How to manage the “unmanageability of life”

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unmanageability of lifeMeet Anna. She’s in recovery, she works full-time, her children and her friends are important to her, and she tries to exercise and take care of herself. Juggling between all these roles is hard, and she feels overwhelmed and stressed regularly. She knows that something needs to change, but she doesn’t know where to start.

Anna is not alone. I often meet people who cannot maintain long-term abstinence because life feels crazy to them. They experience what the Big Book calls: “The unmanageability of life”.

There many tips and techniques that I can share with you to help you turn chaos into balance. We can talk about scheduling, time management, planning ahead, batch cooking, changing your thinking, and many other ways to take charge of your life. But you might end up feeling more overwhelmed if I wrote a long list of ideas. That’s why I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to share 2 specific ways to help you better manage your life.

When you feel overwhelmed and you don’t know where to start, go back to the basics. Focus on only two things:

  1. Getting enough hours of good sleep.
  2. Creating a morning routine to help you start your day on a positive note.

Let me elaborate on these ideas a little bit. Having enough sleep is important because your body needs to be well-rested enough to deal with the demands of life. Arrange your schedule in a way that allows you to peacefully transition into a good night’s sleep. Read this article to get more ideas on improving your sleep.

Now let’s talk about creating a morning routine. It might be the opposite of what makes sense for you. You wake up in the morning knowing that your day is full: you want to get to work on time, so how are you going to add something to your already busy morning?

It might sound like a paradox, but it’s not. If you take just 15 minutes every morning to “switch gears” and gradually transition into your day, it can change the way you feel all day long.

Remember Anna? She was rushing to start her day, and by the time she got to her office her stress level was already at 8 (on a scale of 1-10). Anna was willing to try something new for 2 weeks. She went to bed earlier and she woke up 20 minutes earlier than normal. She spent 15 minutes every morning listening to a guided meditation, praying, and planning her day. In order to make this happen, she created new habits that helped make her mornings more relaxed. For example, she packed her lunch and made basic preparations for breakfast the night before. She also chose what to wear the night before. Getting organized in the evening allowed her to be calmer in the morning.

Creating a morning ritual not only helps you start your day more at peace, it actually helps you feel centered and grounded, and as a result you operate less from a reactionary mode throughout your day and you remember to pause and access recovery tools as challenges arise.

As Louise Hay says: “How you start your day is how you live your day.”

Spend some time reflecting on your current morning and evening habits and make small changes, one change at a time, to create more supportive routines. Why small changes? Because when you start small you can build your success based on your small successes. When you start big, you might get overwhelmed.

If you want to bring some sanity into the insanity of life and you don’t know where to start, go back to the basics. Make changes so you can sleep better at night and create a morning routine to help you start your day with balance.

Remember that just like the sun rises fresh every morning, you too can start fresh and set the tone for a positive, balanced day.

If you have any questions contact us at info@kaysheppard.com

 

 

Yummy Tofu Breakfast

An excellent, delicious way to start your day.

Tofu doesn’t have a great taste by itself, but mixing it with other ingredients gives it a yummy flavor. If you cook the quinoa in advance (I always have a big container of cooked quinoa in my fridge), it makes this an easy, complete breakfast meal.

Yummy Tofu Breakfast
Yummy Tofu Breakfast
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Servings
1 women's portion
Servings
1 women's portion
Yummy Tofu Breakfast
Yummy Tofu Breakfast
Print Recipe
Servings
1 women's portion
Servings
1 women's portion
Ingredients
Servings: women's portion
Instructions
  1. Heat and spray a pan with cooking oil.
  2. Mash the tofu with a fork, and mix the mashed tofu and the quinoa in the pan.
  3. Heat it while mixing it for 5 minutes until it is brown and crispy.
  4. Add cinnamon while you’re heating it.
  5. In the meantime, weigh 6 oz. of fruit and mix it in a small bowl with 1 cup of yogurt.
  6. Place the tofu mix on a plate and top it with the yogurt and fruit.
Recipe Notes

If you don’t like to mix cold and warm food together (I love it!), then place the yogurt and the fruit next to the tofu mix instead of on top. If you are short on time in the morning and want to shorten the preparation time, mix the tofu and quinoa in a bowl the night before and leave it in the fridge. Do the same with the fruit and yogurt so it is ready in the morning.

 

 

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Chicken with Potatoes and Vegetables

Weighing and measuring is easier when we prepare protein/starch/vegetables separately, here’s an alternative where you bake it all together and then weigh and measure it.

