Lately I started thinking that it would be really good to design a healthy, delicious breakfast to eat every morning before my workout instead of just grabbing whatever on the way to the gym.

My perfect breakfast would:

• Feature yogurt so that I can make probiotics a daily instead of “sometimes” habit (yogurt is also a great source of protein).
• Contain nuts and/or flax, both good sources of Omega 3 healthy fats and proteins.
• Be delicious enough to eat every day without getting boring.

So the perfect solution for me seems to be muesli or granola with plain yogurt. I can make the muesli/granola from scratch (cheaper, and I know what has gone into it) and keep it in the freezer so that I only have to make it once every couple of weeks.

Here are a couple of recipes I’m going to try:

• Muesli as created by Kathryn Elliott of Limes & Lycopene
• Epicurious’ Quick Omega-3 Granola Recipe

This power breakfast habit is going to be my tweak for March

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christiansvaneskolding/

Related posts:

• Tweak: Protein for Breakfast
• More Yogurt Benefits!

On Wednesday I was interviewed by the wonderful Kelly McCausey over at Moms Talk Network.  You can find the interview on the Moms Resource Blog.

I talked about travel, my family and gave some advice for moms who are struggling with clutter and/or emotional eating.  Go have a look!

Related posts:

• A Treat for Valentine’s Day

Old habits die hard   I had been planning to do new pictures ever since I began working on NurturingHope.com.  But I always put it off.  I need a haircut, I should wait until I have this or that new item of clothing — the perfectionistic excuses went on and on.  Even though I’m happy with my size and how I look most of the time, I have good days and bad days like everyone does.

So finally today, thanks to encouragement from a wonderful new friend Andrea at www.TheJuicyWoman.com, I took the plunge and had my husband Martin snap a new picture for the site.  Here it is!

(I love the tile wall behind me — this is taken on our front terrace in the lovely little home we have rented for our stay here in Tunisia.)

No related posts.

It’s like a gift when I have a flash of insight that turns my perception of reality upsidedown.  Most of the time, I love those moments of sudden clarity and today I had one of them.

It’s been just over a year since I walked away from diets and eating plans.  A year of eating whatever I want.  And I’ve still been slowly and steadily burning off the extra fat my body carries.  Some people call this intuitive eating; my goal is to eat what I really want when I’m hungry and stop eating when I’m full.  It sounds easy, but of course it isn’t.

Learning to eat intuitively is a process and I’ve had lots of ups and downs.  I don’t always honor myself by taking the time to think about what I really want to eat and then making sure that I feed myself what I want.  I don’t always stop eating when I’m satisfied.  And fairly often I still eat when I’m not hungry.  I sometimes eat out of boredom, eat when I’m frustrated, eat when I’m fearful or angry or sad.

I know it’s not helpful to beat myself up when I fall short of the ideals of intuitive eating.  But of course I feel disappointed and guilty sometimes when I know I have just eaten emotionally instead of out of hunger.  Today I was pondering this and that is when the flash of insight struck.

Before I set out the goal of eating when hungry, I ate without any consideration whatsoever of whether I was hungry or not.  I ate whenever I had the urge to eat, physical or emotional.  (I was able to lose a substantial amount of weight eating whether I was hungry or not because I alternated between a plan that cut carbs and a low-fat, low GI plan.  Neither plan restricted portions.  However, eventually I reached a plateau at about 260 lbs and could not seem to go lower.)

So back to the insight!  Today I realized that while, yes, I do still eat for emotional reasons sometimes, I am always conscious of doing so.  I know when I’m eating to satisfy hunger and I know when I’m eating to try to stuff an emotion.  And so of course I do far less emotional eating than I have ever done before in my life.  I realized that I have a level of consciousness about my emotional eating that I have never, ever had before and that this consciousness has become a truly ingrained habit.

That’s progress!  Instead of feeling disappointed that I do sometimes still emotionally eat, I can feel proud that I am so aware of my body’s hunger cues and my urges to eat for emotional reasons.

Can you turn your perceptions around to see if there are any victories hiding behind your disappointments?  What are they?

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/furryscalyman/

Read more posts about emotional eating here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Christmas and Emotional Eating

Tunisia has a long Mediterranean coastline and its cuisine is a fine example of the Mediterranean diet, rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and beans, fish and poultry, nuts and good oils.  These foods are high in antioxidants and fiber and nutrient-rich so they are naturally satisfying and healthy.

