To Blessed to be Stressed

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From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, visit OD.com to book a demo. It's ODOO.com. Welcome to Heart of the Matter radio with author and host, Cynthia L. Simmons.

How does a godly woman live in a world out of sync? Cynthia digs into the issues women face in our complex culture to set a path through the chaos. It's for women seeking the elegance of God's wisdom. So prepare yourself to listen, learn, and rest.

Now here's your host, Cynthia L. Simmons. I am great at worry. Years ago, when I was in nursing school, we would study a disease and I would think, oh no, I have that symptom.

And oh no, I have that symptom. I began to believe that I had every disease that I studied. So when I saw the pattern, I thought, no, I'm gonna work on that because I know that's not true. But some of that worry carried on anyway.

Whenever my husband was not home exactly on time, he was out there on the freeway, he was dead. What was I gonna wear to the funeral? I'd start planning what I was gonna do when he wasn't even dead and when he walked in the door. All that fear was suddenly became anger and I would blow up and say, where have you been?

Why are you so late? So I had to learn to be careful about my thoughts and not let them get the best of me. Philippians 4 says that whenever we're anxious, we are to take that anxiety and to with Thanksgiving, to throw it on to Jesus Christ. And that's something I've had to learn to do and it's been hard.

Today I have Deborah Cody with me. She has written too blessed to be stressed. Welcome, Deborah. Thank you, Cynthia.

It's a pleasure to be here. Okay, Deborah, I wanna know why this thing, do you have problems with stress? Oh, I always have. Are there any women that you know that don't in this crazy, busy world that we have made for ourselves when we have to be productive at all times and be all things to all people?

I think stress is just a part of it. In fact, I wanted to call the book, Too Blessed to Stay Stressed instead of Too Blessed to Be Stressed because I think we just all are stressed, but the thing is staying there. Do we choose to get ourselves out of what I call the stress pool of life or do we just plound around and they're eventually go under? And so that's why I wrote Too Blessed to Be Stressed.

I wanted to try to help women who are stuck in that stress pool to have some tools, to have them tried in true ways that they can have some, a way to getting out of that and to do it joyfully at the same time. Well, I really appreciate that because like I say, I've been doing some hard times and what I was saying, they're laughing while I was reading what you were writing. So I was feeling better just reading it. So give me some remedies for stress.

Well, there's so many different things you can do depending upon your personality. Some of the things that work very well for a lot of the lady that I speak to, I travel around speaking to women's groups about this very subject matter. And some of the ways that really help are number one, to back off, to get away from the stress source, put some space between you and it, whether it mean take a walk outside. When I was working 36 years as an orthopedic occupational therapist, when I would get to that point where I could feel the stress bubbling up like a volcano about two erupts, I would say, I'm out, I'm gone, three minutes around the parking lot and I would have to take a walk to decompress.

It may mean if you're a mom of young children, walking yourself in your closet literally, setting the timer outside the door for 15 minutes and when those kiddies start sticking those fingers underneath the door and wiggling, you say, go away, this is my god time, when the timer goes off, that's when you're gonna see me. No, my mother taught me that, she would disappear into the bathroom, into the actual bathtub with her Bible. And I remember I was old enough to know, so I'm up to bed at least five or six, pounding on the door, you know, to my, and she'd say, go, whoa, this is my god time. And you know, I learned that from her and I did it with my kids and I noticed that my daughter who is now, she has three children, she's doing the same thing with her.

So pretty good thing to pass down to generations, I think. But, well, there's so many different ways we can try to decompress. Another thing we can do is to vent in a safe place. You know, that's something that you mentioned in your story, we tend to vent to our husbands or to our family members because they're here, and our anger is not directed to them, but it is, it becomes directed to them because they're convenient.

And we need to learn how to vent safely and in some non-scalding ways to preserve our relationships with those that we love. I liked what you said about humor in the trenches. Can you give us some ideas on that one? Well, I believe that humor is so important.

Joy is the most important thing in our defense mechanisms. You know, Nehemiah tells us that Joy's Lord is our strength and it truly is. And I think that Joy sometimes is spun off of humor in our lives. I think oftentimes it is.

