December 2007

Changing your thoughts is a critical step in the slow sustainable weight loss journey. We cannot lose weight when we focus on how fat and unhappy we are. It just won’t work. We will end up beating ourselves up and binging before any real change is accomplished.

It really is true that what we focus on grows in significance and what we resist persists. Did you ever notice that as soon as you stop wanting something so desperately, it usually appears? For example, have you ever sat at home wanting to be in a relationship, and then as soon as you say “forget about it, I am getting on with my life” and you enroll in a class, take a new job or decide to buy that condo, voila, Mr. Right appears?

Our actions follow thoughts so first we must change our thoughts. For me, changing my focus from being thin to being healthy was the magic key that unlocked those pounds that seemed to be permanently stuck on my hips and thighs. Once I stopped worrying about my excess weight and decided to focus on getting as healthy as I could, the pounds gradually melted away.

I got very clear in my desire to live a long life and be a healthy vital sexy senior busy strong and flexible traveling the world and having adventures well into my 80s. I turned to role models in my yoga class, women in there 60s and 70s who are the vision of vibrant lovers of life for inspiration. Your picture may be different. Maybe you want to be an active parent or grandparent able to roll around on the floor with the little ones?

Invoke the power of visualization to assist you with your new focus. Studies have demonstrated again and again the power of detailed vivid visualization in affecting positive results. Peak athletes often use visualization to enhance their competitive performance. The same strategy can work for us with our weight loss goals.

So take time each day to see yourself as healthy and slender, living your ideal life. Choose a healthy person you admire and see yourself in her body. I began to see myself in the body of a healthy, strong, flexible, vital 40+ yoga teacher I admire. In time my body began taking on those characteristics as I continued to visualize, eat well and practice yoga consistently.

Affirmations can be another powerful tool for change. Some of my favorite affirmations include:

• I am happily and easily maintaining my ideal body weight
• I am enjoying optimal physical, spiritual, mental and emotional health
• I eat and drink like a naturally thin person
• I am enjoying life as a naturally thin person
• Nothing tastes as good as being fit feels

I encourage you to begin changing your life by changing your thinking!

I love introducing new students to yoga. I feel that it’s my duty as a yoga teacher to make sure their first lesson is a positive experience, leaving them feeling better than before they began and excited to try it again with me or someone else. It is a special gift that I get to share again and again.

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I have survived Thanksgiving and Christmas and now just have New Years to go! I don’t know about you but I have definitely indulged in more sugar in all its insidious forms–cookies, eggnog, and champagne–than I needed and am feeling the effects. I also succumbed to a nasty cold several days ago, the first in more than two years so I guess I shouldn’t be complaining. I found myself trying to soothe away my discomfort with treats and over-feeding my cold in a feeble attempt to feel better.

Well, every day and every meal really is a new opportunity! After indulging in eggnog, rugalah, butter cookies, truffles, biscotti and champagne over the last several days, I awoke this morning wanting eggs. They provide me with a great form of sustenance leaving me feeling satisfied for hours. To boost their nourishing punch even further, I first sautéed some diced red pepper, green onion, mushrooms in a little olive oil for about 5 minutes, then added two handfuls of baby spinach and let it wilt. (A fridge veggie bin full of choices makes getting your 5+ a day so much easier!) Then I stirred in 4 eggs and scrambled it all together making two generous portions for my husband and me.

I feel much more clear-headed and focused and was even able to re-arrange our remaining cookie supply on a smaller plate without having one because I feel satisfied. Fortunately the plate of remaining cookies is small and we are expecting guests this evening who are sure to help us finish them!

I hope by the same time next year to have a wider repertoire of sugar free treats to call upon. I have just started experimenting with natural sugars like succanat and the herbal sweetener stevia.

