Read Online Ballet Beautiful: Transform Your Body and Gain the Strength, Grace and Focus of a Ballet Dancer by Mary Helen Bowers - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mary Helen Bowers
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day with a cheat day! A rest day is about rewarding your body, but a cheat day is about eating like crazy and threatening the balance that makes Ballet Beautiful work.
Emotional Balance
All of us have reached for food to comfort ourselves, as a way to feel better when we are sad or simply having a bad day.
Imagine this scenario: You are stressed out and starving when you get home from work. Feeling anxious and on autopilot, you abandon your principle of balance and eat a huge meal followed by dessert. You wake up in the morning feeling bloated, lethargic, and generally upset. Yuck. Now you are experiencing more stress fueled by negative feelings about yourself and your body. What could possibly turn the day around? Skipping breakfast? No. When you go to your closet and look at your skinny jeans, you feel suddenly miserable, convinced that you will never fit in them today. You feel hopeless, you’re angry with yourself, and suddenly you’re dreaming about how great chocolate ice cream would taste right now . . . it’s too late for you this week anyhow, right?
Wrong! I have given in to feelings of self-doubt, even self-loathing, and stood in front of the freezer eating that chocolate ice cream for breakfast. It didn’t make me look or feel very good. I am, however, incredibly happy to say that I learned to identify the problem and correct it, and you can too. I don’t deny myself chocolate ice cream when I really want it; I just ignore the craving before lunch!
When I was in the throes of a moment like this one, I felt totally out of control. I didn’t know that what I really needed to turn my day around was to leave the skinny jeans in the closet and pick a different outfit, eat something healthy and wholesome like a slice of whole-grain bread with fresh avocado, and move on. I also didn’t realize that what I needed most was to be forgiving and kind in how I treated myself, rather than frustrated, angry, and sad. Talk about silencing those nasty negative voices! When you feel backed into a corner, take a minute to reframe your choices.
How did I learn this? Trial and error. In the big picture, chocolate ice cream for breakfast is probably no worse than pancakes or waffles on occasion, but I found that instead of making me feel better, giving in to emotional eating made me feel worse.
Emotional eating is a huge problem for so many of us—but one that we can overcome! In the world of dance, it was easy to absorb and mimic the bad habits of others, and it was also hard to let those habits go. In developing my own program, I started paying better attention to my own patterns of emotional eating. I learned to identify my triggers for emotional or thoughtless eating so that I could consciously avoid certain situations and realign myself. I work to pay attention to these triggers to this day.
Let’s back up a minute. If you have woken up feeling puffy and lethargic, take a moment to recognize these as physical qualities. Perhaps you feel bloated because you have PMS, or because you drank two glasses of wine the night before and had toomany olives before dinner or an overly salty meal. Bloatedness can even come from eating a high-fiber meal before dinner when your body isn’t used to it. It can be hard not to feel bad about your body and yourself when you feel like this. But there is always a physical reason behind bloating and lethargy. It could be broccoli rabe that makes you feel bloated! The point is that it doesn’t have to be bad things that make you feel bloated—it might be the high-fiber toast or fresh mango slices you had for breakfast!
Now, take a moment to follow the trail: if your body feels bloated, how does that make you feel emotionally ? Maybe the bloating makes you feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, sad, or just plain bad about yourself. These negative feelings are more than likely left over from your other experiences with food. It’s so common for women (and men!) to turn to food when they are
Emotional Balance
All of us have reached for food to comfort ourselves, as a way to feel better when we are sad or simply having a bad day.
Imagine this scenario: You are stressed out and starving when you get home from work. Feeling anxious and on autopilot, you abandon your principle of balance and eat a huge meal followed by dessert. You wake up in the morning feeling bloated, lethargic, and generally upset. Yuck. Now you are experiencing more stress fueled by negative feelings about yourself and your body. What could possibly turn the day around? Skipping breakfast? No. When you go to your closet and look at your skinny jeans, you feel suddenly miserable, convinced that you will never fit in them today. You feel hopeless, you’re angry with yourself, and suddenly you’re dreaming about how great chocolate ice cream would taste right now . . . it’s too late for you this week anyhow, right?
Wrong! I have given in to feelings of self-doubt, even self-loathing, and stood in front of the freezer eating that chocolate ice cream for breakfast. It didn’t make me look or feel very good. I am, however, incredibly happy to say that I learned to identify the problem and correct it, and you can too. I don’t deny myself chocolate ice cream when I really want it; I just ignore the craving before lunch!
When I was in the throes of a moment like this one, I felt totally out of control. I didn’t know that what I really needed to turn my day around was to leave the skinny jeans in the closet and pick a different outfit, eat something healthy and wholesome like a slice of whole-grain bread with fresh avocado, and move on. I also didn’t realize that what I needed most was to be forgiving and kind in how I treated myself, rather than frustrated, angry, and sad. Talk about silencing those nasty negative voices! When you feel backed into a corner, take a minute to reframe your choices.
How did I learn this? Trial and error. In the big picture, chocolate ice cream for breakfast is probably no worse than pancakes or waffles on occasion, but I found that instead of making me feel better, giving in to emotional eating made me feel worse.
Emotional eating is a huge problem for so many of us—but one that we can overcome! In the world of dance, it was easy to absorb and mimic the bad habits of others, and it was also hard to let those habits go. In developing my own program, I started paying better attention to my own patterns of emotional eating. I learned to identify my triggers for emotional or thoughtless eating so that I could consciously avoid certain situations and realign myself. I work to pay attention to these triggers to this day.
Let’s back up a minute. If you have woken up feeling puffy and lethargic, take a moment to recognize these as physical qualities. Perhaps you feel bloated because you have PMS, or because you drank two glasses of wine the night before and had toomany olives before dinner or an overly salty meal. Bloatedness can even come from eating a high-fiber meal before dinner when your body isn’t used to it. It can be hard not to feel bad about your body and yourself when you feel like this. But there is always a physical reason behind bloating and lethargy. It could be broccoli rabe that makes you feel bloated! The point is that it doesn’t have to be bad things that make you feel bloated—it might be the high-fiber toast or fresh mango slices you had for breakfast!
Now, take a moment to follow the trail: if your body feels bloated, how does that make you feel emotionally ? Maybe the bloating makes you feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed, sad, or just plain bad about yourself. These negative feelings are more than likely left over from your other experiences with food. It’s so common for women (and men!) to turn to food when they are
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