This week in my Strategies for Nutrition Education class, we spent a little time discussing Self Determination Theory. It’s a behavioral theory that posits three essential conditions of a person’s motivation, engagement, persistence, and creativity: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy refers to feelings of freedom and self-governance, competence to feelings of mastery, and relatedness to feeling connected and engaged with others. The more these conditions are evoked, the theory goes, the better the chances an individual will have of successfully implementing and maintaining…

I’m keeping this weekend reading post short and sweet, mostly because my writing energies have been wrapped up in posts for NEDA week 2019, which begins tomorrow! It won’t be a regular week of recipe-sharing here on the blog, but rather a week in which I take some time to celebrate the recovery process, with all of its challenges and gifts. If you take interest in this topic, perhaps you’ll check in from time to time. For today, I wanted to share my…

Happy Sunday, friends! I finished up my clinicals on Friday, and life is good. I’ve also got the cold/malaise situation that I typically develop at the end of a busy semester, so I’m taking this afternoon off to rest and drink tea. While I’ve been too tired to do much, I haven’t been too tired to bake, and I’ve got a delicious new snack cake recipe coming to you tomorrow—and some great article links for next weekend. For today, so much love. xo

The first time self-soothing was explained to me, it was by a friend who had her hands full taking care of a new baby. Self-soothing, she said, is when a baby develops the capacity to calm his or herself down. It’s seen as being key to uninterrupted nights of sleep for parents, since it allows babies to get back to rest if they should happen to wake up during the night. A little while later, when I was exploring resources on coping with…