I have some questions in this blog for you to ask yourself - as the answers may give you some insight as to what makes your MIND tick and how your MIND will make your New Year’s resolutions STICK to YOU.

You are a combination of your thoughts, feelings, personality, memories and daily experiences. (NOTE: you are not your past experiences - but the memories of the past influence YOU!) The more you watch how your mind works, the more you will learn how you play your life. If you want to commit to yourself, you need to understand how your emotions and habits are running your life so you can master them.

One of my favourite fortune cookie quotes is

” Life is not the hand you are dealt, Life is how you play the cards”.

So let’s look at No.1 New Year’s Resolution - to Lose Weight.

Write down the first thing that comes to mind when you read these questions:

1. What makes an exercise and diet program so compelling to you?

2. How do you feel about ideas, standards and goals that are set by somebody else besides yourself?

3. How do you feel about change?

4. How do you feel about a time table?

5. What’s your first habit when you wake up in the morning? (AFTER you go potty, brush your teeth, drink water or any other necessary bodily functions?)

6. When you wake up in the morning what is the first thing you think about?

7. When you think about exercise do you get excited?

8. What food do you buy, that you enjoy eating AND helps you lose weight?

9. What food do you know that no matter what diet you are on, you will not want to give up?

10. What do you think about when saying no to your favorite food?

And Now for your Answers:

1. Look at your attitude to an exercise and diet program - make sure your friend, family, trainer or SOMEONE knows your belief about exercise and diet so they can HELP motivate you move beyond nagging insecurities that exercise and diets are a drag or just not going to work. Find what compels you to stick to a program and write it somewhere you can see when you wake up.

2. If you have a negative attitude to working with a “plan” you will end up leaving that plan. Your attitude to someone telling you what to do may bring up some rebellion or resistance in you - just recognise your resistance and focus on the positive results you want from a plan. You do not have to stick to the rules - you need to stick to what your best possible outcome feels like and how much you want that goal.

3. Your attitude to change reflects your fears and excitement at this moment - and they can change too!

4. Aaaaah Time. Be realistic - if you want to change your life, you must commit time in your day to new behaviour and some parts of your life may have to go.

5. Change starts easier at the beginning of the day. If you want to change your routine, start by changing something when you first wake up and the conscious mind has not got a hold of you!

6. Change also starts by watching your habitual thoughts. If you want to focus your attitude to losing weight, then start with a focus at the beginning of the day. Speak your intentions out loud, stick them on the refridgerator and in the bathroom. Give your intentions a feeling - “I will be xxx pounds and feel sexy, powerful, unstoppable” - whatever!

7. Just find some exercise that gets your juices flowing! If exercise is boring to you, you create negatives chemistry in the body which prevents you from losing weight!

8. When you enjoy food that also good for you, the body also creates a chemistry that is conducive to feeling good - and feeling good encourages the right chemistry for fat loss metabolism.

9. Diet and sacrifice do not go well together. If you want to stick to a diet, you have to find ways to cope with sacrifice those comfort foods without going cold turkey. Be aware of the foods you are crazy about and that make you obsess about eating bad food again - because it “feels” good. Try not to black list your favorite “naughty” foods, but find a surrogate version that is good for you.

10. Saying no to something you want can be VERY CONFUSING to the body. The body chemistry is telling you to have that Dunkin Donut, but the New Year Resolution is saying NO! When you feel deprived it can lead you to rebellious behaviour. This is why food is such a good comfort - but if you want to stick to your ideal YOU - you will need to imagine an ideal sense of yourself that is not dependent on food alone to get what you want.

Notice your feelings about saying NO to something you want. Call your friends, find good company, something fun, indulge in feel good activities to distract you from feelings that you are not getting what you want right this minute. Your resolutions stick to you when you listen GENTLY to your feelings and are FIRM with the voices in your head saying you cannot have what you truly want.

Eating and emotions start from when we are born. The first impulse for a new born child is to suckle on the breast, which releases positive hormones and feelings for both the child and mother. So emotions and eating ARE connected, we will always have emotions connected to food. As we grow up, the family or community comes together to prepare and eat food. You develop other emotional patterns and reactions from what you pick up from them.

If your family or community have bad eating habits, it’s not unlikely you’ll have the same habits.

Dr Mona Lisa Schulz talks about the connections between the emotions and your body in the CD series Intuitive Listening. She talks about a guy who used to be an alcoholic and now has a food addiction. Dr Schulz has found that the best way to overcome over eating is to have a structured eating program AND to associate with groups who have different habits to the ones that support your current emotional patterns.

