As you know, healthy weight loss involves more than just cutting calories and exercising more. You want to change your weight, but you also want to create a healthy relationship with your life, food, body, and self. You want a life that is in balance, without constantly be obsessed with calorie counting or worry about good foods versus bad foods. Healthy weight loss means that you have abundant energy to pursue your dreams and vibrant health to enjoy your life. Follow these simple guidelines and learn a few tips on how to make your weight loss journey balanced and healthy.

De-Stress Your Digestion

Is your digestive tract energetically charged with tension and worry? Stress affects all parts of your body and your digestive tract is no exception. If you are obsessed with what you can and cannot eat, worrying about whether your food is fattening, or unable to relieve your stress, you are upsetting the health and effectiveness of your digestive tract. Stress can lead to ulcers, constipation, diarrhea, and poor absorption of nutrients. Help your digestive tract by keeping your thoughts clear and your body at ease while you eat. Enjoy the food you are eating, relax with company of those eating with you, and learn to breathe deeply and fully while you are eating. Practice eating consciously, with joy, and with a clear mind for three days and watch your life health and happiness increase.

Fill Up On Inner Worth

On a deep level, those who use or abuse food have made a decision (perhaps an unconscious decision) that they are not worthy of being themselves. They believe they should not express themselves powerfully, and they should not receive pleasure for themselves. Overeating often stems from basic unmet needs for excitement, play, love and genuine self-expression. Often, people have decided they are “supposed” to give pleasure out to others, by being nice and good, smiling sweetly, not being bold, loud, or assertive. We go along with protocol buying into the idea that uniformity is the key to a happy and rich life. We are supposed to look a certain way, dress in order to please others, or contain our excitement. Yet to conform is to live in a state of rejection. Realize that denial of your individuality and uniqueness leads to feeling disempowered, mutes passions, and prohibits your ability to receive pleasure. Without pleasure and genuine self-supporting self-soothing strategies, we often turn to food to relieve basic emotional states such as stress, anxiety, fear, tiredness, depression, and anger.

Food In Your Pantry

Diets tend to make us uncomfortable around food. We begin to remove all temptations from our homes. No ice cream, no chocolate, no cookies. After awhile – no food in our pantries. This tactic doesn’t really stop us from eating. Instead, it beckons us to venture out to the nearest convenience store or drive through. Once there it is difficult to resist the temptation of the hamburgers, fries, shakes, and cookies which we then devour in the car on the way home. This is the boomerang effect of deprivation. Scarcity makes us anxious while surplus calms us down. Begin to find your own way to allow food back on your shelves in your life.

Healthy Actions For Today

Health and happiness are not that difficult to have in your life. It just takes some attention and some action to insure that you have as much of both as you desire. Read through the following list and decide what actions you could take to increase the quality of your life:

o Notice what is right for you from the inside out

o Eat more vegetables, fruits, whole grains

o Drink lots of water

o Walk outside

o Movements of balance – balance board, exercise balls, yoga, Tai-chi, etc.

o Dance, exercise, play

o Laugh more

o Rest enough – not too much, not too little

o Remember the playful kid inside of you

o Be kind to yourself

o Feel good in everything you do

o Savor every moment

o Be grateful and count your blessings

o Learn to receive

o Recognize what you are receiving

o Pursue your goals

o Play up your strengths

o Find your calling

o Gain trust in yourself

Make Peace with Food

Do you sometimes feel like food is the enemy? Being at war with food and your body can only lead to decreased passion and a low energy life. The mood and attitudes you eat with affect the positive energy flow between food and you. Indeed, creating harmony with food is critical if you wish to live a happier, healthier life. Take a chance, call a truce, and begin to develop a more peaceful relationship with food. When you stop viewing food as the enemy, you regain control of your own life. You can connect with your body and discover you own subtle fullness and satiety cues. You can become involved in determining what, when, and how much your body wants to eat.