Category: Nourish Your Body

My top self-care tip to raise your vibration

Self-care to raise your vibration

Does this sound familiar? You’re feling stressed, mercury is in retrograde, the full moon is doing it’s thing and making you feel a little troppo. Nothing seems to be working well. Life is overwhelming. It’s not just one thing. It’s everything!!! I know this oh too well. It’s time to practice my self-care tip to raise your vibration.

Spirituality speaking, your vibration refers to your energetic state. Holistically including your thoughts, beliefs, your physical health and emotions. All these factors contribute to the integrity of your energy field.

When any one of these elements are not at optimal levels, your vibration will be lower and you’ll need to do some work to help lift you back up.

This is not all woo woo talk. This has to do with our fight or flight response to a perceived threat. When you feel stressed or threatened by an external source, that part of your brain gets activated and releases stress hormones that allow you to deal with the problem, either fighting that wild tiger off or heading outta there real quick.

This can be handy when there is a real threat, but not when the threat is created by our thoughts or perceptions of reality and stays with you for longer stretches of time. It takes its toll. So you have to take steps to switch your flight or flight off.

 

What to do to turn things around and raise your vibration

When I start feeling  “heavy”, like I’m carrying too many worries, negative thoughts, my interactions with people are starting to be less productive. Life feels overwhelming and it all just seems a bit too much.

I know it is time to reset. Cleanse and raise my vibration. I turn things around by enjoying some downtime in a beautiful warm bath.

I prefer to do this early in the morning, on a Sunday  at 6 AM, when everyone at home is still, and I know I don’t have to rush to be anywhere.

 

My tips:

  1. Fill the bath with warm water,  as hot you can, with enough water to be comfortable. Sprinkle a serving of Bath mix and drops of essential oils of your choice.
  1. Be sure not to take a shower after the bath so the essential oils can do their work.
  1. Repeat positive affirmations while in there, and practice mindfulness. Thoughts are just thoughts, just let them be, don’t push them away, let them go.

 

Here’s my luxurious recipe:

Salt bath with essential oils! (4 servings)

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Combine salts and soda in a glass jar.
  2. Stir in desired essential oils.
  3. Store in cool, dark place.

It’s important to use only quality, high-grade essential oils. Be careful with cheap essentials oils as they can be either aromatic oils or synthetic oils, reducing the effectiveness of the bath. They still smell good, but they may be an irritant to the skin. You won’t achieve the same results, as plant extracts found in quality essential oils have healing properties.

The safest essential oil to use is Lavender

 

Relief of PMS symptoms

Coincidentally, I do this ritual every full moon. It may or may not be coinciding with PMS symptoms, but it is really therapeutic to alleviate these symptoms and nourish our bodies around that time of the month too.

In this fast-paced life, when we play so many roles and have to be and do ALL of ‘the things’, it’s so important to recognise when you’re needing to take some time out for you and replenish yourself.

Let’s face it, these things don’t come passively. We have to take time to lift ourselves up so we can achieve our goals and be there for those close to us.

If you’d like to experience my recommended quality oil blends, you can have a browse here. 

Note: You should always use essential oils with caution if you are pregnant, be sure to consult a professional. I recommend steering clear of all oils except lavender during pregnancy and always read the labels for contraindication. There are essential oils that are photosensitive, like Bergamot (I love the smell!!) , it’s recommended that you don’t have exposure to excessive sunlight for up to 12 hours if applied on the skin.

Easy Strategies to Help You Overcome Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is a common denominator of most of us, the serial dieters, the ones who had tried almost every diet under the sun, successfully losing weight but haven't been able to keep it off. Addressing it with these simple strategies will help you not turn into food to cope with negative emotions and achieve your healthy eating and weight loss goals.

Most of you know that I recently changed career paths and I am now 100% dedicated to my online projects. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting this website for way too long, and no matter how many times I put it on my vision board or my goal’s spreadsheet, I didn’t take action. I made hundreds of excuses, but the main issue was: resistance

Resistance

Resistance is a natural reaction, and I overcame it with hypnotherapy. Showing my brain that is okay to change paths, becoming aware of the blocks that didn't let me move forward and opening a communication line with my inner voice

But it wasn’t always that way.

One of the things I was doing to shut my inner voice up was eating, not just eating but binge eating. I could quickly go through half a big packet of chips without me realising it. In our first session, the hypnotherapist asked me if I listened to my inner voice, I replied: No, I shut it up with chips.