What I’ve found interesting - is what happens when you fall off the wagon of any new program or effort you are using to change your life. How to do you talk to yourself - do you say “well, it’s only just this once”, “I knew I was going to stuff up”, “this is too hard”. Whatever you say to yourself - these words are GOLD. Look at what words you are saying, look at the exact wording and then ask yourself where did these words come from. Where did I get that “programming”. Once you find out how you’ve developed your own self talk - you get some important clues as to what emotional pattern and expectations you’ve set up for yourself.

Perhaps you’ve adopted a belief and even words of a parent, sibling or elder. Maybe you’ve created the words all by yourself at a particular age. If you have created the words at a particular age, its helpful to go back in your memory to that time and think about why you took on those words as a part of who you are. Perhaps you had an emotional experience at the time that only allowed you to deal with the experience by using this belief and these words to “cope”.

Feeling your emotions is sometimes too much to handle. And that’s why emotional eating is SO EASY. Sometimes its too hard to feel unpleasant emotions - but it’s very easy to feel good feelings when you eat.

The trick is to not see “unpleasant” emotions as bad - see your “darker” feelings as something like a mystery - like something you always wanted to know more about and start to find ways to understand them so you can bring them to light.

Learning how to stand and hold your pelvis is the first step to controlling your movement and getting to your core. Sometimes with ab crunches and ab “work” it’s easy to forget how to get into the softer parts of your inner belly. That’s why the softer moves of belly dance are so effective at getting you to feel your deeper abs and your inside muscles that support your spine.

The basic feet position for mastering belly dance is feet facing forward a few inches apart. If your feet are wider than your hips, you won’t be able feel the connection between your belly muscles and your spine.

Next, you want to make sure your tail bone is sitting directly underneath you and not pointing out to the wall. When you “tuck your tail bone under” you pull in your lower ab muscles and tuck in your lower glutes NATURALLY.

The tail bone connects to back part of your pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is all the small muscles that do all the REALLY important stuff, like go to the bathroom, deliver babies and hold all your organs inside your body so you can walk upright! Phew! Thank goodness for the pelvic floor!

The front of the pelvic floor is framed by the pubic bone which connects and stabilises a lot of lower ab muscles.

The Key to NATURALLY lengthen your ab muscles and look instantly thinner is to imagine a line coming up from the pubic bone, the front of the pelvic floor, all the way up the center of the body and into the heart area or breast bone.

As you breathe in - lift the chest up and pull up the imaginary line from the pubic bone all the way up to chest. It’s like you’re lifting your abs up the center part of your body into the chest.

This type of breathing is opposite to the “belly breathing” you may use in yoga, as you are breathing into the chest and lifting the abs up as you lift the chest. Just remember you can use the breath in different ways to create different effects and images of the body.

In Belly dance the lifting of the heart-chest area is connected to the breathing muscles of the abdomen, so as you lift the chest you are working out your abs without pulling them in. You are simply raising the chest and creating the illusion of being thinner!

Belly dance is better when you know how to do the basic moves. There are a lot of belly dance videos and instructional dvds out there. Most of them have some value as you can pick up tips from a variety of teachers.

The key to belly dance is really listening to your body. Stay posted to my other blog www.dancewithangela.com for upcoming online belly dance instruction!

How do you support a positive energy in your life and create energy for others - without taking energy from others?

What is truly the gift of giving and receiving? How do you manage your energy - are you an energy vampire? Or are you an energy generator. Jon Gordon’s article looks at the other energy crisis that’s corrupting the workplace today.

Jon Gordon is an Energy Coach and the co-creator of the Positive Energy Program.

His book the Energy Bus teaches positive attitudes that keep you going with the ups and down of life both at home and in the work place. Maybe a great way to keep the positive spirits going after the jolly season is over!

So how do you move your hips from your feet?
Try this really simple exercise:

Both feet facing forward about a inch to two inches apart (no duck feet please)
Place your fingers tips gently on your front hip bones.
Keeping the heels on the ground, bend the knees softly and notice how the hip bones move ever so subtly. Take care to not lock the knees.
Keep the knees soft and juicy like squeezing a sponge.
Softly bend the knees and start to feel the buttocks fall to the earth as if you’re going to sit on a stool.

As you softly bend the knees, notice the sister fold in the ankles and the fold of the groin. The three folds - ankle, knees, groin - are connected like sister joints all springing in synchronicity together. Let them open a little and close gently and notice your tailbone dropping straight down into the earth (no duck tails please).

Let go of opening and closing the joints.
Keep your knees soft, keep the fold in your groin and ankles and notice your tail pointing down into the earth.
Now – You’re ready to start feeling the rhythm through your feet (while keeping the leg joints soft)

Lifting one heel at a time, start to feel the earth with each heel. As the heel hits the ground feel the reverb into your buttock. And repeat! Using music with a beat!

Pretty soon you’ll find how hitting the earth with your heel reverbs all the way up your leg to your butt – but the key is to always keep the knees soft and juicy to let the beat travel to the butt. Imagine the feet are like a drummer’s hands communicating the rhythm to your body.

