TSHP065: Food, Mood & Body Shape

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Food. We can’t live without it but it’s far more than just a simple source of energy for we civilised human beings of the developed world.

A near unlimited supply of food for the lucky few plus access to a media that demands we be a certain shape and size, however, was bound to cause problems and many, if not all of us, our relationship with food and the size of our waste lines is becoming increasingly fraught.

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Food, Mood & Body Shape

Fat is an emotional issue

In 1978 ‘Fat is a feminist issue‘ written by Susie Orbach. It encouraged women to look at their bodies and why they needed to look a certain way. This was especially important when women were renegotiating their position in western society and challenged the view that men had of the female form. Well, fat has moved on since then, or should I say has grown since then and has become an ever-bigger issue.

The western world is getting fatter. Britain is now the fattest country in Europe, but what does that mean, why is it happening? There are several ways of looking at this.

Protection
Fat forms a protective layer. Sometime people hide emotionally behind a layer of fat. There are three types of fat white, yellow and brown. Brown fat is dense, highly insulative and thin. This is found in those that are more athletic where they are lean, yet their bodies retain heat as well as bigger people.

Yellow fat is the halfway house between the white and brown and appears in most emotionally well balanced people. It is not as dense as the lean brown fat and gives a body a softer look and rounded curves.

White fat is more like loft insulation you need a lot of it to have its effect. Inches of soft white fat have the same insulative properties of the thinner yellow and brown fats. White fat develops from overeating and lack of exercise and is often related to emotional protection. It is as though the person is hiding behind the layer of fat.

I have often worked with women who feel that when they are big men leave them alone and when they are slim they get too much unwanted attention. But there is another issue that effects both men and women, it is the relationship between carbohydrates and depression.

Fat food and serotonin
In the podcast I mentioned the book, ‘Food and Mood’. The realisation that food effects how we feel and think has become current science. The bit that interests me is the carbohydrate cycle. We now know that when we eat comfort foods our brain secretes serotonin the happy hormone of wellbeing.

The carb cycle is when someone is feeling down and self medicates with carbs to make themselves feel better. Their subsequent weight gain makes them feel bad so they eat more carbs to feel better again and so the cycle goes on.

When I look at it this way I suspect that what were seeing is not simply that Britain is the fattest country in Europe but that it is the most depressed country in Europe. I am not sure what this says about the USA and their weight gain.

Other ways to get serotonin
Ok, so if we have a natural drive towards maintaining a level of serotonin in our brains that makes us feel good and creates our sense of wellbeing how else can we do it apart from comfort food?

Well, serotonin will be produced in response to pain which is the basis of self harming behaviours that lead to a sense of relief or well being, not recommended. Humour does the trick when you laugh so much that your face hurts. Sensitive and sensual sex does it. Though, top of the list is exercise. When you heart rate increases for about twenty minutes your brain responds by releasing the endorphins that make you feel really good and happy.

For me exercise is running. It takes about two kilometres for my brain to start to release it and then after twenty minutes it begins to flow. For other exercise may be keep fit, Zumba, gym sessions, energetic yoga, power walking, running up and down the stairs. Whatever it is, twenty minutes does the trick.

You need muscle to burn fat
Sometimes, when you have invested a lot in building your fat bank it can be difficult to shift it. This is because you need to be able to move muscle to burn the fat. This may mean doing muscle building exercises to develop the strength needed to then create an exercise regime that is able to deal with the fat. This can be a longer term issue that requires consistent and persistent determination to create success.

There is another issue worth looking at when considering your fat bank, it is Vitamin D. There is a bit of an argument taking place in the scientific world as to whether Vit D is a hormone or a vitamin. It doesn’t really matter, what is important is the effect Vit D deficiency can have on our systems. There are many disease and illness situations for which Vit D deficiency is the precursor. It is the psychological bit that interests me.

Vitamin D is the precursor of serotonin production in the brain. Vit D is produced in the skin in response to sunlight. This explains how seasonal affected Disorder SAD comes about. As the sunlight diminishes the level of serotonin drops as the level of Vitamin D drops. Our response in the winter is to eat more, generally carbs, that boost our serotonin and take us through the dark months until we get back to the light in the spring.

There appears to be a correlation between our collective paranoia about skin cancer, the increase in the use of sun creams, that can reduce the production of Vit D by over 90%, and the increase in weight of the British population. I could be bonkers but it would seem to me that if we allow ourselves more exposure to sunlight we might reduce our craving for carbs and lose some weight in the process.

