In the world of yoga there is something called the 108 day yoga challenge. It is where an individual sets an intentions to practice yoga for 108 days in row. I have recently seen many of my friends make a commitment to this challenge and it has been incredible to be a witness to the powerful transformation that can occur when we commit to anything for 108 days.

March 1st marks my birthday month and the beginning of what I would like to call my 108 Day Writing Challenge. This month always brings up a lot of reflection for me of where I have been this past year, where am I going, and what intentions do I desire to create for myself. We often teach what we need to learn. For years I have guided my clients in showing up more authentically, more boldly, more empowered in their life and yet, I will admit, have held back my own voice for fear of being truly seen. Wounds from the past have kept my inner voice and my inner power locked inside with lingering questions of if I allowed myself to be heard what if I am not accepted? What if I am not appreciated for who I am? What if I actually have nothing to say? I am excited to embark on this challenge as when we engage in our deeper inner healing as human beings, we support others in having the space to do their inner healing as well as we begin to show up differently in our life and with others.

In the last year I planned a wedding, got married, closed on a house, and engaged in deep inner work to break down the preconceived notions of who I thought I was to gain a deeper understanding of who I actually am. Showing up differently in the world when we begin to release patterns and habits that were only set up from a place of protection to not get hurt from the world can feel messy, awkward, and uncomfortable. And yet, if we want to grow, if we want to evolve, we must step outside of our comfort zones for that transformation to occur.

So while I don't have a set intention for what I want to see happen this next year in my life, or even what I desire to occur for committing to writing for 108 days, I want to commit more to getting comfortable with feeling discomfort. I find a lot of the work I am engaging in with my clients lately has been to acknowledge and embrace our entire human experience and all the many emotions that can arise on our life journey. When we take away labels on our emotions as a "good" emotion or a "bad" emotion, we get to step into curiosity to explore what sensations arise in our body when different emotions are present. Those sensations can then guide us in how we are processing any moment without any story attached to what we are experiencing. Different emotions can produce different sensations and when we welcome in and embrace whatever is present, that is when our emotions and sensations can actually decrease in their intensity as we release any internal battle of fighting what is.

I invite you all along on this 108 day journey with me to explore embracing discomfort, embracing anxiety, embracing frustration and confusion and grief and pain and joy and elation and anything else that might arise in the next 108 days.

I'm sure you're seeing a lot of articles right now on how to eat less during the holiday season, what to fill your plate with to keep the pounds off, how to stay away from certain foods this Thanksgiving. I'm here to offer a very different piece of advice. Eat! Eat with pleasure! Eat everything and anything you want. Eat that pie. Eat the cake. Eat all the foods you have maybe been waiting to eat for an entire year.

When we restrict our food or tell ourselves that we can's have that piece of food that we want so badly we trigger a stress response in our body. Eating in a stress response shuts down our digestion and makes it more difficult for our body to assimilate and digest the food we are trying to eat. So you could be eating the healthiest foods on the planet this holiday season but if you are eating it in a stress response because what you really want is the gravy or the mashed potatoes or that piece of pumpkin pie then you actually won't be nourishing your body in the most optimal way which is probably your intention to begin with.

Now I'm sure some thoughts can perhaps arise of, "But if I eat that food I'm never ever going to stop eating!" When you hear these thoughts, I want you to slow down, close your eyes, and take three deep breaths, and invite in trust. Trust your body. Trust yourself that when you tune in to your body and what it is truly wanting to be fed that your desire for the food will diminish. A tidal wave does not keep getting bigger and bigger. Eventually all waves die down. So you can eat that piece of pie and then notice. Notice how it feels in your body. Notice the desire to eat another piece of pie and explore what would eating another piece give you? Explore the voice that wants more and more and see what it has to say, what does it have to teach you, if it had an age how old would that voice be? The more we deeply listen, the more those internal voices can soften because we are allowing them the space to be heard and acknowledged and seen and we get to embrace our human experience exactly the way that it is. You can invite all your emotions to the table. Invite in the fear, the excitement, the anxiety, and give them all a big hug for a being a grand messenger to remind you to be gentle with yourself.

