Jenna Hollenstein > Quotes

“we end up spending more on beauty and body-related products than on education. Sadly, because of our magical eating, we are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, disordered eating (and, in some cases, eating disorders), and to have lower self-confidence, ambition, cognitive function, and achievement. This is a direct result of the message that our worth is based on our weight and of that message’s impact on our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and how we live our lives.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“Gentleness is implicit in allowing things to just be—including yourself. Mindfulness helps you see things clearly, honestly: as they are. Before you can judge them as positive, negative, or neutral, things just are.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“near-life experiences” in which you are fully present. Waking up to your actual life is the best use of your time, energy, and effort I can imagine, and both mindfulness and Intuitive Eating support you to do this.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Mindfulness of mind, or thought, guides you to remodel your brain by choosing to think thoughts that align with gentleness and self-compassion instead of dieting thoughts that have driven you to hate yourself. You literally rewire your brain.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“When you begin to practice mindfulness, there are immediate and longer term effects. Short-term effects include shifts in circulating neurotransmitter and hormone levels.9 This enhances attention and relaxation.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“works with your emotions with gentleness.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“According to polyvagal theory, mindfulness can enhance your awareness of the different states you move through on any given day. This, in itself, can support Intuitive Eating. Here is an example of how”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“For example, if we eat past the point of satisfaction or comfortable fullness, it is not because our intentions are bad but because we are confused as to what our true needs are in the moment.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“What if the diagnosis had been “matrescence” and the natural response to that diagnosis was a prescription for community and rest and help, with the underlying understanding that it wasn’t her that was sick, it was the prevailing culture, unsupportive of mothers, new and old?”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Mommysattva: Contemplations for Mothers Who Meditate

“Ventral: Physically open sensation in chest, no tension in the jaw, abdomen relaxed, lips and arms feel neutral, body feels relaxed. Emotionally interested in my experience and in others’ experience, content and satisfied, able to work with difficulty, open to feeling, flow, engaged with the world, feeling squarely in my own life, confidence that everything will be okay.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“inhabit”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“Our current paradigm of productivity equaling value fails mothers.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Mommysattva: Contemplations for Mothers Who Meditate

“Dieting often leads to a pattern of weight-loss-and-regain, also known as weight cycling, which is actually associated with many of the negative health consequences usually attributed to being in a bigger body in the first place.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“Mindful eating has roots in a Zen Buddhist tradition called oryoki, translated as just enough.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“Food tastes brilliant, flowers are tender and gorgeous, your love for others is deep and otherworldly. Your suffering also comes into focus. Heartbreak aches dully in your chest, anger stokes a fire in your belly, shame feels like your entire body is caving in. But with the stability gained from mindfulness, you are more able to stay with these emotions. And the staying starts to feel important. Even your suffering is rich, part of what makes you alive.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Sympathetic: Physical muscle tension, jaw clenched, tightness in chest and throat,”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Dorsal: Physically sleepy, body feels heavy and wooden, sensation of caving into myself. Emotionally shameful, feeling alienated from others, feeling “cursed,” wanting to disappear.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Experiencing life in this pure, raw way can make it come alive. What was once straightforward, unexciting, and black and white suddenly becomes Technicolor, richly textured, magnetizing. At least that’s how it’s been for me.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“There are famous studies that position two functional MRI images of the brain side by side: one on heroin, for example, and one on sugar. They claim that because the pleasure centers of the brain light up in both images, both substances act on the brain similarly. What they do not include is how the brain lights up while walking outside on the first beautiful spring day, falling in love, or having an orgasm. One of the cornerstones of addiction is a drive to acquire the desired substance in any form.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life

“Brain changes brought about through mindfulness alter how you experience yourself, your life, and the world. Time seems to slow down. Your mind feels spacious. Awareness expands. And you notice what is happening as it happens.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“The nervous system is “regulated” when ventral is in charge and “dysregulated” when sympathetic or dorsal is running the show.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“The ventral vagal complex is where you feel most yourself: calm, curious, creative, confident, clear, courageous, compassionate, and connected.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“both Intuitive Eating and mindfulness are paths, not destinations or endpoints. You can’t mess them up. Both processes unfold at an appropriate pace for you. And—spoiler alert—this unfolding continues for the rest of your life.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Mindfulness of phenomena is about making connections between the different parts of your experience. For example, if you tend to approach food with rigid control, you probably apply that to other parts of your life, such as work, family, and relationships. Healing your relationship with food and body can filter into every other part of your life. And those of others.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“When life feels richer, you need less entertainment, less nonstop pleasure. You can be right where you are.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice

“Put simply, when free from fat stigma, it is possible for all bodies to achieve health and wellbeing. Yet diets remain monolithically prominent in mainstream culture. With about half the American population trying to lose weight right now (that’s almost 180 million people) and spending major coin to that end ($66 billion in 2017, according to a Marketdata research report), one might conclude that dieting has replaced baseball as the national pastime. Why? Diets are seductive. They make empty but attractive promises.”
― Jenna Hollenstein, Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life