Category: Self-Care

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USING SELF-CARE FOR WEIGHT LOSS AS WE AGE…

 

We all know how difficult maintaining our weight can be, especially after menopause, and particularly during the holidays. We think, ‘Oh, I’ll watch what I eat before the holidays so I can just eat and drink whatever I want during the holidays!” But, does that ever really work? Usually not, because what happens before the holidays?…we meet up with friends and family we maybe haven’t seen since last year, go to extra parties; where, what do we do, but eat, drink and be merry! Oh, and don’t forget holiday baking. All this starts after Halloween, because now we are getting ready for Thanksgiving (those of you who are from the US), and then there are all the holidays after that. 

What can we do to STOP THE MADNESS???

Well, bare with me…But, have you ever tried using self-care to help maintain, decrease, or yes, even increase your weight? By going back to my definition of self-care meaning to spend time on yourself, to do what you want and need to do to improve your overall well-being, this would definitely make sense. 

What do we do when we are not happy with our weight? We bully and badger ourselves into a horrible place; now, feeling guilty for eating that bowl of ice cream or having that second margarita. Does that really help you feel better, bullying yourself, sabotaging your health, your weight? It doesn’t. It just pushes us back and makes you want to eat more!  We start that yo-yo dieting that we lose weight, and regain, lose weight, and regain, over and over and over again. That, ladies is not healthy for our bodies. 

Why not try a couple different new things. Like, we need to stop the fight with ourselves. We go on one diet, then another, then another. It doesn’t work because that is not what our bodies want…more pressure! Instead, try sitting with the pressure. Remember, the more we resist something, the more it persists. That is a fact! If we sit with it and just show compassion and love to that side of us, we will be able to forgive ourselves and let it go. The more you just let go of that pressure of “I can’t eat this. I can’t eat that…” or, “I can’t believe I’m such an idiot and just ate that!” “I’m such a loser!” Bullying yourself is just not going to get you anywhere. In fact, it’s going to just make you feel worse, which is going to make you want to eat more. Instead, just sit and tell yourself, “you know what, it’s okay that I messed up. The next thing I’m going to eat will be something healthy.” Or, just don’t even worry about the next thing you eat. Just forgive yourself and let go of the anger, the pressure. See what happens. 

By just sitting with those self-sabotaging thoughts and just allowing them and really feeling them and let them BE, instead of pushing them away can really make a difference. Sounds crazy, I know. But, it works. If you stop the fight and stop fighting with yourself, you can let go and release that pressure. Maybe you are eating for a reason, a deeper reason. What is or are those reasons? If you sit quietly and just meditate for even 10 minutes or so each day, you might just figure it out. Did you suffer with weight issues growing up and/or get bullied or were not allowed to eat what you wanted? Did something happen to you that you emotionally started to eat to calm yourself, to love yourself, to feel safe?  There probably are reasons. I used to be a stress eater. Anytime I got stressed, I went to my bag of Cheetos, and I usually ate the whole bag! It wasn’t until I realized the ‘WHY’ I was eating that I was able to stop. If there are deeper issues, seek professional help to find out what that is. It may change other areas in your life, also.

Here are some self-care techniques you can do also. Just remember, don’t pressure yourself. Try not making it a punishment but something great for you and your body, for your health. Make it fun.

Self-care techniques to help your eating habits: 

  1. Don’t bully and self-sabotage your eating. If you mess up, it’s ok. You are only human.
  2. Meditate, sit in quiet and ask, “Why do I have weight issues?”
  3. Use EFT/Tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique) to calm your nervous system and release old beliefs about eating.
  4. Drink eight, 8-oz glasses of water (at least) daily. When you feel hungry, try drinking a glass of water first before eating something. Many times we are dehydrated and we feel hungry, but it is our body craving water. This will fill you up for a while. 
  5. Try to substitute something healthy into your diet instead of an unhealthy food. Eat more fruits, grains and vegetables. 
  6. Cut back or delete sugar, white flour, dairy and pop completely from your diet and watch what happens….
  7. Exercise. Even if its going for a 15-minute walk a day, use stairs instead of elevators, do sit-to-stands a couple times a day (this is where you go to sit down in a chair, but just graze your bottom on the seat and stand back up. You can help using your arms to push up from the arm rests if it is difficult for you, or cross your arms over your chest if it is easy. Try 5 – 10 and increase as able.

By starting with these self-care techniques to change your eating habits, you will start to see changes in your habits and weight. However, it may be slow, and that is okay. You don’t want that quick weight loss, because it almost, if not always comes back and sometimes it does with a vengeance. Make it more about the health and not the fight. Remember, make it fun. It’s not pressure, make it self-care, showing love to yourself. You Deserve It!

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10 Benefits of Guided Meditation

First, what exactly is guided meditation? In guided meditation, you are being “guided” by someone else. You listen to them guiding you into a state of relaxation through breaking exercises or mantras or using specific mental imagery.  Whereas, meditation, is done by yourself. Just you, sitting and going into a meditative state.

There are many types of meditations out there, so finding one that really resonates with you shouldn’t be difficult. However, I am just going over guided meditation in this post. 

“It’s estimated that over 200-500 million people meditate worldwide, according to disturbmenot.com meditation. 

  • “Meditation improves anxiety levels 60% of the time.” 
  • “Meditation can reduce the wake time of people with insomnia by 50%, according to mindfulness meditation stats.”

