The "No Diet" Diet

It was a beautiful Saturday morning. We went to the local market where I delightfully watched as the candy man spun sugar around a stick and then handed me the finished fluffy, pink candy floss twice as big as my head. I ate it with my whole face and was SO HAPPY. I was 7 years old.

When was the last time you simply enjoyed food solely for the experience of pleasure and delight, regardless of the nutritive value of the food?

Most people follow some kind of diet. Or at least identify themselves as a particular kind of eater. Maybe you follow paleo or primal, maybe you're a vegetarian or vegan, maybe you're restricting total calories regardless of what you eat. Whatever it is, how long have you gone without feeling bad about eating something "you shouldn't have"? A week? 3 days? 3 hours?

The common denominator in all diets is creating a "good" and "bad" list in your head.

Certain foods will make you feel good and righteous, while others will make you feel like a failure who's fallen off the wagon.

In this challenge, should you chose to accept, you are going to explore the “diet mentality” and see where that leads you.

Why do you judge and criticize yourself for eating certain foods or eating too much? Why do you always need to know exactly how many calories you're eating? What would happen if you stopped trying to lose weight?

Our goal is to hush the judgemental mind and start connecting with the body.

Maybe all the worrying about food and weight is your real issue. Not how you actually are.

Are you ready to relax a little and see what letting go will do for you?

After all, we've been trying to lose weight as a society for the past 50 years, but instead of becoming lighter, we're much heavier - in body and in spirit. If something hasn't worked for 5 decades, you have nothing to lose by trying something new.

Stop dieting. Stop looking on the surface. If it really was as simple as “eat less and exercise more” we'd all be svelte. Let's take a deeper dive and see what we can uncover.

Be awake at the plate

You're at the office. It's 10.30am and you think “Man I need a coffee.” But then you remember you already had one before getting to work. Dang it, now I have to wait till lunch.

Sometimes you're bored at work, other times you have emails coming out of your ears. Either way, you look forward to a break from now.

But when it's finally meal time, your mind is "out to lunch".

On that slow day, when you eat you're reading a magazine or sitting at your desk browsing Facebook. Meanwhile your hands and mouth are on auto-pilot as you maneuver food to mouth without taking your gaze off the page. On that frantic day, when you eat you're thinking about your hideous list back in the office, and you scoff whatever it is and swallow it whole.

Mindless eating is a bigger pandemic than Gangnam Style. And Gangnam style was huge.

When you eat mindlessly you're missing out on Vitamin A. I don't mean retinol and carotene, I mean Vitamin Awareness.

That's a bummer because Awareness is the genie that regulates appetite and the corresponding body chemistry. Eat without Awareness and you'll go searching for food again soon after, even though your tummy is full. Eat without Awareness and you can't fully appreciate those treats that you look forward to, and you're left wanting more.

Mindless eating is the trigger point for overeating and under-nourishing.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept, is to explore your relationship to food and eating. If you don't pay attention to the eating experience, what else in life are you not noticing?

Let's see what being awake at the plate can do for you.

Change the channel, darling

Do you ever take a step back and listen to your internal airwaves?

All the things you say to yourself like:

"Yes, I'll have sushi for lunch today", "Wow, that's a shade of green I've never seen before".

"Sigh, I hate my legs. If only I could lose some weight around my thighs."

If you find yourself stuck on the "I hate my thighs" frequency, Change the channel, darling.

Negative self-talk around our bodies, our intellect, our capabilities, our weaknesses fuel an equally negative body chemistry that ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Every emotion and thought has a chemical equivalent in the body. Truth.

So every time we think a thought that says "I'm not good enough" to some extent, the body will express the chemical equivalent in the way of hormones or neurotransmitters that actually translates into physical symptoms. In this case it might produce a lot of cortisol and inhibit dopamine reception - which physically makes you feel sad and want to eat cookies.

So, valuable energy that could be spent on being the best you ever is instead diverted to breaking yourself down.

Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is to explore the negative self-talk that is crampin' your style and stopping you from being who you are. Where did it come from? Why is it here? "What would life look like if I stopped putting myself down?"

You know the answers to all these questions. You just need to ask them of yourself.

Come on this Challenge and see what vast energy you can unlock.

Keep calm and breathe

You can't believe it's happened again. On any other day, fine. But today?... Oh $*%T!

Whatever the event was. We all know the feeling right? Finding a parking ticket for being just 5 minutes over, arriving at your work meeting to realize you've left your notes on the bus, coming home to find your puppy's pooed all over your favourite lululemons.

In those situations you feel yourself swell up like the Incredible Hulk, angry at yourself and angry at others.

In every "Oh S*%T!" situation, your body goes into a physiologic stress response. You might notice it feels like time is running out, your breathing becomes shallow and quick, and your ability to make long-term decisions go out the window. That's good - it's how we're hard-wired. Imagine if you were chased by a bear... "Oh S*%T!"

What's not good, is the body doesn't differentiate between bears and dog poo. If your reaction to a situation is stress or anger, your body triggers the stress response. Modern day stressors don't usually involve ursine predation. But if dog poo on your favourite pants makes you angry, then you're physiologically in the same place.

Then you do something stupid. Then you feel bad about it. And later you want a comfort cookie. Or ten.

In Hulk state you lose the ability to respond, and instead you just react. The downside reactive decisions is that they can make you feel worse later. And then you turn to a glass of wine or a chocolate cake. Or buy a new pair of lululemons.

Thankfully there's better way to respond and it's much less expensive. BREATHING.

When you breathe deeply into your belly, making it a long and full breath, you tell your body to calm it down please. This technique is so effective in regaining our bearings and preventing stupid behaviour; it should be taught in schools, universities, and especially in the work place.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept, is to explore your relationship with stress. Part of it definitely involves keeping calm and breathing.

Let's explore why you lose it in certain situations and what you can learn from it.

When you can breathe through what seems like a meltdown for everyone else, you've got the power.