, have more energy. Whatever the reason you've decided to dedicate yourself to this effort.  Great!  But often what comes with that is overwhelming focus on food.  It's like it can take over your thoughts and even become stressful.  Today lets talk about how this over obsessing about food is unhelpful and I'll give you some tips on how to handle this.

Is thinner always better? This question came up in a conversation with my 15 year old daughter recently.  And without hesitating, she answered yes.  I pressed her a little, and she wavered and changed her answer but deep in her core, her immediate response was the same as probably all of us listening-that yes, being thinner is always more desirable. That idea comes from a lifetime of conditioning.  Let's talk about this more today!

Imagine if your predominant thought was:"I'm not good enough.""I'm doing it wrong. I am wrong. Something about my life is wrong.""I'll never be as ___ as her. I'm unlovable.""I'm undesirable.""I need to change."If this is your mind chatter, what type of decisions do you think you will make?Most likely, you'll emotionally eat, snack on comfort foods, and quite possibly overeat.  And if this is consistently the action you take, obviously it will make weight loss and maintaining weight loss very difficult.  Though you can never completely get rid of these thoughts, by figuring out how to deal with them, you can stop turning to food to quiet your inner critic.

Women I talk to often say things like: I just need to have more willpower.  Or I don't know why I don't have the willpower or motivation to lose weight.As women we've been lead to believe that willpower is the key to achieving their weight loss goals, but it doesn't work, leads to frustration, guilt and shame when we fail again.  You want lasting habits so simply focusing on willing yourself to a goal only results in short term results.  If you want to make lasting changes that resulting in long term sustained weight loss, you need more than just to buckle down with a burst of willpower. So what is willpower? Willpower is control exerted to do something or restrain impulses.  It's really about making yourself do something that you don't truly want to do.It requires you to use a lot of energy because you are forcing your way into a goal that you may not really want.  And this can leave you exhausted.

It's that time of year!  When we start gearing up for resolutions and we plan for weight loss, eating, and exercise plans.  I'm all for a fresh start and improving ourselves and health but most of us go about it in a very diet culture centric way.  In fact, the term resolution actually means:A firm decision to do or not to do something.And making a resolution means the act of resolving or determining upon an action, course of action, method, procedure, etc. a resolve; a decision or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something.  Which in itself feels like very black or white thinkingDo something or don'tDiet vs. don't dietGood food or bad foodAnd that is not what the anti-diet approach to weight loss is about.  New Year's resolutions often leave us feeling down, discouraged and frustrated.Instead I suggest your resolution be this: NO RESOLUTIONBecause it is not a winning weight loss strategy.

It's that time of year!  When we start gearing up for resolutions and we plan for weight loss, eating, and exercise plans.  I'm all for a fresh start and improving ourselves and our health but most of us go about it in a very diet culture-centric way.  Whatever you're approach, there's room to incorporate these ten tips that I think are important no matter what approach you commit to in the new year, or really any time.

Ever look at a food label and feel overwhelmed by the information available?  What really should you be paying attention to on that label and how should you be interpreting the info?  Are some of the claims manufacturers state actually valid and accurate?  Sometimes those claims that manufacturers make can feel really diety and like they're promoting diet culture.  I like to use labels in a very careful intentional way so that we don't go down the rabbit hole of dieting, good foods/bad foods, and that's what I'd like to share today.

Many of us have done it—you see a link that claims someone has discovered the "5 things you should never eat" or "the one thing that will make you healthier" and you take a peak. Today, there is nutrition advice about what we should and shouldn't be eating pretty much everywhere on the internet.There are a lot of dangers that come with taking nutrition advice from the internet.  Today let's sort through this and talk about the best place to get your nutrition information

What if I told you one simple practice has the power to transform your relationship with food?  Yep, a few seconds a day of a very simple behavior can completely reform, transform, rebuild your relationship with food.  Listen on to hear more

As a child were you told to Clean your plate?Were you encouraged to Eat your veggies first?Were you told If you eat your dinner you can have dessert?These are all very well-intended statements from parents and caregivers, that I've been guilty of saying myself, in this episode let's discuss the implications of these types of statements and how we can undo the programming they create

Is weight loss always a good thing?  I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that most people think weight loss is good in all situations.  But there's really more to it than that.  Let me tell you a personal story and share why the answer is not so clear cut, but why we typically think all weight loss is good.

Have you ever felt or said the words ‘I'm bad' after eating a cookie or a favorite food.  I hear it all the time from clients and want to offer you a reframe of this since it is a very disempowering way of thinking about food. If you want to transform your relationship with food and your experience with food you must shift the way you look at it. Many of us have developed a disempowering relationship with food.This is for many reasons, which I will lump under the umbrella of diet cultureListen to the full episode to hear how to break this down and improve your relationship with food.

A friend of mine reached out to me this week and requested I talk about cleanses.  She was interested in hearing my take and thought others would be too.  So this episode is dedicated to the topic of to cleanse or not to cleanse.

How many times have you tried to change a habit and form a new one.  If you're like most of us, probably more times than you can count.  What if I told you there are really good strategies to help solidify that new habit and break down the process into a very logical stepwise thing instead of a mound of frustration and failure?  

As a registered dietitian, I get asked about carbs way more regularly than you can imagine.  They are definitely the most maligned macronutrient of the most recent years. In fact, there are entire communities on social media that insist that not only are humans not meant to eat carbohydrates, but every day you continue to include them in your diet is a day you are killing yourself and dragging your body closer and closer to diabetes, obesity and heart disease.You can probably guess a dietitian's opinion on that, but before we get into why you should absolutely be eating carbs, I want to tell you the main reasons people are afraid of carbs in the first place, and why they are necessary for a healthy diet.

