Feed Your Soul with Kim

68_Food Freedom: Mindfulness

March 21, 2022 Kim McLaughlin Episode 68
Feed Your Soul with Kim
68_Food Freedom: Mindfulness
Show Notes Transcript

In talking about Emotional Eating, we tend to not think about how mindfulness relates to peace with food. 

Mindfulness is the focus of being in our bodies. Mindfulness increases your ability to be an Intuitive Eater better than most other methods. Being mindful is simple it just not easy, because we put lots of other activities ahead of mindfulness. 

Join us in this Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast where we discuss:

  • How mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present.
  • 4 reasons you want to be mindful.  
  • 3 ways to be more mindful now! 

In this podcast we challenge you to do something different. Yes, as always there are doables at the end of the podcast. But, how about REALLY doing something different. 

Want more Food Freedom?
Get the Food Freedom Masterclass here. 

In this podcast Kim discuss’ Emotional Eating Solutions her signature self-paced course to look at food differently. This course is the way to get into action and make changes in your food AND in your life!

Find out more about Emotional Eating Solutions here:  https://feedyoursoulunlimited.com/emotional-eating-solutions-self-study/

 

Want more information? You can find out more about Kim McLaughlin at www.FeedYourSoulUnlimited.com

 

Want to get the Bold Confidence Card Deck I discuss in my podcast? )I do not get any compensation for this) Check them out here. 

 

 

Kim McLaughlin, MA

Kim McLaughlin is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, inspirational coach, speaker, and writer. She helps people who feel frustrated overwhelmed and overloaded, and it shows up in overeating. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Clinical Psychology. Kim is a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and she assists people to gain peace with food. 

We would love to get your feedback on this show and let us know what you would like to hear in upcoming shows. Email us at info@FeedYourSoulUnlimited.com

 

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Thanks for listening to the Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast.

Kim McLaughlin:

Welcome to the feed your soul with Kim Podcast. I'm Kim McLaughlin, your host. We have a great topic today where we're talking about mindfulness. This is a recording from my recent food freedom live, where I talked over three days about all things having to do with emotionally eating. This is the third day, and I promise you'll get a lot out of it. Mindfulness is one of my favorite topics, because it's something I do literally for myself every day. Have a listen. Thanks. Hey, everyone, we're getting ready. Hi, we are here. Live food freedom live day three. This has been such an adventure these last three days. And today, we still have more left to to go over when we're looking at food freedom. And I want to thank you for being here. I'm Kim McLaughlin, and I am from feed your soul unlimited.com feed your soul unlimited.com. You can find all kinds of things out about me and my blog, my podcast, all kinds of things on that site for you to learn more about Intuitive Eating over eating, and all the all the things that go with it. Welcome to today, d3, we're on mindfulness today. It's actually one of the I was thinking a lot about this today. I think it's one of the components that we don't talk about much I don't talk about it as much as I would like to or that I think I could should if I want to put a shirt on it. And so we're gonna dive deep in it to it today, over the last two days, two days ago on our first for food freedom live. We talked about the diet mindset, we talked about dieting, how it doesn't work, how you can check in with yourself and see if you think you're on a diet. And just how it keeps us lost dieting keeps us lost in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So go back to day one, if you want to. If you haven't listened about the diet mindset, it's a really nice foundation starting point to look at intuitive eating to look at over eating in a different way. It's really a radical, a radical way to to look at food differently. Yesterday, which was day two, we talked about emotional eating, we talked about the definition of emotional eating, what it means to be an emotional eater and some ways to break free have been an emotional eater. We talked about the idea that I find that people often don't realize that they're an emotional eater. They just think I overeat. I like food. I don't know when to stop. And when we look deeper when I ask them more deeper questions, what I find is they are actually an emotional eater, and they realize they're an emotional eater. So there's this kind of idea that you, you know, I feel sad, then I overeat. It's not that it's not that easy to attract when you're first trying to figure it out. And we in that second day of food freedom live, we talked about how to start looking and determining if you are an emotional eater. Today, we're going to look at another component. I call them the six components to feed your soul, body, emotions, mind, lifestyle, mindfulness, and the sixth one is self love. And there is what I often talk about is each one of them separately, but also we we start combining them as we do this work more and more is we combine those six together to see what is getting in the way of you eating in a way that is truly intuitive and really fits for your body yesterday. What I did and I decided to do it today is I decided to look this is one thing I do for my mindfulness is I have a whole bunch of deck card decks on different kinds of affirmations and different kinds of qualities I want to embrace and what I do is I shuffle the deck and then whichever one pops out at me is the one I want to contemplate are kind of my card for the day today. If you see I'm doing again I'm doing my friend Erin some her bold confident you unleashed card deck, and it's a card deck for women and Any of you men that are listening, just know that you can use it to, she just focused it more on women and using, you know, the female term when she when she has her affirmations. So today, the card that I got, which I thought was super interesting was self compassion. So I just pulled out the card and and it's going to be my focus for the day. And I think our focus for what we're talking about. And self compassion is interesting and very, very related to mindfulness. Because if we're in more of self compassion, having compassion for ourselves, we're going to start noticing and being more mindful, because we're wanting to be more in touch with ourselves. So what she says on the back of this self compassion card is, do you ever beat yourself up for not finishing a to do list not being perfect, not being further ahead or making a mistake, the road is never productive, it steals your or she says this road is never productive. It just steals your confidence. Today, write in your journal about a time you were hard on yourself, then write yourself a love note with kindness and compassion. So that is a way to to move into the day. And that actually is one technique I like to do is use my my cards, and then I like to journal about it. So I love doing that as part of my mindfulness practice. So when we talk about mindfulness, I like to, I like to start with a definition so that we're all on the same page about what we find is what we're calling mindfulness. And this is a definition I got off of the website mindful.org mindful.org. And this I think, is really good and sums it up. Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are, and what we're doing, and not overly reactive, or overwhelmed by what is going on around us. What they're saying is, is that it's about being fully present, that kind of, to me, mindfulness is all about being focused in this present moment, what is going on right now, they say aware of where we are. So that is to me, I'm seated in my chair, I can feel my feet on there on my the bottom of my chair, because my feet don't touch the ground, because I'm kind of short. And I feel my bottom in this seat, I feel my hands right here, I feel a little congestion in my chest, I don't know I have a little coffin thing going on, while I'm talking live to all of you, that to me is being fully present is noticing what's going on. And then they add this interesting part about not being overly reactive or overwhelmed by what is going on around us. So to me, that means I'm noticing what's going on around me that I'm alive, that you all are listening, but not being over relaxed, active or overwhelmed to it. So my feelings are at a lower point. So I can be fully present within myself. And I like that definition because it takes that kind of Mind, Body Spirit kind of idea to it. Today, we're going to actually talk more about mindfulness, I think about mindfulness, there are kind of two components to mindfulness. And part of it is the body mind focus. And part of it is the spiritual focus. A lot of times when I talk about mindfulness and think about mindfulness, I go to the spiritual perspective. And I didn't say religious, I said, spiritual perspective. But today, I want to really focus more in on what it means in our body and in our mind to be mindful what that would look like, why would we want to be mindful? Why would we want to be mindful mindfulness is one of the best ways to reduce stress. Anything that's going on being mindful, reduces stress. And what we're going to do later is, is really go into how we become more mindful. But that is one