And I would say that laughter and joy are soul sisters and thankfully the sisters like to travel together. But if we can try to intentionally look at the lighter side and there is a lighter side, if we just look for it, so many times we can't see it because we're just overwhelmed. But I believe we can be wemmed without being overwhelmed. And one of the ways to do that is to incorporate humor into our lives to make sure that we do that.

And in Too Blessed to Be Stressed, I have a lot of different ideas in there to help you do that. Too Blessed to Be Stressed was what I call my mama book. It came out about four years ago and then I've had babies. And it's had about 12 babies now that I call my baby blessings.

And the Too Blessed to Be Stressed cookbook is one of those. OK, so you're talking a little bit about having fun. It sounds like. So how can having fun kind of turn things around for somebody?

Well, if you think about it, what does fun do for you? It lifts you up. And that's what we are to do for one another. In crisis to lift one another up, that's one of the huge advocate of girlfriends.

I call them BFF blessed friends forever that we need other girlfriends. We need, like Anna Green Gable said, bosom friends. You know, men are fine, but their bosoms just aren't saying. We've got to have girlfriends to understand us and to get those laughs together.

Good, clean, wholesome laughter. It releases and doorphones in your mind. It lists everything it makes life easier. Absolutely.

I've learned that one too. It's that if I just start acting silly and running around the house, everybody likes it plus I feel better too. So I've learned that I can be silly and it's OK. Absolutely.

You also talked about venting in a safe life. Can you elaborate a little bit more on some ways we might do that? Well, I like to beat a little yellow ball around a tennis court. And I do that.

I've played tennis for years. I'm an addict, actually. I play in three different leagues. But I do that predominantly for the beating part.

That is a safe outlet. Sport is a very good way to do that, to release some of that pent up frustration that we tend to live under in these crazy stressed out lives that we live. And it's an appropriate way of venting. Other things we can do is to write a letter to the person where angry at, but not send it.

You can then burn it. And you can feel like you have released that stress, that that angst. Another way is to beat up your trash can. But that's not as good as some of the other ways.

We had a tramp can years ago that we were trying to get rid of. We went to trash and to pick it up. And we laughed about how we kept beating up while thinking of the idea that it wasn't meant to be the trap. I never did pick it up or not.

But it sure felt good to get it out, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I know one thing I do is I've learned to just go to the Lord and prayer and just say, I'm really mad right now.

I'm not going to be mad at you. You know, because I've learned that he can handle it. Absolutely. And so I've just used that to be.

Yes, exercise does happen. Now, years ago, my youngest son is disabled. And when he had one of his last seizures, it's going to happen. It was my aerobic day.

Well, the other kids were around. He was taken care of because they were older than he was. And so I went to my aerobic class, but I usually did. And I felt so good when I finished because it used up all of that energy that would not do anything.

Yeah. He was asleep anyway. He didn't need me. So I went in on exercise and I felt a lot better.

Oh, it does. And another thing that we really need to be aware of, that we aren't usually, is to self-talk. The way that we talk to ourselves, our inner chatter, we can be channeling Eor and never realize that's a lot of our problem. We stay pessimistic that way.

And it affects what I call our her specter, which is incidentally very different than his specter. But it really channels ourselves into a bad place. And we're limiting God when we have a lot of negative self-talk. He's the one who's ready to fill up with hope and potential and expectancy and tells us that we can do everything through Christ who gives us strength.

But the way we talk to ourselves, we're not just seeing the glass half empty. We're seeing the glass lacking. And we have to train ourselves to recognize that inner chatter the minute start and shake that mental edge of sketch. We need to replace those negative thoughts with a positive spin.

Tweak our tone when the doctor says it's make pinch a little. You know, he jams an aolent or an arm. Well, we need to borrow that technique. And use words like blemish into the black head.

And it may take a little work instead of impossible. But we just need to be aware of what we're saying to ourselves. Exactly. And I think that we are very perfectionistic about how we look and how we get things done.

And God is it nearly so perfectionist, because he knows we're human. Yes, thank goodness. He knows all of our flaws, because he created us that way. Yes, he did.

We need him. And that's a good thing. Absolutely. Yeah.

So let's just move here into food. Because I know one of your chapters in that book is something about chocolate makes your gene shrink. So how can a cookbook help us to be less stressed? Well, just to mention what you said about chocolate, to touch on that, I'm actually the step beyond chocolate.

