http://rstyle.me/~aeuIl The Blonde Bookworm: First Chapter Friday -- Happy Weight by Daniele Della Valle

First Chapter Friday -- Happy Weight by Daniele Della Valle

Friday, March 3, 2017


About the Author: 

Daniele Della Valle is a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and the Author of Happy Weight. After working in the weight loss industry and having a private practice with predominantly female clients, Daniele made the decision to write a book for all women. A common theme always presented itself and women were ultimately concerned with the weight loss and not the overall health of their bodies. As an ancestral health practitioner, educator and advocate this couldn't have been a more appropriate marriage. Happy Weight is an anti-diet manifesto setting women on a journey to self discovery, body positivity, and bioindividual nutrition. You can find Daniele teaching in her community and growing food on her homestead in the Pacific Northwest.

Book Synopsis: 

Happy Weight is a transformative work that takes women's health to a new horizon. This book is an anti-diet manifesto that encourages the mass public of women in America and around the globe to take the health and well-being of their bodies to the next level. With a bioindivudal approach to nutrition and mindful living taken into account, there is no limit to what we can accomplish.

The truth spoken in Happy Weight is refreshing and cutting edge, going against Big Pharma and Agribusiness while informing the reader of the alternative power that lies within. If we are armed with the correct information as individuals regarding our health and wellness we can begin to live freely- breaking out of the propagandized prison the media locks us in.

Learn to love your body while healing it, on your own terms.


**********************************************************************

CHAPTER 1
HAPPY WEIGHT

To love yourself is to be released from the judgment of others.

My name is Daniele Nicole Della Valle and I am a thirty-two-year-old woman living in the Pacific Northwest. I also happen to be a nutritional therapy practitioner certified by the Nutritional Therapy Association. I have worked for several years in clinical and private settings helping women address the full spectrum of health issues, from autoimmune disease to reproductive dysfunction. I use food based protocols, life style mindfulness, and sometimes whole food supplementation to help them achieve their health and wellness goals. I have a special technique I designed myself, whose tenets include creating a safe space and not judging people. It works quite well. When I stopped forcing people to do things, I was surprised how much they could accomplish because they were doing it for themselves.
Most of the women I have counseled in nutrition first come with immediate issues, but are ultimately concerned about their weight. That is what most of us, unfortunately, think about above all else: Our appearance, and not our health. That is most likely what drew you to purchase this book, right? A bunch of powerful, painted, naked ladies on the cover with a title like Happy Weight? The title is not meant to be misleading, but this is not a book about weight loss. This book is more than weight loss, and more than health. This book is THE anti-diet manifesto created to help you find the gateway to your body’s happy place. In other words, I am going to help you to STOP DIETING, so you can learn to love your body and learn about your health in the process. I am not just writing this book for you, I am also writing it for myself. I’ve struggled with my body image for as long as I can remember. Yes, I am a nutritionist with body image issues, go figure. Hi, I’m Daniele, and I have hated my body for a long time.
I’m sure it started around the time I was in elementary school. My first week in fifth grade, a classmate made some bullshit comment asking if I was poor because she had seen me wear the same sweater twice in one week. I still remember what that white cable knit sweater with the blue V-neck collar looked like. It was my favorite sweater. My mother gave it to me, why wouldn’t I wear it more than once? I’m not sure that after all these years I would have remembered that sweater if it weren’t for that negative memory that attached to it. The sad part is that I had just moved, I didn’t know anyone, and this was my first memory of the new town we lived in at the time. Unfortunately, kids just regurgitate hateful language taught by their parents, they don’t even know it’s cruel. They are completely unaware that you were just scarred for life and they are the one to blame.
The next time I remember feeling personal judgment was when I was eleven. I wanted to wear my first training bra. My grandmother said, “What, with those little mosquito bites?” She laughed, thinking she was being cute. I, on the other hand, was insanely embarrassed as I watched my brothers join and laugh with her. Because of that direct body shaming comment, I spent the next ten years wishing and hoping for a larger bust that never came. The women in my family would joke, back handedly hinting that I was lucky that I wasn’t cursed with the “McNulty rack, and that I should be grateful that I was “flat chested”. All I really wanted was what all people want, validation, and to feel a sense of belonging. At this point I did not.
These are only a couple of stories, but I can still feel all of the embarrassment I have experienced in my life deep inside my heart. I have been called fat, too skinny, healthy and unhealthy. Every person I have ever known intimately brings my skin up in regular conversations, as if I have no idea that I struggle with it. Thank you captain obvious, I get it, I have bad skin.  
I have had perfect strangers tell me that they don’t like my hair color, or what I was wearing. I have had random guys put their hand up my skirt because they thought that my wearing a skirt was some sort of invitation. I have had women judge me and, best friends say horrible things about me. I’ve watched women blatantly lie to me to make me feel less than, only to make themselves feel better.
However, I don’t write this book to be a victim of my past, to blame these moments for the pain in my life. This is my story, an anecdote to tell you, some context to show you that I know what that pain feels like. I have cried thousands of tears at the words and actions of others. This book is for both of us, for you and me. This book is for us to leave the past behind and welcome a new beginning, one without the opinions of others. One without the hate or discontent we feel toward a situation. This book is about love and happiness. This book is about finding a place inside of both of us where we can celebrate exactly who we are and love the body we live in. This book is about finding our Happy Weight.
Happy Weight is a state of being, the consciousness of a world without living as a prisoner to our own bodies. It is a pathway of living as our true self and not being categorized as a thing that has to fit into an inhuman mold. As women, we fight almost from birth to live without flaws. We live in a culture where weight is forced on us as the gauge of health and wellbeing. We live in a world that makes us hate ourselves.
Every day some women wake up, and before the day has even begun, the first idea they have about themselves is a negative one. What kind of sick world do we live in that perpetuates and promotes women living in a constant state of self-hatred?
Unfortunately, it is our world, our culture, and our society that makes us feel this way. It’s everywhere: billboards, TV, radio, social media, friends, family, significant others . . . It feels as though we cannot escape this life of being overly concerned with our physical appearance. We are obsessed with our weight.
We let the scale dictate our happiness and self-worth. We would do anything to change this dynamic, right? Not really. Most of us think we are fat, we think diets are the answer, and we think being super thin is healthy and the key to our ultimate happiness.
The reality of this nightmare is that our culture, which calls for bigger, faster, stronger, now, is killing us. Instant gratification is costing us our health and our satisfaction with our lives.
We need to learn to embrace the following information:
  • The physical and emotional go hand in hand.
  • Self-hatred is unhealthy.
  • Yo-yo diets and crash diets are unhealthy.
  • Being an unrealistic size for our individual body type is unhealthy.

