Chocolate and Beyond

I'm an exercise-rebel: who'll take me on?

If you ever need to find a gym-phobic then I'm the person to speak to. Most people sweat when they come out of the gym, I sweat at the consideration of going in. So I stay away.

Today, though, I had a visit from David Brownley of The Fitness Works for a health assessment. David is to become my personal trainer for the next couple of weeks while I do a personal fitness trial with him for five sessions.

Having met him today, I have to say I have absolute faith in his knowledge of training and fitness, but I don't trust his scales (they were WRONG, I tell thee!). I was stunned when I stepped on them, but I do have some water retention at the moment (possibly not 8lbs worth).

Nutritionally void can also be harmful

My last post 'A perspective on eating what you want' sparked some excellent comments and I just wanted to expand a little further on this and to comment on the comments.

What I believe needs clarifying - which maybe my original post didn't do - is that with 'eating what you want', there are two issues at play:

The first issue is that anyone who has ever dieted is likely to have messed up their own cues about eating what their body truly desires, both psychologically and physiologically. Therefore, it can take some time for your body to learn again what it truly desires. This means that individuals will need to legalise ALL foods in order to let go of dieting and taste the freedom that normal eating brings.

A perspective on eating what you want...

As someone who has experienced the restriction of diets, I truly feel that part of finding freedom from them has to come from allowing yourself to eat what you want, while you are learning to think about food in a different way. But I think we owe it to ourselves to ultimately learn to eat, overall, a nutritious diet.

I believe that there is a diet that is right for our bodies and which can enable us to banish a number of health problems, and that doesn’t involve (in my humble opinion) crap like fizzy drinks, additive-loaded chicken nuggets, or pot noodles (and really, around two thirds of what is on the supermarket aisles).

Diet has a huge impact on both your physical and mental health, much more than many people often realise. A couple of years ago I wrote an article on food and mood for a slimming magazine, Boost!, and spoke to nutritional expert Amanda Greary on the topic.

Book review: The Food and Mood Handbook

The Food and Mood Handbook by Amanda Geary was one of my first introductions into the area of food and mood and in learning about exactly how much diet can impact on your mental health. As someone who used to suffer terribly with PMT, finding anything that might relieve my symptoms was an ongoing task for me – and I know diet has a huge effect on premenstrual problems, especially mine!

Geary’s book is an excellent manual in learning how to eat a nutritious diet that can help relieve mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and generalised mood swings. She herself had struggled for many years with severe depression and mental health problems, and after years of medication, it was only when her diet changed that her depression was finally dealt with. So Geary wrote this book, after training to become a nutritionist, in order to provide a guide on good mood foods.

'Rusty' baby spinach, parmesan & pine nut salad

Okay - I know I should have taken the photograph before I started eating my lunch, but I only remembered I wanted to after I was a few bites in! So, excuse the fact that the food is splodged around the plate a bit (oh I'm such a Nesbitt), but you get the gist of what it looked like before I started scoffing!

Now this lunch has become one of my favourites lately. I recently discovered Carotino Red Palm & Canola Oil and have been throwing it all over my salads, but I came up with this baby spinach salad which I just can't stop eating. I've now called it 'Rusty' baby spinach, Parmesan & pine nut salad because of the lovely red colour of the oil.

Scales are for fish

Yes, yet another blog I've discovered and this one appears to be based on Beyond Chocolate (although please correct me if I'm wrong, Gemma!). Scales are for fish has a great title, don't you think? Gemma has been on the intuitive eating journey for a couple of months, she says, and her latest post on exercise talks about how our attitude to it can change once we're not doing it for reasons of weight loss or calorie burning (which is pretty futile anyway).

Exercise definitely shouldn't be something you HAVE to do, it should be something you enjoy, and of course, the ladies behind Beyond Chocolate, Sophie Boss and Audrey Boss, like to focus on the idea of movement rather than exercise.

Should you diet? Take a test!

Anyone who knows about intuitive eating will know about Linda Moran - and I remember taking her intuitive eating test some time ago. Of course, it told me that dieting was probably the last thing that I needed to do, and as I wasn't dieting at the time, that was fine.

Maybe you should take the test? Just in case you were thinking of beginning another diet...

Looks like I started a trend!

It's always fun to discover other people who are loving their new found freedom away from dieting, and I just can't believe how this intuitive eating blog thing has taken off since I started mine oh-so-many months ago (was it September 2006? My goodness!).

It looks like I really started a trend, because I'm certain I was one of the first.

I just happened upon Bliss and Beauty, another great intuitive eating blog, and I was amazed to also see a whole blog roll list on the site (without Chocolate & Beyond added, unfortunately!) of about 24 other IE blogs.

Taking your time helps you eat only as much as you need...

One of the things I've really had to work at with learning to eat intuitively is taking my time whilst eating.

I used to be finished with my meals in a gulp - even though I knew that I may then overeat because my body wouldn't have time to notice when I was full. But if you're dieting, of course, you do overeat - because you're often eating foods of such little substance (calories!) that you bulk up the amounts so that you can feel full.

Of course, this then teaches your body to expect larger portions and if you then eat something that has more substance to it - real food! - you will eat large quantities of that also, which may contribute to weight gain.

Managing candida through diet: a feature I've written

If you've been following this blog you'll be aware that Candida albicans (a yeast infection) is a problem for me - and my first post on it was about making the choice to follow an anti-Candida diet.

I'm happy to say I've actually managed to earn a bit of money to talk about my problem - albeit it revealing the more embarrassing aspects - and have had this feature on iVillage.co.uk published called Managing Candida through diet. I also talked about it on my portfolio site on a small article about using personal experience for health stories.