Happy Monday! If you celebrated Easter or Passover, I hope you have had a lovely holiday.
I am continuing our conversation from last week, if you don’t mind. I have been thinking a lot about the feedback I received last week, both published on Substack and privately to my email.
I am very committed to the points I made and I want to encourage you to stop listening to people giving nutrition and weight loss advice for a day, or even a week. Let’s do an experiment.
What if I told you that you already know what you should eat? What if for ONE day, we didn’t get on a scale and we committed to talking to ourselves like we talk to people that we really love? Who are those people for you? When you wake up tomorrow, what if you set your intentions for the day about how you’d like to feel? Personally, I’d like to have more of my brain to focus on some business ideas and not on food and how I don’t quite fit in my jeans perfectly well. And I’d like enough energy to have fun playing pickleball and get through the day without being tired. Next, I am going to give myself a compliment of some sort and continue with only positive self-talk as if I am talking to my daughter or my best friend. I will make choices about what to eat according to what will support my intentions for the day AND what I actually would enjoy eating. No second-guessing, no criticism. What if we decided to eat food for the purpose of food - nourishment and pleasure? Not for boredom, not because some influencer eats a certain way, not to punish ourselves…. Let’s see what happens.
After a week of eating more protein, especially at breakfast, I am here to tell you it was a good strategy for me. I was less hungry overall and not craving snacks or sweets as much. Food for thought, BUT I also want to mention that we should all be eating differently. There is no perfect diet and not one way we should all be eating. Nutrition science is somewhat flawed since any study you read did not include you as a participant. Furthermore, sometimes the data is based on men, not women, or rodents. My point is that we all have different foods that don’t work well for us, different levels of blood sugar sensitivity or resistance, different ratios of muscle to fat, levels of activity, on and on.
If you watch my Instagram lives on Mondays at 5:00 pm PT, Cole Kazdin will be my guest tonight to discuss all of the above and her book, What’s Eating Us. I hope you can tune in and ask questions or just hang out and be with us.
Other notes:
I absolutely loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Couldn’t put it down. I have a long list of what I want to read next, but I am leaning towards Geraldine Brooks’s Horse or Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.
Hubs and I started watching the new season of Succession and it continues to be must-see-TV!
xx
Sound advice, Vivian!
The topic is spot-on. Informative and thought provoking. Best for me is to eat to live; not live to eat.