I was thinking about you this morning when I woke, thinking where am I going to fit in time to write a newsletter to you today? 

My mind said, “Hurry up Katie! You've got a lot on today, you don't have time to sit and write a newsletter!” 

But, I know you read my newsletters and I wanted to write to you and to connect with you today so I ignored what my mind was saying and my instinct to just hurry up and get on with things and I went ahead and did the opposite! 

Did you know that your daily instinct has you doing the same things over and over again? 

That's why I teach my clients how to go against that natural daily instinct and do the opposite. 

It’s only when you go against that instinct and stop following your daily routines and habits that new experiences can then flow into your life. 

If you’re feeling stuck right now, in your weight, health, life, happiness or mindset, it’s because daily habits, rituals and responses are governing you thoughts, feeling...

I took this picture on a walk along the Brisbane River recently as a reminder of life.

From a seedling, this mangrove bush has been inundated with water every day as the tides rise and fall.

It not only survived the daily drownings but needed them to grow to full bloom.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED 

I used to complain whenever I was inundated and felt like I couldn’t breathe and I was fearful I wouldn’t survive.

But the reality is it’s been from those times that my greatest growth has come.

When I was just a wee seedling, there was no way I could get my head up above those high tides, I was too underdeveloped, and I had to learn to hold my breath long enough, till the water subsided, and I could catch my breath and feel the sun on my face again.

I didn’t understand then that this cycle is a lifetime cycle and wishing it to be otherwise was futile. I didn’t realise that I would grow, and eventually, I’d be big enough that I would be able to keep my head above water.

You don’t deserve to be slender, fabulously healthy and happy.  

You choose it!   

Every day in every way, you have to choose it.  

From the moment you wake up you’re making, not just one, but potentially hundreds of choices and you have to think about where those choices are taking you.  

And some days it’s hard to make those great choices isn’t it, because we’re hurting in some way: 

*Mentally 

*Emotionally 

*Physically 

Mindset is everything but shit happens and most of us come from tough backgrounds, we've been through hard times and we’ve had to fight to achieve every success.  

Unfortunately, we’ve achieve it at the expense of our health.  

Because in those hard times we listened to that quitter’s mind that comes in when things are hard. The mind that says, “stay in bed”, “just have one wine tonight”, “its’ ok you can have that cookie today, you’ve earned it”. 

So how do we build our mindset so that we can overcome that quitters mind more and...

We know when we’ve lost our mojo don’t we?  

Life just feels bland, our inspiration has dried up and we just don’t feel like we’re connecting to  

*Ideas 

*People 

*Places 

*Situations or 

*Ourselves  

And that leaves us feeling a lack of  

~Confidence 

~Self- belief 

~Ability  

What’s missing is the “hum”.  

You know, that indescribable great feeling, that inner hum that we feel in our very being that gives us the impetus to get up and go?  

It sort of catches us by surprise when because we not only didn’t notice when it stopped humming but we don’t know how to turn it back on. 

We all have to deal with life, it’s not always sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, and feeling exhausted is a real thing, or is it? 

I suggest that when we lose our hum, what we lost first, was hope. Hope that something in our life will change enough that we can experience something new. I think we simply get bored with pushing through the same stuff day in day out and cons...

We can all build our resilience and learn to bounce better and there's a lot we can do to assist ourselves and others to get through the ups and downs of our lives.  

It’s what’s happening in our lives that is having the most impact on our weight and health and the more skills we develop, the more in control our emotions we feel, which leads to feeling more empowered about the responses and behaviours we have to what’s going on. 

There are great short courses around that everyone can do. I did one back in 2009 at The Hopewell Centre on the Gold Coast called ASIST – Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training. This is so you can help others but the personal value to yourself is also right there. There are actually a lot of places still providing this 2 day training and I highly recommend it. 

It’s important to build our own skills and knowledge on what to do in times of distress, whether it’s our distress or someone else’s because when the shit gets real, we all want to fee...

It's completely normal to have ups and downs in how you feel. 

We all go through it. I've had my fair share of ups and downs over my life, some big, some small. It's all part of being human isn’t it. 

It's important to remember that everyone has days when they feel great and days when they feel low, it’s the natural cycles of life. 

It only turns into a problem for us when things start to accumulate and we don’t have the time, skills or support to deal with them or there’s a time when too many things come faster than we can deal with them. 

That’s when we find ourselves grappling to regroup, to get some purchase on a slippery emotional slope. 

The problem is we’re running at life at such a speed that we don’t have the time or motivation to develop and maintain the daily physical health routines that will help us in those times, let alone develop and maintain the good mental and emotional health routines which is what really gives us that ability to arrest our sli...

What do you want?  

Do you ever ask yourself that question?  

If you said yes, I invite you to check-in with yourself: do you ask yourself the question “what do I want” or do you think you know what you want because you complain about what you don’t want so much that it seems obvious that you know what you don’t want?  

The reality is we mostly do the complaining part rather than the more proactive approach of asking ourselves the straight up question “What do I actually want?”  

If we ask ourselves that question, we’re more likely to find ourselves living it.  

Because when you take the reins of your life, then you are the one in control. 

You’re in a better position to be steering that run away stallion that is our unpredictable life rather than being the person tied to its back flopping around, arms flailing, banging our head on it’s arse.  

So ask yourself the question right now: “What do I actually want??”  

Ask yourself that question every singl...

Emotional eating has a massive impact on our weight and health and one of the keys to reducing emotional and stress eating is to increase relaxation. 

 
Taking simple steps to find some little pockets of “you time” throughout the day is one way to begin to reduce stress and increase feelings of calm. 

Another way to break-away from this long standing learned behaviour is to simply be aware that you’re about to engage in emotional eating and take steps to reduce that drive towards putting food in your mouth.

That’s easier said then done though isn’t it.  

I shared my story last night at the Happy Healthy Workshop: Find Your Food Freedom In 5 Simple Steps & Lose Weight Before Christmas of knowing all too well the shame of feeling out of control and that food was my enemy when emotional and stress eating would kick in. 

Sure there were times when I was the one in control and I was able to abstain – heck, that’s how I was able to lose weight on all those diets I did. But...

How do we navigate our way through all the learned behaviours we have associated with food when we don’t even take them into consideration when we decide to lose weight? 

I know I never gave them a thought, in fact I didn’t even know I had eating “behaviours”! 

To be honest, I don’t know what I thought was going on behind the scenes of me, I just knew I was fat and the antidote to that problem was go on a diet (or take diet pills, or exercise my arse off, or not eat for days, or….”fill in the blank” of dysfunctional ways we have been taught to lose weight). 

Is it any wonder we end up with more problems than we started with?  

Being overweight isn’t actually our problem though.  

Being overweight is the result of problem. 

The problem is the habits and behaviours we’ve developed over our lifetime. 

It’s also our own ignorance.  

That’s a challenging word isn’t it, ignorance? It has a lot of “finger pointing” behind it, but really, ignorance simply mea...

It's a surreal moment isn't it?  

When you stand there, having an out of body experience watching yourself eat and wondering "Why can't I control my eating? Why am I putting food in my mouth I know I’ve decided not to eat? Why am I cheating on myself? I don't understand?"  

And even more bewildering is when you do all the "right things" and nothing happens or worse still, you put on weight!  

This is the shit that erodes at our confidence and image we have of ourselves. We think it’s an “us” thing, that no one else suffers this way and that everyone else has self-control.  

The real question becomes "How do I change what’s happening so I can get the health and life I want?"  

Now that question took me a quarter of a century to find the answer for.  

Here’s what I discovered and how I found my freedom:  

🌱 Gain Clarity: Understand the root causes of your eating habits and learn how to navigate them effectively.  

That’s why I developed The 3 Systems of He...