Every eating experience we have is just an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. So instead of bringing in even more control over this holiday season, allow yourself to relax into the moment, and put whatever foods you want to eat on your plate. Fully enjoy them. Notice the tastes, the textures, notice what you love about that food, be fed by your surroundings and being around people you love or even just appreciate your own presence in the moment. When we eat in this way we bring our body into a relaxation response where the body can function optimally and digest any kind of food that you choose to nourish your body with.

I'm wishing you a holiday season filled with self compassion, acceptance, and kindness toward yourself no matter what you eat. I hope your plate is filled with pleasure, joy, and love!

I find more and more these days my clients are finding they are sensitive to the foods they are eating every day.

Eating the foods we are sensitive to can cause low grade inflammation in the body and cause all sorts of bodily and emotional distress.

Watch this episode of Gut Guru and learn about how you can spot and identify a food sensitivity without all sorts of medical or blood testing (which can sometimes miss the foods we are sensitive to anyways).

Have you discovered any food sensitivities? How did you learn from your body around what foods did not work for you? I would love to hear about your experience discovering and learning from the foods you have found simply don't digest well in your unique system!

Ah, one of my favorite topics in the world.  Poop. I get far too excited in my initial intakes with my clients talking about how their bowel movements are doing. 

Honestly, poop is one of the best indicators for how your insides are doing and how clean your digestive tract is.  Dr. Ken Heaton created the Bristol Stool Chart as a tool to measure the transit time of the colon. Take the chart with a grain of salt but many practitioners still use it today as a way for individuals to talk about what their stool looks like.

We typically want stool that is soft, well formed, and easy to pass. This means that food is not staying in your digestive tract too long and fermenting or not transiting too fast and thus increasing the likelihood of not absorbing the nutrients in your food.

Your bowel movements can change from day to day, month to month depending upon what you're eating, your physical activity, your stress levels, even how much you're chewing your food. Use your stool as information and an opportunity to reflect on your eating habits and stress levels. Through healing my digestive tract, I have seen the health of my own bowel movements improve. So don't fear how your elimination is going now, it can and will change.

If you find you're having too many hard bowel movements or stool coming out too easily try incorporating more vegetables into your diet, sip on a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in water with meals, take some probiotics (especially those with Saccharomyces boulardii), try some digestive enzymes for a short period of time to assist with the digestion and elimination process, and add some fermented vegetables like Kimchee or sauerkraut to your meals (just make sure there is no added sugar!).

Additionally, your bowel movements are such a wonderfully unique way, that rarely gets talked about in my opinion, of how to check in with yourself and come into the present moment.  Your stool can tell you a lot about how you're doing emotionally not just physically. What might you be holding on to? Or where are you not creating appropriate boundaries for yourself? Are you holding on to past experiences or fights or grudges and having a difficult time letting go? Do you share everything that is on your mind and always say yes to everything and having a hard time nourishing your soul and identifying what it is that you need?

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with your own poop and what you have learned from your ability or difficulty with elimination.

Let's get vulnerable shall we?  My first year of Graduate School to get my Masters in Body Psychotherapy was intense.  The way I like to describe the experience to others, is that the classes are shaped in a way to rip your heart out of your chest, make you look at it, so that you can do the same for others.  Additionally, while going through the program, you also have to be in therapy so that you know what your triggers are and don't project your issues onto other people.

So my first year of Grad School I was mucking around in the deep dark depths of my soul.  I was looking at pains and wounds I hadn't explored probably ever.  There was a lot of crying and a lot of eating.  I had never binged this much on food in my entire life.  I was uncomfortable and it was unsettling.  Here I was still calling myself a nutritional counselor and spending whole days just eating dates.

While being in that period of time felt like forever, I can look back on it now and feel grateful for that experience.  I was using food as a tool to cope with emotions that just felt too big to manage.  I was talking about situations from my past and deep wounds that I wasn't entirely sure how to sort through, process, assimilate, and digest.  My binging was a way to protect myself.  It was a way to feel grounded on earth, that I was still alive, and that these situations didn't eat me and swallow me whole.  It was a way to fill myself up when I was exploring situations that left me feeling so empty.  