Anyway, in considering your fat it starts with what you are eating and why you are eating it, whether you are exercising, if you are having some fun and maybe if you are getting enough sunlight on your skin.

All positive routes lead us towards happiness

Be happy

Sean x

TSHP064: Travel as Therapy

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What’s Coming This Episode?

It’s holiday season and people across the UK and beyond are packing up their bags and heading away for a week or two. Are they headed to the right places though?

Travel is a wonderful thing and deserves a lot of thought. The right holiday can change your life for the better, the wrong choice can leave you in a worse state than when you left.

Enjoy the show, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Travel as Therapy

Why do we travel?

Having just come back from a long weekend in the Yorkshire Dales I can directly feel the benefits of ‘getting away’. From where we live it is a two hour drive, and an easy drive at that. For most people ‘getting away’ involves planes, airports, delays and a good deal of stress. I hear people say that they don’t know why they bother, coming back more flustered than when they went. Surely travel should be a joyful experience, if not why do it? It seems that it is all to do with the speed that we now need to do everything, time to slow down I think.

The human body was designed to move at a walking pace or, at a pinch, a jogging pace. Humans moved out of Africa, and the Garden of Eden, to populate the world but they did so at a walking pace, there were no boats, planes or cars. At a walking pace there is time to acclimatise to the new land and the flora and the fauna as our system adjusts. We don’t get Delhi Belly and can leave the Imodium at home.

But we do all seem to need to get away and, we need to get away now. We can’t stop doing it; we call it “going on holiday?” So, why? What does travel do for us?

There are lots of types of travel from the package all inclusive that can ensure that we get all the comforts of home abroad, the same food, same drink, same music and TV programmes, the only difference is that it is in the sunshine, through to cruises, holiday camps and activity holidays, to those where we go native and become a local. What do you do?

At a psychological level several things are taking place. The first is that when we travel we are learning and that may be social, cultural, cuisine and wine and so on, and that is stimulating. The second is that it is different. There are different smells, colours, tastes and sounds that expand the way that we see the world. The third, and perhaps the most important, is that travel is therapeutic.

We hear a lot about stress hormones, first on the list are normally adrenalin, epinephrine and cortisol. While stress hormones are associated with stress related illness they are also the fuel that keep us going in life. When we are working it is these chemicals that help to get us out of bed, give us drive and maintain our motivation levels. They are the high octane fuel that powers our daily life. When we are over worked and stressed the levels of these chemical become to high and we feel their effects as hypertension, raised blood pressure and stress related diseases.

When we take a break, when we travel, or go on holiday the levels of these chemicals begin to drop, though it takes a few days. If we leave on Friday we only feel that we have arrived on the Tuesday, when these chemical levels have dropped. At the other end of the holiday when we go home, the levels are low. We arrive at work on the first day back and we just can’t seem to get going. Over the next couple of weeks the chemical levels rise again to their normal levels and we say ‘I feel like I have never been away’.

The holiday gives our stressed system a rest. More importantly is that it reminds us of what life is like without the stress. This is what we should be aiming for.

As you will know I am a meditation junkie. When you meditate on a daily basis you have a daily holiday when your stress hormones drop to holiday levels. Over all you become calmer, more relaxed and more effective. When we become truly relaxed in life everyday is a holiday, yet at the same time we become more productive than ever before.

I love holidays, I enjoy going away and we try to do so several times each year. I also love the daily holiday in my meditation.

Where could you go today?

Take care and enjoy the trip

Sean x

TSHP063: Watch Your Mouth!

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What’s Coming This Episode?

An interesting thing happens when you open your mouth to talk. Your mind hears what you’re saying.

Do you listen to what you say? Do you hear the tone of your voice? Do you realise how you are heard by others? Well, maybe you should…

Enjoy, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Watch Your Mouth!

Did you really just say that?

Do you listen to what you say? Do you hear the tone of your voice? Are you aware of how others hear you? I guess if your answer to these questions were ‘no’ then you would not be reading this. However, becoming really aware of what is coming out of our mouths is an art and requires awareness and awake-ness.

You only need to stand in a bus queue or sit in a coffee lounge and listen the voices around you to realise where people hold their consciousness. Sadly you will discover that the majority of what people are saying is negative. There are many reasons for this but the bottom line is that for some people they live with negative images and beliefs about themselves and about others.

From being children we have learned all that we know from what we heard and what we saw. In the beginning this was from our mother and our father and that went on to siblings, teachers, cultures and nationalities and so on. And we have gone on repeating all that we have learned again and again and again.