Tunisians love spicy food, and the national condiment and an ingredient in many dishes is a paste called harissa, made from garlic and smoked hot red peppers.

Some of the highlights of Tunisian food culture help illustrate why the traditional Mediterranean diet is so healthful:

• Couscous is one of the most popular meals in North Africa.  Couscous appears to be a finely-textured grain but the individual grains are actually made from semolina dough like pasta.  I buy wholewheat couscous to increase the fiber and nutrient content.  Couscous is frequently served with a stew of vegetables, sometimes with meat, chicken or poultry.  Couscous can also be served as a desert steamed with dried fruits, nuts, spices and drizzled with honey.
• An abundance of fruits and vegetables are grown in the northern coastal regions of Tunisia, where we live, and they are sold in the vast outdoor and indoor market nearby.  Depending on the season, we can buy fresh dates, citrus fruit, apples, pomegranates, nectarines, pears, peaches, plums, strawberries, melons, tomatoes, eggplant, artichokes, green onions, leeks, cabbage (red and green), peppers, fennel, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, fresh and cured olives and so much more.
• Dried beans, chickpeas, and lentils are sold in bulk.  Where we live, the most popular street food is a baguette filled with hot chickpeas, drizzled with olive oil and garnished with olives and tuna, egg or sardines.  I had this for breakfast the other day before the gym — my husband and I split one sandwich and I was full for hours.
• With such a long Mediterranean coastline, fish is a popular dish.  Fresh grilled fish, fresh and canned tuna, octopus and squid all figure prominently.
• Delicious Tunisian mint tea is made from green tea, black tea and mint.  Full of antioxidants and, when purchased at a cafe, unfortunately sugar.  I want to try substituting stevia for sugar.
• What do Tunisians eat when they want a snack?  Well, along with the deep fried sweets that are popular (we have these for a very occasional treat), a favorite snack option are the freshly roasted nuts and seeds that can be bought in little bags at ubiquitous little Fruits Secs stands.

Want to experiment with cooking Tunisian food?  You can check out some yummy Tunisian recipes here.

Read more posts about cooking at home here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Tweak: Cook at Home
• Tweak: Daily Fruits and Vegetables
• Tweak: Replace Trans Fats with Healthy Fats
• 16 Nutritious, Easy Crockpot Recipes for Cluttered Kitchens

“I am enough and I have enough,” immediately resonated with me.  Many times in my life I had found myself trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy by putting other people’s needs before my own.  In the workplace,  I worked long hours and took on unreasonable responsibilities.  I got into relationships with people whose addiction issues ensured that I’d be called upon to rescue them.  Instead of taking the time to truly nurture myself and put my needs first, I ate as a shortcut way to comfort myself.  I ate when I was tired, I ate when I was angry and I ate when I was sad or lonely.  I tried to make up for my perceived inadequacy by spending money and buying stuff.

And I always worried that I didn’t have enough or, worse, that I could not trust that I would have enough to survive in the future.  If I could afford the food I craved now, I should buy a lot of it and eat as much as I could.  Who knows when I would be able to buy it again!  I bought my son piles of toys at Christmas because what if next year we were too poor to enjoy Christmas?  And of course, when you don’t trust that you’ll have what you need in the future it’s natural to hang on to possessions as much as possible and as long as possible.

I have come to believe that emotional eating and clutter/hoarding both stem from a scarcity mindset.  We fear that there isn’t enough love, approval, money, or comfort in the world, and we try to protect ourselves against this scarcity by eating and hoarding.

Where did this scarcity mindset come from?  Many of us who struggle with emotional eating and clutter/hoarding didn’t get what we needed as kids or teens.  This deprivation takes many forms:  abuse or neglect or abandonment from a parent or parent figure, poverty or periods of financial insecurity, trauma or grief to name a few.  We gather our piles of possessions around us and eat when we’re not hungry to try to eliminate the fear of not being enough or not having enough.

It’s natural and good to want to keep oneself safe and protect yourself from deprivation, but in the case of emotional eating and clutter, this normal and positive instinct to protect ourselves backfires.  The result is a cluttered home and a body weighed down with fat.

