Getting the Support You Need For Your New Wellness Lifestyle

1. Getting the Support You Need For Your New Wellness Lifestyle By: Aisling Larkin

2. 2 There are some crucial strategies for getting loved ones to support your new healthy lifestyle and effectively deal with negative peer pressure and sabotage. Eating Mindfully – a new way for everyone ! Changing your mindset and habits around food and eating is a wonderful but challenging journey of self discovery and development. Getting loved ones to support you can be challenging at times. Personal journeys like this can feel lonely – you are perhaps the one deciding to embrace this lone journey, break away from the pack, cause unwanted change to normality…. It can be hard – those first days are long and in a lot of cases all you can do is really try to be true to yourself ! You are doing the right thing, you have made the right choice, lets keep going and bring along the rest of your family. Do you have to convince your family to change their eating habits too ? No, this is about you ! This is your choice and your one life. However, for the same token it can make life a lot easier if they are with you each step the way. Also, you want your family and friends to be healthy and safe — to feel good. You want to protect them from the pain of poor health. You want the best for them. And frankly, you need support from the people closest to you. It seems hard — even near impossible — to make these big changes alone.

3. 3 If you’re feeling these things it’s important to know: These thoughts are really, really normal. It is hard to eat and move in ways that support your own health goals when, in your social circle, Friday is after-works drinks, Saturday night is a takeaway and a bottle of wine, Sunday is a big family roast and ice creams with the kids and in some ways, you can be the sum of your social circle. Habits can be contagious. The people around you matter. And you matter to the people around you. Most of this happens subconsciously. We often change our habits to match those of our social group without talking or even thinking about it.

4. 4 Research shows that we are affected by the body composition, habits, and lifestyles of those around us. The more people around us are doing something or living a certain way, the more likely we are to do and live the same — whether that’s what we eat, how we eat, whether we move (or not), how we move, and so on. If your friends and family are fitter and healthier, you’re more likely to be fitter and healthier. And the reverse is true, too. Research shows that: ● The weight of those closest to you may help determine your own weight. According to one large-scale study, having a friend, an adult sibling, or a spouse who is obese increases your own obesity risk by 57 percent, 40 percent, and 37 percent respectively. The following evidence-based examples will show that social norms and social acceptance are huge for your success. ● Even your friends’ friends matter. Two degrees of separation between you and someone who is obese increases your own chances of being obese by 20 percent. You don’t even have to have met them for this to be a factor in your own weight.

5. 5 ● Your social network affects your obesity risk exponentially. Each obese person you know is correlated with a 0.5 percent increase in your risk of obesity. ● Your weight is more influenced by people of your own gender. For women, this means that a girlfriend’s or same-sex partner’s weight may have a larger effect than a guy friend’s or opposite-sex partner’s; and vice versa for men. ● Weight convergence likely happens subconsciously. Researchers believe that we change our habits to match those of our social group without talking or even thinking about it. ● The amount you eat depends on who you’re eating with. Dine with a big eater, and you’re liable to consume more; sit down with a light eater, and you’re likely to take in less. This effect has been observed even among strangers. When asked, the diners usually attribute the mirroring effect to taste and hunger as opposed to the behaviour of others around them. ● How much you eat also depends on the size of the group you’re with. Eating with one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven or more other people is associated with a 33, 47, 58, 69, 70, 72, and 96 percent

6. 6 increase in energy consumed, respectively. ● Your social network can also have a big impact on what you eat. People whose friends generally meet the guidelines for produce intake are more likely to eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables per day. ● Your impression of social norms help determine what you eat, how much you eat, and your physical activity level. If getting a light salad for lunch seems “normal”, that’s what you’re likely to do, even if no one’s going to see you eat it. Conversely, if eating a bag of Ruffles for lunch seems “normal”, you may do that, even if you know the salad is more aligned with your health goals. Those who report a high level of

7. 7 physical activity as the social norm are also more likely to be active themselves. However, lets look at the flip side of each of these – as they say for every negative there is a positive. Social influence is a good thing when used correctly. As human beings we are social creatures who have evolved to depend on each other and co-exist together. We depended on social cohesion — on belonging — to survive. To be alone (whether abandoned, rejected, or left behind) often meant certain death. Today, modern medicine shows us that loneliness can still kill: our bodies respond to social rejection and isolation as if they were viral threats. When we are persistently lonely, inflammation goes up, immunity goes down; we get more chronic diseases and die sooner. Aloneness is scary. Vulnerable. Difficult. “Aloneness” can be “real”, like the actual aloneness of a young woman who chooses to stay in to eat a healthy dinner and get a good night’s sleep when all her roommates have gone out for pizza and partying. “Aloneness” can also be a feeling, like when you are the odd one out because you order a glass of tap water and a salad – dressing on the side of course and all your friends are tucking inot chicken wings and burgers.

8. 8 About Us: Aisling is one of only a handful of people in Europe trained in the MB-EAT programme (Mindfulness – Based Eating Awareness Training – the most evaluated and researched mindful eating approach) by J. Kristeller, PhD (Indiana State University, USA) and Andrea Lieberstein, MPH, RDN, RYT. Contact Us: We’d be delighted to hear from you Log on: https://eatingmindfully.ie Mobile or Whatsapp: 087 9522 324 Email: aisling@eatingmindfully.ie