How to Enjoy Food this Holiday Season

I’m pretty sure I say this every year, and here it goes again: I can’t believe the holidays are upon us. Though they may look a bit different this year with the extra precautions we’re all having to take, one thing remains...food will still be at the forefront.

Especially next week at Thanksgiving—the heightened emphasis on that decadent meal with butter dripping from every possible opportunity leaves so many people feeling anxious due to complicated relationships with food and body image. I know this struggle all too well as someone who suffered a deadly eating disorder in high school. I’ve worked hard to maintain a healthy relationship with food bolstered by a more gentle and balanced approach. Though I feel a million times better today and don’t struggle in the way I used to, I have a very special place in my heart for those who suffer from this ongoing battle with themselves and food.

In fact, most women struggle at some point in their lives with a disordered relationship with food. An estimated 30 million people, men and women alike, suffer from actual eating disorders through the course of their lifetime. Ya’ll, that’s wild. And incredibly sad.

Whereas I highly encourage you to seek professional treatment both with a therapist and physician if you are struggling, I wanted to share with you a few ideas on how to approach the next month and a half with more grace and enjoyment.

Mindful eating

I’m a big believer that it’s not the actual food that creates the problems, it’s our relationship with food. So many of us, myself included, use food as a medicator, to numb and relieve temporary emotional pain. That, or we use it to celebrate good news or important events. So often, this is an unconscious process—one we don’t even realize is happening. It’s automatic, habitual, and ingrained. 

Simply becoming more aware of what you are eating, when you are eating, and why you are eating is incredibly supportive in a more mindful relationship with food. I like to call this mindful eating. It doesn’t mean deprivation either! It simply means slowing down enough to eat with intention and awareness. It’s proven that as we slow down our actual eating time, we can connect to our bodies more, identifying when we are initially full.

Exercise

As many of us will be more homebound this holiday season, we can perhaps focus on maintaining a solid exercise program whether it’s a brisk morning walk or streaming a yoga class. Even 10 minutes a day can make a difference. Let’s face it, we will be indulging a bit more in the coming weeks. This is the perfect opportunity to balance it out with mindful movement. As emotions also run high, physical exercise is an incredible natural anti-depressant and anti-anxiety. Give yourself the gift of intentional exercise these upcoming weeks—it's always a good idea!

Health-ish

You’ve heard about the 80/20 rule, eating healthy 80% of the time and indulging 20% of the time. I try to follow this as closely as possible. However, as I mentioned earlier, the holidays are a time for celebration and merry-making. So you may need to extend a bit of leeway in the direction of a 70/30 rule. Eating healthy 70% and indulging more like 30%. The goal is to eradicate shame when we eat a bit more than we’d like or even gain a few pounds. No one ever improved their relationship with food from a baseline of shame. And that’s what we’re going for: practicing a better relationship with food rather than putting unnecessary pressure on a strict diet.

My favorite thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s not just about food—it’s about gratitude. Enjoying food from a place of gratitude and abundance rather than fear and scarcity is the goal. 

I’m so grateful for you, and that we are on this beautiful journey together.

Restoration Hardware: Thoughts on Healing from a Sleepy Mom

How do you recover from painful experiences or seasons of struggle?  Do you get lost in the hustle of “doing?” Do you get anxious and overwhelmed by the narrow path forward? Do you ever feel like the setback you now face will wreak havoc on the long game of your life and you’ll never be able to make up for lost time? 

I do.  One hundred percent.

Writing and exercise have been the two most important tools in my tool belt throughout my journey of recovery.  They’ve been my pocket of hope and sanity to snugly retreat to when life feels out of control. 

Today, at exactly five weeks postpartum, they seem like a far off luxury.  My whole world turned upside down in the most delightful way with the birth of my son, and yet, I’m not sure who feels more like the infant, he or I.  My existence has been boiled down to the primal steps, breaths, and sleeps of a new creature in a distant land. My identity—undoubtedly shifted from therapist-writer-coach to Executive Milk Factory Manager. 

I am cranking out words on my laptop for the first time in over a month while the house is somewhat quiet—during his piecemealed nap—hoping they make a teaspoon of sense. 

All of my go-to coping strategies and self-care rituals have temporarily vacated the building, just like the 12 pacifiers I seemed to misplace in the last week. 

In fact, alone time is more valuable than a clever blog post, so we’ll keep this short. 

In my lucid, highly-caffeinated moments, I’m struck with two opposing words: restoration & disease.  

Call me dense, but I’ve never stopped to entertain the roots of those words.  “Rest” for restoration and “dis-ease” for disease.  

In order to experience true restoration, we must soften into rest. I’m not talking about lying down for 15 minutes checking emails and making to-do lists for the afternoon.  I’m talking the deep, agenda-less, squishy kind.  For all you type A personality people out there, this might sound like a living hell. I get it.

Yet, if we swing over to this opposing word: “disease,” we find a rather scary predicament.  The lack of ease and rest in our bodies will actually create sickness if we don’t open windows of rest for our weary bones. 

I’ve been guilty of striving my way through self-care and recovery.  The temporary high of this activating energy feels good but doesn’t do the deep work that only true rest creates long term. 