There are many benefits of practicing meditation, either guided or unguided. The benefits are largely the same, according to guidedmeditationframework.com. However, according to The Mayo Clinic, “Meditation can give you a sense of calm, peace and balance that can benefit both your emotional wellbeing and our overall health.” It also helps you to relax and to cope and manage stress. 

Meditation allows you to help clear away all the clutter and baggage that we hold onto on a daily basis, that contributes to our stress. Meditation gives us this outlet to release all this pent-up ‘yuck!’ 

Here are some emotional and physical benefits, according to The Mayo Clinic:

  • Gaining a new perspective on stressful situations.
  • Building skills to manage your stress.
  • Increasing self-awareness.
  • Focusing on the present.
  • Reducing negative emotions.
  • Increasing imagination and creativity.
  • Increasing patience and tolerance.
  • Lowering resting heart rate. 
  • Lowering resting blood pressure.
  • Improving sleep quality.

As you can see, those are all pretty intense benefits, making meditation definitely worth your while to start. Even if you start 10 minutes a day and build up, you will notice the difference in these areas above. 

When we add meditation onto our self-care list of loving acts, we are showing ourselves self-love. All of these benefits decrease inflammation in our bodies, improving our health, improving our coping skills, allowing us to look at situations in a better light, with more unconditional love and patience. 

With that being said, the Mayo Clinic states that “some research suggests that meditation may help people manage symptoms of conditions such as:”

  • Anxiety
  • Asthma
  • Cancer
  • Chronic pain
  • Depression
  • Heart disease
  • High blood pressure
  • Irritable bowel syndrome
  • Sleep problems
  • Tension headaches

I can speak for 3 of those. I used meditation (and continue to) during my cancer journey of finding out about the diagnosis, the fears, etc., along with the insomnia and tension headaches. It improved my sleep and decreased my headaches because it allowed me to let go of much of the fear I had about my cancer. It allowed me to be calmer, more relaxed and look at the whole situation in a different light. And, it still continues to. I was able to look into my heart and see what was really at the heart of my breast cancer and work to release the old thoughts, beliefs and patterns.

I wanted to add this audio guided meditation. To be honest, it is the first one that I have done for others. So, sit back or lie down and turn off your notifications, your phone, tv, etc. and give yourself this time…YOU ARE WORTH IT!

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COPE WITH YOUR STRESS USING THESE 3 STRESS MANAGEMENT TIPS

Who isn’t stressed? At least a little? Everyone gets stressed, however, it is how you deal with stress that is the key.  We all have stress, but some stress is bad and just hangs on inside our minds and bodies in a negative way, and some stress is good, happy stress, which also can hang on in our body, but is not necessarily damaging stress.

In today’s life, we have so much more stress, negative stress. It’s how we look at it and try to make something positive out of it. It can be done. According to Ouraring.com, “The reality is that stress materializes as both emotional and physiological symptoms – your brain and body are inseparable.” When you are stressed, your body is in fight-or-flight mode and keeps running away from the lion, which causes increased heart and respiratory rate, and your stress hormones start working overtime. This is what causes illness, holding onto that fight-or-flight response and not calming it down. Ouraring.com also states you don’t want your flight-or-flight response on all the time, but you also don’t want it inactive.

3  Tips to Manage Stress:

  1. Become more self-aware. I go over this a lot in my online program, “Self-Care for Women 50+” and have an audio, “A Self-Awareness” exercise, by Dr. Frank Kinslow. It is wonderful. It teaches you how to just sit and become aware of awareness; self-awareness. Very relaxing and the more you do it, the more aware you are of being aware; being mindful of yourself and your surroundings.  Becoming self-aware helps to “reset imbalances when you sense them and may even improve your sleep.”

2. Exercise and nutrition: I’m putting these two together, because to me, they just go hand-in-hand. So, exercise, even if it’s a 10-15 minute walk once or twice a day, doing stretches once or twice daily, even 20 sit-to-stands, where you just keep sitting and standing, barely hitting your bottom on the chair, hands either crossed over your chest or out in front of you (if you have a difficult time doing this one, push up from the chair, giving you some support). As always, get your doctor’s approval before starting any exercise program. Start small and go bigger as you feel stronger. Push a little every day and you will reap it’s rewards. And, as I said, nutrition goes hand-in-hand with exercise. Eat healthy and learn. And, drink plenty of water.

3. Meditation. you can become more aware by just sitting in quiet, taking a deep belly breath in and focus on your heart. Breathe in and out from your heart, and be still. You may even get to the core of your stressors and why you react the way you do with certain ones. There are many different ways to meditate (also gone over in my Self-Care program). It’s finding which resonates with you. I love breathing from my heart. It allows me to focus on my breathing, allowing thoughts to come and go swiftly and to really feel and become aware of “me.” Then, I end up really feeling what I am feeling, allowing it, loving myself. Then, I can ask God/Universe/whatever or whoever your higher-being is, questions I want answers to. Sitting quietly, breathing slowly and focusing on breathing from my heart allows me to just release all stress and just kind of recalibrate my system, allowing you to rebalance.

So there you go. My 3 favorite tips to cope with stress. There are many ways, including participating in an activity that allows you to relax. For example, I crochet. It instantly calms me, allowing me to be creative and just focus on the present…what I am creating. Just like what I do when I meditate…clearing my mind to be able to co-create my life in a meaningful way to me.

I hope this resonates with you. Let us know.