For dinner I have tossed together beef short ribs, carrots, celery, tomatoes, red pepper, green chile, minced garlic, a yummy southwest salt rub and chili colorado simmer sauce, from Suzanne™ and placed them in the slow cooker. I discovered Suzanne Somers line of food products while following her diet several years ago. She makes high quality products that are all natural and sugar free, taste yummy and can really simplify the process of getting dinner on the table. Although I enjoy cooking, sometimes I don’t have a lot of time to spend on the process. The slow cooker is a great tool that has stood the test of time. It makes a lot of sense for how we live today. Just toss some healthy ingredients together, turn it on and come back hours later to a tasty healthy dinner. Just add another green veggie or a salad!

This month’s issue of Real Simple magazine has a slow cooker recipe for beer braised pork and black bean soup that sounds hearty and delicious.

Here’s the recipe in case you want to give it a try too.

Beer-Braised Pork and Black Bean Soup
From REAL SIMPLE

2 12-ounce bottles of beer (preferably lager)
1 tablespoon chopped canned chipotle chilies in adobo sauce, plus 1 tablespoon adobo sauce
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 large onion, chopped
1 pound dried black beans, rinsed
1 1/2 pounds boneless pork butt (pork shoulder)
Kosher salt
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup store-bought refrigerated fresh salsa
1/4 cup fresh cilantro

In the bowl of a slow cooker, combine the beer, 3 cups water, the chilies, adobo sauce, cumin, onion, beans, pork, and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Set the slow cooker to high and cook, covered, until the beans are tender and the pork pulls apart easily, 4 hours. Using a fork, separate the pork into large pieces. Divide among individual bowls and top with the sour cream, salsa, and cilantro.

If you don’t have a slow cooker: heat oven to 300° F. Follow the recipe above using a Dutch oven or large casserole. Bake, covered, until the pork pulls apart easily, 4 hours.

Yield: Makes 6 servings

Have you ever noticed that the better your life is going, the fewer food-related issues pop up? I have. When life is good, food becomes fuel that I need, not a crutch to support my destructive tendencies. When my work is going well, when I am involved in healthy relationships, when I am having fun and taking care of myself, when I am learning something new or planning a trip or reading a great book, the likelihood of stuffing myself with food much less likely.

This is the concept of ‘primary food’ in action, an idea introduced to me by Darshana, a holistic health counselor I had the pleasure of working with earlier this year. The stuff we eat is considered ’secondary food’ and all the other areas of our life that support us like our friends, family, career, relationships, hobbies, pursuits, interests are ‘primary food.’ We are nourished by both kinds of ‘food.’ Often when things are out of sync with our ‘primary food,’ we turn to the food we eat as a means of trying to fill ourselves up physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is where overeating and unhealthy habits can take root.

So, when trouble crops up with our eating patterns and we start to overeat or crave unhealthy foods, we may need to look at the bigger picture to accurately assess what is really going on. If we are using food to medicate ourselves or as a form or entertainment, we may need to take a look at our overall life and satisfaction level to determine what needs to be addressed. Maybe it’s time to take a look at our career or our relationships. Or, maybe we need to find healthy forms of distraction until we feel strong enough to tackle something as challenging as this!

The awareness I have developed on my yoga mat has carried over into my relationship with food and eating. For this I am extremely grateful. Like so many others, I have struggled with eating, weight, dieting, exercising and body image. Caught in the vicious cycle of “good/bad” thinking, my attempts at deprivation eventually led to binging and feelings of guilt and remorse. This pattern became a way of life with only the particular approach to weight control—weight watchers, Atkins, South Beach, Fat Flush, Sommersize—changing.

Often we are stuck in old ways of thinking and acting that no longer serve us. When we finally realize this, we can begin to change our behaviors without lots of pain and suffering. My yoga practice has taught me that by sticking with the practice and getting on the mat with regularity, what needs to come into my life will and what needs to be released will be too. As a result, I enjoy a much healthier relationship with food and with myself.

When we do one good thing for ourselves, it sets up a vibration change, we begin spiraling upward, destructive desires diminish and suddenly we are motivated to do something nourishing for ourselves. Ben and Jerry stop screaming from the freezer. A desire for something healthy like a crunchy apple or something else creamy and smooth like plain organic yogurt develops.

