Dates for a Sweeter Life: Living Without Processed Sugar
My Dates with Dates: An Overview
Dates are one of the ways I live a sweeter life without processed sugar.
These are medjool dates, and they are my favorite. I have dates almost every day. Dates are calorie dense, so I have to be careful how many I have in a day.
I often add dates to my smoothies and blended salads. Dates add a delicious sweetness, enough so I can get more vegetables into my mix, especially leafy greens.
I have also discovered that I love dates as part of my soups. I often blend a few dates with a few nuts to add as a paste into my tomato-based soups to help add flavor.
Defy My Own expectations: Travel Edition
Choosing Health When Traveling
Making healthy choices when I travel has always been difficult. I have failed so many times that I still expect to fail. So, this trip is about defying my own expectations.
This week, I travel for work. I have distinct struggles before, during, and after a trip. I was doing okay until I heard I was going to be traveling into Hurricane Hilary.
I am not sure what about Hurricane Hilary prompted me to run for the cashews and bananas, but she did! And, so I failed. But, I failed according to plan.
Eat When Hungry: An Overview of My Transform Shadows Framework
My Framework for Personal Change
This is an overview of my Transform Shadows Framework. The top part helps me tell my story about the mental actions that I use to be successful in losing weight and maintaining weight loss.
These mental actions may help you guide change within yourself. I use these for my self-talk in many ways. Try them and see if they work for you:
NAME Your Shadows
FACE Your Shadows
UNDERSTAND Your Shadows
FIGHT Your Shadows
REFRAME Your Shadows
TRANSCEND Your Shadows
I wish I transcended my shadows all the time, but my life does not work that way. When things are easy and effortless in my lifestyle, those moments of transcendence are glorious.
Eat When Hungry: My Launch of a Signature Series with Dr. Doug Lisle
Eat When Hungry: My Journey Through a Complex Labyrinth
Three years ago, I started working in earnest on creating educational resources that felt like what I was experiencing in my personal transformation of losing half my weight. Transform Shadows is the result of that work, and it continues to evolve. Today marks another step.
My goal has been to create a bank of free educational resources. The 3:00 am resources. The resources that you seek when you look for a different way of living, a healthier way of living, a way of living that you know is best for you. A way of living built on truth, not gimmicks. I know how this works. I lived this life. For years.
Today, my bank of resources broadens with the launch of my first video interview. A very special guest, Dr. Doug Lisle, joins me for this signature series titled Eat When Hungry: My Epic Journey Through a Complex Labyrinth. Dr. Lisle is a well-known expert in the plant-based world, and his work has helped me in my own journey.
Flipping the script for an interview like this, Dr. Lisle actually interviews me about my journey to lose half my weight and transform my shadows.
The Weight of Weight: A Journey of Epic Proportions
Many times, people think my health, wellness, and weight loss journey has been a one-and-done action. That is far from the case because this is a complex journey.
While I have lost half my weight and kept it off for more than three years, the process of maintenance is an ongoing journey, full of mental and physical actions that look and feel similar to the ones I used when losing weight.
Of course, I am thrilled to have lost half my weight. When I eat right, I have emerged from physical and psychological heaviness, which is the weight of weight.
The weight of weight is one of the most important reasons I decided to lose weight. My physical health weighed heavily on my mind, not just on my body.
I knew I was not acting in my own best interests. I knew that there were too many contradictions between healthy foods and the foods I was eating.
The unhealthy choices were having profound ramifications on my mind and my body. I wanted freedom from the mental and physical traps of my weight.
Transforming My Shadows: My Framework for Making and Sustaining Personal Changes
Personal changes are hard to make – especially the changes that run counter to our human tendencies. Making these changes and sustaining them in my life are challenging processes.
When I decided to embark on a serious journey to improve my overall health, I knew I faced a 97% failure and 3% success rate for sustaining long-term weight loss.
I wanted to understand the roots of my failures. I wanted to learn from these failures in ways that led to the long-term successes that had eluded me all my life.
I am still learning to try to maintain long-term success. Doing that means understanding the blurry line between failures and successes where one is always part of the other.
Satiation: Discovering a New Sensuality
Satiation. I love this word and have only recently started to understand its meaning around my hunger drive.
Satiation is the pinnacle of what it means to fulfill the hunger drive, to eat when hungry. Satiation is the linchpin of my long-term success.
Discovering satiation was a confusing, complex process. I had lost half my weight and had maintained that weight loss for more than a year.
Yet, I was flailing and careening all over a razor blade even though the numbers on the scale held steady.
I was desperately trying not to fall into the abysses where one of my shadow selves ruled — either through the excesses of food addiction and binge eating, or the deprivations of anorexic restriction.
I had no idea how to maintain my success.
Re-Solve the Conundrum of Myself: A Re-Solution for the New Year
New Year’s resolutions. Start. Restart. Focus. Refocus. Set. Reset. Boot. Reboot. Charge. Recharge. Commit. Recommit. New. Renew. Renewal. Detox. Cleanse. Challenge. Promise.
These words comprise the language of the new year around health, wellness, weight loss, and self-improvement. These words energize and inspire me.
I love the idea of a fresh start, a new beginning, a way to change what causes me to act against my own self interests.
This is hopeful stuff — making myself better, being the person I want to be, improving myself without hating myself.
My hope is magnified this year because I have the privilege of hearing hopeful possibilities that others have for themselves through Transform Shadows.
Shadow Boxing: Fighting Myself for Myself
Last weekend, I had a failure around food. Failures around food always expose my shadow selves. This time, it was a trigger food for overeating.
But, this post is more about failure than food. Failures happen, and I have gotten used to them. I have also gotten used to getting out of them, which I did.
But, sharing these failures in a public way is new ground for me, and I haven’t known how to talk about my failures in meaningful ways.
My failures around food feel epic and so do the struggles to turn them around. But, the solutions themselves are unremarkably boring.
Talking about the solutions may be more boring than the solutions. I ate clean unprocessed plants. I worked out. I shopped for groceries. I prepared food for the next day.
Transforming my shadows occurs in the boring routines of daily life. But, there is tremendous value in talking about these mundane details to learn and grow.
Still, I had been asking myself: How will I talk about my failures in ways that go beyond summarizing meaningless details?
The answer materialized out of nowhere.
SHADOW BOXING