of the best reasons I found for being mindful is it reduces stress. The other thing that mindfulness does, or mindfulness does is it increases our ability to be an intuitive eater. We've been talking over these three days about intuitive eating all the components, all the things I talk about, is moving off of the diet and into what we call intuitive eating, and intuitive eating. Is that being in your body, so imagine why would We want to be mindful to increase intuitive eating. So then we're more in our body when I when we eat, we're more in our body to notice if we're hungry to notice if we're full to notice if we're distracted to notice it for uncomfortable. What I know happens, and this is from years and years and years of working with people with over eating issues, and also myself is that when we are mindlessly eating, eating mindlessly, we are what I call it is being like outside of our body, where we're not fully embodied, and we're outside of our body. And when we're outside of our body, that is when we're not paying attention to whether we're hungry, or whether we're full, or whether we need to stop. Or even though this food tastes really delicious. My tummy says I'm done. My body says I'm done. When we're focused outside of our body, mindlessly eating, we're not focused on those internal cues that tell us it's time to stop. And when we were, why we want intuitively eat is because when we were children, we knew how to eat intuitively. Children know when they're hungry children know when they're full. Children know, did they close their mouths, right? They close their mouths, when they're full, they will not eat more than what their body needs. And when they're hungry, they're crying, they're upset. They're saying, Give me food now that it's like, my husband will say sometimes with our daughter when she was younger, she would say, you know, she needs to wait. It's like, no, she's just a small child. And when her tummy says hungry, her tummy says hungry, and she's gonna cry, and let us know. And that is intuitive eating intuitively knowing what your body needs. And that's what we want to come back to. And mindfulness is one of the best ways to get us back in touch with our body so we can intuitively eat. So another reason why we want to have mindfulness is more peace. Sound good? Like that, to me is one of the best things I've found. That is my reason for mindfulness. Even beyond intuitive eating, I started at the first of January of 2022, I started doing a mindfulness practice every day. Every day, I just committed it's not very long. It's a short like five minute practice that I do every day. I do other things most days. But this one practice I'm doing every day. And I got to tell you my ability to manage my life, my ability to manage stress, my ability to just know what to do has been increased exponentially. Since January one when I started doing a very short mindful practice every day. To me that is one of the big reasons beyond reducing stress, intuitive eating. My big why of why I am mindful is to have peace in my body, and also peace in my life, peace in how I react to everybody. So if I haven't given you a good sell on mindfulness, I think I think any one of those I think everybody could buy into as being important for them. If we're we're talking about what mindfulness is, why it's important, then we've got to go into Okay, chem, how am I going to do this? How am I going to be more mindful, you might not want to do a daily mindful practice, like I've been doing, and I'm fine with that. I think since we're talking about over eating and intuitive eating, one of the best starting spots is to be more mindful during your time of eating. And that is, it's easier than it sounds. I mean, it sounds like oh, that just be really easy. And it's not. I find every day i i focus on mindful eating, and I'm not 100% I'm not 100% So let's talk about how do we do mindful eating? How do we engage in that what I like to do and talk about with my clients is mindful eating. One of the things for me is I sit at the table I am I'm still sometimes I like eat while I'm driving or eat while I'm distracted. I focus as much as I can not being distracted but one of the things that helps with being mindful while I eat is getting a plate sitting down and eating at the table. It to me it just reminds me that I am here to feed my body. I am here to fuel my body. It is a way of have a connection with food that keeps me in my body. So how do we do that? I mean, you guys, this is radical, simple and radical, right. So sitting at the table, having a napkin, putting the napkin in my lap, right That to me is I learned that, you know, long time ago from my mom, Put the napkin in your lap, and use my utensils to eat my food, eat one bite at a time, put my hand down, sit back and chew my food, to my food and swallow it. And then have a habit just to break and feel in touch with my body. It's a radical concept to be in touch with your body while you're eating while you're eating. And I want to just encourage you to practice it. Because if you're like me, I come to the table about three times a day, I come to the table and sit and eat like literally and figuratively. So it's a way to start practicing mindfulness, literally just get a plate of food, sit at the table sits down, notice yourself seated, take a deep breath, and take a bite of food, Put your fork down, and to whom I Gosh, what I find I do and my clients do is we can eat really fast, right? And that's mindless eating, mindless eating, not really tasting our food, not really giving time in between bites, to be fully present. And one of the things I talk about it, I'm going to talk a little later about my emotional eating solutions course is we talk a lot, a lot about being hungry and full. And how do you start noticing it? And how do you notice when you need to eat and when you need to stop? That's mindfulness. Part of that is mindfulness and being in touch with your body. What I'm just talking about is a really great tool every day to get in touch with your body. What's another mindfulness tool trick that I love that we don't talk about much when we talk about overeating, and its movement? I find that some of my most mindful times are when I am in some kind of movement. I was thinking back on I used to was about 15. No, yeah, about 15 years ago, I was running marathons why I was running marathons is a whole nother story for another day when I talk more about movement, but I was running marathons. And what I realized when I was doing that is that if I wasn't mindful about the placement of my feet, the placement of my feet, each time I stepped down, I could fall, and then I wouldn't be able to run the marathon because I'd hurt myself I would, you know, wreck my ankle or hurt myself in some way. And it became really clear to me that I needed to be mindful during my movement. During my movement. If I'm mindful, then I'm I remember, I would feel myself breathing in and out, breathing in and out. Because when you're running, you know, there's some deep breaths going, especially a marathon is a long is a long way to run. But also I remember feeling I would I run, what was my affirmation, my affirmation, then I run with sure and steady feet. And that was my focus on feeling my foot on the ground, on the ground. And it was such a mindfulness practice, that I keep