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Recovery

  • Blogvember, Body Image, Dieting, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Restriction

    24 – Find Flexibility – Find Food Freedom

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    A huge shift has taken place in the diet/health industry. People have woken up to the fact that being skinny does not necessarily equate to being happy and healthy, that fat loss is not the be all and end all. Size zero is definitely not as ‘in’ as it once was.

    However this has given rise to a new obsession with finding what ‘healthy’ really is. In comes the race to find the most super superfood, the ‘best’ balance of macro and micronutrients, the best time to eat. It’s not just about counting calories anymore. The diet industry is morphing into a health and wellness industry focused on ‘healthy’ eating and with that a growing number of us falling into orthorexic tendencies.

    As you know I like to keep this blog pretty practical and personal rather than going into the factual minutiae but for background orthorexia has been defined by NEDA as “an obsession with proper or ‘healthful’ eating”. It is not clinically diagnosable at the time of this blog but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

    Not only is there a general push towards finding the ‘healthiest’ diet people have also become more conscious of the environmental implications of the food industry. This has led to a shift towards more people choosing veganism and claiming that it is the healthiest way to eat not only for your body but for the planet as well.

    As a coach supporting absolute food freedom for all I don’t actively support any particular way of eating or trends in the wellness industry. I remain neutral not because I don’t have an opinion but because we are all totally unique and different and therefore what looks and feels like food freedom for me will be different to what looks and feels like food freedom to you.

    I also focus on the emotional basis of our crazy eating habits, binges and fad diets because if we don’t dig deep and look at the real reasons WHY we get so obsessed with particular dogma around food we won’t be able to heal it and find a healthy food freedom that will last a lifetime.

    With this move towards healthy eating now being equated with clean eating, i.e. eating in the most nutrient efficient, unprocessed way, and people getting confused with the all too nebulous term ‘balance’ I want to broaden your minds as to what ‘healthy’ could mean in reality for you.

    Health and balance when it comes to food and your body is not just about what you eat and what you look like, it’s not even just about what you feel like. Having a healthy and balanced relationship with food and your body means eating in a way that not only feels good to you and your body but that also slots into your life with the proper priority level.

    Eating well and caring for our bodies is super important. I am a huge advocate of taking care of ourselves in every way we can so that we can show up in the world and give our true and best selves. However sometimes this doesn’t look like waking up naturally at 7am sipping on a lemon water and eating overnight oats then eating our carefully planned, prepped meals every 2-3 hours.

    Sometimes this means getting up super early in the morning to go and pick our family up from the airport, grabbing a coffee and croissant there even though we know that’s not the best for our energy levels, spending the day running around doing chores to get ready for a work event, having an impromptu pizza lunch date, then collapsing onto the sofa with random leftovers we have put together from our fridge.

    Even though that day didn’t look like a perfect ‘healthy eating’ day, we still fuelled ourselves, we were able to get on with what we wanted to do that day and we showed up in our lives without letting the food options available stop us.

    The magic thing is that after a few days like this, if you are truly seeking health and balance and are able to listen to your body, it will naturally start craving more variety, more fresh foods, different proteins and vegetables. You will find yourself reaching for different foods if your follow your body’s intuition. You don’t need to reverse engineer or restrict your daily activities thinking that you need to eat in a certain perfect way to be healthy. Your body is constantly working on the subconscious level to keep you alive and healthy. When you start allowing your mind to dictate everything you are actually fighting against your body. When you are trying to second-guess what your body needs all the time you are trying to predict the future.

    The only way to find food freedom and be healthy is to listen to your body in the moment. To be aware and use your knowledge to support the choices you are making but not to be bound by this knowledge if your day does not go exactly to plan.

    I encourage you before you say no to things because of the food options available to remember that your body is an incredible, amazing thing that is able to self-regulate and is always looking to bring you back to balance. Knowing what is healthiest for your own body doesn’t mean you have to be dogmatic about sticking to those exact things.

    Life is really just about how well we can adapt to constant change, you’ve heard it before and I will say it again, the only thing we can be certain of in this life is uncertainty!

    Be careful when you are saying no to things because of food choices that you are not actually saying no to life.

