March 2017 – Your New Wings

27 Mar

Thanks Lee: Fasting – Now I get it!

On Saturday I was lucky enough to attend a book launch at Oken’s Kitchen in Warwick (Warwickshire, United Kingdom) organised by Warwick Books.

Lee Homes came to talk to us about her new book ‘Fast your way to Wellness’ and demonstrate some recipes from her book.

Lee is Australian, as I am, but until a few days ago I hadn’t heard of her or her work. So when my friend Katherine suggested we go to the launch I checked out her website www.superchargedfood.com

Here I was introduced to Lee’s philosophy and her work with food. It was very refreshing as I discovered it to be very inline with my own values and beliefs. Whole foods cooked from scratch, simple, fresh and made with love. Healing for the gut and the soul as preparing food is once again approached with mindfulness and gratitude. Very much the food ethos I grew up with on our farm in South Gippsland (Victoria, Australia).

Meeting Lee I discover a lovely, laidback Aussie who is living a wholehearted life with wholefoods. Through her own health struggles Lee found her way to health again through wholefoods. Lee certainly knows her stuff, and was able to fill in a number of blanks for me so that I now have a better understanding of how fasting works and how it is really good for your body.

My understanding of fasting has changed too. I thought fasting meant going without food, but apparently you can eat 500 Calories on your fasting days! And with Lee’s new recipe book to give some amazing ideas about what those 500 calories might look like. Lee helped dispel my fear of being hungry all the time (the main reason I have put off embracing it wholeheartedly for so long).

So for me today is my first official fasting day…

Peppermint & Liquorice tea before the school run kept the hunger away.

My workout at 9am – before breakfast, unheard of for me as that mantra of “must have breakfast – it’s the most important meal of the day” always plays in my head. Right there – an underlying belief that I can just give the boot, after 46 years!

Breakfast at 11am – Orange and Cinnamon Buckwheat Porridge (p119)

I used several of Lee’s tricks to ignore the hunger pangs and then it was…

Lunch at 2pm – leftover ginger stir fry from Friday nights dinner (Not Lee’s recipe – but one of my favorites).

Dinner at 6pm – I’m planning the Vegie Nori Wraps (p250) to which I will add some sausages and maybe mash to keep the 3 boys in my house happy (but which I can skip).

So begins the first day of the rest of my fasting life. Two days of extra mindful eating (that makes more sense to me than ‘fasting’) will allow me to eat mindfully for the rest of the week and not feel guilty or like I have to count calories on those other five days. Sounds great to me!

Thanks Lee for your inspiration, and your recipe book. I look forward to trying the rest of the recipes!

Have a fastastic day!

Tina

YNW 001: Parental Transitions: We change as our children do

Welcome to my first Video Blog!

In this video I begin to talk about parental transition and how our lives as adults are changing in parallel with our children’s. Many of my clients are in the midst of some type of change. I give our family’s current transition of our youngest son beginning High School here as an example.

Common parental transitions are:
– Becoming a parent
– Deciding to return to work (or not) after maternity leave
– Youngest child starting Primary school
– Youngest child starting High School
– Last child leaving home

Keep an eye out for more in one of my upcoming blogs!

xx Tina

09 Mar

3 Countries, 3 Continents, 6 Years – Lessons learnt from moving our family around the world…

Just over two years ago our family arrived in the UK to make a new life for ourselves. We have moved countries every 2 years for the past 6 years, moving around for Vaughan (my husbands) work.

There have been many challenges, big decisions and much uncertainty over this time period, but as I reflect back on our adventures I feel very grateful to have lived such an interesting life!

Our last 6 years has found us move:

Australia ==> Brazil (our boys aged 5 & 7 years)

Brazil ==> Australia (our boys aged 7 & 9 years)

Australia ==> United Kingdom (our boys aged 9 &11 years)

It is a strange feeling heading into a third year in the same place and I must admit that I am not in any great hurry to move again just yet!

We can only choose from what we have in front of us. We are given choices every day. We can choose to be courageous or to be safe.

As Vaughan and I tussled with the pros and cons of the possibly of moving to Brazil we looked at it from every angle, researching the city, the statistics, the language. We spent hours, days, weeks researching, discussing and contemplating.

One of our biggest fears as we explored the opportunity of moving to Brazil was not knowing what impact our moving would have on our boys…this was in the forefront of our minds as we made this first critical decision, to go or not to go.

The way Vaughan and I finally decided if to take the leap and head to Brazil with our boys (5 and 7 at the time) was by asking ourselves… “In 10 years are we going to look back and say we were glad we went or glad we didn’t go?” For both of us the answer was crystal clear… we would be glad we had gone.

When we took this ‘big picture’ view all the challenges and uncertainties faded into being almost insignificant. And if asked the same question today I can truly say that we are glad that we went. It was even more challenging than I could have imagined back then, but I am a wiser, more patient, more empathetic, more confident, more grateful and a more generous human being from having the experiences we have had. I see these qualities in our boys too, and even thought there have been huge struggles for them, they too have developed complex and unique parts of their own personalities. Would I choose the same again?… In a heartbeat!

A wonderful book that was recommended to me by an expat friend is “Third Culture Kids” by …Having personally grown up in the same place for my entire childhood (a small farm in rural Australia) I had no personal experience of how our new lifestyle would affect our boys… this book help me to see the pros and cons of living and growing up outside our passport country…It helped us put strategies in place to ensure they maintain a connections with the things that are important. I would highly recommend it for anyone contemplating a change of country with children.

Some of the lessons I have learnt over the past 6 years are these:

Fear of the unknown is normal, healthy and needs balancing with courage, research and faith

When we are challenged – we grow

We are not aware of what we are truly capable of until faced with challenges to overcome

A coach is an enormous support during the upheaval of moving countries

Our first move was the toughest, in lots of ways that is always going to be the case. But one of the things that stands out for me as a big difference between the first and subsequent moves is that for the first move I didn’t have a coach… In later moves my coach was an enormous support for me (and therefore for our family) each time we have relocated. There is always so much to do in what seems like so little time. My coach helped me to get clear about what was most important and what I could let go of. Each move brought different challenges, but each time my coach helped me to stay grounded, focused and (relatively) calm. For anyone who has gone through something similar you will know that there are often sleepless nights, not only coming up to the actual move, but also well before that as you attempt to make the correct decision regarding every aspect of your current and future life!

And so if you are facing a big move in your life -be it your first or one of many – I would recommend a coach. A coach can help smooth out the bumps in the road, and this can be a lifesaver when your energy reserves are hitting rock bottom!

I am extremely grateful that I can now look at each challenge that I face, and overcome, to be a blessing. Each time I get through a challenge I am growing, becoming more resourceful and more able to deal with whatever comes next.

xo Tina