Don’t forget a teaspoon 🥄 of self-compassion 🧘‍♂️ in your daily diet 🍲

Thinking of starting some exercise 🚶, changing your diet 🍦, losing some weight, or improving your sleep 😴? You may have another goal you are preparing to launch. But don’t forget to keep some self-compassion 🙏 in the plan. Very often we can be our worst and harshest critics and are capable of punishing ourself more than just about anyone can. Ways we can be a little kinder are to concentrate on the good things happening in our life. In the field of positive psychology taking this approach makes a lot of sense. If we include mindfulness about the things that are already working for us, it allows us to focus on the positives. It is not uncommon for us to focus on the negatives about ourselves, which can lead us to procrastinating 🤷‍♂️. 

This is where the essence of lifestyle medicine is built around evidence-based medicine that demonstrates change that is within your reach and is part of the portfolio of behavioral change that will lead to better health and the prevention, maintenance or total reversal of most chronic diseases that we are at risk of developing. 

So, for instance, let’s look at our diet 🍲. It has been clearly proven with evidence-based medicine, that the most suitable diet for preventing chronic diseases is based on the following lifestyle medicine diet: 

A whole food plant-based diet rich in fruit 🍓and vegetables🍆, whole grains, legumes, nuts 🥜, seeds and good oils, with less red meat, and more focus on lean meats in small quantities.

 You may say that your lifestyle won’t allow you to eat this way. It may be more positive to think that by adjusting your diet to the evidence-based eating recommendations of Lifestyle medicine, you will have less room in your diet for the foods 🌭🍟🍭that most certainly will have a negative influence on your health, with a risk of developing chronic diseases. 

I can hear some of my readers saying I am just promoting a vegetarian 🌿or vegan diet, but that is missing the point about what determines a diet that is allowing the necessary protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats, essential shortfall nutrients, phytochemical’s, anti-oxidants, vitamins and enzymes necessary for healthy living.

This really makes the process of applying self-compassion to ourselves quite essential. By using this approach, we can learn to be more mindful and kinder to ourselves as we design a new approach to health, based on a more compassionate self-talk (a more kind and gentle form of self-talk) when we are navigating the need for behavioral change, thereby making dietary changes that significantly improve our level of physical and mental health. Remember, as human beings we all tread paths of difficulty and need for change, self-compassion ensures we are giving ourselves a fair and just chance to move towards more permanent long term health improvements, thereby improving our happiness🐬, health🌵, feeling of gratitude🙏 and reduced stress and anxiety🌈 about whether true change is possible or not.

So back to self-compassion, how are you treating yourself today🌷?

I will post a blog every Thursday, see 🤓you next Thursday! I will discuss Lifestyle medicine diet in another blog soon in more details, now is time for you to click on the following me button and turn on the notification, so you will know when it is coming.

Dr Jeremy Hawke (Podiatrist) 👣 is a certified Lifestyle medicine practitioner with The Australasian society of Lifestyle Medicine (ASLM) and is the published author of “Let’s learn about Power of Activity”, available on Amazon Books. He has also been a professional presenter on human motion and Lifestyle medicine.