Natural Health and Wellness

Here is a great excerpt from a thoughtful and brilliant  article by Dr. Mark Hyman .  .... The next time you eat, ask yourself if you are about to eat under stress.  Note how you feel by checking in with your breath- is it shallow or deep? Get in touch with your heart rate and see if you can find a way to use your breath to slow it down and relax your pulse. Is your mind racing and do you have stressful thoughts running it?  Are you excited about your food or are you feeling guilty or concerned about what is in front of you? Do you feel calm or restless? All of these questions are the beginning of embarking on an  understanding of how you relate to food .  The funny thing is, how we each relate to food tells us a lot about how we approach life and what we want out of it.  The next time you catch yourself eating under stress, follow these guidelines: Start each meal with 3 deep belly breaths.  For a thorough explanation on how to calm you...

Oh those sweets! We love them. We hate them. We love the taste of sweets. We love the feeling of sweetness in our mouths. In fact, we love the " feeling of sweetness ". Oh but the guilt that follows the bite down is enough to spoil that love affair with each swallow. I can hear it now... " this is bad for me, I will gain weight, my face will break out, where is my will power, this causes inflammation, this causes addiction, this causes disease ..!" * Gulp! * You just ate that, all that. The guilt is punishing enough to make you never eat another sweet again. That is, until the next bite tempts us. "Oh, hello my sweet love!" Sweet food is, for many of us, a love-hate relationship . We crave sweetness for many reasons. One reason people eat sweets is that we have become "programmed" unconsciously to do so. We have become mindless when it comes to putting something inside our bodies based on triggers that aren't the hunger triggers. How many t...

If we condemn anything that we eat, we are condemning ourselves in the process and our food will not agree with our harmonious, natural state of being. We will then experience the feelings that we offer our food (perhaps in a different context), until they get loud enough that we are able to recognize the feelings we are offering and decide to release them. If you have a bowl of ice cream and feel, "This is bad food for me. I am weak and have no will power to not eat this...", and continue to eat, you have just made yourself weaker. You have confirmed to yourself you are weak in will power, and you have weakened your body's physical health . Perhaps this is because the ice-cream is not a good choice for your well being, and/or because you've condemned it and yourself. So now maybe you feel bloated, irritable, tired, or fatigued. Notice yourself. Your feelings of weakness will continue to manifest in you as you continue to offer them. Now, if you take that same ice...