Inquire Within: An Inner Strength Exercise

Hi, Strongies! If you're not into slightly woo-woo personal development exercises, you may want to skip today's post. Don't worry! I'll see you next week. :)Today's post is all about the video below, but I wanted to give you a little background before we hop right into it.A couple weeks ago, I posted a survey asking you what your biggest struggle is, and many of you said that eating healthy was a big one of them. I'd like to take that one step further if I may...I feel like half the struggle for many of us is indeed eating healthy, but the other half is the battle against compulsive eating. We eat to avoid discomfort, to smash down feelings we're not comfortable with. And hey, I know how that feels.

Last year's very first 30-Day Challenge was launched because I was sick of telling you all not to mindlessly eat, and then going and doing it myself.

No more hypocrite trainer! I forced myself to sit with what I was feeling, instead of fall back into habit, and I know a lot of you got some great results, too (see Ryan's inspirational story here)."Sitting with" a feeling is a very broad order. What does it even mean? Do you hold it like a child? Do you sit across the table from it? Do you simply think about it?How about none of the above?When anyone approaches me about any form of over-eating, I usually send them to the bookstore to pick up Geneen Roth's Women, Food & God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. It is an excellent read for anyone (not just women) who has ever had issues with food (i.e. just about all of us). This is not a religious book, either. She talks about God as an open-ended entity of meaning and "that which we find holy." You do not need to be religious in order to juice this book and all its paradigm-shifting goodness.What do I mean by paradigm-shifting? Roth has a way of showing you your behaviors and thinking processes that would otherwise go unnoticed as habit. She takes you out of yourself so you can see what's happening from the outside, then puts you back in touch with yourself in a way that is unparalleled in any self-help book I have ever read... and I have read quite a few. The bonus? She has personally lost and gained over 1,000 pounds in her life, and finally found her "natural weight" through eating what her body wanted when she actually wanted it.

Today, I want to take you through one exercise she goes over in the book called "Inquiry," as a way to deal with uncomfortable feelings.

I figure: I'm a strength trainer. Time to start strength training you from the inside out. :)Exercises like this one helped me through my personal recovery. They may seem woo-woo and you may feel silly while you do them, but they're downright helpful.

This exercise is not just for those who have issues around food; it's also for those who have a hard time dealing with life.

Today's video will hopefully help you take the first step in dealing with sensations as they come up in you (instead of avoiding them) so that you may realize that they will not overwhelm you.This exercise is to be used when you catch yourself either feeling the urge to eat compulsively, or otherwise avoiding discomfort as it arises in you.Just a heads up: this exercise gets tough. This gets uncomfortable. You can handle it. Just breathe through it and let yourself feel it. It's just you and me. :)Let's get to it...

No joke, right? It's serious stuff we're talking about: your strength.

I whole-heartedly believe that you are strong enough to handle anything, and that this exercise may just be the first step to you believing it, too.

Stay strong, guys. "Stay" being the key word...

With hope and fire,

Amy