Barbara Field, writing for VeryWellMind, believes that If you are a stress eater, which is very common, turning to creative pursuits might keep stress from making you overeat.
Have you ever been so immersed in writing in your journal, creating postcards out of your recent photographs, or dancing to your favorite band that you lost all sense of time? During this time, you’re focused with optimal attention on a task or activity. It’s sometimes called being in the zone,
Creativity has been proven in extensive research to relieve both stress and anxiety.
An article in Psychology Today suggests that one reason our creativity might slim our waistlines is visual - "Less external clues of the presence of food". If you are literally seeing food less, but instead seeing the progression of your art more, you tend to want to spend your time on your project - not your refrigerator. Both would "feed" you, but in different ways.
Another possibility they noted is that an unwanted habit of taking snacks physically into the hands to eat can be overcome at times by having something ELSE in our hands that is already "feeding" our interests, if not our tummies. We may remember family (for me, grandmothers) warning about the difference between Idle hands and busy hands!
No matter how it happens, if my art keeps me from snacking too much, I'm in!
What lovely creativity will keep your interest in May?
), I can think of one large and one lap-size quilt I've done just with straight lines all over, like squares. I can think of two lap-size I've done by straight-stitching along the shapes of the patchwork. Then I quilted a twin size Baskets quilt using curving templates of simple flower shapes. That turned out okay, not ideal, and you could tell I was a beginner at that - not my best. I was smart to quilt it in fourths and then sew those together, though.