Christie Inge has a great blog focused on Intuitive Eating and Body Image. Christie works as a coach in this area and I can’t quite remember how I came across her site. Usual story of going from interesting link to another ending up lost in cyberspace. Anyway, I registered to get updates from her site as I liked her frank and honest approach. If you haven’t noticed yet, I am quite the fan of ‘plain (profanity) English’ – so me and Christie are going to get along just fine. Upon registering with her site I got access to a free ebook ‘The NO BULLSHIT Getting Started Guide for Making Peace with food and your body’. The ebook focuses on the mind-body disconnect a lot of us experience especially when it comes to eating, exercise and other compulsive behaviours we exhibit. The ebook provides structured self excavation questions on our feelings about our bodies, relationships, minds and spirit. The primary intention of the ebook is focused on intuitive eating and body image. However, the questions I think are beneficial for most. It gives us all the opportunity to reflect on where we are at in terms of beliefs we have about ourselves and what drives them. In this type of work, knowledge is power if you want to move forward, it provides a simple (if not emotionally challenging) method to reflect on what motivates the choices we make. In short, I definitely think it’s worth a look, even if your a skinny mini and think you have life all under control. Just use it as an opportunity to do a bit of an internal audit on where your at. You never know you might learn something, plus it’s free! 
In Christie’s blog post ’7 Awesome Resources for Making Peace with Food (and you)’, she explains how we treat our bodies is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.
A direct bit from that blog post which really resonated with me is…
‘Like, if it isn’t about food then what is it about, right?
Well it is about all sorts of shit.
It’s about emotions. It’s about relationships. The job you hate. The crappy belief systems that drive painful negative self talk. It’s about checking out and disconnecting. It’s about avoidance, believing you can’t handle life and the overwhelming emotions that sometimes comes with it. It’s about distraction and sheer lack of pleasure.
And when we boil all that down, it is really about self-worth and what you believe is possible for your life.’
For me this is not only relevant with what we eat and how much we exercise, this is how we suppress the overwhelming feelings we experience and haven’t yet learnt how to acknowledge and manage them. For all the drinkers, drugers, eaters, over/under exercisers, punishers, over pushing ourselves to be perfect. We may be able to exchange a ‘less healthy vice’ for a more productive one, but it’s the same shit. We are not coping and we haven’t learnt the tools how to do so. But there is help at hand! Which is why I like Christies blog so much, her logic is simple, her style open, which means it’s accessible to the masses. No fluffy language to put you off, Christie is clearly living in the real world. Still not convinced? Read this post on ‘The Truth about A-Ha moments’, I think it is so relevant for how we behave these days especially with all the social media available to us. We can have enlightened moments, tweet and update our status so all our friends can be in awe of our enlightened state. Publishing our lovely arty photos on instagram showing us to be super happy – obviously… no one seems to be publishing the ones where you can’t get out of bed and haven’t managed to wash your hair in days. Your friends are able to ‘like’ your updates demonstrating that they too ‘get it’. We are becoming a generation of masters at articulating where we should be in life and telling everyone just how on track we are (too much in some cases). As Christie points out in her post – the next day it’s all forgotten and we move on to the next thing with no action taken. So you had a A-Ha moment? Great, now take action.
I should point out. I am one of these people! I only post good photos of myself having the most amazing fun ever had… by anyone… ever. I offer enlightened tidbits to friends, flexing my well read personal development muscles. What action am I actually taking? Currently I am mastering the skill of ‘avoidance’ once you have become aware of certain thought patterns, you need to come up with an alternative method to sticking your head in the sand. I used to master ignorance (it’s true – really it’s bliss), but now I have awareness, avoidance is the order of the day. Yep, I as much as anyone needs to take action and make use of the well meaning messages I write to myself – where actioning them refers to something a little more comprehensive than just sticking them up around the house.
Thanks Christie with providing us with some worthwhile tools and a supportive framework to make this happen – please have a look at the site and let me know your thoughts http://www.christieinge.com/
