As a lifelong healthy eater, Sherry wasn’t trying to lose weight. Sure she would have been happy to drop 5-10 lbs, but she was comfortable with her body and health. She even thought she was a mindful eater until a stressful event in her life caused her to start a consistent yoga practice.

Yoga, it turned out, became a catalyst to help her relieve stress and let go of difficult emotions. As she developed this talent during strenuous yoga poses, she noticed it began to translate into her eating behavior.

Without specifically trying to change anything, Sherry became more aware of her eating habits and started to eat more mindfully. As she did this she naturally started eating slower and being more thoughtful about her food choices.

To her surprise, she discovered she had been eating way more food than her body actually wanted or needed. She also started slowly changing the composition of her meals to be more plant-based, since this was more in line with what she was craving.

While she still enjoys sweets like chocolate cake on occasion, Sherry has embraced mindful eating and over the past year lost 16 lbs without actively trying to lose weight.

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.

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

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Listen on Soundcloud

“I always wanted to be that person who went to the gym regularly and ate whatever they wanted, I just didn’t know this was how you got there. That person was in me all along.”

Bonnie grew up loving all kinds of foods, especially junk food. She never liked dieting and had come to accept that she would probably always be a size 12.

Fear of developing diabetes like her father eventually prompted her to create a New Year’s resolution to try to be healthier. She slowly added exercise and changed her eating habits, and the weight began to come off until she hit a summertime plateau.

Stuck at the same weight for five months, Bonnie eventually found Summer Tomato and decided to give mindful eating a try. To her surprise she learned she was eating more than double the amount of food her body actually wanted, and that she had a true love for vegetables.

Bonnie is now comfortably a size 8, though she’s not sure what her final size will be. Although she still occasionally treats herself to fast food or sweets, her preferences have changed substantially. She’s happy where she is, but feels like her journey is just starting.

When I asked her if making all these changes was difficult she said, “It was the opposite of hard. It was the opposite of restrictive.”

Links from the show:

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

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Roger Goes From Hating the Gym to Loving Workouts and Loses 26 lbs Without Noticing

The End of Over Eating, by Dr. David Kessler

How to Eat Half a Donut

How to Make Cauliflower Taste as Good as French Fries

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

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.

This week sugar falls while obesity climbs, “natural” may soon be defined, and a surprising benefit of strong legs.

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

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on Delicious. 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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For those who haven’t heard, I’m currently on a 10 day silent meditation retreat in California.

Yes, completely silent. No computers, no cell phones, no talking, not even any books.

10 Days! Crazy, I know.

The reason I’m subjecting myself to this strange form of amputation is so that I can experience what it’s like to have the internal chatter in my mind stop completely, and just be present in the current moment.

Few things have benefit my life as much as meditation and mindful practice.

Mindfulness helps me focus and work more efficiently.

It helps me be more aware of my emotions so I can be more honest and compassionate with others.

It helps me feel gratitude for both the simpleness and complexities of life.

It even helps me sleep.

Mindfulness has also had a tremendous impact on my eating habits. I used to eat incredibly fast (“efficiently” was what I told myself), and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

Then I started noticing all the scientific research about the importance of eating slowly and mindfully and decided to give it a try.

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Photo by ikarl67

When I was a kid I used to dream of one day having a job that would take me all over the world.  I have always loved to travel, so in my brain I envisioned a non-stop vacation filled with exotic places, foods and adventures.

Of course, reality is nothing like that.

There is a huge difference between traveling occasionally (whether for work or play) and traveling regularly, several times per month.

When traveling is a special occasion, there really are no rules. Foodists have accounted for periodic indulgences in their healthstyle already.

But when travel becomes your normal, your Home Court Habits become diluted and you need to integrate a new set of (much more complex) habits to make up the difference.

Recently my travel schedule has moved from periodic to frequent. And adjusting my healthstyle to account for the change hasn’t been easy.

Putting aside the difficulty of eating well at airports and on the plane, simply being outside your familiar environment can throw off even your most ingrained habits, like cooking and exercise.

After 6 months––and much trial and error––I’ve finally developed a set of Away Court Habits that help keep my healthstyle in check while traveling.

I won’t pretend that these are as powerful as my Home Court Habits, but after nearly two weeks away on my last adventure I came home feeling pretty darn good about my state of health and fitness.
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For The Love of Food

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

This week learn what’s really stopping you from changing your habits, good reasons to eat mindLESSly, and how attitude impacts exercise.

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

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you. (Yes, I took that picture of the pepper heart myself.)
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For The Love of Food

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

This week breakfast and salt are back under fire, how to count your bites, and a possible risk in hand sanitizers.

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you. (Yes, I took that picture of the pepper heart myself.)

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Photo by charliebarker

Last week I received a comment on an older blog post that really took me off guard. The post was about 9 Simple Tricks to Eat More Mindfully and Kelsey, a recent foodist convert, had one of the strangest problems I’ve ever heard after implementing some of the tips.

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

This week 5 minutes can add years to your life, rethinking food prices, and the unseen health benefits of trees.

Want to see all my favorite links? (There’s lots more). Be sure to follow me on on Delicious. I also share links on Twitter @summertomato,  Google+ 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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Photo by bark

I’ve always considered myself an active person. I joined my first gym at age twelve (my mom lied and told them I was fourteen to get around the age limit––a terrible idea, but that’s another story), and spent my high school years as a ballerina dancing nearly 20 hours per week. In college I stopped dancing but focused more on the gym, then dabbled in tennis, then long-distance running in graduate school.

As an adult I settled into a comfortable routine of working at my desk or lab bench, then spending at least an hour at the gym 5-6 days per week. Most of us would not consider this a sedentary lifestyle, and indeed it is far more active than most Americans. Unfortunately, spending long stretches of time sitting throughout the day is considered sedentary and has been shown to increase metabolic risk and mortality, even in normal weight and otherwise active people. And that meant me. Scary, right?

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