Guidelines to Self Care
Healthy Boundaries, Healthy Body – Guidelines to Self- Care
Family and work-they help us feel a sense of purpose, belonging and fulfillment. Yet, for those of us struggling with food addiction, body image or emotional eating, the obligations of work and family become overwhelming can cause us to feel like we’re falling apart.
Family and food can be triggers, as can the messages that surround our responsibilities in society, which are often unhelpful, even provocative. Be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter. You’re abandoning your child if you work. You’re indulgent if you don’t work. You have to take care of your parents as they age. You’re ungrateful and selfish if you don’t.
Putting everyone else’s needs ahead of our own can make us feel depleted and pulled in too many directions. The anxiety this pull creates can express itself in our relationship to food.
I have put together these guidelines to help you:
- Create a plan for self-care
- Check in with yourself and your needs
- Prevent situations where blood sugar and cravings take control
- Set and keep personal boundaries
- Maintain your health and well-being throughout the year
These guidelines are to help you commit to your personal boundaries, self-care and your well-being.
Guidelines for Social Gatherings
Holidays can be a time of joy and celebration, a time for family, friends and food. Holiday gatherings seem to bring people together. Yet for those of us struggling with food addiction, body image or emotional eating, these same gatherings can cause us to feel like we’re falling apart.
Family and food can be triggers, as can the messages that surround the holidays, which are often unhelpful, even provocative. (This counter-productive messaging is also common with weddings, family reunions, and other social events.)
Some of the most turbulent times in recovery occur during the holiday season —a mass-cultural phenomenon of overindulgence, disregard for seasonal health, and splurging with plans for atonement, a.k.a. binge now, diet later.
I have put together these guidelines to help you:
- Create a plan for self-care
- Check in with yourself and your needs before and during events
- Prevent situations where blood sugar and cravings take control
- Set and keep personal boundaries
- Maintain your health and well-being through the challenges of the holidays
This guide is designed so you can commit to yourself now, during the holidays, and not wait for New Year’s Day (or any other “special occasion day”) to care for yourself wisely and well.
Getting Out of the Trance of Diet-Culture Mentality
If you’ve been lured into diet culture one too many times, and you suspect there are reasons why it seduces you, try reading and applying these guidelines.
Free Yourself from Diet Culture Manipulation. Gain Control Over Your Relationship with Food.
Cultural Trance. When it comes to food and body image, countless people are lost in a trance. The way any of us thinks about food, dieting, exercising, and our body shape is culturally ubiquitous, media-driven, and insidiously embedded in our consumer mentality.
Reinforcing Fear Whether it’s dieting or body image (or myriad other places to focus our anxiety, such as money, beauty, having enough [this or that], accomplishment, or even approval from others), notions of gain, loss, reward, deprivation, accumulation, and fear are constantly reinforced. We don’t need to have a clinically diagnosable issue with food or body image to suffer from the kind of thinking this milieu creates. Many of us are profoundly preoccupied with food, body image, weight, calorie counting, exercise, food as reward, exercise as redemption, restriction of food as progress or as “good” behavior, and overindulgence in food as “bad” behavior.