Forget Diet Resolutions and Retrain Your Brain For a Healthier, Less Food-Obsessed New Year

Author Nancy Deville advocates eating a historically eaten diet of real whole foods that could be picked, gathered, milked, hunted, or fished, that are grown or raised in clean organic environments and haven't undergone any processing.

Santa Monica, CA (I-Newswire) December 16, 2010 - You may still be feeling remorse about gorging at Thanksgiving, but you’ve slept off the food coma . . . and now the next wave of holiday madness is upon us. Even if you wanted to, you can’t escape the in-your-face edible reminders that the holiday season is in full swing. In fact, celebrations never cease: Blink and it will be Valentine’s Day seducing us with gilded boxes of luscious chocolate.

As you do your best to navigate holiday temptations, you find yourself wondering how you can possibly avoid gaining extra pounds.

Nancy Deville would have us take an unusual route to mind, body, and spirit wellness by consuming a historically eaten diet of real, whole living food. Author of the groundbreaking exposé, Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America (March 2011) and the “how-to” sequel Healthy, Sexy, Happy: A Thrilling Journey to the Ultimate You (May 2011) Nancy Deville says, “People give themselves permission to compulsively overeat or to eat the wrong foods during the holidays by promising—and intending—to diet after the New Year. But let’s face it, the New Year’s resolution to lose weight is a tired joke. Dieting fails, and people end up fatter by swimsuit season. It’s a vicious cycle.”

So what does one do, just give up?

“Not at all,” says Nancy Deville. “It’s time to chart a different course.”

Some strategies to avoid weight gain during the holidays—or if you have gained how to deal with it in the New Year:

• Resolve to never diet again. Diets fail, and are a slippery slope to accelerated aging (obesity, disease, and outward signs of aging).

• Shift your emphasis from weight loss to achieving optimal health. Go into the New Year with a fresh outlook and a new plan of action.

• Recognize what happens to you physically/emotionally when you overeat. You feel groggy, headachy, bloated, constipated, and toxic, with crushing emotions of shame, guilt, and self-loathing. Openly acknowledging these inevitable results is a positive act of self-compassion that will pave the way for you to set your intention.

• Set your intention. Intention is very powerful. Express your intentions out loud such as, “I’m not going to overeat.” Visualize positive eating and behavior during the holidays, and also where you want to be six months from now, a year from now, and for the rest of your life.

• Reprogram your brain to work for you. Be kind to yourself! If you slipped, forgive yourself and treat yourself as you would anyone who has had a bad experience. Say reassuring things to yourself out loud. Treating yourself with compassion, verbalizing, and picturing a positive future free of food cravings will calm the part of your brain that processes emotions.

• Sleep enough to keep your “munchie” hormone from taking over. Sleep deprivation causes your satiety hormone to become confused and out of whack.

• Take care of your “big dumb “pet”—Your Brain. Living food supplies your body with the ingredients to make happy neurotransmitters. This makes your brain—which Deville calls your “big dumb pet”—happy so that it stops controlling you with cravings.

• Stopping eating all factory-produced foods! Eat real, whole, living food. Nancy Deville advocates eating a historically eaten diet of real whole foods that could be picked, gathered, milked, hunted, or fished, that are grown or raised in clean organic environments and haven't undergone any processing. A balanced diet of real food provides the necessary nutrition for ongoing metabolic processes that will rebuild healthy brain cells. Eating real food registers to your survival-programmed brain as the end of the time of famine, so you will stop craving, heal on a cellular level, and shrink down naturally to your optimal body weight.

“Eating real food is crucial to survival in our toxic world,” Nancy Deville says. “Real food nourishes the entire being and when the being is nourished the mind is clear and the spirit is open and compassionate toward self and others. The bonus is that you are in control and food temptations no longer hold power over you.”

For more information, please visit www.nancydeville.com