What I’m asking you to do when you begin the Tweaks system is to start to trust.  Trust yourself and trust the universe to give you what you need when you need it.  I know this is scary, but I promise you that offering this trust is a critical part of transforming your life so that you can experience true abundance.  When you trust, you can learn to nurture yourself in positive ways and gradually release the stuff that crowds your life and the extra weight that pulls you down.

Read all Feelings posts here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Christmas and Emotional Eating

Somewhere in the poverty and emotional struggle of my teen years and early adulthood the dream got buried under the clutter, the emotional eating, and my resulting obesity.

But after I turned my life around, the dream of travel was suddenly within reach.  We moved abroad several years ago and the novelty of living in new places means that day-to-day life is interesting and stimulating.  Just before Christmas we took our kids to the Sahara Desert for a few days.  Yes, I rode a camel 8 miles into the desert and back out again!  And last week we made an unforgettable trip to Florence, Italy backpacker-style with our three teens.

This all would have been impossible seven or eight years ago.  It’s hard to pack for a trip when your home is chaotic and it’s hard to leave a house when you would be embarrassed to have anyone come look after it while you’re gone.  When I weighed over 350 pounds, it was even physically difficult to travel — airplane seats didn’t fit and I worried about going anywhere that might have chairs with arms.  Walking long distances was painful.

I’m writing this to encourage you to ask yourself what you would do if your clutter and your weight no longer held you back.  What are the things that you are truly passionate about?  What experiences are out there waiting for you? What would you do and whose lives could you touch if you could find a way to release the clutter and find your way back to a healthy size?  What does the life you are supposed to be living look like?

What’s your dream?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/decadence/

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

No related posts.

Nowadays my family eats breakfast and dinner together at the table almost every day.  I think this gives us the chance to touch base as a family, creating a stable routine as our day ramps up and winds down.  We have a lot of fun, laughs and sometimes some serious conversations.  But this wasn’t always the case.

During the worst of my times with a chaotic and cluttered house, a year or two before I met my husband and began to help raise his two daughters, meals at the table were unheard of.  My son didn’t get too many homecooked meals between six and eight years of age.  We ate fast food just about every day.  Most of his meals were eaten in the car or at a picnic table or out of a paper fast food bag while he was watching TV or playing computer games.

We’d head out in the morning to get coffee and donuts or Egg McMuffins.  Then my son would snack on stuff like canned fruit and cereal all day.  At night we’d either go back out to get fast food or go to a restaurant, or I would order in.  When I think back on that time I feel true regret and sadness.  My son is fortunate not to have developed a weight problem, and he eats well now, but I’m sad that I didn’t nourish him better when he was a little guy.

Studies seem to suggest a correlation between family dinners at the dinner table and lower drug use and other troubles for teens.  I don’t know if family dinners somehow help prevent kids from getting into trouble, or if they are just a feature of many families in which the kids are actively parented.  But the link is there.

If you are single or partnered without children, the benefit of eating at the table is just as strong.  Eating at the table is a foundation for learning to eat consciously.  When your table is cleared and you sit down to eat regularly, you’re more likely to cook and enjoy healthy foods.

Here are some points to consider when preparing to add the Eat Dinner at the Table Tweak to your routine:

• If your table has clutter on it, take a day (or two or three) to declutter it using the 15-minute-a-day declutter method.
• Clear the table right after dinner and give it a quick wipe so that it’s ready for your next meal.  Do the dishes or don’t — your call — but making sure that you are ready to set the table without having to do any extra work next time will really help this habit stick.
• If you are buying fast food or take out most nights, bring it home and eat it at the table anyway.  Order a pizza or Chinese?  Enjoy it at the table.  You deserve to eat your food in a nice, calm environment instead of furtively feeding yourself in the car, at your desk or at the coffee table.
• You can gradually make the table nice.  Use tableware that makes you happy and consider a centerpiece or some fresh flowers.  How about candles?  A few years ago I realized that I really like cloth napkins, and now we frequently set the table with them.  Find out what you like and what makes your food seem like a “real” meal.
• Try to keep conversation light during family dinners so that the family looks forward to the time.  We use our table for family meetings when we need to discuss problems, but never during meal times.

