Pruning Your Life (Before Life Prunes You)

“Clear space to grow what matters most.”  (Stefanie Gas)

Years ago I read an article in an English Country Living that had quite an effect on me.  It was an article about a Swedish woman, married to an English member of the aristocracy, who went through a marriage breakup and described the experience with these words;  “life pruned me”.  I was very struck by that phrase – possibly because I had gone through a similar thing and felt the harsh cuts and uninvited acts of being forcibly jostled out of a former life. “Being Pruned” was a great way to put it and so this month, as its pruning time in the garden and winter being a time of contemplation, I want to talk about pruning back our lives. This time doing it ourselves and taking the thoughtful and deliberate steps to cut back that which is no longer fruitful and building a strong framework of branches that will in time produce the fruit we are after.

Incidentally, and as a bit of a side note as I know I have a lot of readers who would be interested, Lena ended up with a country house full of traditional furniture.  Do you know what she did? She painted the whole thing.  I loved it because she used all my favourite colours, the blues, greens, greys and whites of the Scandinavian palette and she lightened up and transformed that place. She even painted out the old dressers and brown furniture.  Which turned the house into a gorgeous setting for photo shoots, used by none other than one of my other favourite heroines and style masters, Laura Ashley.   Took a bit of courage to do that but I guess if you have gone through a pruning time – anything is possible!

So lets take a look at our lives now. Who is overwhelmed by too many things, too much to do, too many projects begun but never finished, toxic people, feeling stretched too thin and never seeming to have enough oxygen to breathe into the sort of lives we really want.  That’s what an unpruned bush or tree is like and now is as good a time as any to put some thought into our changing that.  What do we want in our lives and what fruit are we looking for? This is an act of simplifying life.  Getting down to what is important to us in any branch of our life, cutting out what we no longer want, or what’s draining us, pruning back unnecessary stuff so our lives can spring forth into life, and we can start to see over time, the fruits of our labours rather than the round and round sameness of the lives many of us leave.

An unpruned shrub or fruit tree cannot give its best and can end up just dying away after limping along for a few years. What happens is that there can be to much growth and the branches can get tangled together forming a thicket where little light and oxygen can enter.  In some trees, fruit comes on new wood and some on last years wood.  If not pruned, then the branches get longer and longer and the fruit ends up way out on the end of the limbs. Either way the tree is not able to grow to its full potential. It needs some judicious sharp cuts that may seem brutal at first in the cold hard light of winter, but come spring, will burst forth into life and end up a beautiful useful tree.  Sounds good doesn’t it? The good news is that even old trees can be rejuvenated by  little judicious pruning.

Step 1. Decide what sort of fruit you want.  Clarify your vision for your own life – who and where to you want to be in a year’s time, who you want with you, what are your priorities. Get really clear on that so you know what you are pruning for. This will be your guide for knowing what to keep and what to lose– if it lines up with your life goals – then keep it. If it doesn’t cut it off.

Step 2.  The initial aim with pruning is to establish a strong framework.   Now you know where you want to end up, use this to guide you into what branches you want to keep.  So have a branch that represents the physical area of your life,, a business/work one, a people or relationship one, a personal growth one, a spiritual one – you decide what is important to you and create a framework from that.

Step 3. Cut out anything that does not align with your goal or is preventing you from being effective.  Check in the financial area – do you have a leaky bank account?  Is there money going out of your account that shouldn’t be?  Are you distracted by shiny new offers – signing on for too many things,  committees, etc at the expense of what’s important to you? Its good for us to support our communities but its not always the right season – join up later when you have more time but do a bit of deleting now.  Incidentally, when pruning back branches that you no longer want when you are pruning, you have to cut right back to the wood so they do not resprout.

Step 4.  On each of those branches or areas of your life, think about what you really want . The ones you want to keep, prune back to what is effective and what you can manage.  This is for those of you who maybe like me are growing an online business using social media and constantly signing up for the next new course by some bright young thing who has appeared in my feed. My inbox definitely needs pruning with upwards of 20K emails in it.  Trouble is, it’s a form of distraction for me and as part of my own pruning process, I want to cut right back to the essentials of what I need to do to get traction.

