Good Life Cuisine

When things way down on you, you feel low, there are different self-caring things you can try to do. A trick is to remember that not to always try doing the same thing but to reach to our creativity and imagination and pull new things out of there. Having a list as an inspiration may help. Here are some ideas. You can make such a list for your self.

The time has come to dive into the second chapter of McKay's book on self-esteem. It's about "The pathological critic". Sometimes also called the "inner critic", it's the negative inner voice that attacks and judges us. Everyone seems to have one, but for people with low self-esteem it tends to be more vicious and vocal. In this post, I will focus on describing the critic and it's origines. In the following post, we'll see what is the reason we listen to it, and try to do an exrecise to help us to "catch our critic" when he strikes.

I discovered this theory about Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), promoted by Dr. Aron in her books (see her website: http://www.hsperson.com). This is a "distinct personality trait that affects as many as one out of every five people. According to Dr. Aron's definition, the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment". 

I've been trying out to practice intuitive eating. The more I read and practice, the more the approach makes sense to me. It makes sense, but it's a difficult one to learn and apply. 

As I mentioned earlier, I started reading about intuitive eating. The time has come to start practicing. And I know that in order to own the change, it's good to reflect on my experiences and take credit for the stuff I did - a good part of which I get from posting. The first four principles (reject diet mentality, honor your hunger, make peace with food and challenge the food police) prepare you for the big step: respect your fullness.

Something a friend said made me think about sharing some of my moderation journey, it's good to offer different perspectives. We are all different, we're given different skills, minds, bodies, cultural and environmental context... So our journeys differ. But the more of us share, the easier it gets for you to piece your own picture from the different parts that speak to you. 

I started working with a group of friends through the book on self-esteem by McKay (Self-Esteem, a proven program of cognitive techniques for assessing, improving, and maintaining your self-esteem by Matthew McKay, PH.D. & Patrick Fanning). Here are some thoughts. 

On this blog, when I say moderation, I think about moderate drinking. What is moderate drinking? I like the following simple definition: moderate drinker "considers an occasional drink to be a small, though enjoyable, part of life". There are other criteria mentioned on the MM site (see below) that I like. A moderator "usually does not exceed the .055% BAC moderate drinking limit". This seems to be a limit above which we start loosing "control", i.e. our judgment gets impaired. A moderate drinker typically feels when they approach this limit.

Today I had a strange day food-wise. Just a week or two ago, I would classify this as a "bad eating day", and would probably be nursing a "food hangover" right now, after loosing control and binging. But I actually feel good about my progress with respect to learning how to intuitively eat.