The problem is that what you say is what you hear, and what you hear reinforces your basic beliefs. If you see negative things in other people and you verbalise your negative thought you will hear those negative thoughts and simply continue to have more negative thoughts.

You will never find happiness or contentment
while you have negative thoughts about other people

The two things can never go together. If you say anything negative about another person, and you hear what you have just said, you have simply added another little pebble to the negative mountain inside you. If on the other hand you have a positive thought about another person it is as though you have just taken a little pebble off the mountain. Many positive thoughts will rid you of the burden of negativity that you carry around with you.

You can always tell negative people because they find it hard to say anything that is positive. If it’s sunny they will be expecting rain, if it is raining they will be expecting a flood. They will suffer illnesses, bad luck and assume, in someway, that the universe is out to get them, they will feel that people don’t like them and become distrustful.

Thoughts become things

The magic of thoughts is that they precede words. When you think a thought you do not need to say it, to allow it to have its effect. If you have good thoughts you will take the pebbles away from the negative mountain and lighten your load. If on the other hand you spend your time ruminating on negative thoughts you will add to the mountain and the burden that you are carrying.

There are particular words that add greatly to the negative mountain. These will include most swear words and profanities. The word ‘can’t’ should be banned completely because if you say that you can’t, you hear it and it is a done deal. If someone says, “I can’t do that” they are right they can’t.

The other words that do not serve us well are ‘ought’, ‘should’ and ‘must’. The only reason we ever need to act is because we want or desire to do something. There is nothing that we ought to do, there is nothing that we should do and, there is nothing that we must do. The only relevant action is that of free choice.

Just as you hear what you say other people hear what you say. When you are negative with there people you simply are adding to the negative mountain within them. When you act with kindness and love you are lightening their load. In all forms of therapy and healing it is the acceptance by the therapist with unconditional positive regard of the person that they are working with that does the healing.

When we use thoughts and words that treat us with unconditional positive regard we feed our self with the highest positive emotions, we develop self-confidence, happiness and love. We allow our self to enjoy the magic of being alive.

But the world is full of choices. Listen to yourself. If what you are saying makes you feel good then, say more of it. If, on the other hand, it makes you feel not so good, then change your script.

Be happy and love what comes out of your mouth.

Sean x

TSHP062: Wasting Time

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What’s Coming This Episode?

At the start of everyday the universe gives you a cheque for time, that is 24 hours or 1440 minutes. The same happens everyday. That is 525,600 minutes per year or in a lifetime, if you live to ninety, and you probably will, a total of 47,304,000 minutes. What do you do with your time?

Time can be invested well, producing great benefits (profits) or wasted creating negatives (losses) that then colour our experience and our wellbeing.

It’s The Self Help Podcast! Enjoy the show 🙂

Show Notes and Links

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Are You Wasting Your Time?

At the start of everyday the universe gives you a cheque for time, that is 24 hours or 1440 minutes. The same happens everyday. That is 525,600 minutes per year or in a lifetime, if you live to ninety, and you probably will, a total of 47,304,000 minutes. What do you do with your time? Time can be invested well, producing great benefits (profits) or wasted creating negatives (losses) that then colour our experience and our wellbeing.

Time is the progression from what was, through what is, to what will be or, how we cope with past, present and future. However, time is a concept that does not really exist, or more accurately time is in the eye of the beholder. Our experience of time is relative. It depends on where we view it from.

The watched pot never boils

For most children time is a huge thing that lasts forever. It might be that feeling in school when we are waiting for the ‘home bell’ to sound the end of a seemingly endless day or the seemingly endless days of the summer vacation that were hot and sunny and went on forever. When we are children there seems to be so much to do and plenty of time to do it in. At this point the concepts of age and growing old are fantasies that belong to a future that we believe will never happen to us.

As we get into adolescence time pressures begin to occur. Perhaps we are warm in bed, having ‘wasted our time’ the night before, gone to bed late, and now we should be up and getting ready for school. Our mother is shouting up the stairs that we are late, will be late, miss the bus, no time for breakfast, and that we should have gone to bed earlier.

There does come a point when it feels that there are never enough hours in the day. The feeling is that the design is wrong; that twenty-four hours is never enough and thirty-six would have been a much better idea. Ask any busy mum trying to get the kids to school, the husband to work, do the washing, ironing, clean the house, all before the kids are back from school and then due at clubs and friends. The father juggling the needs of family, work, friends and so on. It appears that the day begins to shrink.

As we get older time flashes by faster and faster as “weeks turn into years, how quick the fly” (Bert Bacharach). It is always Monday and another week at work.

