Allie Shawe
Bio
I am a single mom, dog mom, teacher living with anxiety and depression, hoping to make the world a better place.
Stories (3/0)
90 Day Challenge
Self Care Challenge In October, some of my friends from work started a book club, and we started reading Rachel Hollis's Girl, Wash Your Face. Haven't read it? Go download it for your Kindle right now, or order it on amazon. It will be here in two days. Seriously, it's that good. We agreed to read two chapters per week for book club, but I read a chapter a day and had to stop myself from going on. It's funny, true and offered me exactly the kind of advice I was needing. As we began reading her book we discovered (only one day late) the 90 day challenge. The premise of the 90 day challenge is that we don't have to wait until the new year to make our lives better. Rather than always putting it off until January/Monday/the first of the month/after the holidays/etc., you should start now. Rachel Hollis challenged us (completely impersonally—through the internet) to make five promises to ourselves each day, and keep them. So many of us had never prioritized our own self-care before—not really. And so the idea of making a promise to ourselves was completely foreign—not to mention keeping it! So for the last 90 days of the year (October-December) we made a promise to ourselves to keep five promises everyday.
By Allie Shawe5 years ago in Motivation
My History with Food
From Childhood to Childbirth I have always had a tenuous relationship with food. Honestly, as long as I can remember food was one of my biggest sources of anxiety. Many adults have dependent and abusive relationships with food, but mine started way back when I was a kid. I remember going to school as a 5th grader with beautiful packed lunches containing leftovers from my favorite dinners and healthy snacks and delicious treats. And while these were all things that I loved in the safety of my own home, it only took one kid pointing at my tortellini salad, with avocados whose color had changed ever so slightly brownish in the fridge overnight and saying, "What is THAT?! It smells like poo," for me to start "forgetting" my lunches at home. For me to start coveting the lunches all the other kids brought with wonder-bread sandwiches of bologna and American cheese (you know-how kind that comes plastic wrapped in separate slices) and their fruit gushers and Oreos. I even yearned at tines to be "normal" enough to get to eat the cardboard pizza and canned fruit from the cafeteria. Because when you are nine all that you really want is to be the same as the kids around you. Now, as an adult I am so thankful for leftovers from dinner for lunch and healthy snacks to get me through the day and I'm so thankful that some of my mom's message was able to make it through the cloud of little kid nastiness. But my nine year old daughter, she wants to take sandwiches to school in her lunch everyday. She wants chips and fruit roll ups and the piece of fruit that I make her take always come back home with her. And while I would rather she take the leftover tamales (one of her favorite foods) or a thermos of soup that she loved last night, I never want her to come home starving and cranky because she refused to eat her food in front of her friends because someone teased her about her weird looking food.
By Allie Shawe5 years ago in Psyche