    If this resonated check out this blog on how to cope with body change; this one on change in our daily food requirements;
    and this one on finding freedom outside of control

    Lots of love xxx

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    23 – Are you really not your body?

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    There are a lot of messages around self-love that tell you that “you are not your body”; that there is so much more to life than your body, hence don’t waste your time focusing on it or getting so obsessed with it.

    I took this approach when I first stopped dieting and tried to get a hold of my emotional eating. I stopped looking in the mirror, stopped caring what I looked like and how I felt in my body. Instead I shut all of those things off and just tried to eat ‘normally’.

    It was a disaster. Within a few months my health had deteriorated to the point I was suffering from chronic headaches, fatigue, debilitating periods. I thought that when you stopped bingeing and dieting your health and body would improve, or at least stay the same…I was completely shocked.

    So why am I sharing this with you?

    It is a myth that you are not your body. If you are wanting to get a hold of your emotional eating and change your relationship with food the key part is not to start ignoring your body and what it feels like but actually to get deeper into relationship with it than ever before. Every single day of your life you will live inside this body you have. It is as much you as your mind. It is not a part of you to just forget sometimes. This body is your home, it is your life.

    When we diet and emotionally eat we are attempting to separate our basic needs as humans from what we think we should need based on society’s expectations. We deny our own reality when we try to make our body something that it is not.

    If you are not your body then how do you expect to live in this world? How do you expect to show up and be the best version of you if you don’t focus on your body, the very vessel that allows you to experience this planet..?

    Our body’s are to be respected, to be loved, to be cared for. You are your body. Your body is you.

    Internalise this concept, take it to heart and healing your relationship with food will come naturally.

    Lots of love xx

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  • Anxiety, Blogvember, Emotional Abuse, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love, Spirituality

    22 – How to feel your feelings for real

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    This is one of my all-time favourite topics, firstly because I think it is just so incredible that we as humans who have this beautiful ability to sense the wonders of the world around us purposefully numb ourselves to its beauty so that we can avoid any hint of unpleasantness. I could talk for days about how we are taught to numb ourselves and how society is created on the foundations that in our life we should seek to live a life with only pleasure and any pain is bad and dissonant with our purpose here on earth. But this is not the purpose of this blog post!

    You want the action steps right? You want to know how to really get into your feelings. You know you numb yourself. You know that you don’t cry when you’re sad, you don’t speak out when you’re angry, you pretend you’re ok when inside you are slowly shrivelling up silently wishing you could hibernate forever…

    So how do we get past this, how do we get into our real feelings?

    As a disclaimer, read through the exercise first and if you have never done anything like this before I strongly suggest you do it in the presence of someone you trust, a therapist, coach or close friend or family member. If we have been detached from our feelings for a long time it can sometimes be quite overwhelming when we begin to explore them.

    The first thing to know is that feelings are bodily sensations. The way we experience feelings is visceral, it is felt physically. You can’t have an emotion just in your head (I will use the words emotion and feeling interchangeably in this post). If you think you can feel your feelings only in your mind then this is a surefire way to tell you are numbed to or have repressed your own emotions.

    Lets take a look at an example. An obvious one we all can identify with…fear. When we feel fear our heart rate increases, our palms get sweaty, we might need to go to the toilet, our hunger evaporates, we may feel our muscles tense and our senses become heightened. This is an extreme bodily response as when we feel fear our body sends around a massive amount of hormones in preparation to take action to save its own life, survival becomes our priority when we feel fear.

    What about other more subtle emotions? Every individual will experience their emotions in a way that is unique to them, they will have their own flavour but the way to identify them is the same.

    As a human you will have an emotional reaction to pretty much every change in circumstance around you whether you are aware of it or not, for example you will automatically respond when someone has said something kind (or mean) to you, if someone has offered to help you or you have solved a problem you have been working on for a while. In our ever-changing world we are constantly responding to evolving circumstances around us.