Enjoy your feet, feel the rhythm and send the beat from feet to butt.

Belly dancing has been enjoyed for thousands of years because it’s good for the whole body, not just the belly. Belly dancing is an internal workout which builds up your body heat as well as works out your organs and hormonal system that is powered by the mid riff and central channel of the body. The movement of the pelvis repeatedly works like a pump on the belly cavity that holds and protects the organs. Belly rolls or undulations both massage the organs and soothe the nervous system.

Shimmies and vibrations in belly dancing are popularly seen as a butt action. The traditional use of belly dance uses shimmies in the hips, buttocks, chest, midriff, shoulders and chest. When first learning belly dance moves I encourage beginners to feel the shimmy coming from the ground up the feet into the hips. Eventually with more sensitivity to the body parts you can start a shimmy from that body part. A full body shimmy is the best way to wake up the body as it activate all centers of your internal body clock that sits in the lower belly, the organs, the heart area and the brain.

Belly dance moves are not only about building body and muscle strength or control. The idea is to get deeper into your self and have as much internal strength while also expressing yourself in a graceful and skilful way. Once you have the basic belly dance moves, the art of belly dancing brings your creative expression into the dance. Belly dancing combines all aspects of the self, the mind, body, emotions and spirit.

Belly dance is an ancient art form that also developed moves that keep you challenged and involved with your body. In repeating a belly dance move you will become more intuitively in touch with that part of the body and able to move it more comfortably to music of all varieties. You literally “send juice” to your body parts - blood, synovial fluid, visceral fluids, lymph fluid - that soothe and strengthen the body at the same time.

Dancing with the belly and center part of the body is an excellent fitness expression no matter what age, shape or size or whatever lifetime you were born into. While civilizations have come and gone we still have the same bodies that need more than a body building work out. Belly dance moves are a fun way to explore your body and keep your brain stimulated, connected and involved in what you are feeling.

Obesity levels are rising to over 67% of the US population and children are also developing health problems reserved for the over 45 population. In Europe, obesity is also a rising problem and countries such as Italy have introduced the SLOW FOOD movement. The Slow Food movement is both a resistance to fast food and a practice of enjoying home cooked food with family and loved ones in a calm environment.

I remember the first time I went through an American drive through and experienced what I had only seen on TV. It was 1997 and I was a tourist from Australia in Colorado with a group of new American friends. We had one day on the road to see as much as possible and it was getting late. In a flurry to get back to camp we pulled into a drive thru (even the word “thru” is shortened!) the driver yelled at us and then yelled at a box and suddenly some sort of wrap was on my lap. I laughed to myself as I realized I was truly in America and no one else in the car understood how foreign the experience was to me.

Convenience foods are so taken for granted in the US that the alternative is seen as inconvenient. Marketing and food supply companies have done everything to make junk food and processed foods more easily affordable, available and “fashionable” than real food. So when do we start to take the time and make the effort to fight for the right of good old fashioned fruit, vegetables and whole foods? There is the impression that time is the aspect that you have the least choice over in modern American culture.

What to eat has become a hot topic with the popular press pushing one new diet after the other. Marketing by food companies attaches emotional and “feel good” vibes to products.
When food becomes a fashion, an emotion or a choice made by a fad diet, there is a disconnection from the hunger centers of the brain and the body’s natural response for nutrients.

One of the other challenges of modern culture is the over supply of food in the environment and the lack of the need for food considering we don’t move as we used to. Reconnecting to YOUR body’s natural ability to understand what it wants is perhaps the most important skill to learn in order to avoid being overwhelmed by environmental factors in your food choices.

The first step to get back to some sense of what your body wants is to follow the Italians and slow down. Think about the reason you may choose a convenience or processed food. If you are choosing food because it’s there, “you don’t have time”, “its cheap”, understand your choices are creating your future and your children’s future health – or lack there of.

Education about what foods are supportive for you is a gradual process. Sensing what foods are right for you will change throughout your lifetime as the body chemistry changes. If you have an obsessive attraction to unhealthy foods then take a step back and see if you’re actually craving some other sort of emotional need or high. Highly processed foods act like sugar in the body and sugar is just as much a drug as alcohol.

Reintroducing fresh fruit and vegetables is the most important step to reeducating your taste buds and brain to the body’s more balanced response to what to eat and how much to eat. In traditional medicine, fasting and abstinence from food for a short period was also a good way to re-calibrate the body’s natural response for nutrients. You can try short periods of abstinence from a particular food to test how you react to that food when you reintroduce it into your diet. Most importantly, start finding ways where you have MORE choice over what food you have available, so you have whole foods you enjoy that are good for you.

Until the American society as a whole unites to fight for a more wholesome food supply for our children we need to first ask ourselves what motivates our food choices.