Remember:

Choose no more than one tweak per month – don’t try to pile them on! Practicing a single tweak for at least a full month gives you the best chance of forming a real habit and life change. Do not try to add another tweak until the previous tweak has become a habitual part of your life (this can sometimes take longer than a month).

This is all about loving yourself and creating a joyful life! Therefore, when choosing a new tweak to practice, pick one that is appealing and gives you a sense of anticipation.

Read all the posts about the Eat Dinner at the Table Tweak here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Tweak: Eat Consciously

Have you heard of the fat acceptance movement? It is a loose affiliation of individuals and organizations uniting around the idea that fat people are unfairly targeted for discrimination and hatred in our society. Of course, any of us who are or who have been fat know the truth of this like we know our own names. The revolutionary idea, to me at the time at least, is that this is not okay. Being reviled, discriminated against and treated poorly simply because we are fat is not okay. And, conversely, it’s okay to be fat.

In 1998 I was in my late 20s. It’s sometimes hard to remember exactly how I thought back then, because my worldview has changed so much in the past 10 years. But I recall feeling like my weight was the only thing about me that really mattered, and that because I was so fat I was really just an unacceptable failure as a human. The fat acceptance community helped me to see the irrationality of this belief, and I started to truly understand that I had intrinsic worth as a person and that I had a right to respect from others and, more importantly, some self respect.

There are many people who are active in the fat acceptance community and there are many points of view. There are strong disagreements about certain things within the community. Some people within the fat acceptance community feel that to even want to lose weight is a betrayal of yourself and other fat people. I have to disagree with this perspective. I have seen too many people, myself and others, whose health, mobility and quality of life have been severely compromised by obesity. I have had the experience of losing weight and keeping it off through healthy lifestyles changes, not “dieting.”

But the fact remains that the heart of fat acceptance, the idea that fat people have just as much of a right to stand tall in this world as thinner people, is fundamentally true. And I was able to take on this belief in my own worth because of fat acceptance. And maybe this is what helped me to start loving myself enough to begin to make the changes that have taken me where I am today.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• What Does it Mean to Offer Ourselves Radical Acceptance?

Last year, I read some of Geneen Roth’s excellent books about emotional eating and I realized that multitasking while eating made it just too easy to overeat. Frequently I would finish what I was eating and then discover that I hadn’t even paid attention enough to enjoy the food.

And once I started paying attention, I noticed something that was really interesting. Those times when I knew I was eating emotionally — something was bothering me and I was not really hungry — I was a little bit resistant to the idea of eating without distraction. That’s when I knew I was really onto something

How do you eat consciously?

• Eat without distraction from television, reading or loud music.
• Choose one place in your home — probably at your diningroom table — to eat. Make a point of always sitting down and eating in your chosen spot, even if you are eating just a little snack.
• Avoid heated discussions while eating.
• Treat yourself and your food with respect — use a plate and appropriate utensils.
• From time to time while eating, draw your attention to your food and really taste and experience it. Pay attention to the flavor, aroma, temperature and texture.

P.S. This is the tweak I have chosen to implement this month!

Remember:

Choose no more than one tweak per month – don’t try to pile them on!  Practicing a single tweak for at least a full month gives you the best chance of forming a real habit and life change.  Do not try to add another tweak until the previous tweak has become a habitual part of your life (this can sometimes take longer than a month).

This is all about loving yourself and creating a joyful life! Therefore, when choosing a new tweak to practice, pick one that is appealing and gives you a sense of anticipation.

Read more about eating consciously here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

No related posts.

It’s not that I hadn’t been doing laundry, mind you.  A couple of times a week I would wash three or four loads in a panicked laundry marathon.  (Sunday nights were popular because it would dawn on me, “What the heck are we all going to wear tomorrow??!”)  But since I was doing laundry under pressure, I would go through the huge heap trying to piece together enough outfits to get us all through a couple of days.  I couldn’t just wash everything because there was so much dirty laundry.

What happens when you can’t find missing socks in the chaos (hint: check under the kids’ beds and even between their sheets!)?   You guessed it — it seemed like I was always asking Martin to pop into Walmart and pick up yet another six-pack of socks or underwear because there were never enough.  When you’ve forgotten several favorite pairs of jeans or dresses at the bottom of a heap of clothes, it’s easy to think that you need to shop for more clothes because you have nothing to wear.

