Walk With Your Doc Fridays - week 3

Hi everyone!

My apologies for the late blog, I was playing ice hockey with my brother and spent Father's Day with my Dad in Vancouver this weekend!!

As you can see, I was doing some of the things I VALUE, like exercise (ice hockey) and family.

This week, we talked about doing the things which we value as a way of helping with lifestyle change.

As it turns out, values are your hot keys and if you honour them while you make lifestyle changes then you are well on your way. Feelings of guilt, shame or regret are usually signs of not valuing your values!

We also talked about how certain eating behaviours can sometimes be viewed as an addiction (thanks for sharing SB!). Many of the same brain pathways and neurochemicals (can you say DOPAMINE!) are involved in both.

As with addiction recovery, it takes a VARIETY of strategies to help with lifelong healing.

We did some DEEP BREATHING (4-6-7 technique).

We talked about cleaning toilets and other things. We know that we have to do some things (i.e. EXERCISE for health), but the fun thing is to ADD something to it to help it

We DETACHED or DISTANCED from food by continuing to use food logs or take pictures of what we are eating (say cheese!)...

Lastly, we started to understand feelings and how important they are and to ACKNOWLEDGE them if one wants good EMOTION management.

HOMEWORK this week included:

1) continue to use a food log or take pictures of your food
2) DEEP BREATHE (use an hourly chime on a watch)
3) walk or do ACTIVITY of 15 minutes a day, and don't forget to ADD something to it to help (i.e. music, a friend, a small REWARD when done!)
4) keep an EMOTION log daily, figure out at any given time how you are feeling...try and identify the feeling (i.e. happy, at peace, sad, anxious, blah, etc.), ACKNOWLEDGE it and move on! Use your spiral notebooks!
5) have FUN!!

Take care,
Dr.P

BTW Here's a good website for organic vs safe foods:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/eat-safe/Save-on-Sustainable-Gallery-44032808