KARINA MELVIN BSC. PSYCH., MSC. CLINICAL PSYCH.
REGISTERED PRACTITIONER APPI
Growing up in the Irish countryside alongside a working farm, I have a great appreciation for the labour and love that goes into what ends up on our plate.This understanding beautifully merges with what I do now: help people change the way they think and feel about food and their body which I explored in my first book, the bestselling Artful Eating.
I started my training in 2006, completing a BSc in Psychology, an MA in Addiction studies, and an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the UCD School of Medicine. I am fascinated by how our mind works and have been helping people change their lives and most importantly, their relationships with themselves for over ten years though both lecturing at University College Dublin and my clinical practice Sandymount Psychotherapy I have been published within the psychoanalytic field.
Musings
Lasting weight loss is not about what you eat, but why and how you eat. The 5 principals of eating artfully- weight loss is a joyious consequence.
Discover the power that pain and pleasure (or neuro-associations) exert over your decisions around food: This is a vital piece of the weight loss puzzle
As I write this morning the rain is pouring down. I just opened the back door to breathe it in, the smell, the sound and the colours. The sound is wonderfully reassuring, consistent heavy plops of rain. I find my self wondering if its too early in the morning to light a fire...?
I love this time of year and I adore being all cosy inside when its pouring outside, the perfect combination to me. It feels peaceful, safe and familiar. I was definitely born in the right country, you've got to be a fan of rain if you live on a little island on the edge of the Atlantic!
Thinking about that now I realise that so much of this past year has been about embracing the unfamiliar and pushing myself outside my comfort zone. But this has all been in the spirit of growth and the journey has been incredible so far.
As I've shared with you before I chose the word 'grow' to inform my year and my how that's infused absolutely everything; physically, spiritually and emotionally!
But what I've come to understand is that my growth has been all about helping you to grow. I have been working on Artful Eating for a little over a year now, researching, testing, developing, creating, and helping wonderful people all over the world to overcome a lifetime of negative thinking and behaviour.
Well Christmas is almost upon us!
It certainly didn't creep up on me this year, I’ve been anticipating the big day for many months as I am expecting on the big day! So this is a particularly precious Christmas for us.
As I sit here writing this, the smell from our Christmas tree is just glorious. The house feels so festive and cosy, the perfect space to welcome a new person into the world. So I am filled with joy and anticipation about the next few days, weeks and also in a very tangible way, the next few years that stretch out before us. I am so curious to know what our little one will be like and I can’t wait to meet her!
It is that time of year where we try to take stock and reflect on what has gone before and what the future will hold. The thought I’d like to share with you, and that I’d very much like you to hold on to, is that you are the one who determines the life you have, the size you are and how good you feel. In a way I think this has been the most important realisation I have made this year. It’s something I’ve probably always known, but it has become very clear to me this year.
THIS JANUARY IT’S time to finally recognise that the diet is dead. Successful weight loss is not about what you eat, but why and how you eat.
Studies show that up to 80% of women are on a diet or think they should be. This represents chronic dissatisfaction. Alarmingly, recent research from UCLA looked at a number of dietary interventions and discovered that most dieters gain back almost all their weight and potentially more.
So the most likely outcome from being on a diet is to put on more weight than when you started. In fact, recent neuroscientific research has established that our bodies actually resist weight loss.
Its been quite a week here! Normally the week between Christmas and New Year is a lull of rest, relaxation, good books and for me, cooking! But this Tuesday we welcomed our daughter, Claudia Grace into the world. I now understand why they call babies a 'bundle of joy' because thats exactly what she is!
Before giving birth I was quite nervous, as so many women had told me about their birth experiences and most of them didn't sound too pleasant to put it mildly! But I was determined to have a 'natural' birth, which meant no interventions unless absolutely necessary and no pain relief.
I'm sharing this with you because I realised something over the course of the labour, which indeed became increasingly painful (!), because there is a lesson here that I think is very helpful, especially at this time of year.
Having spent the last ten days in the beautiful little fishing port of Honfleur, I have returned home from my holiday feeling relaxed and rejuvenated. Honfleur is a very old fishing port with cobbled streets and tall wooden buildings which sigh into each other. This is where the impressionists came to paint ‘en plein air’. I’ve known about the place for a long time and it definitely didn't disappoint. We stayed in a fourteenth century town house with a winding wooden staircase and had breakfast brought to us each morning- what a sight! This was definitely breakfast ‘french style’, with baguette, different types of pastry and croissants,bien sûr! I ate, enjoyed and savoured the warm, fresh breads. This is what France is all about for me...