CFC

Tuesday was my last day as a care tech at Center for Change. I have loved this job, I quit due to scheduling conflicts with Matt's last semester of class work and also so I can devote more of my energy to the great cause of my family and graduating Matt more quickly. And Matt got a raise in pay due to all his hard work writing for financial grants to receive funding for his projects! I worked part time so it felt like a wonderful break for me to think of different things and to learn, besides cooking, cleaning, and laundry. I learned so much there, my perspective about so many things has changed. I loved trying new things like NIA and going to the different groups like music therapy and the numerous other therapists groups, hey free therapy! Another amazing tool I feel I have learned there is Intuitive Eating. I know eating disorders are so much more than just the actual food issues, the behaviors stem from deeper issues. But here are some basic principles of intuitive eating from their website. I know I am not the best at this all of the time and I have my own body image struggles, but it's about changing the way we think about food, progress not perfection. We become addicted to dieting because we think this diet will be "it", but the diet industry wouldn't be a 30 billion dollar industry if they did work!! It also gives us self acceptance, to learn to accept ourselves and our genetics. To love the bodies God gave us. I love DOVE for this! It is so refreshing to have one company out there that lets us celebrate our difference instead of trying to be all the same person.

10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

1. Reject the Diet Mentality Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight. If you allow even one small hope to linger that a new and better diet might be lurking around the corner, it will prevent you from being free to rediscover Intuitive Eating.

2. Honor Your Hunger Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learning to honor this first biological signal sets the stage for re-building trust with yourself and food.

3. Make Peace with Food Call a truce, stop the food fight! Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. If you tell yourself that you can't or shouldn't have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing When you finally “give-in” to your forbidden food, eating will be experienced with such intensity, it usually results in Last Supper overeating, and overwhelming guilt.

4. Challenge the Food Police .Scream a loud "NO" to thoughts in your head that declare you're "good" for eating under 1000 calories or "bad" because you ate a piece of chocolate cake. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created . The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loud speaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments. Chasing the Food Police away is a critical step in returning to Intuitive Eating.

5. Respect Your Fullness Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you're comfortably full. Pause in the middle of a meal or food and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what is your current fullness level?

6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor The Japanese have the wisdom to promote pleasure as one of their goals of healthy living In our fury to be thin and healthy, we often overlook one of the most basic gifts of existence--the pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you've had "enough".

7. Honor Your Feelings Without Using Food Find ways to comfort , nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won't fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won't solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You'll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

8. Respect Your Body Accept your genetic blueprint. Just as a person with a shoe size of eight would not expect to realistically squeeze into a size six, it is equally as futile (and uncomfortable) to have the same expectation with body size. But mostly, respect your body, so you can feel better about who you are. It's hard to reject the diet mentality if you are unrealistic and overly critical about your body shape.

9. Exercise--Feel the Difference Forget militant exercise. Just get active and feel the difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise. If you focus on how you feel from working out, such as energized, it can make the difference between rolling out of bed for a brisk morning walk or hitting the snooze alarm. If when you wake up, your only goal is to lose weight, it's usually not a motivating factor in that moment of time.

10 Honor Your Health--Gentle Nutrition Make food choices that honor your health and tastebuds while making you feel well. Remember that you don't have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It's what you eat consistently over time that matters, progress not perfection is what counts.

Sherry Dew talks about our bodies in the book “God Wants a Powerful People”

Joseph Smith taught “we came to this earth that we might have a body and present it pure before God in the Celestial Kingdom. The great principle of happiness consists in have a body. The Devil has no body, and herein is his punishment.” Satan has no body, and never will. It is one of the reasons he’s miserable, and always will be. It is also one of the reasons he inspires every conceivable form of bodily abuse and misuse. He doesn’t want those who have bodies to realize that receiving a body is part of God’s great plan of happiness. He doesn’t want us to understand that our bodies were created in the express image of our Father. Or that our bodies house our spirits. It was the savior who first compared His body to a temple (see John 2:21). While the human body is subject to temptations of the flesh as well as pain and illness, it is also contains within it the power to create life. It is, by that fact alone, a sacred and holy temple. It deserves to be treated with reverence, just as we would respect any temple that houses the Spirit of the Lord.

However the most treasured thing I will take from this job is the opportunity to meet and learn from the patients at the center. I admire their courage, sacrifice, strength and wisdom. I have known several mothers like myself that have to leave their husbands and children to recover from their eating disorders. So many of these women have touched my life for good.