Calum Shaw

Her Royal Highness

If you follow our social media, you'll have seen over the past few days/week we've been talking a lot about emotional eating.

Emotional eating is a response.

It's a behaviour that we engage in when our regular, more ideal coping mechanisms aren't sufficient to deal with the stress we're facing.

This is true for most of the behaviours we'd rather not engage in but can't seem to help ourselves. We experience more stress than we know how to handle, it puts us in a state where an immediate solution or release feels like the only way to reduce the anxiety/stress, and we resort to the mechanism that has the highest likelihood of short term relief; regardless of the long term cost.

If this sounds like you, you're definitely not alone. This is something almost all of our clients, friends, family members, staff and definitely myself work with every day.

Below is an image, and in that image there are 6 categories of stress that we experience.

Because stress is such an abstract thing sometimes, it can be really hard to even identify what's bothering you, let alone deal with it.

If you've got a moment, and are up to a little challenge, go through each of these categories individually, and write down what's bothering you. Write it down. Get it out of your head, and into the real world.

Once it's in the real world, it's a real problem; which is terrifying sometimes. But real problems can be dealt with. Real problems can be worked on. Real problems can sometimes be solved.

This is a long process, but if you take the work on, the likelihood of you getting control of your behaviours and your life goes way up.

Have a question or want to talk? I will always make time for you. Just message us, leave a comment, or email me ([email protected]) and I'm always happy to set up a time to work on these complicated problems.

You're not alone ;)

Coach Calum

Image: Precision Nutrition

🤣

Is processed food bad for you?

I guess it depends on your definition of processed!

Smoothies? Processed.

Crackers? Processed.

McDonalds? Processed.

Margarine? Processed.

Any food that's different from its original state before consumption is processed food.

So, the question is not, "is processed food bad for you?" Moreso the question is "how much processing is the right amount of processing?".

Some foods are better absorbed and easier on your digestive tract when they're cooked. A lot of vegetables, especially 'healthy' vegetables and "superfoods" like kale contain compounds that protect it from being digested. These "antinutrients" can be broken down during short cooking, and will actually allow you to get more of the good vitamins and minerals out of your food. Combine that with a little bit of fat and you've got yourself a vegetable flavored multivitamin. Yum? 🤷🏻‍♂️

So, a little bit of cooking or processing can actually go a long way here.

But that same vegetable cooked in a deep fryer and turned into chips will definitely break down the "antinutrients", but will also likely torch any of the vitamins contained in the food. This processing is enough to make it delicious, but kind of defeats the purpose of eating kale, and at this point you may as well eat potato chips cause at least they're what you actually want.

Anyway, I just thought that photo was funny but hope you learned something about processing.

Make it this far?

Put a little 🥕 in the comments.