    In that moment where you sense a change in yourself, or if you don’t sense a change but something has happened and you think you ‘should’ have reacted then take a second to stop. Stay still. Sitting or standing. Close your eyes. Breathe in and out a couple of times. Bring your attention first to the breath coming in through your nose and feel it track down through your windpipe and into your lungs, filling them, then trace the air moving back out, feeling your lungs empty and the air coming out through your nostrils. Once you feel comfortable with this bring your attention to any sensations in your body that are acute, for example any pain, pressure or tightness. Move around your body and explore what is happening. Keep moving your attention around your body remaining curious and non-judgemental the whole time, take a few minutes. As you are doing this you will sense your mind making sense of your bodily sensations and it will start to give you potential answers to what you’re feeling. For example you might close your eyes and breathe and feel your legs become tingly, you might feel a tightness in your chest and the back of your eyes might begin to burn, your mind will spontaneously provide you with answers for how to make sense of what is happening. It might offer you heartache, grief, sorrow. Your intuition will know when you have the right answer. Remember that your body has felt this many many times in your life it is just that you haven’t been aware of what has been going on.

    When you first start doing this, especially if you have numbed yourself or repressed your feelings for a long time, the most common responses are likely to be anxiety, fear and emptiness or loneliness. That is ok. Remember we are doing this exercise with no-judgement.

    It might take you some practice to get answers on what you’re feeling, to start with you might not be able to tune in to your body. But this is all the more reason to keep trying.

    Reconnecting our mind and our body is absolutely vital to improving our well-being, spirit and happiness within ourselves.

    The amazing thing is that you have literally hundreds of opportunities to practice this throughout the day as you are constantly responding and reacting to the environment around you. If you are not sure where to start do this exercise in a scenario where you already know the feeling. For example, if you get angry when someone cuts in front of you in a line, next time it happens take a moment to check in with how your body is feeling. By reverse engineering it you will see how your body responds in different scenarios.

    At the other end of the spectrum, feeling huge emotions fly through your body taking you on a rollercoaster ride on a daily basis is a very different matter. This often disproportionate emotional response to what is going on around you can signify that there is something deep you are repressing and it is trying to be released any way it can, like a pressure cooker needing to let off steam. The exercise described above can still be very useful as you may notice that your body is actually telling you of the ‘real’ emotion that is lurking beneath the intensity of the one you think is being shown. For example often under intense anger there is actually a lot of pain and sadness

    If you would like to explore this exercise or go deeper with me please just book in for a free clarity session where we can discuss how to feel your feelings in more depth, just email me here to book a time.

    Lots of love xx

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Love

    20 – Nourish yourself with Self-Care – Three Tools

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    A lot of what we speak about when we look at the topic of self-love and self-acceptance is all the ways we can best take care of ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually in this life so that we can show up as our best selves and do the things we want to do.

    When we are abusing food and our bodies through extreme emotional eating, dieting or punishing exercise routines we are not taking care of ourselves. Not only when it comes to food and exercise but likely in many other ways as well.

    Some people might like to argue that controlling their food or exercising all the time is healthy for them. I’m not going to dispute that, for example if you are a competitive athlete than living your best, most full up life will likely involve a pretty strict diet and exercise regime. However for most of us to live our best lives we could probably do with being a little kinder to ourselves.

    In this blog post I want to share some of the ways you can heal your relationship with food and your body and yourself without actually focusing on changing the way you eat and move.

    Let me explain. Often when something goes wrong we try to figure out the solution by focusing on fixing the thing that is broken, for example if your knee is hurting then normally we contain our problem-solving to different things that could have gone wrong with the knee. But we miss the fact that even though the knee is the site of the pain it might actually be our hip or shoulder or neck that is out of line that is causing the knee pain in the first place. So perhaps short term we can fix the knee, but long term the problem is likely to return. We haven’t really solved the deeper issue. Do you see where I’m going with this?

    Let’s bring it back to abusing food and exercise.

    Our poor relationship with food and our bodies is normally a symptom of deeper feelings of low self-worth. Focusing on changing how we eat and stopping emotionally eating is just putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. Eating in a more balanced way and exercising differently won’t solve the underlying problem. It is unlikely that by just changing your food and exercise regime you will suddenly begin to live this incredible full-up life of your dreams.