That was my first step

to realise that I was using food to deal with emotions, to make excuses, to procrastinate and to escape from a reality that was no longer serving my purpose.

Easy Ways to Stop Binge Eating
Photo by frankie cordoba on Unsplash

Emotional Eaters find it hard to stick to a diet.

I’ve been an emotional eater all my life and even though I’ve been successful in my desires to lose weight and haven’t manage to keep it off long term.

I know what to eat, I know about portions, and I know about combining food and I know I’m most successful when I follow a well-designed meal plan but what I didn’t know is how hard is to stick to a diet when you are an emotional eater and that until I address it, I’ll be a serial dieter all my life.

Emotional eating is about how food is used to shift an emotional state, using food as a coping mechanism

Food was comforting because at least for those short minutes that the binge lasted I didn’t have to deal with any emotions. Keeping my mind occupied munching on those chips gave me a way to cope with the moment.

But sure, there is a healthier way to do it. Then I went into finding ways to break this emotional eating cycle and it is possible!!

Become Aware

90% of our reactions are formed in our subconscious, mostly from learnt past behaviours and because the binge eating happens so quickly, we may not have time to notice it may respond to certain triggers and follow a pattern or motifs. Becoming aware of this patterns and themes is an important step to get a clear idea of the contributors will help you find your own personal way to deal with struggles.

These questions will help you monitor your emotions and triggers. Keep them handy, maybe in the notes section of your phone. Remember that there are no right or wrong answers, the purpose of this exercise is to identify what lead you to the latest episode of emotional eating.

What was happening that might have triggered that reaction? What emotion was I feeling? What were my thoughts at that moment? What physical sensations was I feeling?

Stop labelling food as good or bad.

Food is food, and all food is allowed, balance and moderation are recommended though. When we start thinking as a particular food as forbidden, like the chips in my case, our mind will focus on that specific food, and we will end up craving it. Resistance, ironically, will drive you to eat it and your brain will take it as you need it, but if you just look at food as neutral, not putting any limits or restrictions, there would be less of an issue with food cravings. Trust me on this one, it works!

Don’t eat unless you’re hungry

Yes, that’s a difficult one but learn to listen to your body and start recognising your body cues. You’ll soon begin to identify when you are hungry or when you just have the urge to eat due to emotions. When you have that urge, stop yourself on your tracks and drink a glass of water instead.

Once I read that when you feel like eating something and not knowing what you feel like it is a sign that you need to drink more water.

Check this post out on how water is essential in our lives and dehydration may lead to depression. I know, mind-blowing!

Cook and Eat Mindfully

Mindfulness is the practice of being present and aware of your thoughts, emotions and feelings. Eat mindfully means to be fully conscious of what you eat and the effects of the food on your body.

Show gratitude to the fact that you can cook with healthy ingredients and the food you are taking is nourishing your body. Being fully present at the moment of eating the food by noticing the colours, aromas, texture and carefully chewing each bite, tasting the different flavours.

This will also aid digestion because as Dr Victor R Benavides V, always says: “Digestion starts in your mouth.”

Mindset Shift

You are loved, you are worthy, you are safe. You've got this, and you can change your habits. Start by saying positive and nicer things to yourself. How many times we have looked our reflection in the mirror and said, “oh gosh! My bum looks too fat in these jeans”; sometimes we are too hard on the words we use to refer to ourselves, bringing us down and guess what, making us turn to food to cope with that sadness.

Showing kindness to yourself will increase your self-esteem, and you will start to make healthier choices.

Today’s Life: The World of Immediacy

stress, cortisol and why sometimes it is so hard to lose weight

HAVE you realised that the world around us is not the same one in which our parents or grandparents grew up in, without going very far, it is not the same world in which we were born?

I am 40 years old, I am an 80’s child and a 90’s teenager, media says I belong to the Generation X. We are a generation that was born analog and grew up digital, a complex one. I see this as having the upper hand, we understand many things of the past, and we navigate through the digital age without any problems.

By now you may be thinking what’s all these have to do with losing weight; well, we live in a “fast” world, a world where everything is advancing by leaps and bounds.  There is never time for anything, and when we have time for something, we are just exhausted, the only thing you want to do is nothing or maybe pour a glass of wine and watch some Netflix. Does it sound familiar?

