An Attitude of Gratitude with Celiac Disease Ep. 114

If using Gratitude could improve your life, your health and your attitude towards living life with Celiac Disease, would it be worth learning more about and taking action?

I hear a "heck yes!". Tune in to today's episode and be inspired by the power of gratitude in your life.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

Now back in episode 54 of the show, I talked about ways to improve your attitude living with the celiac disease. And one of the things that I touched on in that episode was gratitude. Now I've just listened back to the episode and I've realized that I touched on that subject very lightly. I didn't talk about it a lot, and I've been really honing in on my gratitude lately as I've been doing the magic, which I'll talk about in a moment. But I wanted to talk about it more in depth with you today so that you can see how powerful it is and how much of a difference it can make in your life. Now, if you've never done anything with gratitude, then you're in the right spot because I wanna teach you as much as I can in this quick episode so that you can start practicing it. I guess I'm applying it to your life. Now. If you think of gratitude, what's the first thing that comes to mind for you? Now, many people that are religious, they do this on many occasions, they give thanks before they have a meal. And in a way, this is a form of gratitude. So it's being thankful for the food that they're about to eat. And science has actually proven that gratitude goes a very, very long way in improving your life and your health. So if you are open to it , let's jump on in and learn everything that we can very quickly about gratitude. And I'm gonna give you , give you some steps and some actions to take to, yeah, give this a go and see how much it improves your life. Now the thing with gratitude is it's actually rooted in our dna . It's part of being a human is to be grateful. Some of us express that more than others, but as humans, it's been proven that animals, most animals can have some form of being grateful. And that can be in a form of giving to others and helping others and being grateful for that as that can return back to you. And so many people will do things for others because they want to feel good about themselves, and then that other person may come back and help them, which is an incredible way of being grateful. And the more that you can be grateful for someone else's actions, the more it comes back to you. So in life, if you think of anything where you do things in a positive way, it will always come back to you. So the more you are grateful for someone else or someone's actions or something you've been provided or anything at all, it will always come back

Speaker 2: 3:23

To you. Now, some of the scientific studies that have been done around gratitude show that people that are grateful, you may not get the positive effects of it from doing it one time, but if you continuously be grateful, it can show up months and months and months down the track in your brain, they can see the positive effects of being grateful in your brain. So how cool is that? And how much is it worth giving this a go if you're not already doing this just for the benefits of your health? Some studies were done on people in hospital and they were given a task of writing out , um, just to be grateful for a number of things in any given day. So they did this over a period of time. And when they went back and looked at these people that had done the gratitude compared to people that hadn't done gratitude, the people in the study showed that they had lowered their blood pressure, that they had improved their hearts, and they were overcoming adversity much quicker than the people that hadn't shown gratitude. So how powerful was that? So when we think of celiac disease, we think of gluten-free. So many people complain about it. I probably would say that you are not one of those people because you are doing something about your health and your life and you are listening to this podcast to improve your life. So you are probably not one of those people, if I was to have a guess. But so many people whinge, complain, carry on. Woe is me attitude. And if you've listened to my episode where I talk about the five stages of grief, it is acceptable. It is normal to feel down and upset and all the rest of it, but it's when people are still doing this 10 years after a diagnosis, it's not helping those people at all. So for me, I've always, always had an attitude of that. When I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I was so grateful that it was a condition that I was able to, I guess look after myself by eating gluten-free. I didn't have to go on medication. I wasn't having to go have blood transfusions. I wasn't having to have constant tests of my body. I wasn't having to have a treatment done to my body. I just had to change the way that I was eating. And even now I'm even more grateful because there's so much more gluten-free food, there's so much more awareness around celiac disease and I'm so, so grateful every time I go and eat out and that I can find something gluten-free. Just yesterday my husband and I went out for a coffee. I'd been to the chiropractor

Speaker 3: 6:21

And he said, let's go for a coffee. So yep , we called into a cafe near the chiropractor and we had a coffee. There were some menus in front of us and we weren't ordering food. It said on the menu, no extra charge for gluten-free bread. And I was like, what? That is amazing. That is so fantastic. I showed my husband, I was like so grateful to that business that they offer that because most places charge extra for gluten-free bread. So the more we're grateful, the more these things come about. And the more we notice these things and see these things in our life, and when we talk about, you know, being grateful, we see more to be grateful for. So the more you can be grateful for one thing, the more you'll be grateful for the next thing. You'll start to see more and more things to be grateful for . Now, the way that you can do this is by starting a gratitude practice. So , um, for me, I've been doing the magic as I mentioned. So the Magic is a book by Rhonda Burn . If you've never heard of it, check it out. Have a look on , um, Amazon and see if it's something you might like to do or you might like to hire it from your library. Is that the word? No, borrow <laugh> , borrow it from your library and just see if it's something that you might like to do. And basically it's a 28 day practice of just showing gratitude in various different ways. And it's incredible what happens during that period of time. I'm not gonna , I'm not gonna delve into that cuz it might be a little bit woowoo for you. And I don't want to get woowoo cuz I know it freaks out a lot of people. But I want you to know this is based on science. So science has proven that gratitude works. So let's go down that route to start with. And then if you want to chat with me further about it, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know your woowoo stories about gratitude, because like I said, it's huge, it's powerful and it can really, really make a difference in your life. So if I was to say to you to start focusing on gratitude, if it's hard for you, then I would say do it in your brain. Do it thinking gratitude. So you might wanna get up in the morning and think, wow, it's a beautiful day. I'm so grateful for this day, or I'm grateful for the sleep that I just had. Just something really simple to just get in that habit of feeling grateful. If you wanna take it one step further, I recommend that you write down what you're grateful for. In the beginning it can be very powerful to hand write it. Um, I was doing that very often. That was my main way of doing it. But I was feeling up note notebooks and just getting a bit frustrated, having more and more paperwork sitting around, more notebooks, and I didn't know what to do with them once I'd filled 'em up. So I now use the Secret app and I write out my gratitude

