Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week the health value of friendship, the trouble with the carbohydrate-insulin model, and the sad state of the EPA.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

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Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week plastics turn up in seafood and sea salt, Mary’s chicken outed as a factory farm, and NOT dieting helps with weight loss.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

One of the hardest things about making your healthy habits stick is finding ways to do them when you are very tired, stressed or busy.

Randi is a school teacher, which means that in the summertime she has more free time to focus on her healthstyle. During that time, she enjoys making delicious and healthy meals for herself and her family.

However, when school is back in session she no longer has the luxury of a full day to plan her meals, which leaves her feeling stressed about what she is going to make for dinner each night. This pressure causes her to avoid cooking altogether, substituting snacks for a proper meal on the weeknights.

As a breast cancer survivor Randi’s health is of the utmost importance to her. She knows that cooking nutritious meals each week is necessary to maintain her weight and stay in good health.

Luckily for Randi she has all of the tools she needs in order to achieve her cooking goal. By acknowledging some of her limiting beliefs and finding ways to work around them we come up with a strategy that enables her to cook healthy meals year-round.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist Kitchen

The No.1 Thing That Prevents You from Changing Your Habits (limiting beliefs)

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Losing a parent is one of the toughest things you can go through in life. Getting yourself back on track can feel impossible for a long time.

Bonnie was just getting her healthstyle together when her mom passed away. She was eating right, cut way back on sugar and was enjoying regular trips to the gym.

Although she was able to maintain her healthy eating habits, her exercise routine has been completely derailed. The idea of feeling strong and looking fit no longer motivates her, and her mental state almost a year later makes it hard for her to bring herself to even put on her sneakers.

Bonnie yearns to get back into the gym knowing that it would help her sleep better, relieve stress and make her feel like her old self again, but cannot figure out how to rekindle the habit.

Reframing some of Bonnie’s limiting beliefs and coming up with an idea for a new approach to exercise enables Bonnie to shift her perspective, inspiring her to get moving once again.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Self Compassion, by Kristen Neff

Too Tired to Maintain Your Healthy Habits? What to Do When You Are Not Sleeping Well

Home Court Habits

Mindset, by Carol Dweck

No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, by Michelle Segar

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl

Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Once or twice a week Allison and her husband decide to order take-out for dinner. They find fun reasons to celebrate, often making a night out of it by renting a movie and having a couple drinks to go along with the food delivery. It is a good time and sharing these moments together brings a lot of joy to their relationship.

Theoretically there is nothing unhealthy about this behavior. But for Allison and her husband the problem is the amount of food that is ordered and how much of it is consumed. It is not uncommon for them to order two extra large pizzas and eat one each.

Allison knows the amount of food she and her husband are consuming on these nights is not healthy and has seen a fluctuation in their weights. To compensate for the extra calories she often turns to dieting tactics and maintains a very intense exercise routine. She and her husband have tried cooking at home to compensate for their binges and have even planted a garden to inspire them to eat more vegetables, but eventually their willpower gives out and the co-bingeing ritual repeats.

Allison wants to change this unhealthy behavior, but she cannot seem to stop herself from doing it. Throughout the episode Allison and I investigate why she is over ordering take-out and discover that she has many limiting beliefs around what she considers to be healthy behavior. It becomes clear that these limiting beliefs have created blind spots for her, which are preventing her from seeing a solution.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist, by Darya Rose, Ph.D.

The Mindful Meal Challenge

How to develop confidence in your ability to get healthy (podcast)

The No.1 Thing That Prevents You From Changing Your Habits

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Aline struggles with the types of issues many women deal with during midlife. She’s going through menopause, has gained weight and can’t seem to drop those last 10-15 pounds. She eats relatively healthy and exercises regularly, but the tricks she used to lose weight in her thirties no longer work in her late forties.

While it is tempting to credit hormones for the extra weight she is carrying, there is more going on for Aline at this stage in her life than just a slowing metabolism. She’s also experienced a slowing of her work life and her children are older and need less of her attention. Aline has noticed that she often turns to food to fill in the gaps left by these changes.

As a mother, Aline prioritizes her family and wants to be a good role model. She wants her kids to see that it is important to practice self-care and knows that feeling guilty for doing things that bring her joy does not set a good example. Yet she feels conflicted because she believes she needs to compensate for her changing hormones with an even stricter diet.

