Elicit a Lasting Change
With This Year's Strategies For a Wholesome You!

Throughout the year we have covered many topics related to your health and fitness with a unifying thread tying it all together; change. From making a lasting New Year’s resolution to managing your emotions around food, from exercising for pleasure, to shaping-up your body image, all of these improvements required that you plan for change with well thought out steps for implementing the change, and consciously practicing new habits with the goal of making these changes part of your daily life.

In this, my last issue writing for LATINA Style, I leave you with the essence of all the topics covered this year in hopes that you will take this information and use it to walk in a path of physical and mental wholeness.

Making any lasting change requires that you prepare your mindset for the responses that will be elicited by the change. You need to be ready to counteract situations and emotions that may trigger adverse responses. It is also very important to prepare your home, work, purse, car and exercise areas, as well as your family, co-workers and friends when trying to change your eating habits and incorporate exercise into your busy schedule. For details consult your LATINA Style Magazine Vol. 12, No.6, 2006 pages 38 to 42, “Making a lasting New Year’s resolution!”

A big part of making a successful change has to do with raising your awareness regarding your own resistance to the change you want to make. Get past the blocks impeding and sabotaging change by setting up the stage around you and by learning about the feelings that surface while you are in the midst of change. Do not judge these feelings, just acknowledge them with compassion, and move on to finding ways to appease them while continuing to improve your life.

Become familiar with your food triggers and develop a simple plan to deal with them. Notice your actions around food and write them in a journal, in addition to noting every attempt to cope while highlighting the successful ones. This historical record will not only help you to cope, but it will increase your memory of each event facilitating recall of what worked for you, and will raise your consciousness making you more present to your needs. Try small changes in manageable doses. For details consult your LATINA Style Magazine Vol. 13, No.1, 2007 pages 29 to 32, “I can Manage How Much, What and When I eat!” Also take a look at Vol. 13, No. 2, 2007 pages 34 and 35, “Emotional Eating.”

The 12 Types of Emotional Hunger

Type 1. Dulling The Pain With The Food Trance.
If you get really hungry when you feel angry, depressed, anxious, bored, or lonely, you suffer from Type 1 emotional hunger, and you use food to dull the pain that these emotions cause.

Type 2. Sticks And Stones May Break Your Bones, But Cake Won't Heal What Hurts You.
If you react by getting hungry when others talk down to you, take advantage of you, belittle you or take you for granted, then you suffer from Type 2 emotional hunger. You eat to avoid confrontation.

Type 3. A Full Heart Fills An Empty Belly.
If you crave food when you have tension in your close relationships, you suffer from Type 3 emotional hunger. You eat to avoid feeling the pain of rejection or anger.

Type 4. Hate Yourself, Love Your Munchies.
If you tend to become hypercritical of yourself, if you label yourself "stupid, "lazy," or "a loser," you have Type 4 emotional hunger. You eat to "stuff down" self-hatred.

Type 5. Secret Desires Have No Calories.
If your hunger gets activated because your intimate relationships don't satisfy some basic need like trust or security, you suffer from Type 5 emotional hunger and you use food to try to fill the gap.

Type 6. Forty Million Big Gulps And The Well Is Still Empty.
If you eat to make up for the deprivation you experienced as a child, you have Type 6 Emotional Eating.

Type 7. It's My Pastry, and I'll Eat If I Want To.
If you eat to assert your independence because you don't want anyone telling you what to do, you have Type 7 emotional hunger.

Type 8. I Can't Come To Work Today--I'm Eating
If your appetite kicks in when you're faced with new challenges--if you use food to avoid rising to the test, or to insulate yourself from the fear of failure--you have Type 8 emotional hunger.

Type 9. Aroused by Aromas, Not by the Chef.
If you stuff your face in order to avoid your sexuality-either to stay overweight so that nobody desires you or to hide from intimate encounters--you suffer from Type 9 Emotional Eating.

Type 10. I'll Beat You With this Eclair.
Emotional eaters often eat to pay back those who have hurt them, often in the distant past. They use their bodies as battlegrounds for working out old resentments.

Type 11. Peter Pan and the Peanut Butter Cookie.
If you eat to make yourself feel carefree, like a child, you have Type 11 emotional hunger. You eat to keep yourself from facing the challenges of growing up.

Type 12. That Stranger In Lycra Wearing Your Face.
If you overeat because you fear getting thin, either consciously or unconsciously, you have Type 12 emotional hunger.
Source: Mastering Food. “The 12 Types of Emotional Hunger.” By Roger Gould, M.D. www.masteringfood.com

LATINA Style Magazine Vol. 13. No. 2, 2007 pages 34 and 35, “Emotional Eating.”