I am like what I call a chocolate athlete, which means I exercise just so I can eat more chocolate. So I do have a lot of great chocolate recipes in the cookbook. But I wrote the Two Blessed to be Stressed Cookbook, because as I started traveling and interacting with women after the book came out of the Mama book, Two Blessed to be Stressed about four years ago, I found that women kept telling me over and over that they needed help in managing the stress of their lives. And a lot of that stress takes place in our kitchens, the planning and preparing and cleaning up after meals for our families.

And I came up with the idea of writing a cookbook that's more than just a cookbook. It's a let's do life together book. And it has all kinds of great stuff in there besides just over 100 recipes that require less than 20 minutes of hands on track time. It also has a lot of funny stories in there called Chuckle Breaks to help lighten up and give us that smile that we need, especially when we're in the kitchen.

But it also has some crazy culinary adventures and some time-saving tips on suggested menus and even pre-made grocery lists for up to eight weeks of meals, which I've had a lot of feedback people to tell me they love that part of the book. Why do we in the kitchen? I mean, it doesn't sound like joy belongs there. Because we need it so much.

Joy, I think, is the underlying, it's like the underwear. When we get ready to go somewhere, we focus on the first step and that's putting on the underwear, underneath the beautiful outfit that we have picked out. We have to have the foundation. And I think that's what joy is for the rest of what we do, how we are, how we relate to people, what we think, how our relationship is with Christ.

We have to have an underlying foundation of joy. And so to do that, it doesn't just happen. We need to focus on it. We need to make it happen and do it intentionally to choose joy.

And I think there's a lot of great ways we can do that. They're simple that sometimes we just don't think about. We just need somebody to give us a little mudge in that direction. That's what I hope that I've done with my book.

Tell us some of the trouble breaks that you have. Give us an example. Well, there's a lot of them that have to do with holidays in there. But I'll tell you one that doesn't.

This is called Deb's Confession. And I titled it, I won't tell if you will. But it's about the time when I was going to a church potluck. And we were having a big celebratory thing, because I forget now, this was years ago, but something really good had happened.

So we were having this big celebration potluck. And so I decided to make my piece of that resistance. My chocolate cake, three layers high. Just beautiful chocolate cake with chocolate, I think.

Everybody always loved it, had to sit over it. So that's what I made. But suddenly, I realized that we were getting ready to get the card given I had longed out my cake dome to someone. So I had nothing to cover it with.

And it was on a pedestal, one of those little glass serving petals. So I thought, no problem, no problem. So I wedged it down on the floor seat, the back seat of the car, and put the diaper bag and all the other stuff around it to hold it in place. I had about a four-year-old at the time, son, and my little baby daughter was probably about 18 months.

So I strapped her into her car seat. And I got my son buckled in. And he would know, I can do it myself. I do it myself.

And I said, OK, so I was super-biting. Then my husband packed everything in the trunk and all went. So we get to church. And my husband jumped out of the car, goes back, went late as usual.

My son lets him stop out of the car. And I'm working on my baby daughter's car seat. He comes around over to me, a little mad view. And I looked down, and I see he's got mud all over his tennis shoes.

And I said, son, did you step in a mud puddle when you got out of the car? And he looked at me, and he said, no, mommy. And I said, come over here. And I grabbed his butt, and I looked at his shoe, and it smelled delicious.

Oh, no. Oh, no. And I said, oh. And I went and looked at my beautiful chocolate cake, and it was a perfect imprint of his little tennis shoe right down in that cake.

So I did let any stressed out, mother, who didn't have anything else to take to their potluck with you. I scraped it off his shoe with my finger, and I poked it all back and said, oh. And I covered it over, and I swarmed my husband's secret. And we went into the church, and I had so many people ask me, what was the secret of that delicious cake?

And I just had to smile. That's so funny. What about the healthy side? How can it be possible to cook something quickly that's also really healthy?

Well, I have four different sections to the cookbook, and one of them is the healthy section. I'll talk about that in just a second. The first section is time-wise, which is more of the Rachel Ray type family-friendly recipes. And then the second section is, well, let me back up a second.

The first one has a lot of dump dishes that I call one-stop shopping, which is dinner in one pan. And it also has slow cooker recipes, quite a few of those. And then it's good to go munchy-type things. And then the second section is soul-fed, which is more like a Paula Dean.