 This applies to the people in your life. You significant other and your family should be top of your list for example. And that is relative to what stage you are in life. A young family has different needs to a grown up one so adjust accordingly.  Unfortunately we can often get too busy and neglect those vital relationships.   Apply this principle to each branch you have chosen and deliberately plan what you want to grow – getting rid of what is holding you back.

Step 5.  Part of pruning is also grafting.  What can you graft onto your branches to help you get where you want?  What behaviours do you need to add, what systems or routines can you add?  Do you need to make space for recreation and down time?  Think about it.

Step 6. Practice what I call thought hygiene. Traditionally, when hard cuts have been made to trees, the vulnerable are can be exposed to viruses or diseases, so a salve of some kind is applied to protect the site until the tree can heal the wound. Our unconscious hates change and you may find that all sorts of negative thoughts, fears and doubts can rise up when we make changes – even when they are for good. So be aware of that, thank your old brain for caring but boldly go to where you consciously need to go to live the life you want.

Finally –it may be a bit shocking at first.  Any plant pruned right back for maximum fruit bearing may look like it is never going to recover.  This is where you are going to need some courage and have faith.  Spring will come and the life force will flow through the tree and your freshly pruned life. Stay with it, don’t give up.  Keep nurturing and cherishing yourself as much as you would your favourite rose bush. It’s the way of nature and it applies to you as well

There’s a wise old saying about pruning. What you are aiming for is to clear out the dead wood in the middle of the thicket to enable oxygen to get into the plant and have enough room for a bird to fly through.  We all need oxygen in our lives and we all need space for miracles to show up!  So get pruning!

This has been a bit of a long read but I think is a useful one for so many of you.   I am putting together a workshop on this if any of you are interested - it’s a useful exercise to do at any time of your life. Please email on keren@professionalcountrywoman.com me if you are interested in finding out more.

New Years Resolutions and the Anti-Diet Diet.

Aaahhh – the approach of a New Year – the time when many of us, irritated with ourselves for not being where we thought we should be or wanted to be by the end of the old year, resolve to do better next time.  So we come up with another list of resolutions, probably the same as last time and also like then, ones we are not likely to fulfil. For a lot of women (and men) weight comes very high on that list and we promise all sorts of thing to ourselves in the drive to do better. We resolve to make all sorts of changes, often all at once, starting on 1 January every year. How has that been going for you so far?

After many years of doing just that, I ended up stepping off that bandwagon altogether. Last year I published a sort of anti-diet diet book. The Tortoise Diet Method (the word “diet” is crossed out on the cover of the book) is the book for those of you who never want to go on a diet again but still want to look fabulous and probably most important of all, stop the upward trend that the scales have been reporting back to you when you have been weighing yourself over the years.

You see – I finally figured out, after repeating the same behaviour over and over again, that New Years Resolution type behaviour, where we attempt to install a whole lot of new behaviours all at once, is doomed to failure. It reminded me of the Hare in the ancient fable by Aesop of the Tortoise and the Hare.  Clearly nothing much has changed in the intervening 2500 years or so since Aesop wrote his tale about human behaviour, as most of us still act like the Hare, hitting the race with a hiss and a roar (making all those changes all at once and promising to do so for the next year) but losing focus, getting distracted and finally, caught napping while someone else wins the race.

So after deciding to stop repeating what hadn’t worked, I thought about taking a good look at what did work. My focus turned towards the Tortoise in the story and I started to see the value of the slow and steady type of behaviour. 

Of course, most of us don’t like anything that sounds like it is going to take time to get a result. Our world these days is set up for instant change, instant gratification, the miracle diet that is going to solve all your weight issues preferably by last week. It takes a bit of a paradigm shift to stop that kind of thinking and really start to address what needs to be addressed, put into practice the sort of behaviours that need to be practised, and take effective steps over time to win whatever the race is for you that you haven’t been able to win up to now.

I’ve been a journaller for much of my adult life. It makes painful re-reading to go back over the years and see the oft-repeated goal for each New Year to lose a whole lot of kilos.  Quite frankly, I never managed to do that and in fact, each year, my weight instead got gradually higher and higher. I figured that although my weight went up and down, it was actually trending upwards. Once I came to my senses and got very real about what was actually going on, I realised that I could predict my future from that trend line. And the future wasn’t looking pretty.

