Lots of research shows that a restrictive diet is not good for your body or your soul. The saying is; “For every diet there is an equal and opposite binge just waiting to happen.” I bet all you dieters out there know this very well. Michelle May, M.D.-physician and author of the wonderful book “Eat What you Love and Love What you Eat” calls it the “eat, diet, rebel, repeat cycle”. She’s a self confessed Weight Watchers failure, but for years she kept trying even though her own evidence showed it was not working for the long haul. Sound familiar?
Mindful Eating has a whole lot more to do with your relationship to yourself, your body and self-kindness than you might have imagined. I’ve heard so many people say, I hate my thighs, or fill in some other body part. Listen to that for a minute- that’s harsh! What’s to hate? Don’t they get you up from a chair, help you walk, climb stairs, ride a bike – drive a car? So while this workshop will be about food of course but only a bit, and not at all about diets (except to mention that for the long haul research clearly shows they don’t work especially if motivated by self hate)! It will primarily focus on practices developed by Self-Compassion researcher Kristin Neff, who finds that it is a lot more possible to make change through self kindness and acceptance than self criticism, and she has the research to back that up. Learning to “motivate ourselves with compassion” as she calls it is the corner stone of this workshop as well as developing a much friendlier relationship with your poor body, I say ‘poor’ because let’s be honest, aren’t we kind of hard on them? It will involve some short meditation and movement practices, as we know that these work very well to regulate emotion , so you will come away with more tools to use than turning to food when what you really want is some feeling of calm, connection and love.