Will I ever eat ice cream again? Yes. Emotional eating is normal. Sometimes it’s just plain fun to have a yummy ice cream on a hot day or a warm chocolate chip cookie right from the oven. The key is to enjoy these occasional treats without guilt and to be conscious if we begin to turn to food for emotional comfort too often.

If we can learn to be with our feelings and explore them, asking important questions like—How do I feel? What do I need? Who am I feeding—My inner child, my hurt ego, my sad self, my rebellious teenager, my self destructive self? How can I support myself with something other than food? What am I getting from this food? How is it serving me? How might I better serve myself?—We can begin to change our chronic patterns and develop new healthy habits, like finding ways to nourish ourselves with things other than food.

Have I mentioned that I love yoga? It’s the only form of exercise I have ever stuck with for any period of time. It’s been over ten years and I hope to keep practicing forever. I try to get to class at least once or twice a week. The rest of the time I practice on my own or with a DVD as accompaniment.

I arrived back in Phoenix recently after three years in rural Wisconsin. It feels so wonderful to be back, especially at this time of year. One of the best things about being back in Phoenix is getting to reconnect with my favorite yoga teachers and studios. My favorite studio in Phoenix, by far, is A Desert Song Yoga and Massage on 7th Street just south of Camelback. It is an oasis in the desert offering a variety of classes. The studio is relaxed and welcoming, attracting a more mature population than some of the other popular Valley studios. The owner and one of my all time favorite teachers is Mary Beth Markus. She has more than 27 years experience teaching yoga and training yoga teachers.

Kelly is one of Mary Beth’s teachers. While spending most of her time doing massage, Kelly teaches the 10:15 AM gentle class on Tuesdays, which I was lucky enough to attend yesterday. There were about ten of us in class. It was just what my body needed: a slow, gentle, yet deep, workout that stretched, strengthened and balanced me in a calm, safe, soothing, and uplifting way.

Most of the Desert Song teachers are influenced by the Anusara approach to yoga, originated by John Friend. It is a style of yoga that focuses on alignment and heart-focused intention, helping develop body awareness while offering an uplifting message to seek the good in all people and in all things. A lot of my favorite teachers are either Anusara certified or affiliated. The alignment principles have helped me learn how keep myself safe and to take care of my back in any yoga class and I always leave class feeling so much better than when I walked in.

If you live in Phoenix and are looking for a great place to practice yoga, I encourage you to give A Desert Song a try.

My Personal Experience On The Diet Roller Coaster

I love food. I come from a food loving family and as a result have struggled with my weight for as long as I can remember. My mom tells me I was a skinny little girl. But I have no recollection of this period of life; it must have been very brief! I just remember being chubby and most childhood pictures confirm my memories. I progressed from ‘chubby’ to ‘big’ to ‘overweight.’ It is no fun being a fat teenager, especially in our ‘model perfect super thin is always in’ society. The summer prior to my entering 9th grade I went on my first diet subsisting on green salad, cottage cheese, and fruit. I slimmed down, but it didn’t last.

The struggles continued through the college years, where I vacillated between celery and popcorn deprivation and ice cream and Cheese-It binges, all the while over-depending on aerobics classes in a feeble attempt to compensate. Weekends at home meant loading up on Mom’s wonderful cooking and indulging in my favorite local pizza & beer and promising to start a new diet first thing Monday. The ups and downs were exhausting. Eating and dieting were an obsession.

Over the next ten plus years the dieting ups and downs continued. I gained and lost the same 10-30 pounds over and over and over. I tried every diet out there–Atkins, Pritikin, South Beach, Grapefruit, Weight Watchers, Sommersize, Schwarzbein, Fat Flush, low carb, high carb, vegetarian, and through it all my love of food continued.

