Be. Do. Have

One thing that makes my nutrition coaching different @HomegrownHomestead is, I work with all my clients on emotional wellness as a twin peak with nutrition and eating habits. I can teach you all the benefits and ways to eat a plant-based diet until the cows come home. But none of it will matter if you haven't worked through the emotional reasons why you are currently not living your dream life.

Nutrition skills are just one piece to your overall lifestyle puzzle. Have you ever tried to look at one piece of a puzzle without the box cover and tried to figure out that piece's meaning and placement? Kinda hard, right? Without all the pieces to the whole puzzle, and without them together, having one piece just doesn't make much sense.

Our emotions (read: chemical messengers in our bodies) are so powerful and they impact our eating habits. To work with one, you need to work with the other. They are equally important. That's why I refer to them as twin peaks. Food is so intertwined into our every day way of being, ways of acting, even our typical reward systems. Food can even rewire our brains to feel different emotions and spur different cravings. There is a whole realm of food science dedicated to these things.

Food and emotions (read: emotional eating) has been true for me for as long as I can remember. I thought I was destined to be the "chubby friend" my whole life. That I just wouldn't look good in nice clothes. That gaining weight every year was just how I was made. That losing weight was hard and required sacrifices. That it required denial of things I enjoyed because "I like food!" That I didn't have the energy that my friends have. That it required working out and i hate working out. That I had the "cow bones" that the USPHS Commissioned Corps doctor so graciously called me when my measurements met the fitness requirements, but my weight didn't. This is just how I was made. "Being" this way didn't make diets, changing eating habits, maintaining a healthy weight, losing stress induced fat, or any of that stick my whole life. Because I was not going about this the way that would give me the results I know I wanted.

If you are anything like me you have programming that says something like this. "I need to have the money, the body, the house, the spouse, the whatever, before I can do the thing I want to do, go to the gym, travel, finish my education, live the life I want, fill in the blank. Then and only then will I be the homesteader, the naturalist, rich, successful, fit, healthy, person I want to be. Sound a little familiar? Yeah it was the lie going around my head for all of my adult life. I had to have something before I could do what I wanted, and then be who I was supposed to be, who I was meant to be.

To break this cycle, I had to do the emotional work first. The fruits of the roots weren't the fruits i wanted in my life. If you plant apple trees expecting pears to show up you're going to be sorely disappointed when the fruits show up. And i was.

If any of you garden you know the struggle with weeds. If you pull just the part you see, the weed will come right back. You need to get the root out too. The roots are planted into your subconscious and the part you see is what shows up in your thoughts and eventually your physical world (relationships, money, job, environment, house, business, spouse, car, etc.)

I had to root out the negative "weeds" in my subconscious. The ones that were programmed to sabotage me in the first place. Now my subconscious wasn't "out to get me." It's designed to keep us safe. Keep us in our comfort zone. Keep us out of danger. So when we try something new, unless you've done the work, it's default is to throw up all sorts of road blocks disguised as limiting beliefs such as "you can't do this," "remember last time, when you fell off the wagon"... "fill in the blank"

But a few years ago this all got flipped on its head. I learned that having, so i can do, so i can be isn't how this works. And is why I struggled, sat in emotional pain, was broke, spun my wheels, and suffered for all that time. (This is my "why": why I want to help my clients fast track this part and get to the good stuff. Start getting the results they do want as quickly as they can.) I was approaching this backwards. I wasn't getting the results I wanted because the equation actually looks like this. Be. Do. Have.

Boy did my subconscious have a hay day telling me all the reasons why this way was wrong! I had a lot of weeds to root up. First I had to identify who I am meant to be. Who am I? What was I put on this planet to do? What is God and my truest self trying to tell me with all these nudges? Grab your journal and write this out and decide: Who do I want to be?

Then Act From there. Act from that place. What would you do if you were being that person you want to be? Decide to act as if you are already that person. (At this step, my subconscious started to throw up all sorts of limiting beliefs for a long, way too long time. "you're a fake." "you're not a real homesteader." "who do you think you are to do this work" "you don't know how to do this" "you'll fail and people will make fun of you." "you'll find a way to screw this up too.") But what if you couldn't fail? What if God was working with you to bring your dreams to you (because duh...He planted those seeds of desire in you in the first place. Face palm!)? What would life look like if this was true? I journalled the heck outta these questions. Each time, stepping into this new way of being. What would it feel like if I was already this person? And cultivating that feeling as much and as often as I could. This was the first step that started making all of our dreams become a reality.

Once you start doing the things that align with who you are, the "have" part comes a lot easier. It just flows from the "doing" part. The resources show up, the decisions are a lot clearer. You can move forward to having the dream life that you have always pictured in your mind.

Then you get to decide if a plant-based lifestyle aligns with your truest self. And you get to decide what that looks like for you. What percentage plants? What percentage animal products? You get to choose what you do based on who you are. And it becomes part of your lifestyle. Just what you do. Second nature. And as a side-effect you get to improve the environment, make connections in your community, all the while living that dream life you've been seeing in your mind's eye since before you can remember.

So who do you want to be? Leave a comment below with thoughts, musings, questions...