If you feel like you need a change in your life, but you’re not 100% sure what that change is, Dr. Libby Weaver will help you articulate it.
Dr. Libby is literally a life changer, and there are thousands of women in the Business Chicks community who can attest to that. Dr. Libby is speaking at a series of workshops in May, and we think you’d be crazy to miss them. What can we say? It’s cheaper than therapy (and the food and company’s way better too.)
For the uninitiated, Dr. Libby is one of Australasia’s leading nutritional biochemists, a seven-time number one bestselling author, a speaker and founder of the plant-based supplement range, Bio Blends. She’s sold over 300,000 books across Australia and New Zealand and every time we put her on the Business Chicks stage, people beg us to bring her back (which we are by the way!). Dr. Libby’s advice is actually achievable. She has this way of turning really complex science into bite size pieces everyone can understand. People love Dr. Libby so much because she is not a health guru on her high horse – she’s authentic and doesn’t have a one size fits all approach.
She wants women to be and feel the best they possibly can – and knows from personal experience we need to put ourselves first to make that happen. “My business had gone crazy, in a good way, and I was really grateful for that. I was seeing about 10 patients a day; I had no receptionist; I had to return phone calls and emails in the early hours of the morning. I really care about the food I prepare for my family, so I was doing the cooking and shopping on top of that. Never was the privilege lost on me, which almost made it harder. But it was just too much work for one person. It took months for me to realise, ‘this is insane, I’m compromising my highest value, my health, and well-being, to fit all this stuff in,’ she says.
1. Libby believes the world we live in now is a tough one for women’s health.
“From painful periods to fluid retention, from anxiety to yelling at the people we love the most in the word and berating ourselves afterward, it has been a long time since women’s health has faced such an intense hormonal challenge. This interference of stress hormones with sex hormones is one of the major biochemical factors affecting women today. I like to say this biochemical and emotional scenario is common but not normal. It doesn’t have to be this way. What if the symptoms your body gives you, what if the parts of your body that frustrate or sadden you, are simply messengers asking you to eat, drink, move, think, believe or perceive in a new way? It is time to see them as the gifts that they are. These symptoms can be wake up calls for women to make changes in their lives they may not otherwise make, enhancing their health, energy, vitality and greatness in the process.”
2. Her easy technique for dealing with everyday stress.
“Having worked with people for 20 years now, one of the things I’ve come to see is that stress is normally actually used as a word for fear. It’s just kind of weird for us to walk around going, ‘I’m really scared about this and that.’ I’m not denying that there isn’t any genuine stress in the world, nor am I denying that there is genuine trauma in the world, but if we actually pull the curtain back about things that stress us out, it is often fear.”
3. Her gentle reminder that it’s all connected.
“Remember how you eat, drink, move, think, breathe, believe and perceive all impact how you show up each day. Your biochemistry, the nutrients you consume, as well as your beliefs impact whether you experience energy or not. We must give our body what it needs to create the conditions inside of us that allow us to feel energised.”
5. Her advice on dealing with emotions.
“All emotions and feelings come and go, much like waves gently washing over you. Knowing that all feelings – both the enjoyable ones and the painful ones – subside is important because learning to deal with these more painful feelings without eating involves developing the ability to recognise this. Just feel the emotion in its entirety without doing anything to prevent it, let these feelings literally wash over you. By eating while you’re experiencing emotions that you find challenging, you are giving food a new significance, beyond just meeting your nutritional needs. Food becomes a coping strategy, making your desire for it intensify. You begin to believe that you need this food to get through these emotions you are experiencing. Research indicates that eating high-fat (poor quality) and/or high-sugar foods can affect activity in the parts of your brain that manage stress, further reinforcing a reliance on this as a coping strategy.”
5. The reason she thinks you should change your focus.
“Sometimes it’s not useful to focus on the things you want to change in your life, like eating better or moving more. Yes, sometimes that is useful, but what I’ve seen be even more useful is when you reflect on your own values and do an exercise in that. When you identify your values you naturally start to change what you focus on and what you then incorporate into each day. If I asked you to name everything you loved, how long would it take for you to name yourself? Just think about that as you think about some of your values and what you prioritise. Beyond that, another powerful strategy to help us not even go into this stress response, certainly not on a regular basis, is to let yourself have what you already have.”
This article is brought to you by Genea, our digital partners for Dr Libby Weaver’s event series. Head over to our events page to book your tickets.
