Mind Over Plates

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Mind Over Plates

We are Christian coaching business. Mind Over Plates guides you to
MOP away your struggles on the plate & off the plate.

10/28/2026

Score your circle. Ten minutes. One question per section. 📝
Grab the wheel from yesterday's post — print it if you can, doing it on paper genuinely works better than doing it in your head.
Shade each segment as full or empty as your honest answer feels:
🏠 Home: Is there one place in your home that is actually yours?
💕 Relationships: Who asked how you really were this week — and stayed for the answer?
🙏🏾 Spirituality: When did you last sit still on purpose?
🚶️ Movement: Did your body do anything this week that it enjoyed?
✨ Joy: What did you do just because you wanted to?
🍲 Cooking: Did you make anything from scratch, however small?
💼 Career: Did work leave you anything to come home with?
💰 Finances: Did money wake you up this month?
📚 Creativity: When did you last learn something on purpose?
Now look at what you drew.
Most people find one segment nearly empty and one or two almost full. And almost nobody has a balanced wheel. I don't have a balanced wheel. That is not the goal — the last thing you need is one more thing to fail at.
Look at the emptiest one.
Don't fix it. Don't make a plan. Just sit with it, because for most people, seeing it drawn is the first time it's been a fact instead of a feeling.
Tomorrow I'll tell you exactly what to do with what you just found. 💙
Comment your emptiest section — one word. You'll see you're not alone in it.

10/27/2026

Everybody is already planning the holiday menu. The turkey, the dressing, the sweet potato pie. And I love all of it. 🦃🥧
But I want to talk about the food you don't eat.

"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." Proverbs 15:17

A simple plate at a table full of love will feed you more than a feast where nobody is talking. In the Circle of Life, we call that primary food: your relationships, your faith, your home, your joy. It feeds you before anything ever touches your plate.

So this year, before you plan the menu, plan the table.
Who needs a phone call? Who needs a seat? Who have you been meaning to forgive?

Fill that plate first. The rest is just dinner. 💚

Who is getting a seat at your table this year? Tell me in the comments 👇🏾

10/27/2026

🌿 THE CIRCLE OF LIFE: YOUR HEALTH IS MORE THAN WHAT'S ON YOUR PLATE!

What if the key to better health isn't just about what you eat, but also about how you live? 💚

At Mind Over Plates, we believe true wellness goes beyond food.

The Circle of Life highlights 9 areas of Primary Food — the things that nourish your life beyond your plate.

🏡 Home Environment
💞 Relationships
🙏 Spirituality
🚶‍♀️ Physical Activity
☀️ Joy & Social Life
🍲 Home Cooking
💼 Career
💰 Finances
🎨 Creativity & Education

And that small circle in the center? That's your plate. 🍽️

Nutrition matters, but so do your relationships, emotional well-being, daily habits, and sense of purpose.

✨ Here's your challenge:

Take a moment to look at each section of the wheel. Ask yourself how fulfilled you feel in each area.

Which part of your life needs more attention, care, or balance?

Remember, wellness isn't about perfection. It's about nourishing every part of your life, one small step at a time. 💙

📌 Save this post, reflect on your Circle of Life, and share it with someone on their wellness journey!

💬 Which area of your Circle of Life would you like to improve? Tell us in the comments!

🌐 www.mindoverplates.com

10/26/2026

You've opened that cupboard three times. Nothing in it has changed. 🤫

You're not hungry. You're under-stimulated.

Boredom eating is one of the most misdiagnosed things I see, and it has almost nothing to do with appetite. It's your brain asking for input — and at 8 PM in a quiet house, food is the only novelty available.

Think about what eating actually is, sensorily: texture, temperature, flavor, crunch. Something happening in your mouth and your hands at once. It's genuinely stimulating — which is exactly why it works, and exactly why willpower can't break it.

Your brain wants to make something. Chewing is the cheapest substitute we have.

So here's the fix, and it's a furniture fix, not a discipline fix:
✓ Put one thing within arm's reach of where you sit at night
✓ Not in a cupboard. Not in the spare room. In reach of the chair.
✓ Yarn. A sketchpad. A puzzle. A journal. The instrument you were fine at in 1993.

Because the reason you eat instead of making something isn't that you prefer eating. It's that the snacks are seventeen steps closer than the hobby.

Fix the distance, fix the habit. Same principle as the fruit bowl on the counter — applied to your mind instead of your plate.

Creativity is primary food. And a bored brain will always eat. 💙

Comment what you're putting next to your chair tonight 👇

10/23/2026

I already had a career. I was already a nurse. And I signed up to be a student again. 🎓
People didn't understand it.
"At your age?" "Don't you already do this for a living?" "What are you going to do with it?"
Honestly, at the beginning I couldn't have told you. I just knew something was missing from how I'd been taught to think about health.
Because here's what I'd been watching for thirty years:
Somebody gets discharged with a perfect plan — right medication, right diet sheet, right follow-up. And they'd be back. And it was almost never because the plan was wrong.
It was because they went home to a house with nobody in it. Or a job that wouldn't let them eat. Or a marriage taking everything they had. Or a grief nobody had asked them about.
I could see it. I didn't have language for it. And you cannot teach what you cannot name.
Going back to school gave me the language. Primary food. Secondary food. The Circle of Life. The idea that your relationships and your faith and your movement and your home are food — that they feed you or starve you, whether or not anything is on the plate.
Everything I've taught you for nine weeks came from a decision I made when a lot of people thought it was already too late.
So whatever you've been circling — the class, the certification, the thing you keep looking up and closing the tab on:
The thing you think you're too far along to start is usually the thing. 💙
Comment the thing you keep closing the tab on. Say it out loud here.