it to today, when I'm doing things and when I'm being physical is being mindful of where my body is. While I'm being physical. Let me tell you, so why I call it mindful movement instead of mindful exercise is I find everybody I work with is extremely opposed to exercise. No, Kim, I don't want exercise. I don't exercise. I don't like exercising. I don't like sweat. And maybe some of you think that I realized that actually, for me it's not exercise its movement. And that since we are in this physical form, movement is necessary. For me, it took off the trigger of it being exercise, because to me, exercise is always related to diet, always related to diet. So move into that mindful movement. Notice how it feels in your body, and I promise you it will get you from being distracted and outside of your body into being fully present. Okay, so mindful eating, mindful movement. The other area I want to talk about that is something all the time you can do. I was gonna say 24/7 But there are some points in time where you're not. You couldn't do this as when you're sleeping is focus on your breath. focus on your breath, I'm focused on my breath because I'm, I'm, I'm having a cough attack during my life. And I still I can feel that. And what it is, is when we focus on the breath, we're being mindful, there's no other way around it. When you focus on breathing in and breathing out. You're, you're in your body. Mindfulness is about being fully present. Where you what did we say earlier, it's the ability to be fully present, and aware of where we are. And what we're doing, being in the breath, is the best way to be fully present. So that just means breathing in, and breathing out. And I actually invite you to do this with me right now. Sometimes I breathe in from my nose, out through my mouth, in through my nose out through my nose, I don't care. There are a lot you can look up on YouTube, Google different ways to be in the breath. There are so many techniques that I don't I can't begin to go through all of them. What I noticed is when I am in the breath, why? How is it mindful for me? So as I do that, what I feel is I feel the breath in my chest, I feel my bottom on the seat, I feel a little tense in my shoulders. Because when I come and do a talk I, I tend to feel a little bit of a, you know, this is what what's one of the biggest fears people have is public speaking well, yeah. And so I can feel it in my, in my shoulders. I also when I take a deep breath, I feel a little tingly in my fingers, I also always feel my jaw drop. And that is one of my best ways to know that I am relaxing, right? Being in the breath. Being in the breath is one of the best mindful tools to be fully present in your body. And that's literally what we're looking at with mindfulness. So sometimes what will happen is I wrote down another way to be mindful is to do meditation. And sometimes there is this aversion, just like I said, there was a version to exercise, right? There's this aversion to meditation, because it's supposed to be over a long period of time, it's supposed to be done a certain way, I'm supposed to feel a certain way, I shouldn't have any thoughts while I'm being in meditation. And it can be kind of distracting in a way that doesn't work for some people. And I'm fine with that. I found over the years that I do like meditation, and I do like taking the time for meditation. And for me, it does provide more of that mindfulness that I'm looking for. And what I'm telling you is that there's no prescription about how you reach mindfulness, right? What we're looking at is being in touch with our body, and in touch with what's going on mindfulness, right. And when we're more mindful, we're going to be mindfully eating, and intuitively eating, which is exactly why you're here today, listening about this, and it can be a great, huge win for you as you move forward and looking more at intuitive eating, and starting to get freedom with food. Okay, I encourage you to think of one way you can be mindful today, a meal, a breath, take a breath, and then allow yourself to feel in your body. It can be really soothing, and a great way to look at food differently and be different and also just be different in the world. Okay, mindfulness is one of the six, feed your soul components that I talk about a lot. And I wanted to during this live, I also want to make sure that you all know that you have a place to go, that if you're struggling with food, you need to do more than just come to this live. There has to be something more that you do, because you won't do anything different until you do something different. And part of this is the learning about the six components which we do in my emotional eating solutions. self study, it's an eight week course that I have. We go over the the six components in depth, and you really need to know about them in order to have peace with food to have food freedom. And that's literally what we're all taught what we're all looking for. You wouldn't be here if that wasn't what you were looking for. Emotional Eating Solutions is a self study course. Like I said, eight weeks long. Gives you All the components and what you need to do. It's super affordable price you guys, it's 197. I've been talking about it this week, and I was gonna raise my price at the beginning of the year. And I decided since I was doing these lives, I wanted to wait because I wanted to give you guys a super low, low cost price on emotional leading solutions. I'm going to link it in the chat so that you can look at it further and join up. I know you're here for a reason. And I really thank you for joining me if you're here today. And you've watched all three days, thank you, thank you, thank you. If this is your first day, go back to listen to the other to the other two lives, they were really good and helpful. Lots and lots and lots of important information. And I know that you know you have 1000s of other places that you could be right now and that you chose to be here tells me you're serious, tells me you think you have a problem with food and think you have a problem with overeating and you want something different. And I want to honor that and and I hope that you have some takeaways or that you take the takeaways and do something with them. I'd love for you in the comments to tell me what you're going to do differently. You can also email me at info at feed your soul unlimited.com And let me know what are your takeaways? What did you get from this? What did you like? I would also love it if you could share this video to your Facebook page. let other people know that there's this information out here and please share it with other people because we've all got a stick. I call it the Red Rover technique where we all link arm in arm and and we we link arm in arm to look at food differently because when we come to the table differently, we come to the table differently. And I want to support you in that I want us to be supportive for each other. Thank you again for being on this live. I look forward to talking to you more. If you also want to in the comments. Tell me some other topics you want to have. I'm going to have more lives because I'm really enjoying talking with all of you. This is Kim McLaughlin from feed your soul unlimited.com Thank you for joining us and I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye all