Last Thursday, I appeared on Jane Velez-Mitchell’s show on HLN to talk about the public policy hullabaloo of the moment. My sleepy little hometown of NYC made the news when our Mayor for life, Michael Bloomberg, had another brilliant idea for the public shaming of fat people public health — outlawing the sale of sodas in excess of 16 oz.  Of course, the rhetoric from the mayor’s office is all about how soda leads to obesity, and obesity is the scourge of our age, worse than the bubonic plague and alien robots put together. (Or something like that.)

[caption id=”attachment_6902” align=”alignright” width=”307” caption=”Soda… from hell!!! (Image courtesy of wikipedia)”][/caption]

The lawyer part of me thinks that this ban is completely idiotic from a public policy standpoint and the fat activist side of me agrees and thinks that the obesity rhetoric surrounding all of this is wrong and also completely idiotic.

So let’s think about the actual effects of the proposed ban.  What are the actual effects vs. the supposed, heralded effects?

First of all, I think people will find a way around it.  If you really want a lot of soda, and you have the money, you’ll probably just buy a bunch of 16 oz bottles or cups, or maybe you’ll drive over the border into the free counties of Nassau or Bergen and stock up on contraband 2 liter bottles.  So if you think about it, the people who will be most affected by the ban are poorer people living in NYC.

[caption id=”attachment_6898” align=”alignright” width=”152” caption=”The actual NYC soda ban proposal as an infographic (Image courtesy of the NY Times)”][/caption]

Years back, because of wonderful things like rent control, people with not a lot of money rubbed elbows with wealthier New Yorkers.  But in Giuliani/Bloomberg NYC, poorer New Yorkers have continually been pushed to the margins of the city, both geographically and figuratively.  And when I listen to the rhetoric around obesity here in New York and all over the country, being fat is always conflated with being poor and/or being uneducated. And there’s this concept in the background that people in these categories don’t know what’s good for them and need the government to come in and make rules about how they live their lives.  Personally, I think this is a dangerous precedent for a local government to set.

Also, there’s a slope here that feels inherently slippery.  What might be banned next?  So much of our food has high fructose corn syrup in it.  I’m not particularly happy about that, as there’s a lot of evidence that it impacts blood sugar more deleteriously than plain ole table sugar, but Mayor Bloomberg would have to ban most of the food in our grocery stores for it to be avoided.

I also wonder if this ban will lead people to drink more water, which, as I understand it, is the goal of the program (other than this amorphous idea that it will stem the tide of obesity).  But why would it lead people to drink more water?  If people still want a big soda, they’ll just drink diet soda, right?  According to the completely baseless calories in/calories out model touted by diet companies, diet soda is not a bad choice.  But some evidence suggests that our bodies have the same insulin response to fake sugars as to real sugars, except that fake sugars make us more hungry.  In other words, fake sugars are less satisfying and may lead us to eat more than we would otherwise eat, thereby cancelling out any calorie lowering effect of the fake-sugar-laden diet soda.

My final question is, what is the cost of all this?  Will we need a Department Of Soda Inspection to make sure that the right sizes are being sold at C Town?  Will we need the refill police to come in and arrest perps who refill with regular soda? The last time I went to my local park, the grass hadn’t been cut in months and part of the sidewalk was all broken up.  It would be so lovely for some of that soda ban money to go to cleaning up this wonderful and historic park so that kids, fat and thin alike, would have more room to play this summer.  There’s a huge, beautiful pool there too that’s only open in July and August.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the city paid for lifeguards so that the pool could be open now through mid-September, so that kids, fat and thin alike (and grown ups too), could go there after school or work and cool down and swim?

I and my fellow fat activists and Health At Every Size friends and researchers have said it again and again — the stress of stigma is unhealthy.  So when governments set public health policies based on ending obesity, what they’re really saying is, “there is a group of people that are making us look bad by being fat, and we want to have them look different.”  Public officials can say that when they talk about obesity they’re really talking about health, but then why not just talk about health?  Thin people get heart disease and cancer and arthritis and diabetes.  There are more and more studies coming out that healthy lifestyles (eating well and exercising and essentially enjoying your life) are more indicative of health and lifespan than fatness.  So the continued focus on obesity is just a big, fat red herring.

If we really care about public health, let’s focus on health for all of us, and get the most bang for our collective buck, by focusing on what really makes people healthy — access to fresh food, safe places to move and play, and a society that doesn’t stigmatize people’s bodies.

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/free to get her NEW free gift — Golda’s Top 5 Tips For Consistently Feeling Great In Your Body!

Original Article

Plotzing, even though I graduated from law school 10 years ago!

whatshouldwecallme:

(Source: realitytvgifs)

I just wanted to thank you all for reblogging this piece.  It is near and dear to my heart! <3

fatvirginsuicide:

Some Fat Facts

redefiningbodyimage:

captainporkerella:

Golda Poretsky, H.H.C. Body Love Coach:

I’ve been fielding lots of comments of the “how can you be promoting fat?!” and “haven’t you heard of type II diabetes?!” variety. So I’ve decided to write…

John Steinbeck famously said:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

This quote makes an interesting point about how the way people perceive themselves affects everything from their political views, to their choices about what is best for them.

[caption id=”attachment_6865” align=”alignright” width=”224” caption=”Image By Golda Poretsky”][/caption]

Those of us in the fat acceptance community often confront the difficulty of getting fellow fat folks to accept a fat identity. Like some poor folks not seeing themselves as currently poor and poor for the foreseeable future, fat folks often see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thin people. They’ve bought into the very persuasive argument that fatness is merely a temporary state, one that can be easily changed if you just work hard enough or have the luck of finding the right “lifestyle changes” or whatever.

Not that I blame fat people for believing that fat is temporary. Everywhere you turn, weight loss is being sold as a reality, something that works, a solution to the stresses of being fat in a fat-hating society.

The facts that weight is about as genetic as height, that 95% of people who diet gain the weight back within 3 to 5 years, 83% of people who diet gain back more weight than they lose, and 70% of weight variation can be accounted for by genetics[ref]Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2008) 137[/ref], are all very hard to hear. When you’re constantly being sold the idea that fat is unhealthy, unattractive, undesirable, and worthy of discrimination and ridicule, you don’t want to hear that fatness may just be your lot in life. It’s very hard to identify as fat in a society that makes thinness a pinnacle of achievement.

I get that. I totally get it. It is hard to be fat in most of the world, and fat people may feel like they need the hope of eventually becoming thin to make it through.

But there are benefits to identifying as fat, or identifying as just having the body you have, rather than being a temporarily embarrassed thin person.  I want to identify a couple of these benefits for you now.

1. Political Power — The more folks are willing to identify as fat, the more political power we can have. When we approach our fat bodies as embarrassments, we don’t recognize that we’re worthy of rights like protection from discrimination at work, truth in advertising from the diet industry, etc. There is power in identifying as what you are rather than what you hope to be.
2. Fun— Fat positive community is a total blast. It’s a true pleasure to hang out with folks who don’t talk about diets and are focused on loving their bodies as they are.
3. Actual Health — When you stop trying to lose weight for your health, you’ll be able to focus on actual health. Using principles like Health At Every Size can help to actually improve your health and lower your stress levels.
4. Happiness — When you are unhappy with your current state and always striving to change it, it’s hard to just be and enjoy the life you have. You can be present to the good things in your life and the wondrousness of your body when you let go of the idea that you are a “temporarily embarrassed” thin person.

So my bit of advice for this week is to stop seeing yourself as a temporarily embarrassed thin person and begin to see yourself as having a body that is perfectly normal and natural. Begin to see the power in identifying as fat. Allow it to change your worldview for this week. Let me know how it goes in the comment section below.

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/free to get her NEW free gift — Golda’s Top 5 Tips For Loving The Body You Have Right Now!

Original Article

[caption id=”attachment_6816” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”Seriously. (Image courtesy of someecards)”][/caption]

Jezebel and NPR reported something interesting yesterday about the eating patterns of dieters.  As the day progresses, dieters’ food choices get less and less “healthy.”

This information is based on a review of 500,000 meals that were recorded in 50 countries by the users of the app Eatery, a dieting app which requires users to rate their meals by their healthiness.  Of course, this is not a scientific study, but the sheer vastness of the data is still interesting.

The data shows that as the day progresses, people choose less and less healthy food, and tend to snack on unhealthy food at night.  (Of course, we have no idea what people are considering healthy or unhealthy, but I’ll leave that alone for now.)

What’s interesting to me is not just this pattern, but the conclusions that the writers at NPR and Jezebel made.  Both made the argument that we need more willpower.  Ted Burnham at NPR wrote, “So summon your willpower, skip the midnight snack, and go to sleep already! Your waistline may thank you in the morning.”

Wow, Ted, why didn’t all of these people think of that?!  Genius!  (*headdesk*)

[caption id=”attachment_6817” align=”alignright” width=”270” caption=”Self reported healthy eating map (image courtesy of Massive Health — which sounds sort of HAES-y, if you ask me)”][/caption]

Cassie Murdoch at Jezebel also made a comment about willpower, but seemed to have a little more understanding of the issue by writing, “Or it could be that the foods we turn to later in the evening aren’t as healthy by nature—dessert, chips—than what we’d turn to for breakfast. In any event, next time you’re indulging in a little midnight decadence, at least you know you’re not alone.”

The strange thing is that both of these writers took this behavior to just be human behavior, without considering the fact that this is a self-selected group of dieters using an app to track what they eat.  In other words, this isn’t everyone.  Dieters often start the day with fresh resolve to “eat really healthily” and as the day progresses, they get hungry.  They feel deprived.  And once the day is done and no one is around to talk about dieting or see what they’re eating, they grab what they can.

This pattern is not a healthy relationship to food, or even a “normal” relationship to food.  This is a pattern created by the rules of dieting and the lies we tell ourselves when we do it.

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/free to get her NEW free gift — Golda’s Top 5 Tips For Loving The Body You Have Right Now!

Original Article

Back in the early days of dating my boyfriend, every once in a while he would turn on Fox News just for a laugh and to see what they’re saying.  This usually ended up with me yelling at the TV then yelling at him to change the channel, then, and I’m not proud of this, throwing (hopefully) non-destructive pillows at the TV.

So, as you can imagine, I’m not watching the new HBO “documentary” called Weight Of The Nation for the sake of my own sanity and the well-being of my TV.

[caption id=”attachment_6783” align=”alignright” width=”210” caption=”Image courtesy of HBO.com”][/caption]

You may be thinking, “Wait a second, Golda.  Maybe this documentary will be an unbiased look at the so-called ‘obesity epidemic.’  Why not watch it?”  And I want to thank you, reasonable reader, for thinking such a reasonable thing.   But a few things have clued me in that this is a one-sided documentary, including the tagline, “To Win, We Have To Lose.”  That alone let’s you know that this will be a documentary about obesity being on the rise, fat being bad, and weight loss being the answer. The fact that none of that is actually true doesn’t seem to matter.  

Here’s the thing — I actually love debating.  But I’ve found that debating the existence of a problem is often no fun at all.  For example, it could be fun, in a way, to debate what we should do about global warming.  But debating with someone over the existence of global warming tends to be a tedious and fruitless debate.  Similarly, debating with someone over the existence of the obesity epidemic, which doesn’t actually exist and is a completely unhelpful framework for discussing improving people’s health, is no fun when that debate is with someone who’s invested in the idea of the obesity epidemic and the need to eradicate obesity. Plus, debating with the TV is never any fun. 

[caption id=”attachment_6784” align=”alignright” width=”200” caption=”I started yelling at the TV at a young age with the McLaughlin Group (image courtesy of snl.jt.org)”][/caption]

I know that I should be watching this “documentary”, if only so that I can snarkily tweet about it. But I won’t be.  Watching stuff like this makes me feel really stressed out.  It makes me feel personally attacked, which the so-called “War On Obesity” really is.  The War on Obesity is really just a war on fat people.  If weight loss efforts don’t work for 95% of people, and making a fat person thinner doesn’t bestow any health benefits beyond a few months, what are we really talking about here?  We’re talking about a concept that basically says, “We don’t like you or the way you look, so we declare war on you.  We consider you a scourge and seek to eradicate you.”  Couch it however you want, but this is the War On Obesity, and it is truly vile.

So how do we fight back?  This fight is already happening, of course, in so many different ways.  Every time we fight for anti-discriminatory legislation, or put up fat positive billboards, or write letters, or just live our lives in full view of others as fat positive, we are fighting back.

I really admire the fat folks who can watch something like Weight Of The Nation and take action.  I admire the fat folks who can do this on a regular basis, diving into the comments sections of fat positive posts to fight fat hating comments. (By the way, if you want to do this, there’s an amazing facebook group called Rolls Not Trolls which does this in a somewhat organized way.)  

But if you’re like me and can’t hack it, I want to say that that’s okay too.  Activism takes many forms, and all of them are valid and needed.

Finally, you might dig this response video from The Association For Size Diversity & Health (ASDAH):

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. Go to http://www.bodylovewellness.com/free to get her NEW free gift — Golda’s Top 5 Tips For Loving The Body You Have Right Now!

Original Article

by Golda Poretsky, H.H.C.
www.bodylovewellness.com

Listen to the podcast here:

(Note from Golda: This post first appeared on the lovely blog, Roots of She, and may be familiar to many of you.  I hope you dig it!)

[caption id=”attachment_5368” align=”alignright” width=”205” caption=”“Abundantia,” by Peter Paul Rubens (courtesy of wikipedia)”][/caption]

Nearly every woman I know has a screwed up relationship with food.  I think the way to heal this is not more of the same, it’s eating like a goddess.

Right now, we’re living in a cultural moment that tells us that the masculine paradigm is better than the feminine.*  This paradigm honors logic over intuition, outer rules over internal guidance, avoidance of pain rather than attraction to pleasure, and fear of scarcity over acknowledgement of abundance.  And this lack of balance between the masculine and feminine shows up again and again in the way we eat.

But our goddess selves know that none of that feels right.  Your goddess self doesn’t believe in diets, or rules, or calories or Weight Watchers’ points.  Your goddess self knows that food is a blessing, that slowing down a bit feels good, that your body knows what food you need and what you don’t.  Your goddess self knows that your body is beautiful, and doesn’t understand why you would control your food as a way to control the size and shape of your body.

In order to heal the way that we relate to food, we have to return to our wilder selves.  We have to let go of the rules, and delve into our true desires.

For many of you, this concept may be just at the edge of your comfort zone.  You’ve been taught to create meal plans, follow rigid rules, count calories, count fat, weigh and measure your food, etc. etc., so when I say to you that all of that should be tossed out the window, it may feel really scary.  Perhaps you even tried to throw it all out the window and things got kind of weird.  Perhaps you found yourself bingeing, and it freaked you out so much that after a while, you looked for your next diet.  You saw that out of control behavior as proof that you need rules and strictures and meal plans and counting.

But you had it all wrong.  Because you were eating at that time as a reaction to diets, and not as acknowledgement of your goddess self.  And the way to do that is to connect with your true abundance.

You see, you’ve got to get past the reaction of “I can eat whatever I want!  Screw you Jenny Craig!  I’m going to eat everything in sight!”  Because when you eat from that place, you’re not eating from a place of abundance, you’re just reacting to the rules and strictures of the masculine paradigm.  And while it may feel good to do that for a while, it can start feeling bad pretty quickly.  It can start feeling really out of control and just as unaligned with your true desires as a diet plan.  So the next move is to truly connect with your abundance, intuition and pleasure.

So here are 3 powerful tips for healing your relationship with food by eating like a goddess:

1) Connect With Your Abundance — Imagine for a moment that you can eat whatever you want whenever you’re hungry.  Imagine that you have a fridge and a pantry full of food that you really love, and that when your body says it’s hungry, you have your pick of really delectable offerings.  And here’s the key, it’s all going to be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.  Whenever you’re hungry, you may eat.  You don’t have to worry about getting enough, because there is always enough.  Diets and restrictions don’t exist in your world.  You can trust that your bodily hunger will always be respected. You don’t have to worry about over-eating either, because there’s no reason to overeat.  Why have more cake tonight, and stuff yourself, when there will be plenty of cake tomorrow?

2) Connect With Your Intuition — Your intuition is a powerful tool that connects you to your body, your wisdom, and a greater knowing.  If you want to start eating more intuitively, then you need to build your intuitive skills.  The way to start building your intuition is by trusting it, even if you think it might be wrong.  You start by paying attention.  If your inner wisdom tells you to take a different route to work, you listen to it, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.  If your inner wisdom says, “I’m hungry, let’s have seconds!” you have seconds, even if you don’t have any weight watchers points left for that day.  If your inner wisdom tells you to say yes to going out for drinks even when you feel like going home and watching TV, go with your inner wisdom.  It’s important to rebuild this trust in your intuition in order to heal your relationship with food.

3) Connect With Your Desire — People often conflate hunger for things other than food with our hunger for food.  Hunger could be for anything from a new job to a new lover to better boundaries with a friend.  But if you don’t take the time to identify your desires, you’re more likely to turn to food to try to satisfy them.  So I’m going to ask you to start listing your desires, and keep adding to that list.  No desire is too big or too small.  Whether you desire a free iced coffee or to own a villa on the Italian coast, add it to your list.  Be specific.  Be bold.  There is no desire too big for a goddess.  Challenge yourself to think bigger than you ever had in your life.  And if you notice a few days from now that a desire has come true, check it off and write “Thank you, goddess!” next to it.  Just remember that these are not goals, they’re desires.  They’re meant to be enjoyed.

*I realize that the terms “masculine” and “feminine” may be problematic.  I’m using these terms to describe a duality of guiding principles for how people look at the world.  In no way do I mean that all men are one way and all women another, or that they should be one way or another.  It has nothing to do with anyone’s gender or identity.  It’s more to do with how an overabundance of one paradigm and a negating of the other is damaging to all of us.

Wanna learn how to really eat like a goddess? Then join me for The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy. It starts this week!  Click here for details.

 Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. 

Original Article

International No Diet Day was yesterday, and it’s a sacred holiday to folks like me. So in honor of this holiday, I’m giving away my book, Stop Dieting Now, for free and sharing my favorite dieting breakup tips with you.

Stopping dieting is a lot like breaking up with an actual person. When you’ve dieted, your dreams of how your life will look are a lot like your dreams of what your life will look like with a particular person in it. For example, if you’re dating someone, you might be dreaming of going on a vacation with them. Similarly, if you’re dieting, your vacation dreams may involve imagining yourself at your goal weight.

Whether you’re breaking up with a person or diet, you have to acknowledge the fact that some of your dreams may not come true and you have to make room for new ones. I hope these five steps will help you in that process.

[caption id=”attachment_6692” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”This actually would be a good note to write to yourself.”][/caption]

Step 1: It’s Not You, It’s Your Diet

The old “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup line does not apply when it comes to you in your diet. If you lost weight with this diet only to gain it back or to endlessly plateau, you didn’t fail at your diet—your diet failed you. About 95% of dieters gain back all of the weight they lost (often plus more) within 3 to 5 years. So obviously, diets are total crap and they don’t deserve you.

Plus, diets never treated you right anyway, which brings me to my next point.

Step 2: Remember The Bad Times

Just like with any breakup, it’s important to remember the bad times and not dwell on the good. If you keep remembering a particular day, perhaps early on in your diet, when you were feeling super attractive and someone commented on how skinny you looked and it made you feel good, you may find yourself back in a Weight Watchers meeting before you know it.

But I challenge you to instead remember all the reasons why you broke up with your diet. And I have a feeling that you’ll have more reasons to break up than to stay together. Remember that day you weighed yourself after being so careful sticking to your diet all week and your weight went up and you felt like crap about yourself for days. Remember all the guilt and stress you felt any time you had to decide what to eat when you weren’t sure how the food fit into your diet. Remember that diets aren’t actually good for you at all.

When you remember to focus on how stressful and difficult your relationship with your diet was, it’ll be easier to not get back together. But I will say this…

Step 3: You May Temporarily Get Back Together With Your Diet

Look, it happens. Change is hard. You may lose resolve and go back to that Weight Watchers meeting once or twice. You may stress out that you ate something fatty and the guilt washes over you. It happens.

When it happens, it’s important to revert to step two, and remember the bad times. Sometimes I think this moment or two of getting back together with your diet is almost necessary to process – usually you start to remember right away all the things you hated about being on a diet. So if you get caught in this step, do not worry. Just revert to step two and your breakup will be official again in no time.

Step 4: There Are Other (Delicious) Fish in the Sea

Exploring the other fish in the sea can be a little scary in the beginning. It can be nerve-racking to go from a dieting paradigm, with all of its rules and structure, to a non-dieting paradigm where the only rules are dictated by you.

To me, this is the perfect time to start exploring Health at Every Size, particularly the intuitive eating aspects of it. With Health at Every Size principles, you learn to connect with your body’s own signals in terms of hunger and fullness, and get to explore what foods are really best for your body and your needs. Explaining how this works is really beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more about it and how to incorporate it into your life  in an in-depth way, you should definitely check out The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy.

Step 5: One Day You’ll Barely Remember It’s Name

It’s been five years since my last diet, and I have to say, it does get better. All the stress and guilt I used to experience around food and my body are truly gone. Now I eat from a completely different place–one where my focus is on nourishment and what my body needs and desires, not some rules that somebody made up because it led to some temporary weight loss and sold a few books.

It is a much happier place, I’m so glad I made that choice to break up with dieting forever.

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight.  She is now enrolling for The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy. Click here for details!

Original Article

Sorry, you missed the giveaway!

Luckily, it’s not too late to check out Stop Dieting Now: 25 Reasons To Stop, 25 Ways To Heal. Just pick up the paperback here or get your own fully-optimized e-version on Amazon (kindle) or Barnes & Noble (Nook, epub) for only $6.97!

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL NO DIET DAY!

All dieting is null and void on Sunday, May 6th, but let’s make a long weekend of it!

In honor of this most important annual holiday, I’m offering you a FREE PDF copy of my book, Stop Dieting Now: 25 Reasons To Stop, 25 Ways To Heal.

It’s FREE today through Monday (May 7th) TUESDAY (May 8th) only!

This book will support you in:

• Healing from the dieting/bingeing cycle.
• Understanding why diets never seem to work in the long term.
• Simple techniques for freeing yourself from negative body image.
• Easy ways to lower your stress levels when it comes to food.
• How to know when you’re hungry and full and act on that information.

And so much more!

Happy eating!

Original Article

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I broke my wrist. For those of you who’ve had similar issues or other mobility or disability issues, you know how difficult it is to move about the world feeling impaired in some way (and I realize there are way worse things than a broken wrist).  The thing I found is that pain and discomfort are far easier to deal with than the little things like brushing your teeth or putting on a bra.

About two weeks after the injury, I was noticing my uneven manicure more and more.  My left hand, confined to a cast, retained almost a new manicure look, while my right hand, doing the job of two, had almost no nail polish left and altogether scraggly look.

[caption id=”attachment_6544” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Best. Choices. Ever. My newly manicured hand and the proof with a stick.”][/caption]

I realize that there are bigger things to worry about than ragged looking nails.  Truthfully, I usually don’t think about it at all. But something broke in me when I woke up on Thursday morning. I just felt really scuzzy. Showering with one hand in a cast and covered with plastic sort of condom for a few weeks with beat up nails and gray hair growing in and just an all-around sense of the yuckiness had really gotten to me.  Of course, I had a gazillion things to do that day too.  I had to finish writing a teleclass that I would deliver at the end of the day, I had a number of clients on my schedule, and approximately a bajillion e-mails to send out.

I’ve always been a work first/ party later sort of person.  If you had asked me years ago what a person in my position should’ve done, I would’ve said, “Get to work.”  Getting to work is the responsible answer. Getting to work right away might’ve meant getting some more e-mails done or even doing a better job editing that teleclass.

I should have woken up, eaten something and gotten right to work.  Instead, I got dressed as best as I could and went straight to the nail salon. 

As soon as I walked in, it felt like the best decision I’d ever made in my life.  I sunk into a pedicure chair, turned on the massager, and watched whatever cooking show was on the TV there.  The woman who did my manicure was wonderful at working around the cast.  On my way home, I stopped in a drugstore and bought a poof with the stick attached so that I could exfoliate a bit and get to parts of my body that I wasn’t reaching so well one-handed.

The right thing to do would have been to go right to work, but it wouldn’t have been right for me. I felt so good after that mani-pedi and that walk that I approached my work with renewed vigor. When I got back to my home office I answered e-mails, made the calls I need to make, and even started editing that teleclass. I showed up for my work wholly and completely ready and happy and I’m pretty sure that I did a better job for my clients that day because I was feeling good and take care of.

Basically a little self-care (even if it seems frivolous) can go a long way. It’s important to remember that self-care can be a key to not only feeling good but feeling productive, happy, and essentially, nourished.

This concept is something that I touched on in my teleclass last week, The Goddess Path to Healing from Food and Body Image Issues. Essentially, the things that we think of is frivolous in our society, like taking time for self-care, spending a little extra time on our adornment, putting pleasure and happiness and contentment above work, these are the things that really make us happy because they connect us to the goddess and the divine feminine.  Truthfully, I try to live my life from this place as much as possible every day and it hasn’t led to the things that I had initially feared it would lead to, like missing appointments with clients or ignoring my business because I’m out finding my bliss. On the contrary, I find that the more I focus on the things I used to think of as frivolous, the happier and more focused I am and the more able to create the life I really want. These are the tools I’m so excited to be teaching in my upcoming group program The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy.

If you’re looking to increase her self-care, make a list of some of the activities that you think of as frivolous but that you enjoy. Make a commitment to do at least one of these things each week, or go even bigger and make a commitment to do one of those things each day. See how it affects your overall happiness.

Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight.  She is now enrolling for The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy. Click here for details!

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