10/22/2026

Four things I check on a label, in this order. 30 seconds. None of them are the calories. 📋
1️⃣ SERVING SIZE — first, always.
Before anything else on the panel. If the serving is ½ cup and you’re realistically eating 1½, every number underneath is wrong by a factor of three. This is the step everyone skips, and it makes all the others meaningless.
2️⃣ FIBER.
In anything grain-based — bread, cereal, crackers, pasta — I want 3g or more per serving. Fiber is what makes a carbohydrate behave: gentler curve, longer before you’re hungry again.
3️⃣ ADDED SUGARS — that specific line, not total.
The sugar that came with the fruit or the milk isn’t the concern. The added line tells you what the manufacturer put in on purpose.
4️⃣ THE FIRST THREE INGREDIENTS.
They’re listed by weight, largest first. Whatever those three are, that’s most of what’s in the box. If sugar is one of them, now you know what you’re buying — and sometimes you buy it anyway. That’s a decision instead of an accident.
Serving size. Fiber. Added sugars. First three ingredients.
Thirty seconds in the aisle — and once you know how to do this, nobody can market to you again.
Education is primary food. This one you keep for life. 💙
Save this for your next grocery run — and send it to your kids.

10/21/2026

The Circle of Life. Nine weeks on one page. 🌱
Everything I've taught since August is in this one graphic.
Nine sections of primary food — the food you don't eat. Home environment. Relationships. Spirituality. Physical activity. Joy. Home cooking. Career. Finances. Creativity and learning.
And notice the small circle in the middle. That's the plate.
That's not me being poetic. That size relationship is the entire point. The food on your plate is secondary food — it matters enormously, I'm a nurse and I'll never tell you it doesn't — but it sits inside a much bigger circle, and that bigger circle is running whether you look at it or not.
Here's how to use this:
✓ Save it. Or print it — there's a print version and you should use it.
✓ Shade each segment to how full it feels right now. Not how full it should be. Not how full it was in 2019.
✓ Look at the emptiest one.
That's where your cravings live. That's the one your body has been trying to fill with food.
Tomorrow I'll walk you through scoring it properly — the exact questions to ask for each section. 💙
Save it, print it, shade it — then comment your emptiest section.

10/20/2026

You are allowed to be a beginner at any age. 📝

Somewhere in our forties most of us quietly decided we were finished learning things. Not out loud — nobody announces it. We just stopped signing up for anything where we might be visibly bad in front of other people. And then we wonder why the days blur together.

Here's what learning something new actually does:
✓ It makes time feel longer — novelty is what your brain uses to lay down distinct memories
✓ It gives you something to be curious about instead of something to worry about
✓ It puts you in rooms with new people, which feeds two sections of the circle at once
✓ And it fills the 8 PM hole that we usually fill with a bowl of something

Education is primary food. A mind that isn't being fed will send you to the kitchen — and I have watched that pattern in more clients than I can count.

So take the class. Ask the question you think you should already know the answer to. Be terrible at the thing for a month.

Being bad at something new isn't embarrassing. It's a nutrient. It's called learning.

(And if you want the long version of how I got here — going back to school in the middle of my life, and everything that came out of it — that story is in Lay Aside Every Weight. Kindle, link in bio.) 💙

Comment the thing you'd learn if you weren't worried about being bad at it 👇

10/15/2026

The cheapest year of your health is always this one. 🍂

I'm saying this as a nurse, and I want you to hear it as encouragement, because that's genuinely how I mean it.

Things that are inexpensive to prevent become expensive to manage. And the cost isn't only money — it's appointments. It's medications you now take forever. It's Tuesdays in waiting rooms you don't get back.

I watched that math for years. It never once got cheaper by waiting.

But that's not the part I want you to take from this.

Because here's the other thing I watched, over and over:
People improve at every age. Every single age.

I've watched people in their seventies change their numbers. I've watched people come back from things I would not have bet on.

✓ Blood pressure moves
✓ Blood sugar moves
✓ Energy moves fastest of all — most people feel that inside two weeks, long before anything shows on a test

The body is not keeping a grudge about the last ten years. It is remarkably willing to respond to what you do this month.

So this isn't me telling you that you're running out of time. It's the opposite.

You have not missed it. Whatever your number is, this year is the cheapest one you'll ever get.

Start here. Start small. But start this year. 💙

Comment your ONE thing for the rest of this year — say it where people can see it.

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https://www.mindoverplates.com/

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