Ask yourself this: What is your health worth without your happiness? Don’t you want to love every second of your life? To shed the pain you feel because of someone else’s idea of beauty? To wake up every day feeling powerful, beautiful, healthy, strong, and capable of taking on the world? It is possible that you do, but you still base your worth and health on your appearance. If so, why? Why do you buy gimmicks that promise you these things, instead of going on a journey to find yourself?
The answer is fear: Fear of change, fear of indifference, fear of judgment, fear of not knowing where to start or if we are doing it correctly.
As women, we are often our own worst enemies. We make countless excuses as to why we can’t do something. We make these stories up in our heads about the worst-case scenarios with the worst possible outcomes. This negativity becomes an endless loop that engulfs us. It becomes who we are. We sabotage our goals by not making it to the gym or yoga class. We say to ourselves, “It’s just one meal, I can handle it.” That one meal turns into an entire week of binging. After the week is over we hate ourselves for our decisions.
We become beings stuck on a ride of perpetual self-loathing, where the endless life of hating ourselves feels like the only option.
There was a time in our history where a natural curve to a woman was revered. We ate from our gardens instead of supermarkets, and we used ancestral remedies instead of drugs to cure disease. Women were seen as the givers of life, healers, and the peacemakers. The term goddess was a part of the language we used to describe women. Women held positions of power. Our early ancestors made idols and statues of the female form. There have been many great empresses, queens, and high priestesses throughout history. But somehow, we ceased to recognize their status. Somehow, we forgot how powerful we are, how capable we can be of fulfilling our deepest wants and desires.
Today we base much of our worth and power on our appearance and size. Our culture is saturated with the idea that women need to look a certain way to be beautiful. We have an unwavering belief that we need to be a specific size to be worthy. We feel the need to diet until we look emaciated in order to be considered healthy, sexy, beautiful, and respected. We deprive our bodies of nutrients through our addiction to quick fixes, such as weight-loss drugs, with little to no thought of how these diets could destroy our bodies. We grossly obliterate the natural version of ourselves to fit our culture’s unrealistic expectations about women’s bodies. Some women engage in crash dieting, so much so that they destroy their metabolism and thyroid glands in the process. Some women never recover from the effects of those diets. I know women who have gone so far as to lose their lives because of unhealthy dieting.
Why does what our society thinks our bodies are supposed to look like have so much power over us?
Think about this: have you ever seen a group of women line up who are all the same weight, but are all different heights, shapes, and sizes? How do we not see that we are all so different?
How do we not see that ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL!
Our standards of health and beauty in America are truly disgusting. They are incredibly unrealistic, based on bad science.
The details of where it went wrong is something we will discuss later, but the real question for now is, why? Why did we allow society to make us feel less than? Who is the person that decided we weren’t pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough, brave enough, capable enough to make decisions regarding our own health?

YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE
In all of my years of study, I have come across one primary answer. I have heard leaders speak on the subject, psychologists write about it, yogis preach about it. It is US that are ultimately the criminal, judge, and jury of our physical and emotional fate. It is our emotional state of being that dictates the person we see our self as. It is our choice what foods we decide to eat. As adults, we are primarily responsible for our own happiness, for our state of mind, our health, and our wellbeing.
Processing traumatic emotion is the one occasion in which blame is allowed. It is hard to be calm and introspective if we are still reliving a trauma. The rest of the time, it’s on us . . . we are the creators of our reality. No one else. We are responsible for all the decisions we have made and will make. We make the choice to not be happy the way we are. We make the choice to not take care of our bodies.
Ownership is the only way we can accept our reality and learn to understand why we are here. We are here to take ownership.

OWNERSHIP AND JUDGMENT
This book is not here to blame us for our misgivings or our journey in life. It is not to discount any negative direct or indirect experience we have had regarding our body or sense of self-worth. This book is here to encourage us to take ownership over our life and take control of what is rightfully ours: our choices. Every person has the right to choose her own path, no matter the obstacles. It is time to own our choices and take control of our life. From here on out we will decide how to write our own story. Let’s get started.
If we didn’t know this before, know now that there is a big difference between making a judgment and observing a medical fact. For instance, telling someone they are fat is making a judgment. Being morbidly obese, however, is a fact that a doctor might share with a patient. These two are not the same. Judging someone versus warning her of a health risk—when it is our job to do so—are two completely different scenarios.
Perception is a game I always play with people, and being the devil’s advocate is the role I love most often. To change one’s perspective from one side to no side is like a checkmate for me. Take our parents for instance, and their parents before them. They loved to call people fat, chubby, chunky, some sort of farm animal reference, butterball, thunder thighs, or “healthy looking.” All of these terms and comments are formed in a singular perspective that is learned and unguarded. They taught each other that these terms were correct and didn’t care if they were harmful because they thought that they were somehow “doing you a favor” when they used them.
How many women do we know that have a traumatizing story or experience that they can pull out immediately when asked “What made you hate yourself or think that you were fat?” So many millions of women have been affected for the rest of their lives by one single interaction or conversation! When I’ve asked the women I counsel this question, typically they tell me a story about someone they had a deep bond with shaming them. Sometimes it was the words of a complete stranger that damaged their self-esteem. I don’t care about the “sticks and stones” child’s riddle. Words hurt. They leave scars.

