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Home Fitness Tips by Paula Blackwood
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Health & Lifestyle Coaching by Karen Halifax
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 Home Fitness Tips by Paula Blackwood
"This is a simple little exercise which will improve your balance and assist you in shaping and defining the calf area."
Stand with your feet approximately 2 inches apart. Tuck in the tummy and bottom, raise the arms above your head and rise up onto the balls of the feet. Maintain your balance for a count of 10, then raise and lower the feet for a further count of 10.
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Health & Lifestyle Coaching by Karen Halifax
Are you an Emotional Eater?
This newsletter looks at ways of controlling emotional eating so you can stop turning to food for answers. Food isn’t the answer. The solutions lie inside of you. Everyone has an irrational and destructive emotional side to their personalities that rears its ugly head during times of trouble – unpaid bills, wayward children, marriage problems, job stress etc.
You sink into depression or become unglued with stress, you lash out, say things you wish you hadn’t, become bitter and resentful and live with guilt and shame, and these emotions influence the way you behave. It is during these emotionally charged moments in life that these feelings can trigger emotional eating.
Almost instinctively, when we feel stress, anxiety or depression, it is a natural human impulse to turn to food – and for a physiological reason. It’s a long established fact that food triggers certain natural chemicals and that these chemicals have a stabilising effect on mood and mental functioning. The problem is that in these moments we tend to reach for foods such as biscuits, sweets or ice cream –comfort foods – all the things that cause weight gain. For many people, foods like these can be as damaging as cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, and they can be just as difficult to give up. Physiologically these foods do deliver a mild and short-lived high.
Habitually using food as a drug in order to cope with emotional pain and stress can quickly overtake you and become an addiction, with terrible side effects such as weight gain, poor body image and severe self esteem problems. When you routinely abuse food as a drug, eating inappropriately, you leave yourself with a residue of guilt, depression and more stress and anxiety – so you turn to food again. It becomes a vicious circle.
Never in your life will you be without emotional pain and stress – problems, challenges and difficult moments are simply a part of living. You know that if things are going well at home for example, you can count on conflict at home or vice versa. There is rarely a time in your life when all is peace and balance. That is neither good nor bad, simply a part of how life works. To be alive means to experience emotions, painful or otherwise.
Living with unchecked emotional pain, however sucks the pleasure out of life. It is absolutely incompatible with everything you want, need and deserve, including proper weight management, good health, an active life etc. That is why regaining emotional control is absolutely crucial.
More than 50% of all overweight people use food to cope with depression, anger, stress and other emotions. Are you among them? If you identify with the following statements, you could well be an emotional eater…
I munch when I get bored
I eat when I get depressed / lonely / anxious
I crave some foods
I eat even if I am not hungry
I think about food a lot of the time
I eat to relax myself and relieve stress
I always clean my plate so as not to waste food
In the next newsletter, ways to tackle emotional eating…
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