These last week/s of the holidays coming up to the New Year can be full of both joy as well as stress. Since this month’s theme is PLEASURE, I would like to give you a quick and simple way to change your mind state from stressed to pleasurable in a very short time.

Did you know that when you are in a state of gratitude and appreciation your brain emits the feel good hormone dopamine? That’s right, when you appreciate something, your mind immediately calms down and gets a warm and fuzzy pleasurable feeling, dare I call it a ‘blissed out’ feeling? Better than a glass of wine and less calories.

So for the remaining days of this month/year, I would like to focus you on creating a lot of appreciation in your life. Here are some simple do-able tips that will help you stay bathed in pleasurable emotions even when things get stressed or dysfunctional over the holidays.

1. APPRECIATE YOURSELF. Take a few moments each day and focus positively on your self. ...

We are deep into the holiday season now and it’s a time that we easily get stressed out, overstimulated and then eat to calm down. As masters of weight, we are learning to move beyond this by setting ourselves and our environment up for success. That is what we will focus on this week, staying out of overwhelm and using our environment to help us do so.

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PLEASURE BREAKS

Our mind gets easily stimulated, then overstimulated and then overwhelmed. Research shows that overstimulation leads us to get more emotional, eat more, drink more, smoke more and more!

Research also shows that if you take a 5 minute break every couple of hours and breathe and change up what you are doing, you can calm your mind down and give it a moment to REBOOT itself, just like a computer needs rebooting.

This week, I invite you to challenge yourself to move past the voice that says “I have no time to take a break” and give yourself some holiday season pleasure...

I hope that you are enjoying the holiday season so far. I am amazed at how quickly it arrived! This week, as we head into the more social time of this year, I would like us to look at how we can find a way to continue to focus on weight release and also indulge in some our favorite holiday foods.

Today, I want to focus specifically on how we work powerfully with our body to enjoy the holidays and some of our favorite treats and still be on track for weight release.

STEPS TO CREATE A FOUNDATION FOR PLEASURE

How many times have you eagerly anticipated a favorite holiday treat, only to get carried away and eat too much of that holiday treat and let what started as a pleasurable experience quickly dissolve into a painful one?

I certainly have felt that pain of overindulging hundreds of times over the years as I struggled with my weight. I remember once eating a whole batch of my favorite Christmas cookies and lying to my mother when she was looking for them, saying they had...

Welcome to December and our theme of True Pleasure! I am looking forward to exploring how we can use pleasure to impact our weight and our lives in positive ways.

EACH PLEASURABLE WEEK

At the beginning of each week this month, as you plan and prepare for your successful weight release, I am going to give you tools that I think will allow you to experience more pleasure on your journey of weight mastery. This week we will focus on your mind and pleasure.

Please listen to the micro coaching session (download link at top of this email) where I also walk you through getting refocused on your weight release for this coming week.

GET OUT YOUR PLEASURE SCALE

Curiosity killed my fat. It’s true. In order for me to have maintained a weight release of forty pounds for twenty years, I really had to cultivate a serious curiosity about myself and what truly gave me pleasure other than food. There was a time, my monthly mastery friends, that I believed the only thing that gave...

I hope that you are enjoying connecting this month as much as I am. It’s amazing to see what you notice about your thoughts, your body and your life when you really tune in.

One thing I have noticed over the years of helping people master their weight is how easy it is to go from eating one serving of something and then, because the jar or the box or bowl of the thing I am eating is still there, I continue to graze on that thing. The tricky thing is that my mind has registered only one serving, but my body registered, recorded, and stored (as extra calories), 3 servings.

Often, it is those extra bites that create the difference between a weight release week and a weight maintain or gain week.

I have been maintaining for years, but still catch myself with the jar of peanut butter eating an extra spoonful or two… That is when I know the peanut butter is in charge of me and not the other way around.

What do I do?
I get back in charge.
How?

I have learned a simple tool that...

We will look at how we connect with others in our lives with an awareness on how they support or challenge our weight mastery. I invite you to observe these connections and use these observations to create more support based connections for your weight mastery.

We interact so habitually with people in our lives that we often don’t see how some interactions with loved ones, friends or co-workers are detrimental to our long term weight mastery. Once we are aware, we can strategize how to balance these relationships with our own health goals.

How do people challenge our weight mastery?

Their needs get in the way of our self care.
They bring unhealthy food into our environment.
Interacting with them stimulates us and creates emotion so we want to sedate ourselves with food.

How do we begin to move the equation to having more support in our lives?

1. MOST IMPORTANT: We must become conscious of the challenges. Who is a support and who is a challenge to our Weight Mastery? This is...

I remember when I struggled with my weight-- it was like I lived in my head and my body was this disconnected entity existing below me. Every once in a while, I would feel the extra flesh pressing against my waistline or see my reflection and I would react by feeling horrible and habitually spew poisonous word darts at my poor body:

• “You are disgusting”
• “I wish I could cut the fat off my thighs!”
• “Nobody could love you, you fat slob.”

How do we stay disconnected from our body?

• We have negative thoughts about our body and say nasty things about it.
• We feed our body food that pollutes it.
• We do not exercise it.
• We over work and exhaust it.

RE-CONNECT WITH YOUR BODY

When a couple is in therapy trying to repair their relationship, they often have homework to teach them to become more loving towards one another.  Of course, there may be things that we want to change, but step 1 to making positive change is setting up a positive...

As we head into November and our theme of CONNECTION, we will start by looking at our connection within ourselves and learning to become more aware of our actions and thoughts.

Do you know how many times a day you mindlessly reach for food? Not because you are hungry, but simply because you were “triggered” unconsciously? Maybe something happened externally (like your co-worker made an annoying comment) or internally (you were stressing about taxes being due) or maybe you simply saw some food and reached for it and popped it in your mouth--without even giving yourself a chance to think if you really needed it or wanted it?

How many times do you think a certain thought and immediately there’s a response or an answer from your brain, without you being aware of even thinking about it?  “I wonder what Pilates is like?” or “I’d like to do ____” and with no further exploration, your mind has answered for you, “Oh, I couldn’t...