Chicken with Potatoes and Vegetables
Chicken with Potatoes and Vegetables
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Servings
1 meal
Servings
1 meal
Chicken with Potatoes and Vegetables
Chicken with Potatoes and Vegetables
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Servings
1 meal
Servings
1 meal
Ingredients
you can add other vegetables such as broccoli, asparagus, Brussel sprouts or any other vegetables that you wish.
Servings: meal
Instructions
  1. Spray a big pan.
  2. Peel and cut the vegetables into big pieces.
  3. Place the vegetables, chicken and potatoes in a bowl.
  4. Mix spices that you like such as: salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder, and cinnamon. I love adding Penzey’s Northwoods Seasoning, smoked paprika and barbeque seasoning.
  5. Add ½ cup of water to the spices and pour it over the chicken.
  6. Cover with foil and bake at 375 degrees for an hour and a half. Mix from time to time.
  7. Remove the foil and bake for another 15-30 minutes, until it looks brown and yummy.
Recipe Notes

Weighing and measuring:
Separate the ingredients into 3 containers: place the chicken in one container, the potatoes in a second container and the potatoes in a third one. Weigh and measure appropriately before each meal. Enjoy!

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Potato Salad

Great tasting potato salad with mustard dressing and tuna fish.

Potato salad with tuna
Potato Salad
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Servings
1 meal
Servings
1 meal
Potato salad with tuna
Potato Salad
Print Recipe
Servings
1 meal
Servings
1 meal
Ingredients
Servings: meal
Instructions
  1. Combined mustard, mayonnaise and yogurt for dressing
  2. Toss the potato and tuna together with the mustard dressing
  3. Add diced onion and celery to the mix.
  4. Serve on salad of raw vegetables for a complete raw vegetable meal.
Recipe Notes

Remember to have two cups of cooked vegetable for your other meal that day.

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Kay’s Favorite Breakfast

OK, here we go, I am now going to reveal my up-till-now secret, amazingly wonderful breakfast.

kays favorite breakfast
Kay’s Favorite Breakfast
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Servings
1 breakfast
Servings
1 breakfast
kays favorite breakfast
Kay’s Favorite Breakfast
Print Recipe
Servings
1 breakfast
Servings
1 breakfast
Ingredients
Servings: breakfast
Instructions
  1. Mash tofu until pea-sized crumbles, add egg, oat bran, egg and cinnamon. Mix thoroughly.
  2. Fold in Greek yogurt, fold in apples.
  3. Bake in a sprayed pie plate at 350 degrees for 20 minutes until brown and firm to the touch.
Recipe Notes

This is not a good recipe for a loaf pan. It is too wet to bake in the middle. Use a pie plate or muffin pans.

Food Plan Equivalents for basic plan: 1 protein, 1 grain, 1 fruit, 1 dairy, ½ spice

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Mindfulness and Recovery – how to start being mindful right now

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Mindfulness is a hot topic these days. It’s being blogged about, talked about, and practiced in many areas of life, not just in recovery. It sounds like a pretty blissful state to be in, doesn’t it? If you don’t understand it, you might be asking yourself: what exactly is it and why is it important for me, as part of my recovery?

Webster’s Dictionary defines mindfulness as “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis”.

In other words, mindfulness simply means paying attention to your current experience without judging it.

Our experience as human beings is full, rich, and ever-changing. We have five active senses plus a mind that is super active, sometimes over-active. There is a lot going on in each moment and if we’re not mindful, we may end up being unaware and missing out on much of what’s happening inside ourselves amid the activity. That’s a sure-fire way to derail your recovery path.

Have you ever found yourself in the kitchen, completely forgetting what prompted you to walk from your bedroom to the kitchen and why?

Do you ever get in the car, pull out of the parking lot, and then suddenly find yourself somewhere else; not remembering what got you there?

Before I found recovery, I ate all the time (and I mean all the time!), but if you asked me what I ate, I would not be able to tell you because I was completely not present while eating.

Balancing DOING with BEING is essential for recovery. One thing I know for sure is that overdoing is part of my addiction. And I am totally addicted to adrenaline. Part of my recovery has been keeping a daily meditation practice. I find meditation to be the best practice for becoming mindful, and it helps me deal with this part of my addiction.

Creating ameditation practice allows you to extend the same kind of mindfulness to the rest of your life. This expansion process will happen naturally once you develop a meditation practice.

I’m often asked, what’s a good way to start when you have no experience with mindfulness or meditation?

I recommend starting small. It is better to be successful with being mindful for 5 minutes every day than to start with 30 minutes once a week. When being mindful for 5 minutes every day becomes a habit for you, you can add 5 more minutes. And then when you’ve mastered that, add another 5. This is how you develop a consistent practice. When you get to 15 minutes of mindfulness daily, you are in a good place. 15 minutes is all you need. Creating your practice in the morning is best because you start your day on a positive note, or like Louise Hay, the queen of positive thinking says: “How you start your day is how you live your day.”