I’m learning to let go of the normal demands I put on myself in these young days of motherhood: the cleaning, planning, working, creating, and doing (even good doing) are on the back burner.  The holy spaces of rest and odd stretches of sleep—my healing balm during this transition time—are everything.  

In the long run, learning how to rest well, moment to moment, combats disease in our lives, both physically and emotionally. 

Perhaps the first step is to reframe how we think of rest. It’s not lazy, a waste of time, or selfish. It's at the heart of wholehearted living. It's what allows us to approach each day from a place of worthiness.

Food for thought: what does deep, healing rest look like for you right now? 

(Spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be napping!  Although it’s 9am and I’m already jonesing for one.)

Alright, my short window of productivity is over…I hear a tiny human crying in the next room.

Until next week, rest well my Dear Friend…

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

Four Crucial Questions for A Beautiful New Year

One of my favorite pockets of time throughout the entire year is upon us; the week between Christmas and New Years.  I try my damnedest to carve out some “deep work” time as I call it, in order to clear the space, reconnect to presence after all the going and indulging, and map out a vision for the coming new year.  My inner dreamer gets to dance around boldly and color outside the lines a bit.  If I’m lucky, I try to take a whole morning or afternoon to do so.

Today, as you let the turkey and toffee settle, perhaps still surrounded by family in from out of town or friends who stopped by to say hello, I want to leave you with some food for thought as we head into these final days of 2017.

I’m struck by the power of habit or ritual as a pre-emptive tool to greet each new day with, as opposed to drastic measures and knee-jerk reactions.  Over time, good habits create this soft light in our lives that accentuate our potential and undergirds our desires with balance as opposed to extremes. 

I know, it’s so tempting to let it all hang out the last several weeks of the year only to justify it January 1 with a brazen New Year’s Resolution that, in my experience, lasts about two weeks if I’m lucky. 

With each passing year, as I show up for myself and my community, I’m learning something invaluable: extreme, reactionary quick fixes are often just detours. Connection is always king.

If you have battled discouragement in the past because your desire for self-improvement took a sharp turn south when the diet and exercise plan you spent a fortune on went bust four days in, this is for you. 

If you rock resolutions, more power to you and I’d love to shake your hand.  In my experience, they always end like a hot and heavy, short-lived relationship.  I like to call them “whoosh” relationships: they promise the sun, moon, and stars, and then Bam! Like a cotton candy sugar rush, they crash and burn when the lights go up and the curtain falls.  It’s like the jerk of whip-lash—the “whoosh” of a cold whip of wind.  

Interestingly enough, I think humans find extremes far easier than balance.  We like to react out of fear instead of responding out of desire.  Marketing moguls exploit this behavior big time, and anyway you slice it, they’re clever.  They know that people go off the rails a bit over the holidays and wake up January 1 with a foggy head and a few extra pounds.  Swooping in, they save the day with their slashed gym membership prices and 30-day cleanse program promising a new you in just one month.

We’ve been hooked.  When those dollars are spent and the motivation trails off the next afternoon, we go looking for another option, or some leftover peppermint bark, whichever comes quicker.  

The shame cycle’s begun again.  

Perhaps I’m cynical, or perhaps I’ve had LOTS of practice reacting out of fear and manipulation rather than choosing what will truly satisfy me from a place of mindfulness and connection.

*If you jump on my website, you’ll see a logo and the story behind it on the home page.*  My approach to therapy and coaching is built on relationship, as I believe that when we begin to soften and mend our inner dialog and heal our relationship with self, external pieces of life follow suit and eventually thrive as well.  It’s not magic, it’s a journey and one I’m very much still on.

Today, I want to invite you into deeper connection with you by asking four questions that will lay some groundwork for the edits, goals, and habits you want to see take root in your life in 2018.  These are adapted from one of my favorite podcasts “The Accidental Creative” —so good I had to share!  Being mindful of desires, feelings, and curiosities will take us much further than stringent rules and regimens we place on ourselves.  Without the “why” the “how” is obsolete.

I hope you’ll join me and carve out some well-deserved time to journal around the picture you’d like to build for the coming year.  Come back to it over and over again.  Realign with its truth or tweak it if you need to deviate from the course.  The possibilities are endless.

Here we go:

• What do you want to feel more of in 2018? (e.g., energized, awake, confident, accepted)

• Where do you want to go in 2018?  (This can be figurative or literal. e.g., I want to explore a new city, yoga class, or I want to go from full-time to part-time at work so I can spend more time writing)

• What do you want to learn in 2018? (e.g., I want to learn to play drums or I want to learn to meditate)

• What do you want to change in 2018? (Reminder: this is desire driven, NOT fear driven!  Approach this from a place of “I’m enough” rather than insecurity.  e.g., I’d like to build in more margin for rest and play into my life.)

I can’t wait to hear your feedback on this exercise! When we give voice to this stuff, it crystalizes in our bones a bit more.  Let’s ease into 2018, listening, noticing, and responding to its inviting call to action.  If you’d like some extra light for the journey ahead, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Happy New Year!

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

xoxo