    This certainly wasn’t the case for me. I reformed my eating habits and exercise routine (more on me and exercise here), began resting a whole lot and eating a whole lot more nourishing foods, in a more balanced fashion but I still wasn’t really taking care of myself. Not really. The band-aid was firmly on but the bullet wound was not healed. In fact when I realised I was still struggling with so much in my life despite this change in attitude to my food and body, I thought ‘this isn’t working’ so I slipped back in to trying to control my food and the destructive eating and exercise habits came back.

    I needed a longer term solution.

    I needed to find real self-acceptance that came not from changing my food and exercise but from nourishing who I was as a person.

    None of my tips for nourishing yourself are revolutionary and there is actually good reason for this. We are talking about nourishing your human side. Humans have been living on this planet for thousands of years, and yes we have made a hell of a lot of progress in that time but we are still essentially human beings and this is still pretty much the planet we began life on.

    So let’s get in to the list

    1.Nature – Get into Nature

    There is nothing in this world more healing and nourishing for our humans souls than pure connection and nature is one of the most abundant sources of this powerful energy. Parks and gardens are ok but really I am talking about ‘big’ nature – a forest where you can surround yourself with trees, the ocean, a lake, the top of a hill. Any type of nature where you can escape shops, billboards, cars, sirens…you know what I’m saying.
    If you want to feel more at peace with yourself, more supported or held then get into nature.
    A big part of the reason we mess with our food and bodies and don’t love ourselves is because we feel disconnected. We carry around this sense of isolation and loneliness, we feel unloved and unworthy, the feeling that we are not good enough for this world. This disconnected feeling is because we are not in touch with our true selves. Being in nature reminds us of who we really are in the most basic sense. We are living beings, we are alive in the same way birds are alive, the same way trees are alive. Being in nature reminds us of that. When we are reminded of that we feel connected to things outside of ourselves lessening that sense of loneliness and abandonment.
    Maybe you’re not sure what I’m saying here about connection and energy, you don’t need to believe me, just go and spend some time out in nature, switch your phone off, take a look around and then see how you feel after. Chances are you will feel more relaxed, lighter and at ease with yourself. This is the feeling we are after when we talk about nourishing ourselves.

    2. Caring for your body – going back to basics

    Here I am going back to basics, talking about mindful washing of ourselves, the most basic form of self care but that we mostly just do on auto-pilot, we jump in stand there worrying about what we have to do that day, think ‘sh*t, I’m running late’, jump out and get on with our day.
    An amazing way to nourish yourself is to spend this time actually caring for your body. The best thing is that it doesn’t take any extra time because we all regularly shower anyway.
    There is no set routine or way to do this correctly. The point of this is to show our body some care, to focus and give our attention to loving the skin we are in. You don’t need to move into ‘body love’ mode, just focus on the caring act of washing yourself clean. Giving your body a mini fresh start. Its amazing what a mood booster this can be when we wash mindfully. If you find your mind wanders bring it back to the moment by saying to yourself what you are doing, e.g. let your inner voice say ‘washing my feet’ as you are washing your feet.
    If you want to make it into a ritual by having a soak in the bath that’s also an option. But the point here is that actually the small moments where you are acting in an intentionally caring way towards yourself are just as valuable and nourishing as the big gestures!

    3. Give yourself the gift of sleep

    Giving your body some security in terms of sleeping patterns is one of the most caring things you can do for yourself. It’s telling your body that it’s ok to rest. We need to encourage our bodies to shut down. We need to get proper rest otherwise how are we supposed to do everything we want to do in this life? Often we can’t sleep or our sleep is disturbed because of anxiety that is based in fear. When we are fearful or anxious about things our adrenaline is switched on and we are constantly on high alert. Our bodies don’t feel safe to shut down in that state because we are afraid of being attacked or that something will happen where we will have to defend ourselves. Having a regular bed time and a bed time routine, whatever that looks like for you, is vital in reassuring our minds and bodies that it is safe to sleep. Having more restful sleep is absolutely vital to taking care of ourselves.

    We are caring for ourselves when we stop doing as much. Being still and resting in this busy chaotic world is one of the highest forms of self-care there is.

