When you turn to food and dieting to change the way you feel, your body can stop trusting that you’re giving it what it needs.
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Releasing Toxic Emotional Weight Why It’s Not Always About Food This week I reached out to a trusted friend and colleague for assistance in reaching a specific issue around my changing weight, that I couldn’t on my own. A few years ago after an emotional rollercoaster with key family members (still not resolved on their behalf), my body began to shift into protective mode (i.e. stress and survival) and my weight started to slowly increase, regardless of my eating and movement not changing – improving actually! Excess weight is often about ‘protection‘. When I became aware of what was happening, I
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Why You are Not Your Eating Disorder ** POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING ** When a new client comes to me with an eating disorder, I always request that they change their language and stop referring to ‘their’ eating disorder as ‘mine’. It becomes ‘the‘ eating disorder, and ‘that‘ mean voice. I love working with Eating Disorders. I know not many in the health and medical professions feel the same. In fact, I’ve had several look me in the eye and state how much they “hate working with eating disorders”. They quickly move them on. Perhaps because they don’t refer to their
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How Memories Can Affect Your Digestion Is stress impacting your digestion? Find out how eating either in a stressed or relaxed state affects your ability to digest your food properly in this brief introduction that will make total sense in illuminating your eating behaviours! In this powerful 6 minute video, I share a brief explanation of why we get stressed and relive past emotions when eating. It’s got a lot to do with our nervous system, how our brain processes information, and the individual meaning we attach to past experiences. These short 6 minutes could change your life! (I hope so) Viki Thondley
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Your Body is Listening to Every Thought You Think One of my favourite pieces of wisdom is: What we think, we create. Literally. Because of my therapeutic holistic approach I spend a lot of time educating my students and clients about epigenetics, neuroscience and neurobiology. We have over 50 trillion cells within our bodies, each one listening intently to the reaction and response of our thinking, as a consequence of our perception. Every cell absorbs this perception – positive or negative, safe or stressful – and will either shrink or expand as a consequence of our thoughts and feelings, whereby creating an internal
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How Dieting Works Against Your Body and What You Can Do to Work With it Have you been doing EVERYTHING “right” but your body doesn’t seem like it’s doing what you want? Don’t lose faith in it, learn to trust it again so your body can learn to trust YOU again! It’s an interesting concept that most people don’t even consider – that your body might lose trust with you after all your efforts to make it weigh less and feel healthier. The thing is most of these efforts are done without consulting the body. Instead of turning inward, asking
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The Cost of Staying Stuck If you’ve ever tried to reach out for help but at the last minute retreated back into the safety and comfort of what you know – even though it might be painful or uncomfortable – have you ever thought about how much it costs you to stay there? The nature of human behaviour is that we want change, but often are unwilling to do the changing! When I receive an enquiry from someone, they usually send it at a time when they can’t take it anymore. When the pain is too intense, when the discomfort
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PODCAST: Abuse and Body Image Emerge from Past Pain & Reclaim Your Life There are many different types of abuse. It can come from the self or it can come from others but all forms of abuse are painful. What happens when the abuse from another turns into excessive abuse towards yourself in the form of punishing, destructive and sabotaging exercise and eating behaviours? In this brand new podcast video I invited Elena Terziyska from EAT Nutrition to talk – for the first time in public – about her experience of remembering her childhood sexual abuse and how that fuelled her body
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DIETING DANGER – Food Can’t Fix Feelings Have you ever been on a diet? If you’re here at MindBodyFood, you most probably have! In fact, there’s bound to be many of you who have never got OFF the diet wagon because you’re still struggling to feel comfortable in your body (instead of ashamed). Have you recently committed yourself to a ‘new’ diet for the New Year? We so often fall into the trap of believing that if we can control our food and change the way we look, we just might be able to control how we feel. NEWS FLASH –
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Instead of Dieting, Bingeing or Restricting this Christmas Try a New Approach… It’s that time of year again when many of us freak out at the abundant supply of festive food that is often on our “forbidden/bad/diet says no” list. Because I have no intention of losing my mind dieting for the next two weeks just so I can let loose on Christmas Day, my lead up is mostly calm, relaxed and peaceful. (I say mostly because I can’t control everything.. and it relieves a lot of unnecessary pressure when you realise that.) Your Christmas can be calm, relaxed and peaceful
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Break FREE of Fearing Food Going out to eat used to always be an anxiety-inducing routine of worrying what I’d wear to hide my body, who would be there scrutinising my body, and what food was on the menu that would put fat on my body. I’d study the menu prior to arriving so it would reduce the panic time in front of my friends, delaying everyone’s orders. The extra eyes on me only fuelled my anxiety and generally resulted in me ordering something I didn’t really want so that I’d spend the entire time waiting for the dish, worrying about if I made
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Bloating, Pain, Hospitals and Parasites Become Your Own Best Health Advocate If you follow me on my Facebook page you’ll know that last Wednesday I was woken in the early hours with EXCRUCIATING lower right, abdominal pain followed by vomiting bile. I was taken to hospital and drugged up on morphine, asked to pee in a jar, fill up with fluid for a couple of ultrasounds, then drink a litre of dye and be injected with contrast for a CT scan. The suspects – kidneys, ovaries and appendix – were all clear, but not before they offered to call a surgeon to cut me
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MINDBODYFOOD PODCAST Do you struggle with self-sabotaging beliefs? Do you get so far on your health and wellness journey, start to see positive changes, feel like you’re actually making progress and starting to feel more energy, more positivity and even a glimpse of self-love… And then all of a sudden….. something happens that triggers your subconscious mind and you come to a screaming holt, reverting back to old habits of thinking, feeling and behaving?! Maybe you find yourself focusing back on your food: restricting again, cutting foods out.. At the end of the day you might find yourself hungry, but
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How to Let Go of Food Rules How many times a day do you tell yourself, “I can’t have that”? And what happens when you tell yourself you can’t have something?….. It’s like talking to a child: you either focus on it and want it more, question and barter with yourself until you’re worn out and give in, or just eat it in an act of defiance anyway. If dieting has become a way of life for you then it’s highly probable all those guidelines and restrictions have left some lingering do’s and don’ts that are tangled up in your negative self-talk and
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Do You Love Yourself? FREE Self-Love Reminders Printable PDF below! I used to loathe myself. Love was a word that didn’t compute. I could never truly accept love because I didn’t know how to feel it for myself. As babies we are born happy, loveable and wanting to love. But what happens when we experience feelings of neglect, criticism or abandonment in our childhood…. that we feel the hurt so strongly and intensely as children we appoint ourselves to blame and internalise our pain? As we grow, a part of us begins to believe we are unworthy of love…. That inner child who felt unsafe and
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