The one thing I want to offer you that I could have done without during that time was the judgment.  If you have ever binged or are currently struggling with binging it is not something that is bad, not something to be shamed, or ashamed about.  It is a message from yourself to yourself.  You can learn from these experiences with food and they can teach and reveal to you your own resiliency.  Whatever your binging is trying to help you get through, it is actually a sign of your strength.  You are getting through whatever difficult experiences that are happening.  The situation and the binging will eventually subside (even if it has been years), I promise you. 

Binging is a way to feel connected to yourself, to feel your aliveness.  I recently heard Marc David, founder of IPE, say that binging has a lot of power to it.  So you engaging in the act of binging can just be a misguided attempt to step into how powerful, resilient, and strong you are.

The lesson that my time with bingeing helped me to discover was to reach out and talk.  So I will leave you with this the next time you are feeling the need or desire to binge on food, pick up the phone and talk to someone.  Call your mom, your dad, a sibling, a friend, a significant other, whoever you want and talk about your emotions.  You can talk about the fact that you want to binge but that is skirting the issue that some big emotions are coming up that feel like they have the power and are going to consume you. 

Even if you have the binge, once it is over and you feel yourself coming back in to your body, still pick up the phone and call someone or take out a journal or a piece of paper and start writing.  Find some way to connect back with what is coming up for you because even after the binge is over the emotions will probably still be there.  And remember to send yourself so much loving kindness because you are just trying to do the best job you can taking care of you and, trust me, you are doing a pretty damn good job.

This was my very first episode of Gut Guru. 

In this episode I talk about cravings and how they are meant to be heard, they are meant to be listened to, and they typically have a message for you.

How do you typically approach your cravings?  What do you find yourself craving on a regular basis?

Happy Day after July 4th!  You might have gone to a big BBQ yesterday, ate a lot of food, and now today feel perhaps sluggish, tired, bloated, and gassy.  Additionally, often times after a large meal there is a judgmental voice that pops up.  "Why did you do that?"  "You are such a failure for eating that much." "I have to restrict what I eat today to make up for yesterday." "I have to go to the gym today and work this all off." 

Do any of these sound familiar to you?  This list goes on in terms of what that voice can say, but it is a voice that is loud, mean, and not looking after your health and well being.

So here are a couple of steps you can take after eating a big meal:

1.  Focus on Emotional Nourishment

Being with friends and family nourishes us in a similar and different way than food.  We can get filled up by the experience of being around loved ones.  Chatting, catching up, funny stories, playing games, effect the way we digest our food.  When you are being emotionally nourished by the situation your body is in a relaxation response and your digestive tract can handle any input of food easier.  So as those voices pop up, redirect your thoughts toward how you were nourished by the situation.  Often big meals are eaten in the company of others.  Instead of focusing on how much you ate, reflect on how the people, the situation, the environment was ultimately very fulfilling.

2.  Be gentle with yourself

Think of the negative, harsh, internal voice that arises after a large meal as your inner child.  The more you ignore the fact they are whining, the louder they get.  Listen to what your inner child is saying, rub their back, and tell them everything is going to be alright.  The voices may still be there but you can acknowledge them and choose not to do anything about them.  This can be an opportunity to delve deeper into what the voices are really trying to say.  Is eating a large meal mean you deserve less love?  Is feeling overly full mean that people won't like you anymore?  Be super gentle with yourself after a large meal and think about what you can emotionally nourish yourself with throughout the day that doesn't have to do with restriction or self punishment.  Take a bath, take a walk, listen to some music, call a friend, do something that nourishes your soul.  It is all about coming back to self love.

3.  Eat something fermented/take your probiotics

I of course had to add this in!  After a big meal, there might have been a lot of sweets, sugar, or carbs that were consumed.  By eating some kimchee, sauerkraut, taking a probiotic, drinking some Kevita, you will be flooding your gut with beneficial bacteria which will go to work to make sure those foods are not sitting in your stomach and fermenting.  Getting in the good bacteria after a big meal will help keep your mood up and aid your belly in digesting all the yummy food you just ate.  Additionally if you take your probiotic with a glass of water with a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in it you will increase your stomach acid to also help break down the large meal.

And just remember every time we eat is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves.  Every meal is a chance to explore our relationship with food and others.  There is no judgment here.  Be curious like a child and explore the situation with fascination and inquiry.