This dynamic along with a few other subconscious limiting beliefs have left her feeling stuck and unsure how to improve her healthstyle at this stage of life.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control

Limiting Beliefs: The No.1 Thing That Prevents You from Changing Your Habits

Listen:

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

You can probably name several barriers in your life that feel like they are preventing you from getting healthy or achieving your goals, but the biggest ones are always mental.

Confidence in particular has an insidious ability to undermine your motivation, making it feel like nothing you can do actually matters since no matter what you try you’ll always be stuck in the same place. Logically you may know that if you don’t try or do something different it isn’t likely things will change, but when all your actions feel futile this knowledge has little power to help.

Lack of confidence keeps you feeling stuck and overwhelmed, and it is one of the most common symptoms of someone who has tried for years to lose weight or get healthy without lasting success. It’s like a Catch-22, you can’t succeed with action. And you can’t take action without the confidence that comes from success.

Or is that too a limiting belief?

In this episode, Leslie tells the story of how several small wins in her life built up trust in her process and confidence in her ability to overcome healthstyle obstacles. This meant shedding several limiting beliefs she had about what it means to feel confident, as well as what success really looks like.

Leslie’s story covers several decades of obstacles, including both failures and successes, as well as what being healthy means for her today. Her story is wonderful illustration of what it means to build confidence and trust your process when it comes to health.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

Mindful Meal Challenge

How Reshanda Overcame Binge Eating and Lost 28 Lbs

For Richard Ford, Memoir Is A Chance To ‘Tell The Unthinkable’

Breville toaster oven

Foodist Kitchen

Small Victories by Julie Turshen

Listen:

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

For the Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup. 

A quick reminder that next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week smash the patriarchy with vegetables, “overfat” is the new “overweight,” and why cows are eating Skittles. 

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

Photo by joeb

All I remember is staring at the open box in shock. Did I really just eat 3/4 of a large cheese pizza by myself?

One. Two. Yep, only two slices left.

I was a sophomore in high school and my parents were out of town for one of my brother’s sporting tournaments. I was old enough to be left home alone to work and study.

Normally this meant a free pass for me to subsist on coffee and Frosted Flakes for a few days (remember when dieters were scared of fat instead of sugar?). But this evening something got to me.

Looking back on everything I had going on at the time it was probably stress and anxiety from juggling my daily ballet lessons, teaching at the studio to pay the bills, and getting up before dawn to start my rigorous course work at school.

Or maybe I was just hungry.

I didn’t know what to do for dinner so I called the pizza delivery place that my family loved. I knew this wasn’t good behavior for a ballerina and chronic dieter who still desperately wanted to lose weight, but something compelled me.

It took several minutes after I stopped eating before the sick, bloated, oily feeling took over. The lingering smell of cheese in the house made me feel nauseous, so I took the remaining pizza and box to the trash outside and pushed it as far into the bin as I could manage.

What had I done? I was so ashamed. I told no one.

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“It’s been the easiest 33 lbs I’ve ever lost.” ~Angela

Angela just discovered Foodist a few months ago after a lifetime of being overweight and chronic dieting. By changing the way she approaches food and health, she’s been able to lose 33 lbs in what she calls the easiest weight loss of her life.

Despite her success, Angela still has progress to make and is trying to figure out some of the more subtle aspects of her healthstyle. Today she asks a question that every foodist must grapple with at some point along their journey, which is how to know if an urge to eat (or skip a workout or other healthstyle behavior) is coming from a place of physical need or some other impulse that should be resisted?

This question is particularly difficult for people who have spent a lot of time dieting, since by its very nature dieting teaches you to ignore your body’s basic signals and use willpower to stick to your plan. As Angela explains, it can be very difficult to trust the different voices in your head that are pushing you to care for yourself, especially if you believe they were what caused you to be overweight in the first place.

There are several things to consider when you’re learning to answer this question for yourself, including what situations are the most important to get right, how to learn from your mistakes when you get it wrong and how not stress out when you find yourself in a position of uncertainty.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Bonnie Transforms From a Junk Food Speed Eater to a Mindful Vegetable Lover and Loses 40 Lbs

‘The Myth of Willpower’ (chapter from Foodist) and free starter kit

The Worst Thing You Can Do if You’re Trying to Lose Weight

Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting

Way of Life app

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.