    Please have a go at implementing these tools, and let me know how you get on – just drop a comment below or email me sasha@sashafardell.com. Such simple things practiced over time with patience and consistency are absolutely life-changing.

    Lots of love xx

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    19 – Physical practices that make self-love easy

    Growing your self-love practice means getting comfortable with your own body. By that I mean getting intimate with yourself, and not necessarily sexually although that can be a helpful way.

    I’m talking small ways you can physically show yourself love. These suggestions are tools you can use any time and only need to take a few seconds, but they are practices, the more you do them the stronger they get. Try these practices for a few days and see how you feel.

    Before doing any of these first focus inwards. Take a few deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Feel the air moving in and out of your lungs as it inflates your chest and tummy then empties again. Once you feel calm and relaxed then begin. These exercises give you the opportunity to fill your heart with love. If that’s something you are not sure of or are unable to do just go through the physical motion and try to pay attention to what is happening inside your body. Just holding space for yourself is very powerful.

    1. Hug yourself – yes, it is as simple as it sounds. Take your arms out wide, fill your heart with love then wrap your arms around yourself. You can do this standing, just wrapping your arms around your upper body. Alternatively you can sit on the floor with your knees bent up to your chest and put your arms around your legs and lower your head so your forehead is against your knees. Stay there for as many breaths as you need until you feel a calm relaxation come over you, you may start to feel warm and hopefully comforted as well.
    2. Pat yourself on the back – I mean physically. When you do a good job, act in a positive way, say something kind to yourself or do something on your to-do list give yourself a little pat on the back. To be honest you can do this anytime, even if you make a decision that wasn’t quite right for you give yourself a little pat of encouragement anyway. Acknowledge yourself throughout your day. Regardless of the circumstances remind yourself that you are doing your best. Again this might sound a little empty if you’re randomly patting yourself but this self-love practice is incredibly powerful in building up your connection between what you are doing in your daily life and your physical body. It is interrupting the auto-pilot where you spend entire days acting only from your head.
    3. Mirror work – this isn’t for everyone right away. Mirrors can give a very distorted picture and can be pretty triggering, but I encourage you to give it a go in the knowledge that it is just a mirror and is not actually exactly what you look like or who you really are. My first recommendation would be to look in the mirror and look yourself directly in the eye, don’t look at your body, and say ‘I accept myself’ or ‘I accept you’ whichever resonates more. Say it multiple times. Repeat it until you believe it. Then try ‘I support myself’, ‘I respect myself’. Try different words depending on what you find hardest. Then move on to ‘I like myself’ before moving on to ‘I love myself’. This is about progressing towards really looking at ourselves and believing it. There is no point in saying it if you are not yet ready to believe it.

    These practices are just that…practices. You need to keep coming back to them to keep reaffirming to yourself that you are at home in your physical body and that you accept and love yourself as you are. It will take time, think how many times you told yourself you were not good enough or looked for hugs from other people rather than comforting yourself? This is a new skill you are learning so keep practicing and you will get there.

    Lots of love xx

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  • Binge Eating, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Spirituality

    17 – Is mindful eating important and what even is it anyway?

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    For me the term mindful eating has been wrongly appropriated by the diet industry. Diet tips often include things like ‘savour your food’, eat slowly, put your knife and fork down between bites, drink water as you eat, chew your food 20 times before you swallow.

    All these things are technically mindful eating, however the way they are sold is as though if you do these things they will help you to eat less and therefore lose weight. I want to reclaim these mindful eating tools as helpful ways to train us to eat intuitively and NOT as weight loss tips.

    Mindful eating is great for us in a myriad of ways. It helps us focus on our food rather than eating distractedly, it brings ceremony and importance to our meals which helps us enjoy them more and it also help us connect with the food we are eating and therefore aids our digestive process. All of these things help us tune in to our bodies more, enjoy the food we’re eating and therefore cultivate a healthier relationship with food and our bodies.

    Mindful eating is an amazing way we can learn to eat more intuitively. It helps us quit dieting and stop emotionally eating.