BEAUTY CANNOT BE PUT IN A BOX
The proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” tells us that beauty cannot be judged objectively, for what one person finds beautiful or admirable may not appeal to another. There is no one right answer of how we should or shouldn’t look. This is fact. Women in China bleach their skin because in China, a lighter complexion is a sign of beauty; while some women in the United States spend thousands of dollars a year on tanning and darkening their skin. Every person’s idea of beauty is different.
Who makes the rules about our bodies anyway? Is it our parents, their parents, and the people that came before them? Is it our teachers, bosses, spouses, or friends?
The truth is that not a single person on this planet has the actual authority to make a statement against who we are, what we look like, or who we want to be. They can’t control how we want to be or how we process our thoughts about our lives and ourselves.
Every single person on this earth is faking it. Our ancestors were basing their reasoning on those that came before them, who were quintessentially also faking it, and often got things wrong. Critical people don’t get to decide what works for our bodies or us. They only need to worry about themselves, while we worry about ourselves.
In my own experience, the people I once thought to be the bearers of all truth showed me that no one is perfect. I have had family members, friends, and coworkers pretend at perfection, while living lives that do not conform to their beliefs. I have heard a friend say they wouldn’t be caught dead doing something, and then caught them doing that very thing not a moment later. Hypocrisy is everywhere; it is one strong gauge of imperfection.
Remember, those we believe to hold the power to define us carry their own negative definitions of self. Our friends and family are just as screwed up as we are! NO ONE IS PERFECT! NO ONE HAS IT ALL FIGURED OUT!
Others project onto us the misguided, vicious, perpetual cycle of self-hatred and negativity and sometimes we believe it. This is so horribly sad. Why can’t people just communicate how they really feel? Why do we have to bully each other?
If we begin to understand the fallacy of the human condition, we can begin to understand the idea of happy weight. Although finding our happy weight may sound profound and complicated, it is actually the opposite. Finding our happy weight is about power, liberation, and freedom.
Finding your happy weight is about loving yourself unconditionally, validating your deepest emotions, setting boundaries, gaining confidence, being vulnerable, and understanding how to be of healthy mind, body, and soul. It is the ultimate state of being to remind you to take care of the one and only body you have in this life. This is a testament to your body and life. You have the power to make it what you want, without fear.
You’re following me, right? Happy weight is achieved when you are deeply connected to your health and happiness without question, without harm, and without toxicity.

CHANGE IS NOT AS SCARY AS YOU THINK
It is likely that the thought of not being skinny enough has crossed your mind. This act of judgment and self-hatred is regularly justified by the pressures of society to be more. You become overwhelmingly concerned that your worth is not enough. The thought is, If I were skinnier, my life would be better. I would, in turn, be happier. I would find that magical love of life. I would finally find the greatest happiness to ever exist.
Upon occasion, I become delusional and think, I will become prettier, better, and happier if I were skinnier. Quickly, I wake up and realize that’s not reality, that’s not how this works. Do I actually think that all skinny people have the answer to life? That when the fat melts away I could become a super being that is shielded from negativity? Not so much. Skinny people have their problems too.
Don’t get me wrong. This book isn’t about skinny shaming. Or fat shaming, for that matter. I am only making a statement that being skinny may not necessarily mean healthy. This is a profound awakening that size doesn’t matter. Your health is your health, be it mental or physical.
You are beautiful no matter what you look like. The prettier, the better, the happier you, already exists, you just have to believe in it- and then own it.
Why is it that life doesn’t just magically get better when we lose weight? Because this idea that we aren’t thin enough, good enough, attractive enough, happy enough, all stems from something deeper. The deep-seated emotional need to be something that we think we aren’t came from something outside of us. It was direct or indirect, either way, we feel unworthy in some way, shape, or form. Somewhere, somehow, we learned not to like the way we look or feel about ourselves.
Has this happened to you? Somehow, you began to believe that your body image was more important than your health. Maybe you saw the recognition another person got and thought, I want to be treated like that. Or you had a medical professional tell you that you are in the incorrect weight category, saying, “You need to lose weight.” It could be someone in your life that shames you with negative language and bullies you into thinking you will never be good enough. There are so many possibilities.
You may have forgotten that most people are rude and judgmental, and that the idea of “skinny” or “pretty” is created by unrealistic ideals and false promises by other, self-hating individuals. I know that is a mouthful, but whoever is delivering you a plate of self-hatred is not your friend. If they are your friend, family, co-worker, or spouse, they are using projective language.