When I decided something had to be done,  I started a new routine:  washing, drying and putting away two loads of laundry per day, every day. In my large capacity washer, this was about twice as much laundry as our family of five generated on an ongoing basis, so I figured I’d be catching up on the backlog of laundry at the rate of one load a day.

Well, I did two loads of laundry a day almost every single day, and Mount Washmore gradually — very gradually — became smaller and smaller.  Believe it or not, it took more than a month to get to “bare floor” status.  This means that our family of five had more than 30 loads worth of backlogged dirty laundry!

Decluttering the Clothing

As I sorted and folded the clean laundry every day, I separated each item into one of three piles:

• Keep: the item was in good condition, still fit, and looked nice;
• Throw Away: the item was torn, stained, worn out, etc.;
• Donate: the item was in good condition but no longer fit or, if it did fit, it didn’t suit its owner.

Why didn’t I just trash the junky clothes without washing them?  This is where the crazy comes in     To this day, I find it nearly impossible to throw out an item of clothing that is dirty.  What would the garbagemen think??

I have to tell you that it was very challenging also to give some of the clothing away, my clothing in particular.  What if I gained weight and needed those bigger clothes?  What if I lost weight and could wear the smaller clothes again?  Well, the truth of the matter is that most of the clothes that didn’t fit me were also very dated, and if you look at your clothing critically you may find the same thing.  This anxiety that I had was compounded by the fact that I had suffered poverty in my teen and young adult years and I worried that I would find myself too broke to buy more clothing in the future when I needed it.  Well, that worry proved to be unfounded and I now truly believe that clearing out the clutter opens the door to abundance in our lives.

So I pushed forward through the anxiety and continued to trash and donate all the clothing that was in bad shape, didn’t fit, or that we just didn’t like.  Every time a donation bag was filled I put it in my minivan and made a point of dropping it off the next time I went by the clothing donation box.  I did not keep count but I know that I must have donated at least 12 huge bags of clothing.  It was unbelievable.  Even after tossing and donating every item we didn’t love, the whole family had more good, clean clothing than we knew — and so many socks that I did not buy socks again for at least a couple of years!

A nice side effect of dealing with the clothing clutter?  My daily habit of doing laundry stuck with me and became my Laundry Routine.

* Thanks to the wonderful FlyLady for this unforgettable expression.

Read all the rest of the posts about daily decluttering here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/jillslivingroom/

Related posts:

• Tweak: Laundry Routine
• Tweak: Declutter Daily
• The Top 6 Non-Reasons for Clutter

Research shows that eating at least 5 to 9 daily servings of nutritious fruits and vegetables can slow down your aging process and significantly reduce your risk of cancer, stroke, heart disease and more. But if you are in a rut, depressed about the state of the house and/or your struggles with weight and eating, eating habits can really suffer.

I found myself in this situation back in 2001.  Even though I love lots of different fruits and vegetables, I was so deep in despair and apathy about my life that I had stopped grocery shopping regularly.  My son and I ate a lot of takeout   I had already made my first Tweak — switching out regular Coke for Diet Coke — but I knew more positive changes were in order.  I could not face the idea of another failed diet, but I decided to at least introduce some healthy food so that we would be getting the nutrients we needed.

A nice coincidence happened around this time.  I began working on a community project with a couple who owned an organic vegetable farm and who were creating a weekly “food guild” (also known as CSA or farm subscription).  For $25 a week I began to get a bushel basket every week filled to the brim with fresh organic veggies and even some fruit.   (You can find a CSA program near you at http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ and many CSAs will even deliver straight to your doorstep.)

Once I had the bushel of veggies every week, I knew I had to cook them and serve them so that I would not be wasting my money and my farmer friends’ incredible efforts.  We ate delicious salads with cherry tomatoes and amazing mesclun salad greens.  I boiled, roasted and even fried the vegetable bounty.  And guess what?  Our takeout orders and drive-thru runs dropped in number dramatically!

How much fruit and vegetables should we eat?  I found an interesting calculator on the US government site FruitsandVeggiesMatter.gov and plugged in my info.  According to the calculator, a 38-year-old female who does 30 to 60 minutes of brisk exercise per day should eat about 2 cups of fruit and 2 1/2 cups of veggies.  (Now, if you are diabetic or following a low carb or low glycemic index eating plan, you’re going to want to substitute vegetables for most of that fruit.  Berries are a good low glycemic fruit choice.)

I typically eat more than 2 1/2 cups of vegetables a day — I say pile on the non-starchy veggies like spinach, leafy lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, etc. as much as you like — as long as you don’t completely drown them in fat, vegetables are always a healthy indulgence!

Remember:

Choose no more than one tweak per month – don’t try to pile them on!  Practicing a single tweak for at least a full month gives you the best chance of forming a real habit and life change.  Do not try to add another tweak until the previous tweak has become a habitual part of your life (this can sometimes take longer than a month).

This is all about loving yourself and creating a joyful life! Therefore, when choosing a new tweak to practice, pick one that is appealing and gives you a sense of anticipation.

Read all the fruit and veggie posts here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• The Best Fruits and Veggies You’re Probably Not Eating
• Tweak: Declutter Daily
• Tweak: Daily Probiotics
• Tweak: Sugarless Beverages
• Tweak: Daily Personal Grooming

The desk was piled high with mountains of paper, empty coffee cups, CDs, assorted junk and garbage and who knows what else.  The bedroom in which the desk stood was crowded with cardboard boxes of clothes, plastic totes full of clothes and heaps of clothes.  There were shopping bags full of papers.  There were narrow paths to get around the room.  Of course, the bed was unmade.

From the desk I could see the laundry room that adjoined the bedroom.  The laundry room floor was entirely covered by an 18-inch deep pile of dirty clothes.  I had to step up onto the dirty clothes to do wash, and sometimes I would have to move the heap away from the dryer door so that it would open and close.*

The kids rooms were also piled high with junk.  With nobody to teach them how to stay organized and get rid of what they no longer needed, how could it be any different?

The living room was also filled with clutter.  Sometimes we’d manage to get it cleared out down to the bare floor, but toys and junk piled up again quickly.

The kitchen typically had a pile of “recycling” in the corner — but really, when there’s a big pile of empty bottles and cans it looks more like trash than recycling, doesn’t it?  More often than not the counters were piled high with dirty dishes waiting patiently to be washed, sometimes for days.

To tell the truth, the clutter had been even worse at times in the years before that fateful day, but I had already been working what would become the Tweaks System.  Regular grocery shopping and cooking at home meant that the kitchen had to at least be functional.  The junk food packaging piles from my darkest times were already a thing of the past.

Nevertheless, the house was incredibly disorganized and cluttered and I knew I wanted this to change.  I just had no idea how — the task of getting it all cleaned up seemed absolutely overwhelming.

Then, on a message board I found a post about an organizational site called FlyLady run by a wonderful lady named Marla Cilley.  Her site put a name to what our family was living in:  C.H.A.O.S. , or Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome.  How apt, because I would panic if we had unexpected drop-in guests!

According to FlyLady, the first step in dealing with a chaotic disorganized home is to get rid of the clutter — and anything you don’t use frequently or wholeheartedly love is clutter.  You can’t clean around clutter, you have to just get rid of it.  And she is absolutely right.

Following FlyLady’s instructions, I started to clear up our clutter that very day, spending only 15 minutes per day on the task. This is critical.  For those of us with serious clutter and hoarding problems, the clutter can be so overwhelming that we can easily become overwhelmed and burned out from trying to deal with it.  As Marla says, our homes did not get cluttered overnight, and they don’t have to get cleared out overnight either.

Once I committed to clearing out clutter a little bit every day — and of course I sometimes neglected the task but then I just got right back on the wagon — our home gradually became clear of junk.  I think it took about six months total!  But once the junk was gone I couldn’t believe how much easier life got.

*FlyLady calls this phenomenon “Mount Washmore”

Remember:

Choose no more than one tweak per month – don’t try to pile them on!  Practicing a single tweak for at least a full month gives you the best chance of forming a real habit and life change.  Do not try to add another tweak until the previous tweak has become a habitual part of your life (this can sometimes take longer than a month).

This is all about loving yourself and creating a joyful life! Therefore, when choosing a new tweak to practice, pick one that is appealing and gives you a sense of anticipation.

Read all the decluttering posts here.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorywithserifs/

Related posts:

• Dealing with Clothing Clutter
• Tweak: Daily Fruits and Vegetables
• Tweak: Daily Personal Grooming
• Tweak: Laundry Routine
• Tweak: Daily Probiotics

Giving up sugared drinks was one of the first positive changes I made back in 2001 when I was at my heaviest. I was stuck in a rut that may be familiar to you: virtually every day included a McDonalds run for a supersized Big Mac meal. (The reason for this routine may be familiar to you too — my kitchen was so hopelessly cluttered with junk and garbage and dirty dishes that it was often impossible to cook — but that is another story.)

With the meal comes a soda, of course. Back then, the supersized soda was 42 ounces — more than 400 calories.

I felt so much despair about my size and my out of control life that it seemed laughable to order a diet cola. “I’m as big as a whale,” I thought, “so who would I be kidding?”

But one day something clicked. It would be so easy to just switch to diet soda. And it couldn’t hurt, could it? It’s not like I was asking myself to give up the food, the “treat” of going out for fast food every day, the security of a hot meal without the effort of facing my chaotic kitchen. So from that day forward, I started ordering the Diet Coke instead of regular. And then I started drinking diet soda at home instead of regular soda. Nobody told me I was too fat to drink diet soda. It was as if nothing had changed.

But it had. I was ingesting perhaps 800 or 1000 fewer calories a day. I stopped getting bigger. In fact, in the months that followed, I started to notice that my clothes were gradually getting looser.

Over time, I also realized that my heavily-sweetened drivethru coffees could also be switched over to sugarfree, so I started using Splenda. This too made an impact.

Nowadays, I also avoid drinking fruit juice most of the time — I eat my fruit whole in order to get the fiber and filling bulk of the fruit, not just the fruit sugars that are present in juice.

A recent study suggests that people who drink diet sodas tend to gain weight. The researchers are unsure whether drinking diet sodas actually somehow causes weight gain or whether people who are worried about weight gain switch to diet sodas and then tend to go on gaining weight anyway.

Over the years since 2001 I have drastically reduced my soda intake (diet or otherwise). I will frequently just drink water (tap or sparkling). Every day I also have several cups of black tea (which I do sweeten with a teaspoonful of sugar). But we are talking about baby steps here, and dramatic change does not happen overnight. If you are drinking a lot of your daily calories in sugary sodas, coffees or fruit juices, consider switching to sugarless alternatives — it can be an easy way to make a big difference in your life!

Remember:

Choose no more than one tweak per month – don’t try to pile them on! Practicing a single tweak for at least a full month gives you the best chance of forming a real habit and life change. Do not try to add another tweak until the previous tweak has become a habitual part of your life (this can sometimes take longer than a month).

This is all about loving yourself and creating a joyful life! Therefore, when choosing a new tweak to practice, pick one that is appealing and gives you a sense of anticipation.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Tweak: Daily Fruits and Vegetables
• Tweak: Eat Dinner at the Table

There is a critical, self-loathing voice inside my head, and it seems like it has always been there for as long as I can remember. Perhaps you have one too. It tells me that I’m just not good enough, that maybe I don’t really have my life under control, that maybe I’m just a misstep or two away from living in squalor and filth again, that maybe my eating is already out of control and I’m back on the road to morbid obesity. It tells me that I can’t trust myself, that I have to be self-critical and hard on myself or my life will fall apart again. The voice both creates and expresses a sense of fear and anxiety that can be paralyzing at times.

A month or two ago I was discussing this self-critical voice with Bill. He asked me a question that boggled my mind: “Catherine, what would it take to accept the part of you that does not accept yourself?” At first this question seemed so paradoxical that I could not even comprehend it. My self-loathing voice is like an enemy who is determined to make me miserable, an enemy whom I cannot escape. I desperately wanted to eliminate this part of me, not accept it!

And then I stumbled across Radical Acceptance, a book by Tara Brach. Brach is a psychologist and a meditation instructor who has woven her own life experience, her clinical experience with clients and her Buddhist beliefs and practices into an approach to dealing with the crippling inadequacy so many of us feel. Brach tells her readers that they can offer every feeling and thought friendly acceptance — even feelings of inadequacy and our most self-criticizing thoughts.

