Would you cut your own hair? There are other things in life that need experts to help you.
Wellness and Well Being Is a Process
Formula for Change
BEHAVIORAL CHANGE
If you look at any habit that is out of balance or conflicts with your goals, behavioral change is a vital piece in the process of altaining your desired outcome. This may include eating habits, lack of exercise, procrastination or compulsive behaviors. Here are the 4 stages of behavioral change, and each must be addressed in order to effect lasting change:
CONTEMPLATION
It’s that initial period where you spend a fair amount of time thinking about a specific change you want to make. It could be that you want to stop night eating while watching TV.
PREPARATION
Here’s where you’ve make a decision that you want to and are going to make a change
ACTION
Now you begin taking small steps and noticing how it feels, addressing roadblocks that come up. Your first action may be to stop buying the items you generally eat while watching TV. It may be to drink water or tea in the evening without food. Consciously note any positive outcomes from this change in habit.
MAINTENANCE
This is the last and final step in making change, and can be the hardest. It takes 21 days to solidify a new habit, so be patient with yourself, and stay with it. Once you have these 21 days under your belt, you will have created a new routine that will feel easier and more natural as time passes.
Food Is Medicine
Some years ago, Dr. Conrad Esselstyn and Colin Campbell combined their expertise in clinical nutrition and nutritional research and reinforced the finding that there is one true path toward lifelong wellness, and that is food.
Like Dan Buettner. who wrote The Blue Zone, they showed that eating fresh unprocessed food makes a world of difference in health and wellness, and may be the only medicine needed throughout life.
It’s been my mission since completing my training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in 2005 to help whoever is ready and open to living with the simple belief that whole foods are the answer. It doesn’t mean you can never have a treat, or a pizza, or fried clams or chips. What it means is that most of your food falls into the categories of fruits, vegetables. whole grains, clean meat and seafood, nuts, beans, fermented foods and seeds. Real food.
It also means that while staying within these parameters, there may be times when some of these foods don’t agree with you or you just don’t like them. That is your bio-individuality speaking to you, and it is up to you to listen.
You may know I offer nutritional cleanses 3 times annually. These are times designed to acclimate to changing seasons and in one case reset from the holidays. Here’s an example of what you might discover through this experience:
Karen was a first -time cleanser with Wellness and You. This is what she relayed back to me a week after the cleanse ended:
The Proof Is Here
Look at Drs. Esselstyn, Campbell’s conclusions. Look at The Blue Zone, And look at Karen. Eating healthy is the best medicine and it heals quickly. I’ve seen it over and over. You may know Dr. Mark Hyman, another doctor who espouses food as medicine. The bad part is we hear so little from mainstream medicine about the power of food,
Instead, we hear one should lose weight, or exercise. Excess weight and the lack of exercise is the result of poor quality food. In my book Food Becomes You I talk about malnutrition. You might think I’m talking about not having enough food, but I’m not. I’m talking about eating highly processed food that offer few if any nutrients, causing you to always feel hungry. That hunger turns to over-eating, and if the food offers no nutrients, your brain will continue to trigger your appetite.
Join Me on the Path to Wellness
We all want to feel good. No one wants to be crippled by pain, digestive distress, headaches, depression, high blood pressure or excess weight. Taking time to commit yourself to a healthier way of life with your food is so worth it. It takes time and attention, but like Karen, once you see how much better you can feel, you see how worth it healthy eating really is.
I invite you to read over my programs page to see if something may be right for you. I work virtually and in person in my Six Weeks and Comprehensive Coaching programs. We start with a detailed health history and goals statement to be sure the program is right for you. Everything is confidential. And the best news of all, getting your food right will create a ripple effect in all aspects of your life.
Habits
If you stepped back and looked at how you spend your day, what would you see? Most of us see a fairly predictable routine, with a few unexpected but manageable events peeking into our routine on most days.
In essence, most of our lives are built around habits. Some are very conscious habits while others may be things we haven’t given much thought to but we do them every day nonetheless.
Learn how habits may be the biggest indicator of weight and lifelong health.