Setting goals – The one person in your life to must learn to trust is you.

Could you be sabotaging your own wellness and destroying your own self belief through broken promises resulting in mistrust from yourself, family, friends and your own children?

From the reading that I have done and from personal experience this is most certainly the case. For years I would make the obligatory New Year resolutions to start the year a-fresh with a movement towards a more healthful lifestyle. The problem that I experienced was that by week two I started to come unstuck. This is the point where I made mistakes and became slack in my promises.
The flaw that hampered my progress was me.

I broke a promise to myself and as such reinforced the idea that I was weak and couldn’t succeed at what I was setting out to achieve. This manifested into depressive state where other things I tried started to become a mountain that was unclimbable. My faulty self talk was the only thing holding me back. I stopped trying for fear of failure and played it safe in all other areas of my life.
In a previous post I wrote about stress and this is most certainly something to be considered as part of health balance but today I would like to convey the importance to staying true to yourself and your goals and most importantly your truth.


Issue 1. I use to I write myself list of things to do and time-frames to get things done by. Tasks on this list wouldn’t get finished and made their way to the bottom of the pile. At the end of each day I’d look at my list and at the things that I didn’t get done. They would haunt me as they get transferred onto the next day’s list.

Breaking a promise with yourself is breaking lines of communication between yourself and your heart. You become weaker and more vulnerable essentially destroying the essence of what makes you you. This leads to a scarier phenomenon….

Issue 2. People and animals can sense your fears, mistrust, and weakness. Scarier yet there are people out there that want to take advantage of you for their own gain and they are especially good at this. It is in our nature to scramble for survival but some people identify this so well that whole companies and businesses are built on the instability of our own emotional status.

I see businesses that sell promises and products that don’t necessarily teach you the tools to help yourself and therefore you become dependent on the product rather than yourself. It isn’t a hidden fact that food companies use highly addictive and deemed safe “food grade chemicals” which make it even harder to stick to the healthful plans for a new lifestyle. These chemicals have such a hold over our brains that when we try to give them up we end up in a deeper depressed state and we are back to being failures because of our own broken promises. It’s not you, it’s the food.

Consider how hard it is for you to give up these foods and now consider how hard it is for a child to control their desires towards these foods and their behaviours while in the process of removing them as part of a healing protocol. Withdrawals!

Issue 3. There are health compromising behaviours out there some of which are seen as insignificant, like not being able to keep a promise to yourself, to set a personal boundary, or to follow through on a simple meal plan.  These compromises might not be seen by the community as being as bad as binge drinking, and drug abuse but on a soul level they can be just as dangerous.

Issue 4. Fact, children learn from our every response, we pass on our insecurities and self limiting belief. When a child is born they learn fear from their parents and are rewarded for mimicking our response. They are praised for being “just like their mother” and yes I have caught myself saying that exact statement. What I try to do now is focus on them being themselves without my emotional hindrance.

sabotage picThe reality is that if you don’t have the strength to commit and complete a goal it is likely that this will set the tone for many other parallels including but not limited to exercise, play, creative processes such as art, writing and poetry. Take a moment to consider what it does to your relationships. If you feel that you can’t be trusted I can guarantee that your friends, co-workers, partner and children can see it too. They may not know consciously know but they are certainly aware on an unconscious level. How are they going to develop trust in you and have faith in your abilities if you cannot do it for yourself?

If you are at the cross roads…Lets create change and break the cycle of mistrust and strengthen the belief in you and your abilities.

