How to start loving your body

In our teen years or later in life, with or without a reason, every woman goes at least once in her lifetime through a bad relationship with her body. Blame the society, the media, the stereotypes...the reasons do not matter always too much, but the effect on our self-awareness and even health can be devastating. Strict diets, psychological pain, tensed social relationships.

Although we cannot predict when this crisis will take place, at least we can learn how to cope with them in a delicate and constructive way. 

Based on her experience, not always happy, Laura Fenamore elaborated a couple of advices aimed to stop our negative way of treating ourselves. 'I went from being totally irresponsible with my health, and with my heart, to being completely devoted to self-care and self-love'. This wisdom does not come overnight and the author herself needed a lot of time and failures to find her way. But, the most important is to be positive and turn every experience we go through into an asset for our inner development. 'Though we don't always succeed at what we set to accomplish, that does not make our efforts failures'. Finding the right support either as a group or as an individual is very important in some stages of the development. 

For someone being victim of abuse and unhappy life occurences being a victim and keep being one the entire life is a logical result. However, it is possible to go beyond the paradigm of 'victim stories' that 'keep us stuck'. 'After recognizing that we are not in fact a victim of anything or anyone, we are able to take back our power and take control of our eating habits, lifestyle and ultimately, our happiness'. 

In this process, the laws of attraction are very important and my personal experience too proves the importance of a positive mind. Good things start simply to happen to those who are wishing for. Just because. 

Being in love with ourselves is the beginning of normality and of a meaningful life celebrating the present and using every moment of life for being grateful and happy. 'When we fall in love with ourselves (...) we begin to fell a deep sense of self-care and want to nourish our bodies with what is best for them'. 

A book recommended to anyone interested in increasing self-respect and understanding our bodies not like standards expected by the society but as a way of expressing ourselves. It is well written and can be easily read. My only regret is that there are not too many examples offered which can offer even more inspiration and guidance to the reader.  

Disclaimer: I was offered the book via NetGalley.com, but the opinions are, as usual, my own

On diets and discipline

source: www.abovethecrowd.com

I gave up my daily strict diet for a long time. Not because of laziness or because I had some sudden health problems, but because I wanted to have the pleasure of tasting those foods that I forbade myself to eat for more than a decade. After all, I wanted to improve my cooking skills and one of my biggest challenges was to discover how to match different food and tastes. With a very limited list of foods on the daily menu, I was unable to do it so I put my diet on hold for a while. At the same time, I continued with exercise, the interdictio

n of eating after 7pm and so on. But I will approach those aspects on a different post. For now, I want to recall my memories of the diet years.

Teenager temptations

As many teenagers, I started to carefully watch my weight when I was 16. Most probably, today girls start around 14 (hope not earlier). I was not fat or overweight according to the general standards, but I was allergic and without a clear daily eating plan. The life was hectic; we, the kids were mostly left on our own, with busy parents working hard for allowing us the best education they were not able to have for themselves. 

Once the week we had the family meal with some diversity of foods on the table, but for the rest of the week, our dining times were rarely matching. I was enjoying a lot of freedom to wander in the city or to read till late in the night but the food was never important enough to make me think more than in terms of nourishment. I was eating when hungry and when hungry, needed to see what is available in the fridge. And the choices were usually limited, but we had a healthy bunch of milk, eggs, veggies and fruits. 

My diet plans

My diet plans were an attempt to avoid the frequent allergies that were turning very dangerous sometimes, plus to keep myself fit as a good looking girl. I did not have at the time too many resources in order to organize my eating habits (no Internet or glossy magazines lecturing about it or even products mentioning the level of fat). But I knew that too much oil is not healthy, and chocolate is bad, and wheat can create weight problems. I ended up eating a lot of tomatoes, a glass of milk, and a lot of black bread per day. Apples were my favourite sweets, with some melon or peaches or apricots. Sweets and pastry in general were forbidden. My 'luck' was that my diet plans were never took too seriously in the family and rather considered a typical outburst of the age. 10 years after, I was still eating maximum twice the day, with a generous breakfast limited to: black bread, eggs, tomatoes and maybe some very low fat cheese. 

I remember that it was not very easy at the beginning, but I succeeded to plan everything carefully with a discipline that helped me later to have a good time management and an almost perfect career organization and a very successful writing time. I added to the diet a very clear set of exercises in the morning, that I still practise from time to time, plus a walking of minimum 60 minutes. I never did a strict control of my weight, but I knew that I was close to the very skinny ideal. Nothing worried me and the fact that I eliminated the allergies from my life for a long time - later on I discovered that mostly, there are associated with immunity problems so food is not always their main cause. 

Lessons learned

Any mother coping with her girls' new sudden diet plans will hate me maybe for saying this, but honestly, I don't know where I would have been without my diet. Once I realized that I can discipline my stomach, I knew that I can achieve everything I realistically planned. I know now that it was not 100% normal, but for a while, eating was not my priority, unless for having enough strength to work, read and write. 

The same discipline helped me to keep my metabolism after little by little I extended the list of foods and meals I wanted to have back into my life. I still stop eating after 7pm during the week, and I eat when I am hungry. I am mostly interested in healthy recipes and salads and the sweet pastry is the experiment I try only once the week. 

As in the case of many things in life, I feel more free now than when I was a rebellious teenager. Plus, I have a nice blog where I can share recipes and food tips.