Happy Tuesday Healthy Sixers -
Have you made any of the kefir smoothies yet? I can't say enough great things about Kefir - highly probiotic, My Cherry Vanilla Kefir Smoothie is one of my favourites. And if you haven't started taken a probiotic yet, please do - this is one of the most important, and easy to implement Healthy Six strategies for improving your gut health.
A reminder: Tomorrow Night at 730 we have Colin Matthews, my friend who is a yoga master, a Medical Intuitive and a genuinely incredible guy. He presented this session in the fall - why we self-sabotage, the four archetypes that hold us back and how we can overcome this, and honestly: do not miss it.
I have written a piece on emotional eating that I have cut and pasted below, and you can have a quick read here. Emotional eating isn't all bad: It often serves us. What we are trying to build in the Healthy Six is conscious-raising around sleep, exercise and healthy eating: a healthy life.
So much of that is tied to the why, not simply the how: I can provide you with a how-to get fit and healthy, but you have to find your why.
Quick links for this week again:
Habit Stacker
Recipe Sheet (recipes added daily!)
Cookbook
And also...have you started your gratitude journal?
For Exercise:
ZOOM 3103249098
Password: FITFAM
Wednesday
7 am: FULL BODY WEIGHTS
12 PM - Exercise Snack
630 - Strong 6
Thursday
7 AM - CORE
930 AM - Cycle
Friday
7 am - FLOW
Expert Session:
Wednesday 730 PM
In health,
Erin
Emotional Eating Is Part of Your Story
I learned how to bake chocolate chip cookies the day my father collapsed on a golf course in the Bahamas.
Dad ran an advertising agency in Montreal in the 70s - he was the original Mad Man. Three martini lunches, fancy business trips to Vegas where my mother - tanned, lithe and in a spaghetti-strap dress, smiled brightly to the Kodak, squeezed in-between two portly men, in one of those hollowed out conch shell benches that could seat parties of twenty. My dad smoked cigars, ate plenty of red meat and his workout schedule involved anaerobic sprints down the ice refereeing, Old Timers hockey league.
Let’s say that both genetics and lifestyle choices were not on his side in 1976 when he collapsed on the 2nd hole, right in front of the pharmaceutical big-wigs who had flown him down on a rewards trip.
Back home in Hudson, Quebec my mum was slatering my brother and I in calamine lotion. The under-the-skin itches had exploded in the middle of the night into full-blown chickenpox. Mum heard the phone ring in the distance, and let it go. It rang again. And again. And again. The 4th time, she knew something was up.
Get down here fast. Your husband is not going to make it
Within hours, we had been thrust at her best friend Jo’s house, who had two boys the same age. Back then, the theory was every kid was going to get chicken pox - my brother and I might as well give it to her boys, and we would all suffer through it together.
Jo was a solid Englishwoman of the same upbringing as my mum - stiff upper lip, and there was nothing that tea and a biscuit couldn’t fix. The door hadn’t even clicked shut, my mum's tear-stained face leaving her sick children to tend to her dying husband, when Jo dragged her mint-green chipped footstool to the counter. We were going to bake cookies.
She pulled out butter from the fridge and set it to soften; she lined up silver cup and half-cup measures, and a set of spoons attached together around a thin wire; she pulled tall canister full of brown sugar, white sugar, oats and flour, tied an apron around my waist and handed me a wooden spoon. The recipe, Mona’s Mothers Mothers Best Friends Favourites had been in her family for generations, and now she was passing it on to me.
My tiny four-year old hand grasped the wooden spoon, and I learned how to cream the butter and sugars, smoothing it together, then spinning it around and around the metal bowl. Jo cracked the egg, and added tiny drops of vanilla that I pulled under my nose to smell again and again. She taught me to add the rolled out and flour slowly, and we used one of the little spoons for baking soda. Lastly, she pulled a magical canister, telling me it was the secret ingredient: coconut. A fresh back of Chipits was opened, and she placed a few in my palm to nibble; she let me dip my finger in the bowl to try the cookie dough.
It was heaven.
We placed them on parchment-lined paper and popped them in the oven; Jo flicked on the light, and popped me off the stool. I had momentarily forgotten my itching arms and legs, and my mum wet eyes. I stared in the oven, watching the cookies brown at the edges, staying opaque in the centre. Jo taught me to pull the cookies out of the oven a little early, so the centre would be warm and gooey.
We sat in the living room with cups of tea and biscuits and watched The Price is Right. We made those cookies again and again, until my mum returned home a month later - my dad hadn’t died...yet. When he did die several years later, I made those cookies every time I could see that my mum was having trouble breathing in life. I would often nip over to Jo’s place for a baking session throughout my childhood - learning to bake scones, lemon loaf, banana bread, a playdate with her sons usually landed me on the mint-chipped paint stool.
I got plumper. My mum, a teen of the Twiggy-era, encouraged me to join Weight Watchers when I was 13. The love-hate relationship with my body began, a battle that many of us were called to fight. I discovered bulimia at university, and those cookies were often baked, and then flushed down the toilet.
I learned to love those cookies again after the children were born, pulling up a stool and wrapping an apron around their little necks.
I have made Mona Mother's Mother's Best Friend's Favourites a thousand times in nearly fifty years. I have made them in times of turmoil and in times of joy. If I was given one day to live, I would make those chocolate chip cookies.
There have been moments I have numbed with the baking - when I didn’t want to face life, or when things became too much, baking would soothe me. But I have also made those cookies as an act of love. They are part of me. The food we love has a story, and that story is a part of us.
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