Feel that you should or shouldn’t eat specific things? Have ‘fear’ foods that you have to stay away from so you try and try and try until you ‘binge’? Feel that you have to earn a ‘treat’? This blog series is for you. It has actually become a worrying norm.
A brand new blog series to feast upon coming up – this time, one close to my heart. We are talking about our relationships with food and our relationships with our bodies and how we can achieve our goals safely and effectively without compromising the way we feel about ourselves or demonising the foods that we love. This is BIG and if we can conquer this one, we are onto a winner.
Day after day after day when I have coaching and consultation calls with lovely ladies, I hear negative or derogatory comments about their own bodies while also displaying mindsets around food which are actually often pretty disordered and certainly extremely damaging both in the short and longer term.
How you feel about yourself and in turn, how you approach your health and fitness is literally a deal breaker as to whether you achieve your health, fitness and wellbeing goals or not. With my coaching, I see the greatest success with women open to transforming themselves into feeling good about who they are first and then working on the rest. With a positive mindset and feeling okay with what your body looks like and can do right now we can make mega moves with your health, aesthetic goals and overall well-being.
It goes without saying that these issues, of course, affect men too, however I see women day in and day out affected by what could be considered disordered nutrition and exercise habits, or at least a mindset around nutrition and exercise that is less than desirable.
Ladies I have been there, not only have I been there, but I have been there to an extreme with a diagnosed eating disorder myself and know the extent to which a less than optimal relationship with food can affect your life and the way that you feel from day to day. There is nothing more controlling for your mind than a preoccupation with food. I want to take that away from you over the coming days so that you can go through every day looking forward to nourishing your body without overthinking it, exercise in a way that makes you feel great and have a fabulous social life full of all of the things that you love, in moderation, coming out of those times feeling great, not compensating with exercise and enjoying the occasion for what it is and the people that you love, rather than focussing on food and drink.
If you have a preoccupation with controlling your weight, serial dieting, restricting what you eat unless you have ‘earned’ that food with compensatory behaviour or have any sort of anxiety around food or body image because of the cultural messaging that we have received over time, then I want to help you. I know the physical and mental consequences that these feelings have if left to do their thing and it’s seriously damaging BUT all is not lost.
I’m not asking you to love yourself, that might seem like too far away just now and a disclaimer – I don’t think I could be described as a person that ‘loves myself’ just yet, I’m working on it, but if we can work together while you learn to accept glorious you, THEN we can work on healthy habits, both physically and mentally that will see you achieve whatever aesthetic and health goals you have in tandem. I promise, over the coming blog posts, we are going to drastically increase your quality of life and ensure you are physically healthy!
I will not help you ladies set or achieve goals that aren’t in support of your physical or mental health – one of the reasons that if someone comes to see me for a crash diet, quick results, a restrictive meal plan for aesthetic reasons or something of the like, I will politely decline their business, chat about a healthy mindset and perhaps, if appropriate, signpost them to someone knowledgeable that might help them to achieve what they set out to in a positive way. I simply can’t condone what they are after because I know how damaging it can be.
I want to begin by telling you that you are NOT a ‘bad’ person for eating something that you enjoy, and therefore crave. You are ‘good’ enough with your food choices. You do not need to be stricter or have ‘more willpower’. All we need to do is give you permission, together, to eat anything that you would like, and this is where I come in – I can teach you how to do that with moderation. We will break this cycle together and I’m excited for you to find a new lease of life with your nutrition and exercise habits. We both know that restricting so hard until you no longer can, leading to eating the entire packet of biscuits rather than just a couple, leaves you feeling dreadful. ‘Will power’ is a finite resource and will run out eventually and as a result cannot be relied upon. Longer term, this is far more detrimental to your goals than having biscuits every day. Trust me, I see it every day in practice.
So, we’ll get this one out of the way early, you will almost NEVER hear me attach morality to food – good and bad foods do not exist, there are more and less optimal nutrition choices for specific goals but that certainly doesn’t mean that specific foods are good or bad in isolation. In fact, there might come a time where a giant slice of cake is a great food choice for our health – eating cake does NOT make you ‘bad’ so let’s do away with that choice of language right now. Personally, I even struggle with the notion of a ‘treat’ because, again, it attaches an element of morality to our nutrition.
I would like to arm you with the tactics to recognise that if you enjoy the things that you love, within moderation, then nothing ‘bad’ is going to happen to you, your body or your health. I want you to feel happy and confident within your own body. I want you to see and feel the very best of yourself. Strap in ladies, I’m excited. This is HUGE.
Peace and love for now, A x