If you are a beginner, listening to a guided meditation or focusing on your breath or a noise (air conditioner, clock, traffic) is a good place to start.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, the founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, defines mindfulness as “the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment — non-judgmentally.”  He explains that the focus should be on noticing the moment rather than trying to feel differently. Many people think that they are supposed to feel a certain way when they meditate. This is a false perception about meditation. Meditation is simply about being where you are and knowing it. Remember: being non-judgmental is part of the deal. You want to release expectations that you need to feel a certain way and simply to allow yourself to BE.

There are other ways to bring mindfulness to your life in addition to meditation. Throughout your day you can add fun, short Mindfulness Pauses such as: focusing on the taste, smell, and sensations when you brush your teeth, paying attention to the smell, taste, and texture of the cup when you sip tea, or spending 5 minutes in your backyard observing nature and paying attention to every small detail, using all your senses.

To get started building mindfulness into your life today, choose one idea shared in this article and start now. Stop right now and think, how can I be more mindful right at this moment?

Every moment you spend being mindful will allow you to become more aware in the moment, aware of your thoughts, and aware of what you are eating. Mindfulness will allow you to enjoy the present, and truly live your life to the fullest.

 

 

 

Take Care of This Moment

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Every day, every moment offers an opportunity for growth and change. Sometimes the opportunity is real, sometimes imagined.  We have two types of challenges in life; first, there is reality where we get to deal with serious illness, relationship disputes, unemployment, death of a loved one, and other major life issues.  Secondly, there are the ones we make up all by ourselves.  These are ego demands such as dissatisfaction with life on life’s terms (I want what I want when I want I it!), resentments, whining, complaining, criticisms, blaming, and all other attitudes that show lack of acceptance and forgiveness.  That is just stuff that we have made up that seems real.

We can be grateful for the day when there are no major challenges because those are the days that we can practice the recovery principles of evaluation and correction of the “made up stuff”.  In other words, we go to work on those defects of character that keep us miserable.  We identify those traits which we need to address in our daily tenth step inventory.  It is critically important to stay conscious and current on our shortcomings.  Once identified, it is time to apply the principles of steps six and seven, eight and nine.  If others are involved we owe amends or forgiveness, if not, we owe it to ourselves to change the attitude that is creating our stress.  Doing this work on a daily basis is like exercising a muscle, we get stronger, better at it, and eventually it becomes our way of life.

In his book, Rewire Your Brain, Dr. John Arden lays out a simple formula for how to harness this science for personal behavior change. It follows the acronym FEED (Focus, Effort, Effortless, Determination)

  • F for Focus: Attention activates your brain, so you want to pay focused attention to the behavior, memory, or pattern to repeat or remember.
  • E for Effort: Take deliberate, specific action to program the new behavior or thought pattern. Practice. Even if it’s hard. Even if you fail sometimes. Keep practicing. The more you think a thought or take a specific action, the stronger the neural network gets. Note: many people give up on new initiatives before they have practiced enough – made enough “effort” – to create sufficient neural network.
  • E for Effortless: Once the neural network becomes wired, actions that once required effort become effortless. Think of the effort required learning to drive a car; years later it’s effortless.
  • D for Determination: Finally, you must exhibit the determination to keep the neural network strong. “Use it or lose it.” Continual practice builds the neural network even further until it becomes your dominant pattern.

That is the neuroscience of recovery too.  So here is the wisdom: do the work every day, deal with the daily annoyances and irritations that are demonstrations of our disease of attitudes.  When we do the daily work, we become ready for the big stuff when it hits.  An example of this in my own history came about in 2004 after I had seen a physician who told me in so many words that I had cancer.  She didn’t say it outright because as we all know it takes a biopsy to be sure.  However, what she did say to me was this: “That is not a cyst and this is why.”  She then explained the difference between a cyst (which I thought it was) and a tumor.   After a period of ice cold shock, after I got home, I said a prayer.  I was standing in the living room when I said, “Whichever ways this goes—live or die–I accept it.”  Well we all now know the outcome; I completed successful treatment with an attitude of acceptance without fear or complaints.  At that time I realized that I was able to “accept the thing I could not change” because of my practice (at that time) of acceptance for thirty-seven years.

Every day we have opportunities, real or created, to strengthen our acceptance and forgiveness muscles.  And by doing so, we develop a brain/body/mind/spirit that is resilient and ready to take on the next challenge.

Change your Attitude with Flash affirmations

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flash affirmations practiceManaging our emotions is key in staying strong in our recovery. While other people might be okay taking the risk of living in negativity, we who suffer from food addiction might risk our recovery if we allow our emotions to control us.

We manage our emotions by challenging and changing our thoughts. Awareness is the first step, and then we use different tools to create thoughts and attitudes that are supportive for our recovery. We pray, we meditate and we ask God to help us change our attitude. We can also use affirmations.

Out habitual thoughts influence the quality of our lives. We are actually making affirmations all day long because everything we think and say to ourselves is an affirmation. We want to pay close attention to what we are affirming. Our thoughts have power, and they influence our environment and the people around us. And more than anything, they affect our attitude.