    One of the main things that happens when we emotionally eat is that we disconnect our minds from our bodies. Our minds are in distress, we are upset or angry so we turn to food. We ignore whether our body is saying it is hungry or full or whether it is craving vegetables or protein, instead we follow the part in our mind which is saying ‘feed me food that will bring instant pleasure right now’. Because we have trained ourselves to respond to our thoughts all the time there is no room to listen to what our bodies are saying. We have learnt to short circuit our own internal cues.

    This is where mindful eating comes into play.

    Mindful eating practices help us to reconnect our minds and bodies. When we eat more slowly and with more focus our mind relaxes it’s control and we can hear more clearly what our bodies are saying.

    Binge eating is an extreme manifestation of mindless emotional eating. We want to crush down how we are feeling, or repress it before it even rears it head, so we stuff down as much food as we can. We are abusing food. Food is actually for nourishing our bodies, giving us energy and bringing a little simple joy into the experience of being alive. If we are shoving it into our mouths to forget our feelings we are purposefully using food for the opposite reasons. In order to stop binge eating we can change how we eat – the speed, the thoughts and the process – in order to reset ourselves and therefore start using food for its intended purpose.

    A key tenet of mindful eating is slowing down. Put your food on a plate, eat with a knife and fork, chew your food properly before taking another bite, pause briefly periodically while you’re eating and see how your stomach feels. Slowing down is not just about being able to listen to what our stomach is saying but also what the rest of our body is experiencing.

    By slowing down our eating the emotion we are trying to hide (in the case of emotional eating/bingeing) might come up to the surface. Tears might threaten to pour, a scream might rise up from the bottom of our lungs. This is what you are supposed to be dealing with. This is your body saying please stop hiding your feelings with food. If emotions rise up put the food down and honour your feelings. Honour yourself, honour your body, respect the reality of the moment.

    Being more mindful with our food is another avenue to being more mindful with ourselves. Another way we can get to know ourselves better. When we get to know ourselves better, paradoxically we don’t need to hide from ourselves in food anymore. Therefore more mindful eating means less emotional eating and bingeing.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love, Spirituality

    16 – You are one of the 5 people you spend most time with

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    We are all aware of the concept that we are the product of the 5 people we spend most time with right? This makes a lot of sense logically, and we have probably experienced it for ourselves, where you start saying the same phrases as your best friend, or ending up wearing the same outfit as your partner. These are fairly harmless examples, but there are of course loads of other ways we subconsciously integrate what those around us are doing. How we feel about our bodies and ourselves is certainly one of them.

    Think of it this way, when one of our friends says she thinks she is fat and goes on a diet, and then our colleague sitting next to us at work is constantly telling us to ‘hide the biscuits’, what message are we hearing?

    We are hearing the voice of restriction, the voice that says we are not good enough as we are. Those comments are reaffirming that we are not ok enjoying our bodies, enjoying our food. We shouldn’t be a certain way, shouldn’t look a certain way. Even if we are confident in ourselves if we continuously spend time around people who are not loving themselves, who are restricting what they eat or are constantly on a mission to ‘beat the bulge’ then these messages will eventually get through to us.

    I’m not telling you to ditch your friends or swap seats in the office. This is not other peoples fault! We are adults now and we have a choice to change the narrative of our daily lives.

    When we were children we didn’t really get to choose the 5 people we spent most of our time with. They mostly included our family, caregivers, teachers at school and classmates. Most of us grew up in a competitive environment based on comparison which we were ill-equipped to deal with because our parents didn’t know to teach us about self-love. It was also an environment where fat is bad, where we compared the size of our thighs to our friends, where boys picked girls based on how pretty they were and nothing else. Our parents and teachers told us to just ‘get on with it’, to hide our feelings, to hide our personality, to blend in. We were taught from a young age that we are not acceptable as the unique individual we naturally are.

    This is exactly the message that many of us are now continuing to pass on. With all this talk of dieting, over-exercising, feeling ‘fat’, it is all part of the same narrative that we are not good enough.

    So rather than ditching the people we love in search of others who might have a different story to tell why don’t we start with ourselves.

    The magic of being a product of the 5 people we spend the most time with is that we are a part of that! We are influencing the 5 people closest to us as well. And that means we can change things.

