Tag Archives: mindfulness

10 Tips from an Anti-Diet Dietitian for Practicing Intuitive Eating at Your Holiday Meal

This time of year, the media is all about how to maintain your weight this holiday season or minimize the holiday eating “damage”. These articles or news pieces essentially give you all the diet tips you’ve heard many times before. They teach you how to spend the whole holiday meal planning to eat enough to satisfy your cravings, but not too much that you might end up gaining weight. The tips are well-meaning. After all, most people are worried about holiday weight gain and then try to go on a diet come January 1st.
But what if you didn’t need to worry about your weight? What if you could just enjoy the holiday season with family and friends? What if holiday gatherings were about all the things you’re grateful for?

What is Hunger and How Can You Honor It

When you were younger, it may have been as simple as whenever your belly rumbled, you got yourself a snack. Your body was telling you it was hungry and you fed it in response.
Now, we may not even be attuned to our body’s hunger signals. We may have desperately tried to silence these signals through dieting and deprivation. Or we may keep ourselves full at all times so we never have to experience the emptiness of hunger.
We may associate hunger with binging. That’s because when we get overly hungry, we’re ready to eat just about anything and we want all of it. We may not trust that we’re going to eat again, so we feast. This is one reason why it’s important to listen to your hunger and feed yourself before you get too ravenous.

58 Practical Ways to Treat Yourself Without Food or Spending Money After a Challenging Day

We’ve all had challenging days. Either at work, at school, or caused by a fight with someone or too much stress at home. It’s easy to think of self-care and taking care of yourself as eating treats or buying items you feel you “deserve” because your day was so difficult. This can lead you to ignore all of those stressful moments because you automatically compensate with food or purchases and don’t give yourself time to process your feelings. So here’s 58 practical ways to treat yourself without food or spending money after a challenging day.

Pay Attention

In addition to focusing on all the work we need to get done, all the chores we still need to do, and all the people we need to reach out to, why not pay attention to the little things as well?

Body Scan

Body scanning is a component of mindful meditation. During a body scan, you focus on your breath and focus your attention on each body part being scanned while visualizing the breath penetrating and relaxing the body part. Compare that to body checking, which often includes trying on various items of clothing, adjusting the way you’reContinue reading “Body Scan”