I’m quite sure that over the course of our lives, my son is going to teach me quite a lot. He already had, before he was even a part of this world.

Even with a mother who is a well-trained psychologist with a speciality in eating issues, he’s reminding that it’s he who’s the expert on his own eating.

I’ve been saying for years that we need to get back to our own intuitive sense of what is right for our bodies. That we need to listen to our hunger and fullness cues, the ones that McDonald’s and The Biggest Loser and the rest of our culture have tried to preempt. That once upon a time, as children, we knew what we needed.

And I’m going to be really honest with you here. When my son started having some feeding issues, I let what I know to be true fly out the window for a moment. When the professionals told me that a typical baby only eats about 2-3 oz. of milk at a feeding, and my son wanted more, I assumed something was wrong.

Am I overfeeding him? Do I not know how to read his hunger signals? Am I making him dependent on food to fall asleep? Is he missing his satiety hormones and I’m going to keep giving him milk and he’s going to get ill?

We’ll chock this up to a combination of post-baby hormones, sleep deprivation, and the vulnerability of new motherhood.

Fortunately, I encountered a smart pediatrician who looked at me during one of our many visits and said, “Screw what those other people say. This is your kid. If he’s hungry, feed him.”

Duh, mom.

It unfortunately took that reality check to snap me back into my own truth. We are all born with a natural sense of what our bodies need to flourish. Nature doesn’t want us to eat too much or too little. It wants us to grow into the size and shape that’s right for us – and that takes eating as much as is right for us. Not as much as some “expert” tells us is the right amount. If we can cut through all the static, we are our own experts.

My three-week old son reminded me of that. He’s pretty darn smart in his old age.

Do you trust your body to tell you how much too eat? If not, when did you lose that trust? 

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been a little less active around these parts as of late. There’s a good (a really good, if I do say so :) reason for that, and his name is Oscar!

Our son was born a little over two weeks ago. He’s healthy, happy, and the light of my life. We’ve been getting to know each other over the past couple weeks and I’m learning how this whole parenting gig works. It’s an incredible adventure, and I’m so fortunate to have some time to dedicate to him.

In anticipation of his arrival, I wrote a few posts (while my brain was still functioning at fuller capacity, fortunately for readers!) and scheduled a few guest posts. You’ll be seeing those over the next several weeks, interspersed, hopefully, with some more current stuff as I can manage to write. I’m still trying to post interesting things to facebook and twitter and stay connected to all of you.

Thank you for all of your support during my pregnancy and with Oscar’s birth. Wishing each of you nourishment for your spirit!

Warmly,

Ashley

If you’ve lost steam with your New Year’s Resolution to love yourself a little bit more, today’s guest post comes from Michelle Marie McGrath, self-love advocate extraordinaire and Nourishing Body Image Aware Nominee. She shares some wonderful ideas for promoting self-care and nourishment.

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So often our focus is external, as we rush around keeping ourselves busy, trying to juggle work, family and relationships.  It can be easy to become depleted as we exhaust ourselves, racing from one thing to the next and trying to move through a never-ending ‘to do’ list.

We put so much effort into our relationships with others, but how much effort do we put into our relationship with ourselves?  When we make our own wellbeing a priority, we are far more able to relate to everyone else in a healthy way, free from a sense of obligation or resentment.

 Let’s explore 5 ways to make that happen:

 1.     Give yourself 10 minutes of undivided attention every day

Turn off your phone. Close your laptop. Sit. Close your eyes. Breathe. Relax your shoulders and just imagine all cares and concerns, dissolving with each exhale.  Notice how your body is feeling. Observe how deep or shallow your breath is.  Is there any part of you in particular that is attracting your attention?  Bring your awareness into your heart and ask ‘what do I most need from me?’ Listen to the answer.

 2.     Create an intimate relationship with yourself

 When you create more intimacy with yourself, then you can extend this ability to others.  How can you be truly present and available in your relationships with others if you don’t really know you?  Remember that the way you perceive all your relationships is influenced by how you relate to you.  How do you create an intimate relationship with yourself? It begins by simply spending time with you, in the same way you would spend time with someone you love and value.

3.     Give yourself permission to feel all your feelings

Let yourself feel however you are feeling without judgment.  Allow yourself to be the compassionate observer.  Acknowledge how far you’ve come, rather than how ‘far’ you feel you have to go. If a friend was having a bad day and wanted to talk about it, you would probably listen patiently and empathize.  Can you extend this courtesy to yourself?

4.     Treat your body like your best friend

This could start in a gentle way with speaking kindly to yourself.  When the inner critic starts, observe without resisting and say “thanks for your input” and then move your focus towards more encouraging thoughts.  Using statements such as “I’m doing the best I can in this moment” can be a way to interrupt and create new neural pathways.  Celebrate food as an essential part of the way you nurture yourself.  Tune into how your body is feeling.  Move your body in a way you enjoy, not as a punishment.  Buy the best quality underwear that you can, so that you feel fantastic underneath, regardless of how casually or formally you are dressed.

