January 31, 2017

Do me a favour. Let go of that donut for a second and count down the following 5 thoughts on your fingers.

 

1. Are you hungry?

Every time you want to eat something, stop and ask yourself:

Am I really hungry?

Food will only satisfy your hunger if it is a real physical hunger.  Not if it is an emotional or habitual hunger and never if it is a craving for love or a more satisfying life.  Food can provide us with instant gratification, a quick fix to feeling better, whereas building relationships and meaningful lives require more effort.  In the long run, filling your void with food will lead to more unhappiness, more cravings, more self-loathing, less self-respect, being even more disconnected with your inner wisdom.

If you notice that there may be a painful memory or traumatic experience that keeps on haunting you and you suspect this may be why you are in the habit of numbing your pain with food, please have the courage to acknowledge it and find a therapist to help you deal with it.  We are so aware of early detection of breast or skin cancer, isn’t it time to also be on the lookout for signs of deep emotional wounding that needs specialist care and treatment?  There may still be a stigma around this but slowly we are seeing more and more people willing to admit their inner struggles and we applaud these brave souls.  You wouldn’t accept your best friend’s excuses for why she ignores the lump in her breast, so why do you keep on ignoring the warning signs your own body-mind is sending you?

 

2. What is the healthiest choice that will satisfy you now?

Learn to check in with your body and find out what you really feel like.  Ask yourself, do I want hot or cold food?  What texture am I looking for, heavy or light, crisp or stodgy, hard or soft, rough or creamy, liquid or solid?  What taste am I after?  Spicy or bland, sweet or savoury, fruit or vegetable, meat or fish?  Next step is to have a look at what is available in the fridge, pantry or on the menu.  Rate all the foods that meet your fancy from healthy to less healthy and choose the one that will leave you most satisfied.  Some days you may feel like a piece of sweet, soft, creamy chocolate cake and all the salad in the world won’t make this craving go away.  On days like these eat your cake but remember to follow the rules:  enjoy every bite and stop when you’ve had enough.  Over time and in exploring healthier options, you may decide that a rice cake with a thin layer of Nutella or carob will also take care of your chocolate craving and leave the cake for special occasions.

Most important is to also check in with your body after eating.  Your body will always provide you with feedback and your long-term goal is to learn what kind of foods work best for you.  Look out for signs such as:  headaches, heart burn, excess wind, bloating, post-nasal drip, skin irritations, watery eyes or feeling tired.  Being mindful of the foods that disagree with you will help you make better food choices that provide you with energy, health and vitality.

 

3. Enjoy every bite

Our excuse for overeating is usually that we truly love our food.  So the next step is to do just that:  to sit down, eat slowly and enjoy every mouthful.  Involve all your senses by smelling your food, looking at it and appreciating its beauty.  Take the first bite, roll it around in your mouth, feel the textures on your tongue, taste all the flavours, and slowly chew it well before swallowing.  Stop between bites to put down your utensils, take a breath or two and chat to friends.  We do this naturally when we go out to restaurants or try a friend’s new cake recipe, the trick is to do it all the time with all our food.  Extracting the maximum pleasure out of our food and enjoying it mindfully, help us to eat less.  Overeating happens when we mindlessly ram food down our throats and afterward we are left with a stuffed stomach and no memory of how good it was.  Enjoying food helps us relax while eating which improves our digestion and enhances the body’s natural self-healing abilities.

 

4. Stop when you had enough

Babies have a natural built-in mechanism that tells them when they’ve had enough milk.  But as we grow up, we are taught to finish all the food on our plates.  Our parents’ intentions were good, they wanted us to eat healthy and meet all our dietary requirements and most of us abhor the wasting of food.  It became a problem because we never learned to listen to our bodies and stop when we’ve had enough.  To complicate matters further, we could only eat dessert after eating all our food.  This set us up for a very negative pattern where we learn to eat everything in front of us and then reward this behaviour by stuffing even more sweet treats down our throats.  Over time we also learn to use food as a reward for working hard or going through difficult times.  No wonder we lost contact with our inner wisdom and continually override our body’s messages by eating way more than we need.

 

5. Positive self-talk

The most important fact to remember here is that your body knows exactly what to do with the food you eat.  It is however up to you to provide the best environment for your body to do its work.  By engaging in negative self-talk, guilt and anger after eating something you think of as ‘unhealthy’, your body releases stress hormones which interfere with your digestion. Choosing instead to be calm, relaxed and content with what you’ve eaten, leaves your body free to focus on digestion.

Negative self-talk may also start a chain reaction where you keep on eating, trying to punish yourself for lack of will-power or further trying to numb your unwelcome feelings with more food.  Another tactic that can be used either positively or negatively is exercise.  Dreading the thought of all the calories that you need to burn after overeating sets you up to see exercise as punishment, rather than just a natural part of your daily routine which you follow to take good care of yourself.  We encourage our kids to go out and play, but as adults we forget that we need to keep on doing that ourselves as well.

Learning to eat according to what works for you, may never help you look like a super model, but it may help you look like the best version of you.  It is time we stop comparing our beautiful, natural three-dimensional bodies to the photo-shopped two-dimensional perfection we see in magazines and on screens.  See it rather as an exciting journey to embark upon and embrace the opportunity to finally follow your own heart and your own gut to lead you back to inner wisdom.

So think twice before you bite and if you do, enjoy it!