Self Care by Brianna. Wiest

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing. It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution. It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day. A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure. True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do. It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t. It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening. If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness. It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place. It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people. It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
By Brianna Wiest
(Photo from Pinterest)

The French "No-Diet" by Marie-Ann Lecoeur

 

The French "no-diet' diet is three simple ways that work to lose weight.

1- The food shouldn’t be ‘piled on’: only 1 layer please!

2-There should be some space left on your place without anything.

3- Leave something on your plate.

I have been teaching this French way to eat to many women who not only lost weight but kept it off and are now loving this French way to eat. They are excited with every bite, every meal, their new slimmer body and their new-found confidence. They have a new relationship with food, one that makes them happy and certainly no longer guilty.

What is this technique?

Have a good look at the size of your plate: a great way to decrease your portion size is by serving it on a small plate.

In France, our plates are smaller.

What is the benefit of eating from smaller plates?

Our portions are smaller.

What is the benefit of smaller portions?

We don’t eat as much.

What is the benefit of not eating as much?

You guessed it! We either keep to our weight or we lose extra weight.

Simple I know but it works!

Please do implement this at your next meal: pick up a smaller plate (a dessert plate for instance) and see the difference in the size of your portion it will make. This will also make a difference to the size of your body if you continue applying this great tip, alongside the other three I gave you yesterday.

Here are some comments and questions I hear regularly:

- But what if we don’t have French people’s good genes? ;0)

These four tips I gave you will work no matter your genes. Decreasing the amount of food you eat does make you lose weight or stop extra weight from creeping up.

- I have hit the menopause and noticed the pounds creeping up and nothing works!

French women also get to that stage and many of us manage to keep to our weight and lose extra weight. This is of course possible for you too!

- I have no access to French food. How can I eat like the French with the food available in my country?

The beauty of this French no-diet diet is that you can get great results no matter where you live. Great news, right?

Marie-Anne Lecoeur