For Healing Hearts: How in the world should I eat?

Happy New Year! I'm SO happy for the new year! 2015 has not been an easy one! I had Gabby the 25th of January. I Love her more than life itself, but it rocked my world. In fact, because I love her so incredibly much is why it rocked me so bad. I have been fighting off fear of failure as a mother left and right! When you love someone so much and you feel like their entire eternal well-being is in your hands its almost more pressure then you can take. Compound that with serious sleep-deprivation, like the kind only mama's know, and the demands of a new born and a toddler AND your husband losing his job for 5 months. It's been beyond stressful, but not defeating! I am hoping this will be one of those years that makes the next ones sweeter.

The one thing that has not been a struggle for me this year is food! In fact I think if I would have had to deal with that too I would have collapsed :) But I think i've had my fair share of struggles with food and the fact that food is now a strength of mine has been hard earned.

At the treatment center I went to I was taught Intuitive Eating is the way to recover from an Eating Disorder. I studied this and worked on it for years. And while some points are very helpful and I apply to my eating today, some aspects of Intuitive Eating were very confusing to me. My Eating Disorder was all about self-hate and numbing out, like a drug. I used food as a drug. My drug of choice- binging. It has the same affect on the brain as any other addiction, it literally produces a high and the brain can become addicted and crave it. So if I was using food as a drug, and if I hated myself so bad that I completely disrespected myself to the point of fullness where I couldn't even walk without hunching over how could the principle of eating whatever I wanted help me recover? Now intuitive eating does say stop when you are full BUT it seemed that having one cookie didn't satisfy my appetite but only made it stronger. I tried Intuitive Eating for years, but I kept having the occasional binge. And if I wasn't binging it was on sheer grit and will power.

I prayed and prayed and searched to know how to eat. I came across some documentary's on netflix that really made sense to me and rang as truth to me. Slowly I started falling in love with healthy eating not only because it made me feel better but because it kept me safe from binging, and anything was worth that. Food had stolen enough of my life already, and I was sick of it! I've realized Satan's door in my life is food, realizing that is powerful because I can keep my guard up. The door can only be unlocked from the inside so I've decided to keep it on lock down and give "Place no more for the enemy of my soul" (Shout out to Nephi :) Because Satan wants us all to be as miserable as him. Then I realized that what I learned on those documentary's went right in line with what The Word of Wisdom teaches. The Word of Wisdom was given for our day, and for the weakest of all saints. Hey, that's me! :) I'm amazed that the Word of Wisdom has had the answer all along and that the Lord gave it to us way before any research had been done about nutrition. Now as nutrition is a hot topic, mostly because people are looking for some relief from food issues, scientists are backing up what the Lord has said all along.

There is SOOOOOOO much information out there, how do you know what to believe? Well I'm not going to tell you how to eat, I'll let you do your own research. I do know that prayer helps, that God cares, and that he created us and he also created the food that is best for us. He wants us to be happy! I'll leave you with some resources that I find to be most helpful if you want to take a look at them.

If your goal this year is to become a healthier you I just want to give you a little motivation and tell you how much it has improved my well-being to eat healthy. The physical benefits are obvious but even more important to me are the mental and and emotional benefits. I almost don't know what to do with the emotional energy that has been freed up because I am not fighting with food anymore. Food is actually my friend! I love my food, I feel satisfied completely after every meal, I feel energized and full and healthy. I don't think I can ever go back to the standard american diet because this just makes way too much sense to me. I feel like I have found a priceless pearl, you hold on to those and treasure them! I'm so happy Heavenly Father is answering my prayers. If my ED was all about self-hate and stuffing my face to numb then shouldn't my recovery be about self-respect and treating my body like a temple and a gift?

So here's some things I came across in my research/experiment to find my answer about how to eat! And I'm not saying i'm perfect by any means, its a journey, but I'm really loving where i'm at!:

Netflix: "Hungry for change"

Netflix: "Forks over Knifes"

Documentary: "Food Matters"

Word of Wisdom: D&C Section 89

Conference Talk: "Avoid It" by Lynn G. Robbins

http://discoveringthewordofwisdom.com

Youtube: "Discovering the Word of Wisdom, a short film"

Drmcdougall.com

Ted Talk: Dr. John Mcdougall