PROJECTIVE LANGUAGE REVEALS INSECURITY
Projective language comes from a place of personal discourse. “Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.”1
An example of projection is a mother that raises her daughter with comments like, “You’re too fat to wear that,” or “Are you going to eat that, my little piggy?” These comments come from a deep place of personal insecurity. These comments are generated from the mother’s personal self-hatred and she expresses herself by projecting her own insecurities onto her daughter. Sometimes it isn’t a mother or father; sometimes it’s someone we thought was a friend.
The person using the language has their own damage they are dealing with. Because this person only knows how to express him or herself through negative language, they will, unfortunately, never heal. They will not heal until they decide to take an introspective approach to life. Only an introspective person has the power to change their mental state. Don’t be angry with that person; instead focus on yourself. You can’t fix their crazy. That’s their job.

THE FALSE STATE OF AMERICAN MEASUREMENT
Where do we get our standards of weight and size from, anyway? We thought scales, measurements, and BMIs were the best measurements we had. These may have been initially created for scientific study, but we do not need to be treated like lab rats. Remember that the physical and emotional go hand in hand. As we came to rely more and more on these measurements, we became emotionally dependent on them to dictate our ultimate happiness. We became a number instead of a person. We began relying on numerical measurements and not personal accomplishments. We began rewarding with food and using words like “treats” and “cheats,” making food pleasure seem like some sort of perverse act. Doctors, nutritionists, and personal trainers have a hard time letting go of numerical scales because they truly believe it measures success.
The success of what? Losing and gaining the same weight over and over for the rest of our lives because we have never learned how to truly measure our success. I know almost any doctor, nutritionist, or personal trainer reading this will disagree and say, “Well, according to this study . . . blah blah blah.” I have little to no faith in the standard teachings of the American Medical Association. So, if a doctor thinks that weight loss is the only hope, it might be time for them to go to a Functional Medicine or Integrative Health school and take some psychology classes on disordered eating. Health is so much bigger than a black and white approach to fat vs. thin. There is a huge gray area. The human body is made up of so much more than fat tissue, and shaming people into crash dieting will only cause more damage in the long term. Shaming tactics make us feel stuck, and lost, and leave most of us worse off than when we started.
Maybe we think it is normal to be treated differently because of our size? Maybe at some point, someone made us feel less than worthy. Did we think that whoever made us feel less than worthy had the authority to do so? Why?
And why do we so desperately want to be any different than we are? Why are we more concerned about our size and looks, than our health? Why is vanity our driving factor, and not how we feel about ourselves emotionally, as whole people? Being a person is not an abstract idea. Why isn’t our primary concern our health and wellbeing?
Why aren’t we more concerned with healing our digestion, getting off our medications, sleeping better, or having more energy? Some of us think about having surgery on our hips and knees, when we could easily avoid surgery by healing our bodies.

HEAL WITHIN
What I am trying to say is that how we feel physiologically needs to be the ultimate and primary focus when thinking about our bodies. Not our media-driven, societally approved, negative idea of beauty. Using makeup, plastic surgery, and body-modifying clothing will not hide what is really happening on the inside. Last time I checked, lip injections don’t fix emotional trauma.
Do we really want to be just like that one girl on Instagram, that Fitspo queen? Do we think that because she looks a certain way that her life is better? I get that role models are important, but why does the inspiration have to come from someone that looks nothing like us? Unless it is solely for workout routines, nutrition, or lifestyle advice, why are we following them?
Do our role models actually know what they are doing? What makes them credentialed? Is it because they are fit and surviving on 500 calories a day?
That can’t be right. If anything, some of these “health coaches” are trained in destroying our health. Do they understand how the endocrine system actually works? They may know nothing about the long-term damage their advice does to the thyroid gland, which is the primary driver of metabolism. Or to our adrenal glands, that control our stress response. If we become so fatigued we will end up right back where we started or much worse.
A personal trainer that uses packaged products as “nutrition” recommendations is someone I want nothing to do with. Unless trainers are preaching that we eat real food, I want no part in their lessons.
Consider what makes you so prone to listening to all of this nonsense. Is your poor body image helping you make poor life decisions?