One of the wonderful practices I learned from Kay is using Flash Affirmations. I often play with flash affirmations with myself where I come up with new words to the phrase: “I choose…” I simply keep making up new, positive, uplifting words that make me feel better. I do it in the shower or while waiting in line. I also do it when I’m tired and feel negative in any way.

A few days ago I posted a question on our Breaking Free from Food Addiction Facebook page. The question was:

“Happy New Year! So if you were to have a recovery “theme” for the New Year, what would your word be?”

I got so excited by the words that were posted that I used all the words to create the flash affirmations below.

I choose HONESTY

I choose PEACE

I choose ENERGY

I choose ABSTINENCE

I choose WILLINGNESS

I choose POSSIBILITIES

I choose HAPPINESS

I choose SELF-LOVE

I choose HONESTY

I choose LOVE

I choose Higher Power

I choose SANITY

I choose ABSTINENCE

I choose CLARITY

I choose RESEARCH

I choose PURPOSE

I choose THRIVE

I choose ACCEPTANCE

I choose SERENITY

I choose SURRENDER

I choose COMMITMENT

I choose HOPE

I choose REBIRTH

I choose NEW

I choose MINDFULNESS

I choose LIFE

I choose GRATITUDE

I choose TRANQUILITY

I choose JOYOUS

I choose FREE

I choose RECOMMITTING

I choose BLESSED

I choose FELLOWSHIP

I choose FREEDOM

I choose SERVICE

I choose VIGILANCE

I choose GRATEFUL

I choose COMPLIANCE

Want a fun and easy way to change your attitude? Write the flash affirmations above on an index card or on your smartphone and read one (or more) daily. I hope they help you keep a positive attitude, or change your attitude if you’re having a tough day. Enjoy!

My Story of Surrender

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my story of surrenderRecovery starts with surrender to the fact that binge food will always have control over us. We are ready to surrender when we accept that we have no power over our eating and recovery is the only alternative we have.

I remember the moment that I was finally willing to surrender. It was more than 9 years ago. I was 90 pounds heavier than I am today and totally desperate. We had a weekend planned in Las Vegas, and I got Kay’s book “From the first Bite” on the day we left for the vacation. I took the book with me, and on my way to the airport I called the woman I chose to sponsor me and asked her if she would work with me. She asked me to read the book and to call her when I’m done and am ready to start. I spent the weekend eating like crazy (there was an unlimited amount of sugar, flour, and wheat products offered on the buffet-style meals we had) and I felt sick to my stomach. I had a big dessert on Sunday night and then felt terrible both physically and emotionally. I finished reading the book on Sunday night, after eating all that junk, and I knew that my only solution was to surrender to the program. It was in that moment that I realized that I cannot feel worth the way I was feeling at that moment, and I was willing to do whatever it takes to truly live. I called my sponsor (to be) on Monday morning. I got abstinent and we started working together.

My recovery began on that Sunday in Las Vegas when I was willing to surrender and accept help.

My definition of surrender has emerged through the years. When I was new to recovery, I used to see Surrender as giving up. My image of Surrender was very passive, like carrying a white flag cresting a hill or peeking around a corner in hopes of not being shot. I used to think that if I turn things over to a power greater than myself, I am ok to sit quietly and wait and the rest would take care of itself.

Reality made me change my definition of surrender. I know now that it is an active process that requires action.

The AA 12 & 12 (page 24) says:

“few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s remaining eleven steps means the adoption of ATTITUDES and ACTIONS that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking.”

I love those words – “attitudes and actions”.

Once we make the third-step decision, we actively work steps four to twelve.

Today, surrender means for me that I say “YES” to life by turning things over to God, as I understand God, and I’m following directions for taking actions. Working the steps, attending meetings, planning my day, cooking my food, and other activities which are related to recovery are all the active part of surrender.

Surrender is the foundation and platform for successful recovery. But it only works if you work it!

Colorful Healthy Vegetable Dish

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vegetable dish - recovery from food addictionVariety is important in our food plan and when you add colors to your “vegetable palate” you invite balance into your life. Take advantage of your local farmers market and load up on a rainbow of fresh flavor and health! Make a big dish of cooked vegetables, keep it in the fridge and measure 2 cups daily.

Ingredients:
2 onions
3 peppers in different colors
5 zucchini
1 eggplant
1 small cauliflower
20 Brussel sprouts
4 carrots
20 green beans

Preparation:
Peel, cut and mix all vegetables in a large pan. Add one can “clean” tomato sauce, salt and pepper. Cover with aluminum foil and bake on 375 degrees for one hour. Remove the foil and bake for 30 more minutes. Store in a big container in the fridge and enjoy delicious vegetables for the whole week!