If I kept going at the rate I was, then my weight would continue to go up.  The outcome of that was not just that I wouldn’t look great in the clothes I wanted to wear, but the health issues that start to occur along with unnecessary weight gain.  A bout of gout (I was nowhere near old enough to have that!), a blood-test that showed warning signs for my health, and the failure to once again reach the weight target I had in my head, led me to finally take a good look at the situation and start addressing it in a realistic way.

The first thing I did was to stop the dieting.  By that I mean, I stopped embarking on every new miracle diet that turned up promising incredible results in an incredibly short period of time. When I looked back over my life, I realised that I wasn’t even overweight when I started dieting in the first place and in fact, the act of dieting itself was one of the catalysts to a lifetime of weight gain.  I also realised that the times I was a steady appropriate weight, that I was eating quite normally and not consciously even thinking about food.   I was eating normal nutritious meals with nothing much in between, mainly because I was busy, involved in meaningful life and just focussing on  living rather than what I was going to put in my mouth next.

Which started me thinking about “what if’. What if I had never started dieting in the first place but just carried on eating the normal 3 nutritious meals a day that I had grown up with as part of family living on the farm.  I realised that the act of dieting itself, triggered a lot of disordered thinking, which led to disordered behaviour, which repeated over time, led to the lifetime of yoyo weight loss and gain that many of us experience as the reality of our lives.

And what if instead of aiming to lose too many pounds or kilos in too short a time, I lengthened out that time, lowered my expectations, and aimed to lose a realistic and achievable amount each month and kept that off?  In fact, what if I aimed to lose a kilo a month?

And what if I could stop obsessing about weight and the scales, stop weighing myself all the time and putting so much emotional weight (sorry about the pun) on that number the scales are reflecting back at me, and either stop weighing myself altogether, or weigh myself once a month?

I know a lot of you stopped reading at the ‘one Kilo a month” bit but I want you to stay with me for a minute. I know you may have a lot of weight to lose and sure, some of those miracle diets do work if you stick to them for a decent amount of time. But what happens when you stop the diet and go back to your normal life? What happens when the stressful troubled times come to disrupt your routine and trigger the overeating problem you may have in times of stress? What happens then? You put it all back on of course plus a bit more. Now you feel even worse about yourself and more susceptible to the false lifelines being thrown to you so you do the same thing again.  And each time ending a little heavier than the last.

I am saying, what about losing slowly and sensibly without dieting but giving your body the nutrition it needs, eating regular meals that are not too far from what is normal for you.  Then gradually increase the types of food that you are know are good for you at the particular stage of life you are in right now, so that eating well becomes a habit for you. That way you are more likely to stick to it and you are more likely to make deep effective changes over time.

That is the basis of the Tortoise Diet Method.  No dieting, but eating what your body needs and what you truly enjoy as part of a well-rounded life, focusing on living life, and allowing your weight to sort itself out naturally. For most of us there is a lot of healing that needs to take place to address the sort of old behaviour that led to weight gain in the first place, so you do need to allow yourself time to address the issues, time to put into practice the right thoughts and right behaviour and time to tweak your environment to support success. Which is why I advocate taking a whole year to establish a good foundation for the best sort of future for you – and which is why now, at the beginning of a new calendar year, it is a good time to be taking a look at a successful system such as the Tortoise Diet Method rather than throwing yourself full swing into the old way. That way has already shown it doesn’t work.

If you want to know more, you can buy the book from me on the link below, or you can buy it from Amazon. You are welcome to do either but of course I would prefer that you buy direct from me – that way I get to know you and you can choose to become part of a community to support you.   I can safely say that as this year comes to an end, my weight trajectory is trending downwards, and I still have more to go. Join me this New Year in taking effective action towards reaching your goals -whatever they are.

Comfort Food

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so entwined that we cannot thing of one without the other.” M F K Fisher.  

“Soul food is our personal passport to the past.”   Sarah ban Breaknacht

Mmmm….comfort food!  It took me a while to find the right image for this post as I really wanted to put up an image of meat loaf with mashed potatoes and peas.  However, it turned out to be very hard to find one that looked glamorous enough to headline a blog and catch the eye (in a good way) so you’re getting this delicious image of a piece of lemon meringue pie that I had made a week or two ago instead.

