Hello!

This is Part VII of The Diet Mentality Series, (visit The CEDRIC Centre Blog for immediate access to all articles in this series).

Welcome new members of our community! You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop.

Over the past 2 months now we’ve been exploring in detail each of the key aspects of thinking and behaving that make up what we at CEDRIC call The Diet Mentality.

Last week we covered the topic of weight and how our attachment to a certain size or weight impacts us. I asked you to contemplate a brief series of questions to do your own inner exploration of this topic and from the feedback I received you learned a lot! Good on ya!

This week we are going to begin a little exploration on another of your favorite diet mentality topics: Exercise! Don’t ya just love it!!!

Continue reading “How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part VII ©” »

Hello!

This is Part VI in our Diet Mentality series (visit The CEDRIC Centre blog for immediate access to all articles in this series).

If you’re new to our community, welcome!

You’ll fit right in here if you are an emotional eater, find that you binge, restrict, or struggle with anorexia, bulimia or some other stressful way of relating to food and want to learn how to stop.

All righty! In the past few weeks we’ve covered:

1. The perils of both just arbitrarily restricting the amount of food you’re “allowed” to have regardless of your true hunger levels; and
2. Of feeling obligated to eat what is placed in front of you – whether or not you like it and whether or not it is too much.
3. We’ve also addressed the stress of labeling foods as good/bad legal/illegal and the nasty consequences of doing so.
4. And we’ve talked about what happens when we get stuck in rules about when we can eat rather than just listening to our body’s natural cues of hunger and fullness.
5. My last article discussed the biggie of engaging in all or nothing thinking regarding food and meals.

This week we’re going to explore the topic you love to hate: Your weight!

In the diet mentality perspective on life your weight is the central focus of your life.

You base decisions about what you can have, do and be on how much weight you have lost or gained.

Therefore, if you have gained a bit you feel deserving of punishment and will attempt to restrict yourself or isolate yourself.

If you have lost weight you feel more deserving of “treats” and feel more positive self-regard.

The truth is, once your self-esteem becomes attached to a number on a scale or a particular pant size you’re in big trouble. This is because now you’re attaching all your worth to one thing which makes any human obsessed about that one thing, which means we get in there and micro-manage that one thing and pretty soon we forget how to just be normal and natural and let our body do what it naturally does (eat when hungry, stop when full and be a natural healthy weight without effort).

Continue reading “How To Get Free Of The Diet Mentality Part VI ©” »

Greetings all,

This week, we are bringing you some interesting Statistics on Dieting, including how they can lead to eating disorders for our Video Blog.  Some of them are hard to believe!

Please click on the image to hear a few minutes of an excerpt from Michelle’s presentation of  ‘Sidestepping the Food Emotion Power Struggle’

For this week’s blog, we have a Podcast recorded by Michelle, in which she examines the dynamics of the Diet Mentality and Natural Eating.

Please click on the image to hear a few minutes of Michelle explaining the importance of changing your way of thinking if you have been stuck in The Diet Mentality, and to start  listening more to your body instead of what some diet is telling you to eat and when to eat it, and more during the 11 minutes.

Enjoy!

This week we instead of bringing you Michelle’s message in print, we are introducing our CEDRIC Video Blog.

Please click on the image provided to hear a few minutes of Michelle explaining the importance of the ‘Drill Sergeant’ and some steps to take to retrain your thinking and have an immediate and powerful influence on your behaviour.

I chose the ‘Drill Sergeant Dialogue’ to kick off our monthly video series because it is such an important concept to grasp.  Self-esteem is one of the very biggest areas to work on for complete recovery from your stressful relationship with food. It is the solid foundation from which the rest of our life practically falls into place.

Just recognizing the dynamic of the ‘Drill Sergeant’ dialogue is helpful and I thought this clip explained it well.  After you watch it, you may find just having a quick flashback to Michelle encouraging you to deal with your D.S in a different way will help you adjust your thinking that much faster when you are being down on yourself.

After absorbing the material at the weekend workshop myself, I practiced the process of rephrasing things to be more positive and encouraging and now when I want to quickly zap myself into coming from a positive place of love, patience, understanding with lots of great options in front of me, I just say “Be Kind.” Then I can quickly remember to adjust my thinking to override the negative thoughts.  It really does work if you practice the correct phrasing to play in your head to replace the negative stuff that is hindering you on so many levels.  After all positive breeds positive and vice versa. So do whatever you can to stay in the positive, even if it feels like just a baby step!

Have a watch of the video and then really get to know your own ‘Drill Sergeant’ so you can integrate that well-meaning but confused aspect of yourself and truly support yourself in ways that are kinder, more patient, forgiving and encouraging.

If you want to read more about the ‘Drill Sergeant’ just search that term on our blog and you’ll find lots of great articles that help you to change the way you relate to yourself. From there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to forever changing the way you related to food.

Enjoy the Video Clip!  You can see more clips at CEDRIC’s YouTube Channel

Janice