    So starting with yourself, change that inner voice. Tell yourself you can eat whatever you want, look in the mirror and tell yourself you are beautiful and perfect exactly as you are. Tell your friend she is an absolute goddess and will continue to be whatever dress size she is. Ask you colleague how she is really feeling and why she gets so agitated when treats appear in the office.

    Yes, we are a product of the people we spend the most time around. But don’t fool yourself into believing that you don’t have the power to influence those people right back! Be the loving, positive force you really are and watch those around you shift in response. Create your own body positive, anti-diet community by starting with yourself!

    If you want help and support on your journey to filing every inch the superstar you are in the body you are in then please drop me a comment down below or email me sasha@sashafardell.com and let’s get started. Changing the world starts with you.

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  • Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    15 – What is Radical Self-Love?

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    I’m not going to make you wait until the end of the blog post…let’s start with answering the question ‘what is radical self-love?’

    Radical self love comes with learning to love yourself every single second of every single day no matter who you are meeting, where you are going or what you are doing.

    When you think about it, radical self-love is really our natural state. It is feeling secure in ourselves as human beings, knowing we are fallible, designed to learn from our mistakes and continuing on in life with confidence in ourselves regardless. This is how we are as babies. We turn up in the world and immediately start exploring our humanness, we don’t second guess ourselves or berate ourselves for being hungry or tired, we just go about our day being hungry and tired.

    So why in learning to ‘check ourselves’, to be in this society, to be part of things we learn that loving ourselves all the time as we are is not ok? We are taught that we should in fact not be loving ourselves, that it is somehow wrong to fully be the human that we are.

    The point of telling you this is to show you why your emotional eating has started. Emotional eating is a way of self-medicating our humanness. Yes, we have been told we are wrong for being ourselves, this makes us feel depressed, upset, not good enough…all that stuff. So then we turn to food to fill that hole where our self-worth should be.

    The truth is we aren’t less worthy if we make a mistake, or annoy someone, or overreact sometimes. There is no need for us to feel bad about ourselves when we do those things, there is no reason to stuff our faces because our friend is upset with us, we had a fight with our partner or we made a massive error at work. Those things make us human.

    When you emotionally eat you are denying your own humanness. You are saying to yourself it is wrong to be who you are and therefore you need to eat to conceal yourself.

    Radical self-love is the opposite of that.

    Radical self-love is realising that all the time, no matter what, you are loved and lovable. This doesn’t mean you don’t apologise to people you upset or try to fix the mistakes you make if that’s possible. What it means is that you accept that those things happened but that you as a human being are still fundamentally ok.

    Radical self-love means the thought of eating to suppress your feelings doesn’t even come into your mind. It doesn’t enter your thoughts because you eat to nourish yourself, sometimes for pleasure or celebration but mostly because you need energy and you want to feel healthy and full of life. Of course you eat things of less nutritional value because they taste good, but you don’t hide your eating, you don’t feel shame or guilt around what you are putting in your mouth, for the very simple reason that whatever you are eating and whenever you are eating you are doing so out of love and care for yourself.

    Radical self-love is coming back to our natural state. It is the only way to stop emotional eating for good.

    If you’re struggling to know how to get started on your self-love journey, or you have no idea what that could even look like then drop me an email sasha@sashafardell.com and book in for a free self-love strategy session where we look a little more deeply to uncover the real reasons you aren’t loving yourself.

    Lots of love xxx

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  • Blogvember, Dieting, Recovery, Self Love, Spirituality

    12 – An Anti-Diet Manifesto – What are you missing out on?

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    Let’s face it, dieting is a miserable way to exist. Restricting our existence based on what foods we can eat at what times and how much we need to exercise leaves very little room for spontaneity and excitement in our life.

    Don’t get me wrong I think a little discipline is great for us as humans and we thrive with a bit of security, but when we set ourselves up to follow an extremely rigid diet or exercise regime we are not giving ourselves any opportunity to pivot, to try something new, to change direction. Our life becomes this small pattern of repetitive behaviours that keeps us imprisoned in the life we already exist in.

