30 Day Life Improvement Plan - Day 17 What's Your Eating Philosophy?

Tell me what you eat, I'll tell you who you are. 

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

For this week, we're continuing to focus on renewing our energy.  Recently, we've worked on improving our sleep, practicing deep breathing and paying attention to our posture.  For today, we're going to consider our eating habits. 

1.  What's your eating philosophy?  Do you eat what you crave?  Do you eat a certain way for religious or health reasons?  What do you expect to get from the food that you eat--nourishment, energy, comfort?

Briefly, describe your present eating philosophy and your ideal eating philosophy.  Your ideal eating philosophy is a long-term manageable way of eating that you'd like to achieve:  It's not a short-fix diet.  For instance, if you often eat fast foods and drink soda, then your ideal eating philosophy could be to eat more home-cooked foods and to drink more water.  Here are some related links. 

http://nutrition.about.com/

http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/emotional-eating-feeding-your-feelings

http://www.emotionaleatingsecrets.com/about-us/

2.  Tracking Your Food and Mood  - For today and Day 18, track the foods that you've eaten, the time eaten and your mood.  If you want, you can track your mood both before and after you've eaten certain foods.  That way, you may be able to see how certain foods affect you.  If it's not too much work, you can include beverages as well to see how your mood could be affected.  You can make up your own chart or use this link: 

http://www.personal-nutrition-guide.com/food-diary-template.html

Quick Tip - Before at least one meal, take 2 slowwww deep breaths before eating:  See if it helps to relax you.

3.  Foot Massage - Give your feet a break:  Massage them at least twice during this week.  Massaging your feet helps to relieve stress and imrpoves overall circulation  http://www.lifescript.com/Life/Timeout/Chill/Knead_to_Relax_Give_Yourself_a_Foot_Massage.aspx

Today provides an extremely general look at eating and the different reasons for our eating habits.  If you'd like to learn more about emotional eating, overeating, nutrition and so on, feel free to explore those topics further.  I've had one nutrition class and I do like to eat but I'm not an authority on nutrition.  : )

Day 18

Visualizing

Tracking food and mood

Eating more energy foods

Here's a reminder about our daily routine so far-

Continuing to work on our 4 projects

Increasing our sleep, if needed

Deep breathing

Scalp Massage (optional)

Proper posture

Tracking our food and mood

*If you're doing a daily affirmation, that's also great!

Of course, use common sense on this program and the standard of checking with a medical professional before beginning a health/fitness program applies here.