“Is it August already? It can’t be we’ve only just had `Christmas”

Every New Year is followed by another Christmas Eve and the years become decades as we transit from 20s to 30s to 40s. It is the ones with noughts on that now mark the passage of time. Sometimes the noughts are followed by depression as the experience of time passing becomes a fear that time will run out and it will be the end and a feeling of loss.

“What on earth have I done with my life?”

Actually it is not always true that time gets forever faster, there is a stop point. Many older people return to the experience of their childhood, not just in their memories but they begin to feel that everyday is lasting a life time. As a child this was an exciting experience that was full of things to learn and do, it was a world of discovery. In older life, for many, this expanse of time, rather than being a joy, becomes something to fear. Now it can feel that ‘it all’, time and life that is, now drag on forever. The elderly residential home can become like a waiting room full of people waiting wearily for their end.

It does not have to be this way

Here at Live In The Present we are forever banging on about things like ‘life time learning’. We live with the realisation that we will each only produce new brain cells in response to new learning and, at the point when we stop learning our system will fall into decline. The difference is that when we are learning we are occupied and when the mind is actively engaged time does not begin to drag or weigh on us, each moment is a joy of newness.

“Time is an illusion designed to explain the passages of history
History is an illusion designed to explain the passage of time”

Douglas Adams

Forget Einstein, the relativity of time is all in your head. Time is only ever the way that I experience it and your experience may/will be different to mine. Let’s say we go to a play at the theatre that you really, really want to see but I don’t. For you each minute of the performance will keep you engaged and the time will fly. For me, I don’t want to be here, I am hating every moment and the time drags painfully by. It can be the same on holidays and outings, Christmas and Easter, all these events are a joy or a curse depending on how we view them.

Living outside time

The present, the current moment, the now, is really all that there ever is. By the time you get to the end of this sentence the first word you read will be in the past, the full stop will be your present and, the next sentence will be the future. Your current breath is now, your last breath the past and the next breath your future. You current heart beat is the now, the last one your past and the next one your future.

Time is really a continual set of experiences of ‘now’ that when put together become our experience of past, present and future. There are many quantum scientists who would suggest that neither past nor future actually exist and that ‘Now’ is all that there is. It can all become a bit mind boggling.

Past and future

Those of us that do not live in the present moment are emotionally out of step with ourself. Those living in the negative past will be diagnosed with depression while those living in the negative future will be diagnosed with anxiety. Here come the happy pills.

Those able to live in the present will not be hampered by what was or be fearing what will be. Living in the present requires that we are in the ‘zone’. For some the zone will be something like meditation while for others it will be something more active like running. However, any task, even work, that we are fully engaged in, when we are truly present in the moment will, mean we are at our best, most efficient and potentially most happy and fulfilled.

Transcending time

When we transcend time we step out of time and space, this is known as a trance. We fall into a trance state when we are highly concentrated in the moment. Have you ever been reading a book and suddenly realised that time has passed by without you even realising it? Have you experienced your child watching TV who does not hear you when you shout out that their tea is ready? These are trance states. When we are highly concentrated in the moment, in the task, so that past and future are not impinging in the now, we are living in the present. In high states of concentration time, or the passage of time ceases to exist as we have moved into continuum of present.

This high concentration can be there when we are at work, at play, with our friends, family, making love, whatever, we are present to ourself in the moment, in the now.

Mindful meditation

To be the most effective and an efficient person you need to live in the present. Mindful meditation is the way I use to maintain my ability to be in my ‘now’. I use a ‘Vipassana’ style approach, which is also known as breath focus or body focus meditation taught under other names. Meditation is a process that allows you to let go of what was, also of what will be, and enter your present.

This involves:

Relaxation: a comfortable position in which you can relax your body without falling asleep
Contemplation: begin to focus your mind into breath/body awareness
Concentration: being able to hold single thought, focus or feeling without your mind wandering
Meditation: becoming so highly concentrated in the present that past and future no longer exist and in doing so all sense of yourself as a distinct individual ceases so that in this trance state you step out of time and space. This is also known as ‘self annihilation’.

Becoming a time lord

Dr Who was described as a time lord because he could travel through time. A real time lord is someone who is in control of their time world. When we are able to hold our concentration mindfully we are no longer controlled by time, we control it. As a time lord there is always enough time and time is never a burden and never drags.

The trick of being a time lord is to stay engaged in life, maintain life long learning, stay fit and healthy, have a positive attitude of gratitude and, live in the present.

Becoming a time lord is a choice. What will you choose to do with your 1440 minutes today?

Take care, be happy and, live you the present.

Sean x