DO YOU LIKE BEING UNHAPPY?
When did you begin to believe that being objectified was better than being what you really are? Can you remember the first time you felt like you weren’t “enough?” Who made you feel that way? When did it happen? How did you respond? Do you even remember how it happened? At what point did you become consumed by the idea that being thin would magically make your life better?
If we think the fat on our bodies is repulsive, then we become repulsive to ourselves. We create a cycle of self-hatred and unhappiness. As this continues, desperation sets in and we reach the point where we will do anything to be skinny, believing this is the key to finally being happy with the way we look and feel. We actually start to believe that being skinny will make us happy. We let the scale dictate our happiness and we start to base our worth on a number.

THE INSANITY
Is that why we are on that liquid shake diet that makes us starve, or that cayenne cleanse that makes our brain feel like it’s melting? Is that why we are on that pregnancy hormone diet where we eat 500 calories a day only to gain all our fat tissue back instantly?
How sustainable is that? Were we able to maintain it? How many times have we lost and gained the same weight? When we were at our lowest weight, were we actually happy? Do we believe that being thin makes us happy?
My heart breaks. The truth is, you are already the most amazing person you know. And if you aren’t sure that’s true, you just haven’t met the true you yet.

WHEN DID WE BECOME SO DISCONNECTED?
Why did we stray so far away from our connection to natural foods? When did we begin to rely so heavily on these chemical imitations of real food? How did we lose the intelligence of listening to our own bodies and knowing when something was wrong? The truth is that we forgot to focus on eating real food. One day, food became more of a science project than it did sustenance. We started counting calories and fat instead of nutrients.
I had a client bring me a loaf of bread that had over twenty-five ingredients in it and she asked me to help her read the label. I told her that her first mistake was that the front of the package lists calories and fat. The second is that bread should never have more than five ingredients in it, and those five ingredients should be flour, water, yeast, baking soda, and salt. That’s it. Unless she was gluten free, and then wheat flour is nowhere to be found. Her third mistake was that nowhere on the package did it say whether or not the food is organic, non-GMO, or minimally processed. The “loaf of bread” was really a loaf of crap. Not because I think so, but because our bodies think so. The organic, non-GMO, gluten-free labels are not a fad; they are a red flag signaling the reality of the world we live in. The reality that we stopped caring about what we put in our bodies because we are so focused on convenience.
In Chapter 3, about nutrition and bioindividuality, I’ll get into the how and why, but for now let’s explore the shift that desperately needs to take place. The need to clean up how we eat and get back to basics.
Bioindividuality is a word that will appear a lot in this book. It is the idea that every single person is different, and that we all have different approaches to achieving optimal health and wellness. We all have different scopes of understanding, different backgrounds. We all have different genetic makeups. We are all living in different economic, geographic, and physical environments. The result is that no one person on this planet has the exact same biological map. However, the one consistent factor, the common denominator in all of this is the need to eat real, clean, food as medicine, and understand the delicate state of the human microbiome. The Human Genome Project defines the microbiome as “the collective genomes of the microbes (composed of bacteria, bacteriophage, fungi, protozoa and viruses) that live inside and on the human body. We have about ten times as many microbial cells as human cells.”2
Our microbiome can be altered by the foods we eat. The old saying “you are what you eat,” could not be any more real. Eating clean is the best place to start when understanding our effect on our microbiome for the first time. Eating organic, grass-fed, unprocessed foods that are not full of chemicals and additives is the one unchanging variable in human health. We simply forgot how to eat, care about, and pay attention to real, natural foods. The American need for bigger, faster, stronger, and right now has destroyed the culture of slow eating, growing our own food, and nurturing our soul through every aspect of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is one of the most important acts in human existence. Mindfulness is paying attention to any and all of the actions, choices, and movements we make in our lives. As our physical health collectively began to deteriorate, so did our collective mental state of being. Mindfulness has been long forgotten by our culture and we now live in ignorance. We cannot begin to understand how to make changes unless we understand where our ignorance came from.

