For this week’s article I’m happy to respond to a question from a telephone client on the Eastern Seaboard. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s relevant to anyone at any stage of the journey to complete freedom from food and body image stress, whether you have an eating disorder or just feel that food focus takes up more time and energy than you’d like.

Question:

“One minute after our talk, which I found extremely insightful as I always do, I walked out of office and into my cubicle to have my lunch.  I had ordered egg salad on a wrap and fruit.  I was ready to eat until full and, if I wanted, to finish rest later if I got hungry.  I’ve really been working hard on trying to listen to my body cues.

(more…)

You can’t expect yourself to do something perfectly the first time around. In fact, you won’t be perfect (i.e. never make mistakes) right out of the gate (or ever for that matter). If you expect that or believe that there are others who are able to do that, you will sabotage yourself and you will never move forward. If you carry the belief that you have to be perfect and that if you can’t be perfect and guarantee that you’ll not make a mistake you’re not even going to bother trying something, not only are you going to experience a very stifled and rigid existence but you’ll probably feel anxious and on the verge of a breakdown most of the time. That kind of thinking is supreme all-or-nothing thinking and it is what is keeping you stuck in all areas of your life, guaranteed.

If you use food to cope, you likely had a primary caregiver or mentor in your life who did not allow mistakes, someone who shamed, blamed, criticized or judged you for not doing something perfectly – or rather the way they thought it should be done.

(more…)

A snippet from the Food is Not the Problem web-based program.

This week I thought I’d share with you one of the weekly discussions/exercises from my new Web-Based Program. This discussion is on the topic of Natural Eating. I’ve attached a copy of the Natural Eating handout as well and encourage you to make use of it!

If this article resonates with you and you’d like to experience a life free from your stressful relationship with food, I hope you’ll consider joining our web program, attending a workshop or taking part in some one-on-one counselling. You don’t have to continue to feel stuck and ruled by food one more day.
(more…)

Hello CEDRIC Community Members.  In this article we are continuing with our goal exploration and creating small, doable steps to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

If you’re just joining us as a community member and want to take part in this series about self-care and forward momentum, I recommend you follow the link to the first article in this series and build from there. You’ll get much more out of the process and it will transform your current use of food to cope.  We have two more weeks (after today) of the self-care series and then we’re on to other key bits and pieces of the recovery and freedom process.  Eating when you’re not hungry, eating more than you’re hungry for, not allowing yourself to eat enough, and purging are all harmful ways of coping with the world and the stress it currently presents to you.  They are learned patterns of behaviour. They are not who you are. They are behaviours, and behaviours can be changed.

(more…)

If you haven’t yet read the previous installments in our Self-Care Journey, please vist them here:
The First Step to Self-Care
Self-Care Part 2
Self-Care Part 3: Sustainable Change Begins!

Okey dokey!  We’ve done all the prep work. We’re ready to dig in and start identifying the steps we’re going to take to achieve our goals. For those of you just tuning in, and those of you who may need a reminder, we have, for the past 3 weeks now, been on a mission. A mission to identify the goals you have in each of the key areas of your life; to identify the values and principles that you believe in and currently embody or that you’d like to embody in your day to day life; and to make sure that the goals that we identify are actually ours and not what others think we should do so that we can have the sense of purpose, motivation and excitement that we deserve to have when achieving our dreams.

This week we’re going to begin to identify some small steps we can take to get you from “here” to “there.”

I’m just going to pick a few goals out of the air and show you how to break them down into doable steps for some of the key areas someone might have.  If you’d like help to sort yours out or with the recovery process in general, let me know and we’ll arrange a session.

(more…)

Hello CEDRIC community members. I want to send you off on your long weekend experience, whatever that may be, with a quick thought to help ground and center you and to guide you in making decisions around food this weekend and beyond. At the very least it will illuminate some of your current barriers to having a peaceful relationship with food.

Whenever you are faced with a choice to eat ask yourself the following two questions:

1. Am I physically hungry?
2. Is what I’m about to eat going to support me to feel psychologically, emotionally and physically well after I eat this and tomorrow morning? If not, what will?