Delicious home made lemon meringue pie

Comfort food can be a tricky area for those who are preoccupied with health or weight – particularly if you have developed disordered thinking around food. While food is not to be seen primarily as providing comfort when we feel bad – there is no reason not to enjoy comfort food from time to time.  The danger comes when we make it our go-to coping mechanism for dealing with uncomfortable feelings -even when we know the practice is futile. The trouble with using food to change our state from feeling sad, mad or bad, is that a lot of us spend a lot of time feeling sad, mad or bad, so we naturally end up living with the consequences of that behaviour including extra weight to carry. We add more pain to our state which then feeds back into that low mood state. It becomes an endless feedback loop.  Food in that context may be a comfort, but it’s a counterfeit comfort and a fleeting one at that.

The Tortoise Diet Method is about breaking that cycle by gently asking you to take the time to step back and take a look at why you are feeling the way you do.  Addressing and resolving the reasons behind your feelings and developing the behavioural skills to manage them is a key part of getting back to a life of wellbeing.

Once you do that, you can might even be able to get back to enjoying the pleasure of true comfort food!   The one that connects you to memories of childhood and the feeling of being surrounded by family, warm and safe. The sort of food you don’t really get at restaurants but more likely when you go home to visit mum or Grandma. It usually involves carbohydrate of some kind with a rich savoury sauce that doesn’t require much in the way of chewing even. Mince and mashed potatoes? Smoked Fish Pie? Meat Loaf? Lasagne? Can I get an amen? What’s your comfort food?

I learned a lesson many years ago my husband of the time brought home a big corporate client to visit at the end of the day. He was visiting from the US with his attorney and they had come out to our country house for a visit. I also had been out all day at work and when I saw how the visit was going, I could see that they would end up staying for dinner and I wasn’t really prepared for that. However I managed to rustle up something a bit flash and we all sat down to enjoy a meal together.  They had been travelling for some time and we were talking about food. About halfway through the meal, he put down his knife and fork and said “Do you know what I would really like to eat?” I waited for the answer.  “Meatloaf” he said.  Turns out he was tired of the endless hotel and restaurant dinners and wanted some good home cooked simple meatloaf. That was such a lesson to me but it did make sense.

There’s nothing nicer after a hard day’s work, especially if its cold outside, than to sit down to a plate of slow cooked goodness, rooted in good childhood memories, and lick that plate clean.  So don’t ever think that in order to be slim that you have to forgo all your favourite foods and replace them with lettuce. Enjoy those experiences and make sure you share them with your family. How much better to pass on good food memories to our kids rather than memories of associating food with fear and restriction. Balancing good nutritious food with the enjoyment of treat foods at times of celebration, family favourites and yes – comfort foods when required. Creating a healthy culture around food is one of the biggest gifts you can give to your children (along with a plate of savoury mince, mashed potatoes and peas)

Bonus Recipe!

Pauline Mackay’s Meatloaf

You will need a lightly greased loaf tin plus a nice ovenproof casserole dish to bake this in. Its a two step cooking process and involves a surprise ingredient in the sauce – but a very popular family favourite.

• 500g Beef Mince

• 500g sausage meat

• 1 cup fresh bread crumbs

• 1 onion chopped

• 1 dsp curry powder

• 2 eggs

• 1 tbsp chopped parsley

• ½ cup milk

• ½ cup water

• 1 tsp salt.

Get in with your hands and mix all the ingredients together.  Press into prepared loaf tin and bake in a moderate oven for 30 mins

Sauce

• ¾ cup water

• ½ cup tomato sauce

• ¼ cup Worcestershire sauce

• 2 Tbsp malt vinegar

• ½ cup soft brown sugar

• 1 Tsp instant coffee

• 2 tbsp lemon juice.

Combine all ingredients into a saucepan and bring to the boil stirring on the stove top. Simmer while the loaf is cooking.  Pauline often adds a bit more water to make sure there is plenty of sauce!

After 30 mins, remove the loaf from the oven and carefully tip into another casserole style oven proof dish – one you can serve it in if you wish. It should hold its loaf shape by now.   Then pour over the sauce and pop back into the oven to cook another 20-30 minutes.  Baste every 10 mins or so.

Serve with plenty of creamy mashed potatoes and maybe peas to complete the comfort food factor. And as a bonus, if there is any left over the next day it makes a great sandwich filling.

Note: I got this off my MIL and have since heard its written up in the CWI recipe book as well.