Why Diets Don’t Work

According to Drs. Roizen and Oz, in their bestselling book, You: On A Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management, “When you try to ‘diet’ by going for long periods of time without eating or by eating way too few calories, your brain senses the starvation and sends an SOS signal through your body to store fat because famine is on its way. That’s why people who go on extreme fasts and extremely low calorie diets don’t lose the expected weight. They store fat as a natural protective mechanism. To lose weight, you have to keep your body from switching into starvation mode. The only way to do it: “Eat often, in the form of frequent, healthy meals, and snacks.”

Other reasons diets fail include:

1. Eating the wrong foods, like overly processed chemically laden foods, simple refined sugars, refined flours, high fructose corn syrup and saturated foods. We have gone from consuming 7.5 pounds of sugar a year in 1700 to 114 pounds in 1967 to 150 pounds on average today! And it has virtually no nutritional value at all–no vitamins or minerals–just ‘empty calories.’ Studies have linked this increased sugar consumption to increased rates of obesity and diabetes. The more processed foods we eat, the less room we leave for the whole grains, fresh vegetables and protein-rich foods our bodies really need to help us stay healthy and grounded. According to USDA data, people who eat diets high in sugar get less calcium, fiber, folate, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, iron, and other nutrients. They also consume fewer fruits and vegetables. Foods made from white flour also have very poor satiety value, says the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, so you end up eating more to get full and increase the likelihood that you will end up overweight.
2. Emotional Eating. We don’t just eat when we are physically hungry. Many of us eat when we are happy or sad, tired or stressed. We eat for lots of reasons beyond physical hunger. Sometimes we eat because something looks good or smells good even if we just had a big lunch and aren’t hungry or to fill an emotional void. Most diets fail to address this important aspect of feeding ourselves.
3. Restrictions, Restrictions, Restrictions. A lot of diets tell us what we can’t have and leave out whole categories of foods. We may be able to sustain this eating style for a while, but usually, in time we begin to crave what we are missing and revert to old ways. Cycling between all or nothing thinking. The most successful change occurs slowly. It takes at least 28 days to form a new habit. A better approach may be to focus on slowly introducing new foods and learning to gradually make healthy replacements for less healthy foods. For example, using salsa instead of sugar laden ketchup or whole grain bread instead of white bread.

Through the years I have learned a lot about food and nutrition and cooking, about what works and what doesn’t. It has included lots of trial and error. I have read more books than I care to admit, taken cooking classes, worked in restaurants and for a caterer, and even cooked as a personal chef for a while. For a time, transferring my passion from eating food to cooking food worked as a weight management technique. There is something about cooking all day and being up to your elbows in food that is overwhelming to the senses and strangely satiating, although not altogether healthy! Replacing one obsession with another is not a viable solution.

A healthy balanced life requires a healthy relationship with food. In our society we tend to treat food as the enemy, something to be constantly feared. Trips to France and Italy helped me learn a new appreciation for food. It is an important component of life, something to be enjoyed and savored. There I learned that it is possible to enjoy food, to have a healthy relationship with food while maintaining a healthy weight. I have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for several years. I still go up and down a bit–my weight tends to fluctuate 3-5 pounds depending on the time of year and life circumstances, amount of exercise I am getting, and overall satisfaction level with my life. Minor adjustments are required from time to time, when a couple of pounds sneak up, but no major dietary overhauls.

The key is to focus on real food, whole grains, fruits and veggies, and lean proteins, enjoying the occasional decadent treat. These foods can be so much more satisfying and delicious than the over-processed, chemicalized, nutrient-depleted stuff so many of us have become accustomed to eating.

I am not your typical yoga student. I can’t really say that I like “working out.” I have tried various forms of exercise through the years, not because I ever really loved it, but as a means of helping to control my weight. I usually felt better after exercise, be it jogging, aerobics, step, or weight training, but I can’t honestly say I ever loved the process. It was only a means to an end.