Give this a whirl, see what happens. Let me know.

Love Michelle

Whether you prefer one-on-one counselling (in-person, by phone, or email), our intensive and transformative workshops, or the  self-help approach, take action today to have a stress-free relationship with food. Sign up for our free newsletter today! Newsletter subscribers receive exclusive product discounts and are first in line to get on all the latest new at CEDRIC!

Many people hear the term Natural Eating and immediately assume it’s about eating whole grains and non-processed foods or has something to do with organics or locally grown produce, etc. Well, those are all great ideas and your body will love you for eating as unprocessed as possible, but….that’s not what we mean when we say “natural eating.”

Natural Eating, also more recently dubbed “Intuitive Eating,” refers to the simple process of eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. As a natural eater you are conscious of your body’s signals of hunger, fullness, lightness, energy, or bloating, lethargy, fatigue and heaviness. These are your cues about what your body likes and needs vs. what it doesn’t. In a natural eating approach, you honor those cues and are drawn to choose foods that allow you to feel light, full, and energized after eating rather than heavy, bloated, and pooped out.
(more…)

Those of you who have worked with the CEDRIC Core Beliefs booklet are probably familiar with these stages, but seeing as how June is ‘Natural Eating’ month, we thought that you might enjoy a quick reminder to help you grab the nutshell of where you are in your process, right in this moment, taken from our Natural Eating booklet. (more…)

The thing about having an issue with weight is that it translates to an issue with food. This relationship is something that is mismanaged and misunderstood by the best of them, but when you are dealing with personal challenges, the relationship gets even more murky.

There are so many opinions in the western world for the person who is having self esteem issues around the fact that they are considered overweight or are gaining weight.

There just as many options as there are opinions for the person who is dealing with this and they come from all sides as our culture invests a fortune in keeping the superficial issue of body image in the forefront of the collective consciousness.

We have people on tv, in white coats, claiming to be specialists. They give us the gears for being hefty by informing the population that we are ‘less than’ if we don’t buy their plan for salvation, hook, line and sinker. We hear about Food for nurturing and Food for self numbing as an opiate. Martha Stewart tells us that we need to be making the meals pleasing to the eye, Rachel Ray says we should be making four course meals in half an hour to measure up. Even Oprah, who is a cultural icon in today’s world, has her own kitchen staff that includes a world class chef so she has NO idea what she’s eating as she’s passed that on to her dietitian and yet her weight STILL has more ups and downs than a staircase.

How can a little person from small town wherever, with shoelaces for a budget, compete? How can we get away from the constant berating that we are living with a ‘problem’ and if we aren’t constantly doing something about our ‘problem’, we may as well move to the Tennessee Ozarks into a decrepit trailer park right now. Its bad enough that the reality is our bodies need food for fuel and three times a day or more, we better gas up or we won’t have to worry about it, we’d be dead! How does one address mealtime without confusion when messages are coming at us from everywhere with an opinion of how to think? (more…)

I read an article in a local mag recently that was touting the use of food journals as being key to success in losing weight. I am incensed by publishers that give writers free range to put out this kind of information when it is nowhere near the approach for weight loss. This kind of general advice seems harmless enough and I can understand how it could be perceived as being helpful but I take it personally when people suggest that my issues can be solved so easily.

If all it took was to write down everything that I eat, recording caloric intake as well as nutritional content, I would have done it a long time ago. Unfortunately, the things that make us rely on food for comfort or problem solving run deeper and more complex than that and in my case, focusing three times a day on my mealtimes with a critical analysis of each one’s contents would just trigger me with food cues MORE!

Not only that, but who has time to plan, prepare, eat a meal, and then record the entire meal. Food journals are purported to make for more personal accountability. The article criticizes and diminishes the overweight by referring to them as underestimating their intake, and panderers of their indulgences. What scientists who advocate food journals don’t take into consideration are all the social, personal and emotional issues that the person with a food disorder is up against. Taking a person who should be gentle with themselves, who should feel redeemed and appreciated and instead, making them feel less than, in light of all their former failures at weight loss, is hardly a solution that stands a chance of being any use at all. (more…)