Let's not look at the calorie count, but just taste how wonderful these are. And that has southern bell fare. It hadn't been able to tell from my accent. My pizza all from Georgia.

So I have a lot of southern bellpot, different things from my grandmother and my mother that I tweaked to make sure that, again, everything in the cookbook takes a less than 20 minutes of prep time. And they take a little bit longer to cook, but you don't have to stand there while it's cooking. It's less than 20 minutes of your hand-drawn prep time. And then we have breads and munchies and sweet tooths in that section as well.

And then the third section is heart-healthy. And that's the wonderful recipes that are low-fat, fiber-rich, vegetarian, and I have a sub-section for shades of green. About 15 years ago, my husband was in the door and announced that he was becoming a vegetarian for health reasons. So I have been able to collect quite a few nice vegetarian recipes that I've gotten really, really good feedback from people that have used them.

And we're focusing on the healthy section for January. And I'm running a wonderful contest, which is posted on our website, DeborahCody.com right now. If you look under it, you click on Contest, it's the very first one. And it's eating healthy and it's dress-free in 2016.

And we're trying to lose 3 pounds in three weeks altogether. I've had quite a few people sign up and agree to do it. And I put their names in a drawing for the two-blessed-be-stroke book. I'm going to give away five copies at the end of the month.

And if they do lose their 3 pounds in three weeks, they get their name in twice. Extra-possibility for women. And so anyway, that's the third section. The fourth section is Company Happy.

And it's kind of a fancy or tight dishes that you would serve to company. And the sub-sections there are for orders and soups, salads, sides, entrees, and desserts. That sounds wonderful. I tell you one of the best ones, the recipe.

I've had a big flutter of conversation going on Facebook just today, this morning, about the bean soup. It's called Best Bean Soup Ever. I made a pot a couple of days ago before my Bible study gal for coming over, having a group that meets in my house. And I wasn't intending to feed them beans soup, but they walked in the house and my husband and I had just had some for dinner and I still had the pot on the stove.

And then I'll gather around to the bottom of that awesome smell. And everybody got themselves a bowl of bean soup. And so I took a picture and posted it on Facebook of the unintentional refreshments that I served for my Bible study girls. And people started trying the bean soup all over the place.

And I've been getting lots and lots of comments. People said, oh my gosh, it is a best bean soup ever. And it's just one of those low calorie, good for you, easy to make dishes that there's quite a few others in that section too. And I just love it.

It's really delicious. I also made a one of the delicious fish fillets. That's what it's called, delicious fish fillets, the name of the recipe. And I posted it earlier this week and had a lot of people say they tried it because it looks so good in the picture.

And we're very thrilled with how it turned out. You know, that's exactly perfect. It needs to be low fat, good for you, easy to do, doesn't take too many hours. And then it tastes good too.

So it's so hard to find that combination. It really is. I'm trying tonight. I'm having a little bit cool here in Tampa area.

We don't get much winter. And this is it today. I think this is our winter. It's actually a little bit low 60 degrees.

So because it's so frigid, we're going to have a backyard. We'd like to just have a lawn fire in the backyard. Invite a bunch of family and friends over. So we're doing that tonight.

And I'm going to make some vegetable latte. A lot of these. I always call them latte. Lotte, which are in the section of the cookbook, the heart healthy section.

Those are really good. And the sweet to pay the home fries are really easy to make. And they go a long way in feeding a big crowd. People always love them and ask for more.

I appreciate your willingness to share with us about your life and how you have learned how to overcome stress. And then you're trying to help us. That's great. Well, thank you, Cynthia.

You can find her at DeborahCody.com. It's D-E-B-O-R-A without an H. And it's the O-T-Y. And if you go there, you can sign up for her newsletter and see the other things that she has done.

Thank you, Deborah. Blessings to you. You've been listening to Heart of the Matter Radio with Cynthia Elsynitz. Your comments and questions are always welcome.

Contact us at Cynthia at CLSimMons.com. We'd love to hear from you, whether you're an author, young mom, a mother or a teen, a homeschool mother or an empty nester. Join us next time, as Cynthia once again sets a path to grow in wisdom at a closer walk with a savior here on Heart of the Matter Radio.