Back in 1998, I was leading a stressful life–I was newly divorced, working as a healthcare consultant traveling several weeks each month and suffering from excruciating back pain and sciatica. I was suffering and miserable and wanted relief. An MRI revealed herniated discs in my low back and a doctor recommended physical therapy. After six weeks I wasn’t much better and so the doctor wanted to inject cortisone into my low back. I didn’t want anyone shooting anything into or near my spine! Something inside my head told me to try yoga. I have this inner voice that can be really insistent at times so I found a yoga studio, explained my situation and the receptionist recommended the classes and teachers that would be best suited for me.

I hobbled into the first class and planted myself in the back of the room doing what I could and resting in child’s pose when it became more than I could handle. After the first class I felt a little better so I kept going back. Slowly and steadily the pain started to recede and I became hooked. Over the years yoga has been a constant in my life. The one form of exercise I have been able to commit to. As a result I have received its benefits. It has been there for me in good times and bad and seen me through love and loss, success and failure, and the everyday ups and downs of life.

I haven’t “progressed” with the challenging postures as quickly as others who are more physically fit or who had the advantage of relatively healthy bodies or youth when they started. I was in my mid 30s and pretty beat up when I first got on the yoga mat. I will never look like a yoga journal cover model or fold myself up like a pretzel and you know what? It doesn’t matter. The practice has guided me because I have stuck with it slowly and steadily. I have kept going back for more; at times it has been intermittent; life has a way of getting in the way of our best intentions and yet I have always ultimately gotten back to it.

I think that is what makes me so excited about sharing everything I can about this practice with others like me–others who don’t fit the expected profile of yoga student. I want to help everyone I can learn that yoga can help heal your body and enrich your life, regardless of your age, health, or experience. Yoga is for anybody and everybody. You just need to find the style and teacher who work for you. There is such a smorgasbord of yoga options that there really is something for everyone.

Two of my current interests are yoga & food and my commitment to trading in a life of ‘dieting’ for a life of healthy delicious eating and living. My passion for yoga spills over into a lot of my life. I credit it with helping heal my body and enrich all aspects of my life. A few days away from my mat and I find myself craving it.

My yoga practice combined with a focus on feeding myself healthy delicious food also helped me lose thirty pounds and keep it off. It’s funny, but when finally I stopped worrying about losing weight, and instead began to focus on getting healthy, the pounds gradually disappeared.

Yoga has been so helpful to me I hope to help make it accessible and user-friendly, especially for the over-forty beginner. I get excited when I learn just how many people are doing yoga these days. It seems like wherever I go I meet another person engaged in a yoga practice, which is great. But there are a lot of people who are hesitant to give it a try. I hope to help change this by encouraging people to find the right class, or if they can, take a few private or small group sessions to get comfortable with the poses. I am living proof that you don’t have to be particularly athletic or flexible to experience the benefits of a yoga practice.

Eating is such an important aspect of life; I think it is important to enjoy food while maintaining a healthy weight. Actually, it is hard to overeat good healthy food. Did you ever hear of anyone getting up in the middle of the night craving salmon or kale? It’s the junk food, especially the highly processed snacks made from bad fats, sugar, high fructose corn syrup and white flour that cause the problems. When we start to trade in the processed stuff for real food, we get more balanced and the cravings diminish. Diets are a bad idea on many levels. A topic to be explored in greater detail for sure.

Welcome to Simple Nourished Living

What are the ingredients for living a simple nourished life? I have been exploring variations on this theme for as long as I can remember and want to share what I have learned and continue to learn, as well as gain insight from you as you share your ideas and comments with me.

Our world is moving very quickly and it’s just so easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of it all, losing sight of our true desires. What is a simple nourished life and what does it take to create one? What is necessary to live the life you really, really want? My desire for all of us is to create lives nourished with passion, purpose and joy.

For me some key ingredients in a simple nourished life are:

• Yoga
• Gratitude
• Friends & Family
• Delicious Healthy Food
• Guiltless Self-Care
• Simplification (Clearing away the unnecessary to create space for what’s personally meaningful)

So if any of these topics are of interest, I hope you will stop by often, check out what’s new and share your comments and thoughts.