If you're like me I've historically had parts of my body that I don't like.  And I've never met a woman who at some point hasn't criticized their body for one reason or another.  Does this mean we have a poor body image?  And how can we shift our thinking to improve our body image?

I was at a function recently and talking to a woman I know and her son who is in his late 20's.  There was a buffet of beautiful food salads, hot foods, etc.  I wrapped up our conversation and said I was going to get a cookie.  And both of them looked at me aghast, as if they couldn't believe I would eat a cookie.  And I realized they thought because I'm a dietitian I would have really strict eating habits and follow rules about what I can and can't eat.  Most likely, because they have strict rules about what they can eat.  I want to talk about this more today and get into some really nitty gritty actionable steps on how you can eliminate food rules.

Ever felt like you HAD to exercise to make up for something you ate?  Or decided to do a punishing workout because you wanted to eat your favorite treat later that day?  So many of us do this.  It's a very common practice and very understandable given the messages we hear from others. But what if I told you that it's not having the desired effect AND it's actually doing more harm than good?  That's what we're discussing on this episode.

I've had a lot of life transitions lately.  My youngest child started high school, my middle child is abroad on a gap year program.  And I'll be transitioning into a new part-time dream work role in a few weeks.  All of this has left me tearful, partially because I miss my two older kids now that they're out of the house, but it's gotten me thinking about how my role as a woman and mother is changing.  And really, we're always evolving, changing, and reinventing ourselves.  It can feel helpless unless we take things more intentionally and approach it as a choice and decide how we want to reinvent ourselves.  That's what I help women do with their relationships with food.  In fact, the process I've developed is called the Reinvention Formula.  This formula helps professional moms go from out of control emotional eater to a calm, confident eater so you can stop obsessing about food and enjoy life in just 15 minutes per day.  It's really the process I use with women individually or in a group setting.  The next round will begin September 14.  

Intuitive eating is an eating style that includes several key principles.  But are these principles consistent with the anti diet approach?  Does it work?  And how does one get started?Those are the questions answered in today's podcast episode. 

A lot of professional moms I talk to want fast, fast results, specifically fast weight loss.  I know you've heard of programs that promise to lose 10 pounds in 1 month-there are a ton of those out there.I'm sure many if not all of us have tried one of these programs or many in factAnd there are so many plans promising quick results, but the question that comes to mind is: if these plans really worked, then why are there thousands of options out there?  Right?  If something was going to work, then there'd only be one option/one diet plan out there.We hear all the time we should focus on long-term sustainable efforts, and that's trueBut the brain wants results NOW-it's how it's programmed so that delayed gratification just doesn't seem appealingIs it reasonable to expect fast results.Instead I encourage you to focus on the journey not the destinationI know you THINK that the destination is what you really want but if you shift your focus to enjoy the journey and who you're becoming that's when my clients have the biggest transformations

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she was asking me all sorts of questions about the phrase Food Freedom that I use frequently.  She said she thinks she understands what it means, but she can't even fathom how she could ever get to that point of feeling food freedom.  And because it felt like such an unrealistic possibility for her, she couldn't imagine her life with it and the impact it could have on her life.  So that's what we will discuss today.

This topic has been on my mind for a while, but I've dragged my feet on recording this episode because it is heavy and close to my heart.  So talking about it makes me feel a little vulnerable.Surprisingly, 4 college students reached out to me this summer, kids of people I know, Surprising because I don't usually work with this age group, but the mom's thought my messaging was appropriate for their childWhat they all had in common was poor body image and to varying degrees disordered eatingI helped each in different ways, as I thought was appropriate, one I referred to an eating disorders facilityThis really broke my heart, because they are all tremendous young women, thriving on the outside, being traditionally successful at school, socially, etcBut on the inside they're hurting, their self-images and self-esteem is not idealAnd their perception of food is very skewedThey have so many questions about good foods/bad foods, feel guilt about what they eat, confusion about foodAnd it's primarily because these wonderful beautiful young women are bombarded with images, on their social media feeds, pictures from peers, and celebrities or others touting-cures for bloating, or weight loss on social media.This is why it is more important than ever as women, as mothers to get a handle on our own relationships with food so we can role model a fantastic relationship with food.I provide some specific guidelines to get you started in this episode.

I had a really nice interaction with someone this week on IG.  She made a comment about how my tips were really helpful that I posted and we got a little more detailed about her experience with emotional eating and how that typically spirals.  We talked about identifying the emotion and how that initial awareness has been a really helpful tool for her.  Based on that conversation, I wanted to provide some additional conversation and guidance on how to discern physical hunger and emotional hunger.  Physical Hunger:Comes on graduallyFelt in stomachAny food can satisfy itEmotional Hunger:Comes on suddenlyTriggered by an eventFelt in headOnly specific foods can satisfy itStrategies to manage emotional hunger:Take a deep breathAsk yourself if you're hungry.  What emotion is causing the hunger?  Label the emotionMake a decision.  Will you eat the craved food or not?

It's pretty common for people to cruise along and think they're eating really well, then something happens and they revert to old habits or a favorite snack or treat.  They often feel like a failure or that they've messed all their efforts up.When we let go of all or nothing beliefs around food, we really gain food freedom, and more joy in life.  Here's what 'perfect' eating looks like to me:1.      Eating all foods, accepting that all foods fit into a healthy diet, not restricting food groups or foods because you think they're bad, but enjoying all foods in moderation2.      Eating a balance of foods from all the food groups3.      Eating a variety of foods from each food group4.      Not feeling guilty or shame about what we eat5.      Not stressing about food choices, especially when we're at functions or gatheringsListen to the full episode for more details!