Speaker 4: 9:19

On there each night. So that could be something you might wanna do. Some people like to do their gratitude post first thing in the morning, and that way you set yourself up feeling really positive for the day. But for me, sometimes I find it hard to find that time in the morning or <laugh> not being a morning person. It's not really something that I wanna be doing first thing in the morning. And I find that at night I can run back through my day a bit easier than if I did it in the morning and thinking about the day before or what's to come. So I personally like to do it at nighttime and write down all the things that I'm grateful for that day. So do what works for you. You might wanna start with one thing. You might wanna start with three. You might just not even set any sort of rules around it. You might just want to say, right, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna think about what I'm grateful for and I'm just gonna write those things out that I can come up with one day. It might be one thing, one day it might be 20 things. It will totally vary on what you know, what you are focusing on and what you're feeling in that moment. But like I said, the more that you find grateful, sorry, the more you focus on gratitude, the more you will find to be grateful for. Now, this doesn't have to just be based around celiac disease, it doesn't just have to be based around gluten-free. I do it on many, many things. I know for me last night I wrote down that I was grateful my kids went to bed without any arguments, which is amazing when they do that. So, you know, all those little things, it's like, it's so nice to recognize the good things in our life and the more good you focus on, the less rubbish you're focusing on. That's the way I look at it. If you, anything you focus on, you bring about. Okay? So if you're focusing on the well is me, you're focusing on all the negative. You're just drawing more and more that of that into your life. Whereas you're focusing on the positive, you're being grateful. You will draw more and more goodness to yourself. You're putting out positive energy. If you don't know much about energy, then it's worth learning more about because we are all energy and what we put out to the world is what comes back to us. So if you are going into a cafe or restaurant and you are freaking out that you are gonna get gluten, you might be so caught up in that negative head space that you miss the clues, you miss asking the right questions, and you are not focused on a positive outcome. I always go into a cafe or restaurant being grateful that the person that's about to serve me is going to listen to me, is going to answer my questions, that there's going to be safe, gluten-free food for me. So always go about your life with a positive attitude, feeling grateful, and it will make a huge, huge difference. So here's my challenge for you this week. I want you to write down at least one thing a day that you are grateful for. And then in seven days I want you to tell me that you had a crap

Speaker 5: 12:17

Week. I bet you won't do it. I bet you will not come back at me and go, Belinda, this doesn't work <laugh> . And I'm not grateful. I can almost guarantee that if you focus on what you are grateful for, you'll have such a better week and you'll want to keep doing this. So I urge you to give this a go and see what a difference it does in your life and see if you notice the way that you're feeling, see if you're feeling more positive. And when I work with my clients, this is something that I get them to do as well, that I ask them to look at the positive side of their life. And it's funny because most of the people that come to work with me, they want to lose weight. And by the end of their time of working with me, they're so grateful, they're so happy that that the weight side of things is not even an issue anymore. And they're so happy within themselves that it's, it's like, what did we even start coaching on weight loss for? Because it was never a big deal in the first place. So it's super powerful how much it changes your perspective and how much it changes the way that you feel. So give it a go. And like I said, try this out. I don't mind whenever you do this. If you are listening to this podcast in the future and you know it's not the current week that I've released, it still let me know. I want to hear from you. I want to know that this has changed your life and made a positive and impact on you. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really appreciate you being here and learning this from me. And if you want to learn more about gratitude, then definitely check out anything that Rhonda Byrne has released , um, the Secret, any of her books that she's written. She's got , um, the Secret Book and also a movie or a doc . It's not even a documentary, it's a movie I guess. So yeah , you can find that online pretty easily, but anything by Rhonda Burn . Um, and also Pam Grouch , she's fantastic for helping learn about the law of attraction and being grateful and drawing things into your life. So yeah, check them out. But otherwise, I will talk with you again next week. And as always, let me know over on Instagram at the Healthy Celiac how you like this episode. And if you've got a few moments, pop over to Apple Podcasts and rate and review the show to help get it out there to more people. Thank you so much . All right , take care. Bye .