I've been asked in the past, why is my tag line with Your Essential Dietitian, “Love Your Food and Love Yourself”. And I have to tell you that this tagline ended up just flowing out of my mouth one day when I was talking to a friend, and then it really just stuck. It encompasses everything I talk about in my podcast, what I write here in this blog, and it aligns with all that is supported in my group coaching program. Really it is my value system as a practitioner. If something comes into my realm of potential offerings to my community, I evaluate if it will serve my community in a way that allows the Love Your Food, Love Yourself relationship.
So what does Love Your Food and Love Yourself really mean?
First, I think it's good to just take a basic look at what is the basic definition of love. I was researching this a little bit and I saw lots of different potentials out there of what that definition is, but really it comes down to some people think of it as an intense feeling of deep affection (which is where many minds first go) or it can also meet a great interest and pleasure in doing things. I've also seen that love means to be deeply committed and connected to someone or something, so love is really amazing because it is really versatile, and I do believe that it's kind of a basic necessity in everyone's life. For the most part, hopefully, we were all raised with at least a little touch of love, and hopefully we experienced a little of touch of love within minutes of our life from parents, caregivers, grandparents, or whomever it is that we had in our life.
As a parent, I can attest that love is definitely nurturing and unconditional as well. My children can sometimes test me and let’s be real… make me want to pull my hair out. But because I love them, I continue to love them, no matter what. We love people through their goodness and through their badness, which demonstrates just how love is completely unconditional. If we were to love conditionally, it's not really that true, deep sense of love. Love is meant to be unconditional and beautifully just detaches from the outcome. If I were to say, I will only love you “if”... that's not really coming at it from a view of love. Love comes from a variety of feelings, emotions, and attitude. Love is a force of nature!
One thing I read was “love is like the sun, love radiates independently of our fears and our desires”. I think of so many different situations where sometimes we may be scared, fearful, or worried... But in any of those situations, love really can conquer all the things when we allow it. Love can help us come together. And another beautiful thing about love is that it cannot be turned off and turned on. When we love, it's just inside of us, it's there, it's always present! We don't say, you know what, I'm not gonna love that person today or I'm not gonna love that thing anymore. So it encompasses you, and love is really in the vibration of spirit here, it's the song of the universe, it really speaks volumes into the vibrations within ourselves, within our community and our relationships with not only other people, but within ourselves, and then we take that into our relationship with food as well. Living in the love vibration is really kind of our birth right and natural state. In this state of being, we're very heart-centered in our thoughts, in our word and our actions, and the love vibration requires our ego to let go and allows us to get out of our own way.
Love is forever flowing, it’s abundant! It is always available to us for as much as we want. I often find that the more that we love, the more that we feel loved, because what we put out, returns to us. Love is about connection, it's a sense of wholeness, lightness and expansion, and really, love is kind of the beautiful magical potion that creates joy and it's the antidote for pain. So I encourage everyone to embrace love. Sometimes leaning into love can feel like too big of a feat, so we might need to embrace something more attainable for the moment, but try focusing on the goal of embracing love because love transcends time and space, and love can heal us and heal our pains.
To continue digging into the “Love Your Food and Love Yourself”, I wanna talk a little bit about vibration, since I mentioned vibration a few times here talking about love. Vibration is the quality of our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions and our attitudes, and these are all influenced by our beliefs, which are really impacted from our thoughts. Our vibration can go up and it can go down, and that's very, very normal. The vibrations that we put out into the world are based on our resilience for balancing our own mind and our emotions. In order to maintain a higher vibration, (basically feeling a little bit better, having more positive emotions, and impacting our attitude in how we look at the things), we want to use our heart in our connections.
Please also note, that when I use the word love, I'm talking more about maybe caring, compassion, kindness, appreciation, or even forgiveness. All of these things illuminate the same vibration of love. The service that I offer is heart-centered. I look to connect with others, heart to heart, and I want to really help them move up that vibrational ladder and get out of their current pain. So many of the people that I work with, they come from stories and stories of pain and suffering, and oftentimes this is a result of diet culture and weight stigma, which breaks my heart! But there IS hope... I've seen first hand, so many people turn this around! Part of how I help people is through intuitive eating which transcends love through and through.
To learn how "Love Your Food, Love Yourself" is integrated with intuitive eating, pop over and listen to my most recent podcast HERE (or find it on your favorite podcast platform). Another option would be to join my free Facebook Book where we are diving deep into this topic this week and in the weeks to come... Join that group HERE!
As always... much love to you!
