Stephanie's Studio

Regulars here know of my weight loss journey. If you're new, here's some brief background. I decided to lose weight, using spirituality and calorie counting on My Fitness Pal about a year and a half ago. I lost 50 pounds. I felt great, gave away my big clothes to charity, celebrated and still planned to lose 40 more. I also embarked on writing the book "Mama Earth's Spiritual Guide to Weight-loss." Then life stepped in, in a big way. I got distracted. I started cooking my own food less, eating out more. Staying within the calorie limits I'd set (higher mind you), I reached for some "healthy" packaged foods. Low and behold, weight started to creep back on, slowly but surely. It came a pound here and a pound there--until I'd gained 5 pounds back. Recently I went back to the source. Back to Mother Nature for guidance and nourishment. I'd mentioned in a previous post how I'm eating more vegan and raw foods. That's a part of my mov...

I am on my way somewhere. I think I have an idea of the destination but really I'm unsure. I'm the type that likes to hold onto things. As a nostalgic person, I'm very resistant to throwing things out. I hold on to old letters, redundant email addresses and ancient digital files. Those should be the easy things to trash but they aren't. Then there are the larger items, clothing, shoes, coats and books. You don't even want to know the age of my collection. This morning I had a novel idea. I decided to pack things up and give most of them away. The nicer things I'd put on consignment. "Where's all that stuff going?" My husband asked as I carried bag after bag out the front door. "Away," I said, feeling as though my stuff had found a different place to live and was moving out. When I reached the 25 pound weight-loss milestone I had what I thought was a clever idea. I began packing away clothing that was too big for me in chests...

I’ve written a lot about transformation during the past year because I started working on that journey seriously in January. Yesterday I went shopping. It was an eye opener. After having lost 45 pounds, I found that my former haunts were no longer mine. Over the years I had gotten so accustomed to being a certain size and shape that automatically when shopping I gravitated towards the same sort of clothing. Yesterday, I had to redirect myself away from the XL clothes, which would have bagged and dragged along after me. Instead, I headed to the size mediums—a huge breakthrough for me. In my past with the XL’s, my main goal was to find what covered me up the best. In some instances I had pushed past XL to a size XXL, so there was also a challenge to figure out which size I could actually fit. Generally at the XXL sixe, I would just leave the store to go find a store specializing in vanity sizing, wherein I could fit an XL. Now I’m no longer engaged in that sort of inner conflict. St...

Remember as a child, being told, “Now, just be still?” I do. Mother’s and caretakers are sages. They know things that we as a child couldn’t even imagine. Stilling your mind, can lead to a steely resolve needed to make critical changes in your life. Changes you may have lacked the focus to carry out because your mind was in such fast motion. Stillness can lead to greater creativity and even productivity. Are you wondering what this crazy post is about? I can just imagine that because everything in our 2014 world says to stay constantly in motion. There is the subliminal message that if you don’t keep moving you will die. No, I’m not being dramatic. That is the latest wisdom. Being sedentary, sitting around for hours on end can lead to an early death. Sitting around for hours isn’t what I’m advocating. We are all so accustomed now to sound bites. You hear a little something on the news or read it and then go with it. The kind of stillness I’m advocating is found through doing yoga ...