SHAMING
Unfortunately, the state of emotional health and the systems to support it in our country are declining. How can we begin to process what is ultimately wrong with the physical health of our society if we, as a whole, feel shamed and defeated? How can we begin to rebuild and support each other as a community if we don’t believe in ourselves? The American food culture and body shaming go hand in hand. We cannot find our happy weight physically if we do not first begin to heal the wounds of our past.
I recently had a client that came to see me to discuss fat loss. She knew it would not be quick because she wanted, above all, to be healthy. I thought, “Great, a client that has come to terms with her reality.” It wasn’t until she began to hesitate with making simple changes that I realized she had not fully dealt with the pain of her past, and in particular, the relationship she had with her mother. She was combative and abrasive. She said she was fine, but her face would become flushed any time I suggested a shift or reason why she was not working toward her personal goals. Her deprivation gave her a sense of entitlement. This deprivation came from an all too familiar memory of someone using shaming and abusive language about her body.
Her truth was, how could she expect to make a change in her health or the way she approached her relationship with food if she didn’t change the way she viewed herself?
Our food ignorance comes from a history of self-doubt, shaming, guilt, bad habits we were taught, and poor science making us prisoners to toxic products.  We resist making food changes because we cannot accept that we are living with a lifetime of shame and a complete lack of vulnerability. True vulnerability is the act of asking for what you want regardless of what others think.
If we do not work through our shame and guilt with vulnerability and gain confidence in the process, we are destined to repeat the past. We will never find completeness if we first do not come to terms with our reality, and work through the pain of the shaming language that was used against, and imprisons us.
We can learn best from living our life with vulnerability and transparency. We can work through the shame by living our truth and making no apologies.
I never push change on my clients. I deliberately never make them feel as though they “have to” or “should” do anything. Health and happiness are a state of mind. Weight is not always the primary factor when it comes to health; fat tissue and the buildup of toxins are. Several recent studies show that some people’s buildup of fat tissue can be protective against environmental toxins and oxidative stress.3 The primary concern here is inflammation and toxin build up, not weight. If we suffer from inflammatory conditions and weight gain, losing the weight may not necessarily correct the issue. The fat itself is not the cause of our disease, the imbalance is. Weight gain is far from the biggest problem in the grand scheme of your health. Inflammation, estrogen dominance, cortisol build up, uric acid build up, and acidic blood are some of the many issues that threaten our health. Some women might actually gain weight as they get healthier, and some may lose weight as a result of their body adapting to a protocol to correct their health. Fat tissue on the body is not the primary identifier of poor health, the existence of an inflammatory disease is. Don’t be so quick to compare yourself to or judge another person based on size, they might be healthier than you are.

THE SECRET
The secret to life is: LIVE IT. Be conscious in this life, be mindful, and pay full attention to the world around you. It has nothing to do with how fat or skinny you are. The body you live in is a vehicle to get you through your life, so that you have the chance to experience it. Think of your body as an organic machine house for your consciousness.
We can’t float around as consciousness, so this organic machine house helps us see, taste, smell, touch, and experience life. What we look like is not something we can control. Therefore, we can try and contour our bodies as much as we want, but in the end, what we get is what we get. Every single human on this planet is beautifully constructed. We are all so different. So many shapes, sizes, and colors. It is truly amazing. We are incredibly intricate beings. Yet, we have unlearned that our organic machine house needs to be healthy in order for us to continue to experience life.
Have you ever heard “Your body is your temple”? Well, this is truth. Your body is your sanctuary.
This journey through discovering your happy weight will help you understand how to treat your temple. It is about finding yourself and understanding the concept of existing fully. Happy weight isn’t just a journey into discovering your true health, it is about finding your voice, being vulnerable, saying NO, and saying YES. The path to finding your happy weight follows these simple themes:
  • Establishing confidence and vulnerability
  • Nourishing your body’s bioindividuality with nutrition
  • Stress management
  • Losing the guilt
  • Breaking up with foods through mindfulness
  • The art of saying no
  • Creating yourself by finding your tribe
  • Detoxifying your home and life
  • Ultimately learning how to listen to your beautiful body

This book is a guide to stepping into the amazing woman that you have always been. It is about making her known to you and to the world. Let me be your guide. You may not like me at times, but don’t put me down. I promise I will be here every step of the way.

******************************************************
Thank you for sharing your first chapter Daniele! Readers, if you're interesting in purchasing Happy Weight, click HERE.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

 
(© copyright 2015)