Know your excuses not to exercise and the inherent barriers present in your current life. Write them down in a journal to work out some solutions that you can track down for success or failure as you try them out. Be consistent in your new practices, keep a schedule, make one change at a time until it is part of your routine, give it at least six weeks, then consider if your lifestyle will allow for another one at that particular time.

Exercise for pleasure. Move to music to change your attitude about exercise:

• Dancing is considered a low-impact, weight-bearing, mild to moderate intensity activity

• Because it is a low-impact, weight bearing exercise it may have cardiovascular benefits and prevent osteoporosis

• A 150-pound adult can burn about 150 calories doing 30 minutes of moderate social dancing (AARP, Getting Motivated, Let’s Dance to Health, www.aarp.com Retrieved 4/9/07)

• It involves the whole body which can result in an overall increase in muscle tone

• It requires good posture which is always a plus for your back and your body alignment at any age and will make you look confident and taller

• It improves your balance and your sense of where your body is in space during movement as well as your ability to respond to changes in movement

• It also entails learning step sequences hence requiring you to concentrate and focus which will in turn distract your mind from daily worries while exercising your memory

• If you are dancing in a group setting, it provides you with opportunities to meet new people with a similar interest

• Dancing with a partner also requires that you connect and respond to another human being by being present, receptive and yielding, qualities that will benefit your relationships

Dancing to appealing music can be exhilarating, renew your spirit, spark your creativity, improve your mood, bring you joy, and make you feel sexy. Belly dance and Latin dances involve movements of the hips and pelvis area which can make you feel sexy and lead you to reconnect with your body on friendly terms, not to speak of what it can do for your libido. Enjoyment is a key ingredient to compliance with any exercise program, the more we derive pleasure from an activity, the better are the chances that we will repeat the action.

LATINA Style Magazine Vol. 13, No. 3, 2007, pages 30 and 31, “Exercising for Pleasure.”

Recruit a support system to help you get through the tough moments. Rely on people that you trust and that are not judgmental. Inform your loved ones of your intentions and ask for cooperation. Write down a list of your expectations from your family clearly and succinctly and post them in the refrigerator.

Adjust your expectations to the demands of your life, and to your genetic predisposition. Set realistic goals with achievable steps that will give you a taste of success, and that will increase your motivation and sense of control.

Pay attention to the extreme beauty standards imposed by our society; feeling beautiful is a state of mind. Practice being beautiful in your own skin, befriend your body with care and activities that restore your connectedness to it. Acknowledge the old self-talk without judgment, and move on to nurturing actions in spite of any painful feelings. The pain comes from the views we allow our culture to impose on us, our longing for a body shape that we don’t have, and our inability to get nature to comply. Use your intellect to over ride negative talk and to put these simple steps to work, and pay attention to the changes in your heart. With time, you will reclaim and establish appropriate boundaries shifting a focus from weight-obsession to feeling and living healthy.

Negative body image is
A distorted perception of your shape; you perceive parts of your body unlike they really are.

• You are convinced that only other people are attractive and that your body size and shape is a sign of personal failure.

• You feel ashamed, self-conscious, and anxious about your body.

• You feel uncomfortable and awkward in your body.

Positive body image is:
A clear true perception of your shape, you see various parts of your body as they really are.

• You celebrate and appreciate your natural body shape and you understand that a person’s physical appearance says very little about their character and values as a person.

• You feel proud and accepting of your unique body and refuse to spend an unreasonable amount of time worrying about food, weight and calories.

• You feel comfortable and confident in your body.

(National Eating Disorder Information Center, Body Image, www.nationaleatingdisorders.org Retrieved June 7, 2007)

LATINA Style Magazine Vol. 13, No. 4 pages 48 to 49, “Shape-up Your Body Image.”

Overall, small steps toward change will get you much farther than trying to change every aspect of your health and fitness all at once. Work on your vision, develop a plan, polish it as you take small steps, bend and adapt to your discoveries, become aware of your feelings, treat them with compassion, nurture yourself and enjoy the fruits of your effort. Any steps you take to know yourself will have a long-lasting positive effect on your wellbeing. Wishing you good health!

Ana Castro works for UnitedHealthcare Latino Health Solutions. Ana has over 20 years of experience in the field of fitness as a personal trainer, lifestyle management coach, and is the producer and developer of six exercise videos in Spanish especially dedicated to Latinas. UnitedHealthcare Latino Health Solutions is leading the way with its commitment to building diversity and promoting opportunities for Latinas in the workplace.

By Ana Castro