I have been eating whole unprocessed foods sans of gluten, sugar, and dairy for a long time now because this is what feels good in my system now.  There were a lot of vegetables I thought tasted disgusting when I was a kid.  I was a very picky eater when I was little and I lived off of pasta with butter and chicken nuggets. 

When I first started to try out new vegetables I thought kale was too bitter, radishes were gross, and I did not like leafy greens.  These days if I don't have vegetables at every meal, I am less satisfied with my meal and I feel like I don't have as much energy as I typically have when I am eating vegetables all day.

It took me years to get to this point.  But at the beginning of changing eating habits to food choices that are cleaner and come from the earth instead of a box, you kind of have to ignore your taste buds just a little bit.  I know this sounds counter intuitive to everything that I teach, but if your diet is filled with processed foods and lots of sugar your taste buds have become accustomed to those foods.   

The way foods are manufactured and processed these days are made to be addictive.  They are filled with the perfect ratio of fat and sugar to light up all of your dopamine receptors and make you feel happy and want more.  But this feeling is not sustainable as they also mess with blood sugar stabilization and eventually will cause you to crash a few hours later in which you will then want to reach for more of those foods to get your high again.

It takes time to slowly get your taste buds to sense the subtler taste of natural fruits and vegetables.  When your taste buds have been overloaded with really intense flavors from preservatives and processed foods, it makes sense that vegetables just won't taste as good.  But if you give it time, eventually when your diet is 80% whole natural foods when you go to eat something from a box it just won't taste as good as it used to. 

To start this process, begin just by eating a vegetable at every meal.  You can do whatever you want with it.  If you don't like raw, then cook it, steam it, sauteed it, bake it.  Do whatever you want to it.  Basically, you will be crowding out the food that drains you of vitality and health and adding in food that will increase your energy in your body.  So if you really have to have some potato chips, eat them with some steamed spinach or if you love to snack on cookies in the afternoon have it with some red pepper.  While this may sound strange, you might begin to notice that the spinach and the red pepper tastes better than the cookie or the chips you thought you wanted.  Slowly your taste buds will change and you will naturally crave the foods that make you feel sustainably good and happy in your body.

Sometimes it takes me awhile to get inspired or worked up enough to write a new blog post...so stay with me even though my posts are sometimes far and few between.  I'm struggling with the concept of social media.  I have started a new Youtube show called the Gut Guru mainly for the purpose of just wanting to share the knowledge I have and to teach more individuals how to communicate with their guts.  Yet, this weekend I spent time teaching myself Html to hopefully create a new website and thrown in my face was suddenly all these questions on how I want to come across to the world.  We live in an era where so much information is right at our fingertips because of the internet and yet there has been this new (or old) concept arising of how to brand oneself.  It feels icky to me.

I looked and looked at other nutritional websites, watched other people's youtube videos and, for the most part, its all the same.  The videos are all the same, even the way I constructed my videos are pretty much following this unspoken rule of how to set up a video.  As soon as you open a website, most of the time your senses are thrown into over drive.  So many things on the page, a million different places to connect with that person (facebook, twitter, google plus, linkedin, pininterest, etc., etc., etc.), pictures, videos, basically all saying if you want to make it in this whole creating an online business thing you've got to do it all.  You have to "brand" and package yourself in a way that is receptive to the masses while also appearing to be personable and honest.  It all feels like a game.

There is a part of me that just wants to do my videos with my pajamas on so that my appearance becomes less important and what stands out is where my heart is and what is the information I am trying to relay.  I am feeling some resistance in going deeper into the rabbit hole of having an online business.  I don't want to set up this external image that I've got it all together, because folks I don't.  Sometimes I have no idea what to eat, sometimes I don't always make the best decisions for myself or my body, sometimes I feel overwhelmed by my surroundings.  But what I do know is I love connecting with others.  I love supporting others in delving into a journey with their relationship with food.  Can that be enough?  Can passion be enough to guide?  Do I have to go in to all the other fancy shmancy stuff?  I have a background in theatre, I know what it takes to put on a show and I got out of theatre because I was tired of the facade.  So I am reaching out to the people who actually read this blog.  What do you think?  What draws you to an individual and creates a desire to want to work with them?  Is it their fancy website?  Is it the way they have packaged themselves?  Is it their authenticity or their ability to shine?  I am truly and honestly curious and want to hear from you.