Mindful Eating: 4 guidelines to Properly Nourish Your Body
Ending My Struggle with Food
You may know that I’ve had the vision to work in media ever since I was in Grade 7. At that time I was struggling a lot with my body image and I didn’t know how to fight all of the voices in my head that told me that I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t skinny enough.
I’ve gone through periods on diets, on super stringent eating rules and period where I completely forgot my own obsessions around food and just enjoyed my life.
The more I live, the more I realized that I don’t want to spend my whole life mentally fighting my body.
I used to eat until my belly felt full (more on this below). This meant that I stuffed my stomach until it felt stretched. I knew this wasn’t healthy, but I couldn’t seem to stop eating. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot more about why I would do this and how to properly nourish my body.
Intuitively I knew, Anita, you’ve to settle this one, so that you can move onto bigger mountains.
Eating can be a great source of joy, but western culture also has some really warped ways of looking at food. Here are the practices and eating mindsets I’ve adopted in my life, that have nourished my mind, soul and body!
Eat for a full life, not a full belly
I want a full life. I want to know that I did my absolute best to live my fullest potential, contribute my gifts to the awakening of humanity and fulfilled the destiny. I want to know that I did my best to become the person I can be.
Working in a regular job, I could see how easy it was for me to use junk food as comfort when I came home after a long day at the office. After doing this for a few weeks though, I was terrified. I stopped because I saw how this habit was not leading to a full life. It was turning me into a sugar- and salt-craving machine.
I have decided eat to live a full life, not just fill my belly. This is a mindset I own. Eating to live a full life means that I take pleasure and joy in nourishing my body with foods that are high in nutrition. It means that I am conscious of eating foods that will make me feel awake, energized and light, not lethargic, foggy or tired.
2. Develop An Awareness of How Food Feels Inside You
This is an ongoing process of retraining your body and mind to work together. Most of us have lost touch with how food actually feels inside of us. We only account for the moment it enters our mouth, not how it feels in our system. I now deliberately give myself space and time for digestion, so that I can notice how I feel after I eat a meal.
How to do I feel after I eat sugar? How to I feel after lentil soup? How do I feel if I don’t eat any veggies?
Sugar may seem to make me feel good, but then I always crave more of it. Sugar turns me into someone I don’t like. Someone obssessive and unaware. Now that I know sugar does this to me, it’s much easier to say no.
This practice makes it a lot easier to avoid unhealthy food, because I know that it will make me feel horrible.
3. Undo the brainwashing
I first heard of this idea in Allen Carr’s The Easyway to Lose Weight. He has developed and ingenius mental formula that will help you to understand why we overeat. I highly recommend the book! He says that most of the ideas we have about food come from advertising and the food industry. We have been programmed to believe certain things about food.
For example, feeling unhappy? Treat yourself to a chocolate bar.
Got a promotion? Celebrate with cake!
But is are chocolate bars and care really treats? Or are they concoctions of poison, chemicals and sugar that don’t do us much good?
When I saw that I was so brainwashed, I’ve been undoing the brainwashing by declaring my own ways of relating to food.
For example, treats for me are taking a bath, spending a long time in nature, giving myself extra time to read a book and meditating. Through self-awareness, I know now that I get much more life and joy from doing these activities than from eating sweets.
Once you become aware of how advertising is warping your natural desire for nourishing food, you’ll see it everywhere and it becomes easier to develop your own eating guidelines.
4. Eat whole foods, since whole foods contain the most original nutrients.
Simply put, don’t eat anything that comes in a box and with an ingredients list. Fill your plate with whole foods. This means fresh fruits, veggies, grains, legumes, seeds, nuts. Personally, I don’t eat very much meat, maybe just once or twice a week, because I find that it feels heavy inside me.
Our digestive systems are designed to process and handle real food best.
A few weeks ago, I was choosing breakfast and I felt an intuitive nudge tell me not to reach for bread. It felt like my stomach was telling me that because bread has been processed, it’s more difficult for my digestive system to unpack and extract the nutrients. Therefore it requires more energy to complete this task, and at 9:00am in the morning, I would prefer to use this energy for other tasks. So my body told me to pick something simpler to digest, which led me to pick up fruit!
When foods have been overly processed, they loose their nutrients, which means were basically eating flavoured cardboard. I want to live a full life, full of energy, vitality and joy, so I don’t put cardboard inside the supercomputer of my body.
I hope this helps!