5.     Declutter your space

Make your personal space a sacred haven.  It never fails to lift our spirits when we declutter and create room for new energy.  Check out a Feng Shui bagua map if you would like to focus on a particular area in your life.  If you are feeling stagnant in any area, this always seems to help.  If you would like additional support from the universe, it’s great to do a big clear out in the two weeks after the full moon. Set your intention for a new start at the time of the new moon.  Cleanse with a sage stick, burn some incense and light a candle.  You deserve to live in a space that supports and nourishes the most important person in your life: you.

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Michelle Marie McGrath is the creator of
 Sacred Self’s Self-love range of Alchemical oils and cards. She’s the co-author of “Love and Oneness” in the best-selling Adventures In Manifesting series. She’s also created “100% self-love ecourse”, “33 Days of Self-love” (starting 22 April 2013) and author of “7 ways to love yourself” e-book.  Michelle is 
passionate about falling in love with ALL parts of herself, and creating products and services that remind others to 
do the same.

Living in a culture that treats thinness as it’s the golden ticket to all things happy and wonderful, it’s not hard to understand why millions of people flock to the latest diet trends. In our society,  achieving a certain body can seem to become almost a matter of survival. And pursuing survival leads people to do all sorts of irrational things.

The tricky thing is that those irrational ideas don’t seem quite so crazy when we’re in the midst of them. In fact, they seem like the most rational and necessary behaviors in the world. Think about a relationship that you’ve had where you can now look back with the perspective that time and distance provides. There are undoubtedly things that you did, maybe at the beginning or end of said relationship, that you recognize now as ridiculous. Standing outside your lover’s window at late at night holding up a radio playing a Peter Gabriel song, for instance?

Likewise, the drive for thinness can leads us down paths that are silly and ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst. And, sadly, it’s often only the benefit of time that shines the needed light on how absurd these ideas are.

Take for example some of the craziest diets that have somehow made their way into public use:

Sunglasses Diet – A Japanese company recently started marketing blue-tinted sunglasses that reportedly make all food like unappealing. The idea is to curb your appetite by changing the color and appearance of the food you are considering eating. No mind that you could, say, take the sunglasses off. Or the fact that you look totally ridiculous wearing blue glasses at lunch in a dimly lit restaurant. At least you could curb you’re eating out — no one will want to be seen with you!

Tapeworm Diet — It’s still not clear whether this is an urban legend, but reportedly stars of the 1950s took capsules containing tapeworms that would then cause dramatic weight loss. Because, obviously, they are parasites! Call me crazy, but I try to avoid ingesting things that are known to cause disease and death.

Cotton Ball Diet — Another one of the more dangerous diets, the Cotton Ball Plan suggested ingesting cotton balls (low in calories apparently, and high in fiber) as an appetite suppressant. The fact that they can also clog your digestive system and serious malnutrition apparently was considered unimportant. (Note that if you find yourself eating non-food items, you should talk to a mental health professional.)

Swamp Diet — In a classic case of allowing a correlation to be confused with causation, one scientist found that people who lived near swamps tended to be heavier. His conclusion was that to maintain your figure, you need to simply move to a drier climate.

Miracle Soap — Many in China and Japan have sworn by the so-called miracle seaweed soap that they claim removes body fat in three out of four cases. Call me a skeptic, but my take? You might look cleaner and smell nicer with a good wash, but you’re not going to lose weight.

Drinking Man’s Diet – In a classic representation of the 1960′s, Robert Cameron began selling a pamphlet describing his “genius” diet solution: don’t eat, just drink. We would now call that alcoholism, but back then 2.4 million people bought the instruction guide and limited their intake to what Cameron called “man-type” food, items low in carbohydrates like steak and gin.

What’s significant is that each of these diets made a huge splash when it was introduced. People grasped on to soap and gin and cotton balls like they were the holy grail, only to be seriously disappointed when the results were absent, fleeting, or, in some cases, deadly. What’s also significant is that many of these diets were supported by trained medical doctors and backed by “research” (not the randomized controlled clinical trials we should expect, mind you). So while it would be easy to call the individuals who used them gullible or even stupid, they might not be so different from the rest of us.

I have a strong hunch that many of the diet trends that perpetuate our popular media today will be looked upon with eye rolls and smirks in years to come. Why are the Paleolithic Diet or HCG Diet or Wheat Belly Diet any different than those above? Just because the books these days are glossier and have their own Facebook pages? Because we see doctors-made-famous-by-reality-television promoting them? Because we feel more desperate than ever given the national push to address this so-called epidemic?

Personally, I don’t trust any way of eating that suggests cutting out dessert or leaving your body deprived of certain nutrients. I’ve seen enough of the comings and goings of certain fads to hop on any diet train. What I’ve learned is that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And if a diet claims to be able to bring you happiness, popularity, or anything other than a possible reduction on a machine that you should probably throw away, you should toss it out with the blue-tinted sunglasses.