  • Set attainable goals always – This doesn’t mean you need to lower the bar but rather just be realistic. Sometimes you need to build up to greatness. There will always be the cycle of student to master and when you get to being a master of what you set out to achieve in most cases you look over the hill that that you climbed and you realize that you are once again the student.
  • Set time frames – Identify that each task/activity needs a time frame to be completed by and make note that some tasks require events to happen first before you can achieve them. This includes changes that you want to make in your health too. For example, if your goal is to get off the statin drug therapy for cholesterol then you will need steps in place to achieve this and it will be down to your own body response and recovery time. If you don’t meet your own time frame this does not mean you’re a failure.
  • Congratulate yourself on achievement, I’d suggest creating a checklist and enjoy the chance to congratulate yourself every time you mark off one of those tasks or events. I call this the internalized-happy-rave-party. If circumstances require you to be demur then a chair dance may be more appropriate. If you’re like me, then you channel the inner child and explode into a frenzy of self appreciation that is likely to be a cartwheel, a self high-five aka a single clap.
  • Make a note on you phone’s calendar weeks and even months ahead of where you are now and set the time to go off. Then you get to celebrate all over again, relive the awesomeness.
  • Consider unattained goals and try to identify the reason behind un-attained goals before you go writing them down again on the next list. Why were you not successful, who had a hand in it, and what needs to precede the next time you attempt this task/goal/challenge. Be kind to yourself, life is full of mistakes.

Don’t make your biggest mistake one of feeling defeated and unworthy of trying again.

Each of us should accept that we are here for a purpose and the very essence of that purpose is gradually understanding of the truth of our own selves. As the individual we should be working on knowing ourselves and growing into each challenge that life presents in an environment safe from our own self-criticism which will allow us to make self-promises that we can keep. Likewise as a collective population, we must all be mindful of the fear, failure and criticism that we inflict on others adding to their emotional hurdles.

Morning Mantra:
I can help others including my family, co-workers, friends, children and strangers by minding my own emotional status and working in my own emotional space, protecting others from taking on the issues that I have not dealt with yet. I will begin by honoring promises made to myself.

Activity: It’s all about you.

  • Take a photo of yourself now and write a list of self promises that you intend to keep. The list should be now, future and then possibly some outcomes of promises/tasks or milestones once met.
  • Buy a small cork-board and some pins to pin up the photo and the list of promises.
  • Get some ribbon and tie a pen to the board so it is always there ready for action.
  • Start collecting trinkets to add to the board for inspiration (old photos, material swatches, mantras, sparkly crystal things, feathers, yarn or fibre, quotes. Inspiration for this can be found on Pinterest. Make this space a shrine to your spirit and inner compass.

Preventative medicine & PCOS

I watched a documentary recently where scientists had cured asthma in mice and reduced the size of tumours in rats. The scientists went on to say that they gave the mice asthma and then they cured them of it. Questions started to race in my head…
How about we take a step back and start to consider that if “they”, the scientists, have the power to cause asthma, cancer, arthritis, MS and all the other afflictions out there that are adding to the government financial burden as part of the health care crisis, then shouldn’t the scientists be sharing the information about known contributing causes of these diseases? Can the government start publicising the known causes and how to live the healthiest life possible by avoiding these things? Why does the government still allow “franken-foods” to be produced? Continue reading

Why grass fed makes a difference

Two of my favourite authors are Robb Wolf author of The Paleo Solution and Claire Yates author of Optimum Health the Paleo Way both present amazing information about the importance and difference between the grass-fed option and the grain-fed or finished choice of meat.

Claire Yates makes the point that animal and humans alike thrive on the diet that they are designed to or evolved to eat. Domesticated animals that are fed a diet of soy, corn, and protein meal, or synthetic vitamins impacts on the health of the animals. This is reflected in the quality of fats and nutrients within the meats. Continue reading

What I ate today?

IMG_4580FullSizeRenderFullSizeRender2What does my daily diet actually look like…
A reader suggested the diet that I live by might be a bit too high in amines for her to adopt. I consider that this is probably true for a person that follows a low amine diet. However my current view of low amine diets is that it is a stepping-stone to the next piece of the puzzle which is gut health and healing the cause of the reaction and inability to digest food properly. I mean no disrespect to the person who messaged me in any way as I came from a similar place. I too reduced our “real food” intake such as veggies, meat, eggs etc in favour of the grain and legume based material to pad out the reaction and uptake into the system. We were at one point afraid to eat certain veggies and food because of the high reactions that the kids had to these foods. Continue reading