No matter your crafting preference, be it knitting, painting, or needle felting, a love for the arts is a powerful passion to have, and if you’ve been struggling to control your weight or simply trying to drop those excess pounds, crafting may be exactly what you need. Keep reading to find out why!
The Chance to Reset
Often, our food issues aren’t about food at all, but instead our relationship with it and ourselves.
A poor mindset can lead us to treat our bodies in self-sabotaging ways, through a lousy diet, lack of exercise, and other unhealthy habits that can all see the pounds quickly pile on.
Crafting activities give us the opportunity to check in with our mindset and how we are feeling. They increase our confidence and self-esteem and contribute to improved overall wellbeing. By assessing our mindset and actively working toward a more positive view of ourselves, we can begin to adopt healthy habits and treat our bodies with the love and respect they deserve.
A Welcomed Distraction
Besides the obvious fact that it can be rather challenging to eat while your hands are full of felting needles or paint brushes, when you’re crafting, you’re in the flow and less likely to mindlessly eat. The brain’s creative areas have been activated, and before you know it, hours have passed by, and you didn’t even notice! All this distraction not only helps to ward off the unnecessary snacking that is often a
leading cause of unwanted weight gain, but it also means you’ll get more time to work on your beautiful creation!
Relief From Stress
Did you know that too much stress can have a negative impact on your ability to lose weight?
High-levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, triggers what’s known as the ‘fight or flight’ response in our bodies. This response leads to an increase in glucose in the body, which in turn leads to intense sugar cravings. And we all know what consuming too much sugar can result in – weight gain. This weight is usually in the form of abdominal fat, which is often stubbornly hard to shed and can quickly become dangerous!
What happens next is the beginning of a vicious cycle: feel stressed, crave sugar, gain weight, feel more stressed, crave more sugar, gain even more weight!
A stressful lifestyle doesn’t only result in increased cortisol levels. It can also produce some pretty unhealthy eating habits and behaviors such as emotional eating, eating for convenience, and poor sleeping habits – all of which can lead to unwanted weight gain!
So what can you do? Craft!
It’s a well-known fact that crafting is a great reliever of stress. So next time you feel like things are getting a little out of hand, instead of reaching for that packet of biscuits, reach for your felting needles instead and craft that stress away!
Would you like to give needle felting a try?
Join my Needle Felting Academy! You’ll get video courses, learn techniques, and receive support to get you started or improve your felting skillset. Let’s destress together, felting-style!
Learn to Needle Felt the Easy Way!
Join the Bear Creek Needle Felting Academy today!
