Emotional Eating - Time to Get Moving

So what are YOU eating tonight?

You know how it is. Full of good intentions, you plan your day/week/monthly menus, fill the house with good food and have the best of intentions for healthy eating.

That’s Monday.

And you chop, slice, sauté, cook and produce a great meal.

Tuesday too.

Wednesday you have an evening meeting, various offspring need to be picked up or dropped off for soccer/tuba lessons/knitting marathons and you are, frankly, exhausted. So you go for a quick easy meal.

Thursday it’s a freezer meal and Friday it’s takeaway.

There is a reason for this.

You are NOT a failure, an unhousewifely slob, or a bad mother.

You ARE busy, living an interesting life and have family/friends/pets with interesting lives. And that takes your time AND your energy.

So this week I’m going to say to you, relax, take it easy and loosen the dietary corsets. If you’re not sticking to whatever rules you’ve set yourself why beat yourself up about it?

And try, longer term, to set yourself up for success. You can’t in the middle of a busy weekday evening, grapple with a new recipe or an unfamiliar food. Do that when you are more relaxed and have more time. If you learn how to competently prepare one new healthy meal each month that’s 12 in a year, which means by the end of the year you have almost two week’s worth of good meals you can do.

I have been following some of the recipes from Natalia Rose’s The Raw Food Detox Diet. Raw food did not get a good press in my childhood so it took me ages to regard a salad as a meal. But Natalia’s gentle approach is great and some of her recipes are fantastic. I regularly do 3 salads with 2-3 basic salad dressings and they taste wonderful. And now I’m familiar with what I need to buy I can always have the ingredients in the house and I’ll do what I have time for. I’m aiming to gradually increase my raw food “vocabulary” so that I never have to cook again!

Food shouldn’t be difficult. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. But if you decide you want to change you will have to change the way you eat. Now this change will require you to be courageous, brave and willing to be in the world differently than you are now. But I am here to tell you: change can be done, little by little, to fit in with your life and bring you to a rewarding future. Your new you is closer than you think.

(c) 2009 Liz Copeland