In an interview posted on Beliefnet.com, Brach says:

When some people talk about accepting themselves they have this fear that they’re condoning some bad behavior, or that if they accept themselves, that means they’ll never improve. But the truth is, we’re not saying, “It’s OK that you did that bad thing.” All we’re accepting is the actuality of our experience in the moment: I’m accepting this shame is here, I’m accepting this fear is here, I’m accepting this anger, I’m accepting that there’s craving, I’m accepting the truth just now, that I acted out of that craving and I ate too much. I’m accepting how bad I feel about that. But in the moment of accepting, we’re not condoning. We’re just acknowledging the truth of what’s here with kindness. The reality is, if we can do that, it actually begins to free us so we can in the next moment, be a lot more wise.

Reading Radical Acceptance has opened a window for me into the possibility of a powerful sense of acceptance of all the thoughts and feelings I have, even those that I would prefer to be without. I feel like I’m just starting to get an inkling of how profound the practice of radical acceptance really can be.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Did Fat Acceptance Help Me Lose Weight?

I have struggled with emotional eating since childhood. However, I was able to achieve much of my weight loss so far without directly taking on the issue of emotional eating. By gradually changing my lifestyle and building healthier eating habits I lost weight and maintained the loss even though I was still eating for reasons other than hunger.

This is the power of what I’ve dubbed the “tweaks system” — over time, with gentle and gradual lifestyle change, those of us who grapple with the twin issues of compulsive eating and hoarding can almost effortlessly change our lives for the better. Tweak by tweak, small positive changes incrementally become transformational.

Once upon a time, just the idea of trying to get to the emotional root of my issues with food caused me insurmountable anxiety. However, over the past year I’ve discovered that I’m finally ready to start to examine why I choose to eat for reasons other than hunger.

Today I was feeling raw and edgy and could not put my finger on exactly why that was. Novembers have always been tough for me. A number of times over the years the month of November has marked the beginning of a winter depression, and so I now make a point of getting as much sunshine as possible during the late fall and winter. (I’m blessed to be able to live in a warmer, sunnier climate than my native Canada!)

As I was sitting down to work today, I had a strong urge to eat even though I was not hungry. And I didn’t want to eat just anything — I wanted fruitcake. Ordinarily, I keep Christmas sweets out of the house until a few days before Christmas. Out of sight, out of mind. But this year is our first Christmas as expats here in Tunisia and I decided to make our family’s two Christmas favorites, mincemeat and fruitcake, from scratch to make sure that we’d have some traditional Christmas goodies in this Muslim country. The conventional wisdom is that mincemeat and fruitcake must be aged for at least a few weeks, so I got the preparation out of the way early.

This year was the first time I have made fruitcake as an adult. My mother made fruitcake several years in a row when I was a preschooler and it shocked me how vividly I recalled those times as I started in on the multi-day fruitcake process this year. I remembered standing on a kitchen chair as a three and four-year-old, stirring the fruit mixture with a huge spoon — my Mom made such a big batch that she had to soak the fruit in a laundry tub! The taste of the batter, the smell of the spices, the little baking rituals all came back in waves.

My father moved out when I was six. As I recall them, the Christmasses before he left were magical, and much of the magic was food: the fruitcake ritual, a huge box of my grandmother’s Christmas cookies arriving in the mail, tins of smoked oysters and Terry’s chocolate oranges in the stockings my mother stuffed for me and for Dad.

Kids of divorce know that holidays are never the same afterwards. My mother did her best but Christmas after Dad left meant an intensification of sadness, rejection and anxiety.

So today I thought about what that slice of fruitcake I wanted so much represented to me. Geneen Roth, a woman who has spent her life writing and leading workshops about emotional eating with tremendous insight, encourages us to try to think about the feelings we want those craved foods to give us. How do we want the food to make us feel?

What did I want from the fruitcake? Warmth, comfort, love, security, acceptance. A tall order for a slice of cake. But naming those desires is powerful. I want warmth. I want comfort. I want love. I want security. I want acceptance.

I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t eat a slice of fruitcake — I did. Change is as much about awareness and acceptance of our needs and feelings as it is about actually changing how and why we eat. I ate a slice of fruitcake and when I found that I was still raw, edgy and sad, I walked outside and sat in the sun.

Click here to get updates and information about the NurturingHope.com Tweaks System by email, FREE.

Click here to find out more about our private, supportive Member Forum.

Related posts:

• Decoding Emotional Eating