    There is no room to dream bigger. We develop a big fear of colouring outside the lines, of leaving our box. We stop imagining something different for ourselves and instead can only see the finish line of losing x pounds, or hitting y PB in the gym. Everything else falls to the wayside, socialising with friends becomes fraught with anxiety if they invite us over for tea and cake and it doesn’t fit with our diet plan. Or we have to take food scales and prepackaged protein bars on our holiday lest we veer too far off-plan and ‘ruin’ everything.

    When you look at it like that how small has our whole life become? It is not just about shrinking our bodies anymore, it is shrinking everything. Our ability to socialise, our ability to relax, our ability to share experiences with our loved ones, our ability to enjoy a moment for what it is rather than thinking what it could do to our waistlines.

    I implore you, please please think just how much you are really giving up when you start dieting. It is so rarely just a change in calories. It is taking everything in your life and making it small.

    And what the world needs now more than ever before are women who are able to play big. Women who want to take up more room in this world. Women who are ready to shine their light into the darkest recesses of our society. Powerful women who know their worth and are not afraid to be who they are. Women who will stand up for what is right and fight against what is wrong. That woman is not a woman who is scared to eat a piece of cake or miss a workout. That woman is one who embraces her real hunger, her hunger not just for good food, but for life. Her hunger to be full-up and strong. This woman is a warrior and she respects that about herself by not trying to put herself in a little society defined box.

    When you diet or when you let food control you you are handing over your power to societal restrictions. You are selling yourself short compared to who you truly could be. You are worth so much more than you will ever know if you allow yourself to be controlled by the way you eat.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Dieting, Recovery, Self Love

    8 – Diet culture can’t beat Love

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    One of THE MOST important messages I hope you will read and digest. It’s something I wished someone had told me earlier on. Learning this saved me a lot of stress and anxiety and rocketed me toward inner peace and happiness.

    When I was healing my relationship with food and my body I was constantly looking outside at all the ‘triggers’ around me. It was making me crazy. Everywhere I looked were adverts for ‘healthy, low calorie’ snacks, pictures of skinny, fit-looking people, calorie counts, diet books and 8 week transformation plans. I couldn’t seem to have a moment of peace away from all these messages. It felt like a constant attack – which let’s face it is the reality. But I realised that I was so busy sending my hate to diet culture for making me feel bad about myself and bombarding me with their irresponsible messages that I was distracted from doing my own healing work.

    It was only when I stopped focusing on hating diet culture and started focusing on myself that things started to change.

    Important disclaimer…I am not condoning what the diet industry promotes or the insidious methods it uses. AT. ALL. This blog post is about how you can protect yourself from all of the harmful messages it sends out.

    The diet industry has been around for decades, and this doesn’t mean its right, nor does it mean it’s here to stay. But while we are in the throes of bringing it down it is still wise to build up our own toolkits so that we can go on living our lives without being so affected. What we want to avoid is that feeling that we are ‘too fat’ or ‘not good enough’ every time we walk past a billboard, close a pop-up ad, watch a TV show, go to the movies or look in a magazine showing a thin, airbrushed woman.

    There is only one truly effective and immediate way for us to do this. And it doesn’t involve blaming marketing agencies, blaming ‘the man’, blaming society. It starts with you.

    We have to love, respect and most importantly value ourselves for who we are so highly that we know intuitively comparing ourselves to airbrushed images is a waste of time.

    We are the ones who have to quiet that voice in our heads that says we are ‘not good enough’. We have to know deep in our souls that we are good people, that we do our best, that we care for ourselves and others, that we are kind and generous and loyal. We have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are worthy of our space here on earth. We need to believe in ourselves and trust that our journey, while unique, is no less valid than any other of our fellow human beings currently navigating this life.

    When you look at it like that doesn’t it ring true? We are so much more than a distorted 2-D image on the side of a highway, we know that, and yet our self-esteem is so low that we allow one glance to make us feel bad for hours.

    I’m not saying that the advertising and diet industries don’t need to radically change. I am saying that in the meantime, we can work on bolstering our own self-love and building our own belief in ourselves so they don’t have such an impact on us.

    And if we all work towards this at the same time, guess what…diet culture would die all on its own anyway because it would have no-one to sell it’s lies to. Have a think about that…

    (for more read this on how to stop comparing yourself)

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