This made me think that our grandparents may have had a more relaxed lifestyle, not depending on their phones, checking emails, the latest app, a Waze app to help to get to a destination in less time by avoiding traffic. If we look at our grandparent at our age, they seemed to have a quieter life than us. You can call it boring if you like, but I don’t think they had the same levels of stress that we do.

We live in a world of information technology, of immediacy; a world in which we cannot stop to have lunch without checking our phones, answering a work email, or we just can’t resist the temptation to photograph our food to publish it on social media and show the rest of the world what we are doing and how “happy” we are. We are dependent and stressed, prisoners of ourselves, not able to relax or travel without the need of documenting every single step.

The other day someone shared this picture with me.

Credit: John Blanding / The Boston Globe

This picture shows a group of people, most of them from my generation or younger, at an event on the street. Please take time to notice the lady that is observing the occasion with her eyes!  She seems to be enjoying what she is seeing. She is in the present moment and registering it in her in memory, as she used to do it all her life, as everyone used to do pre-mobile-phone-with-camera era. My first thought was:  “she knows how to enjoy the moment”.

What about the rest of the group? They all are looking at life through the screen of their phone, creating videos to add to the “never looked again” pile or “posting to my social media story” that will be deleted anyway after running out of space to store once it’s time to register the next event.

That made me realise that most of us just live without enjoying the moment.

Back to the losing weight part.  What do all these have to do with losing weight?

Well, a lot. This lifestyle of recording the next event, the rat race, technology, fast world, answering emails on our downtime, of being connected all the time, bring stress.

Stress is in the hands of a hormone called cortisol, also known as “the stress hormone”, this hormone is usually a great ally or an enemy. Depending on the case, it helps us to face situations of tension: the flight or flight mode; or be present in emotional situations turning into frustration, anxiety or anger. The negative part of these last three ones is that if these sensations become chronic, they can seriously affect our mental and physical health.

Cortisol is also the culprit of not having success on losing weight, regardless of the number of times we tried, you can’t go past the three kg mark and after lots of efforts. And even worse, after deciding to quit that diet you put those three hard lost kg back on or more!

Among many other conditions, the excess of cortisol usually produces insulin resistance, which will lead our body to accumulate fat and, as consequence obesity, depression, high blood pressure and even autoimmune conditions. These situations will be the key to open the diabetes door.

Every time we are stressed, the cortisol hormone is activated making it challenging to lose weight.

Stress is part of lives and in small quantities is even needed;  it should not be seen as totally bad, it gives us the extra push to deal with a situation but it is essential to have a balance and make sure we put techniques in place to deal with stress.

Here are some tips to deal with stress and keep the keep your cortisol at normal levels

#1

Go offline: it is unbelievable how convenient mobiles phones are. Everything at our fingertips, literally, but some of us depend too much on it that seems we can’t breathe without it.  I challenge you to make the decision of not looking at your phone for at least three hours straight.  I know, #fomo!  But being connected all the time can also be a stressor. Give your mind a rest and go without it. Focus on another activity like listening to music, dance and disconnect. The benefits of music are endless, connects you with memories and can take you on a journey.  Join our playlist here.

The iPhone has a  “do not disturb” feature when activated only your favourite contacts can reach you. Allow yourself some time off, you deserve it.

 

 

#2

Improve your sleep – some people claim that they can survive on 4 hours sleep with no issues, but the lack of sleep can lead to poor health and decrease our resilience. Experts recommend at least 8 hours of sleep per day to allow our minds and bodies to recover.  One good tip to improve your sleep is to make your bedroom a pleasant room to be in: don’t accumulate clutter and reduce electronics.

You can improve your health by sleeping.

 

#3

Ground yourself in the Present Moment – mindfulness techniques are perfect for this. Be fully present in what you are doing by tuning into your senses.  One useful and straightforward mindfulness method to ground you in the present moment is the 5 to 1:

 

Look around and describe 5 things you can see. 4 things you can touch. 3 things you can hear. 2 things you can smell. 1 thing you can taste.

 

#4

Breathe!  Stand with feet a shoulder-length apart.  Take3 slow and deep breaths using the diaphragm muscles. Breathe in through your nose, and breathe out through slightly parted lips. Get the oxygen flowing into every little inch of your body and with every exhale let all the worries out.

 

 

 

#5

Catch up with your friends: spending time with friends reduces cortisol levels and gives you a sense of connection regulating other functions of your body. Make time to go out with your friends,  is excellent medicine.