Practicing Conscious Eating

Many of us who struggle with weight have a love-hate relationship with food. For many of us, food becomes more than nurishment and fuel, it is transformed magically into comfort, energy, solace, and a way to stuff down our emotional needs and remain stoic and strong. We love it, but then, after overindulging we hate what we ate, and that we ate, we aren't too happy with ourselves either (although thank goodness, I have never even been tempted to resort to the binging/purging habits of a bulemic. I binge, and it ends up on my thighs). Food became a tool for avoidance, or for trying to manipulate the inner emotion or physical state, and those bad habits and poor choices always cycled back on themselves (the cycle of poor eating, not enough exercise, and too much work comes back on itself, and you eat poorly again, to try and feel more energized).

Part of what has helped me lose weight has been focusing on what I eat, why I eat it, and learning to understand my body cues. Not only to eat only when hungry, but to take some other action when I want to stuff down my emotions with food. Call a friend, take a walk, go shopping, or even write in a blog :-) Lately, however, I've found myself backsliding on this piece of the daily work I must do. I'm eating Core on the WW program, which is all about chosing high quality, healthy food, and eating based on cues. I do pretty well, until I get to the end of the day, and everything I've been thinking about and working on overwhelms, or exhausts, and I can't figure out how to manage it on my own. So after the healthy Core dinner (or instead of), I'll sit down and eat something definitely NOT Core, and more than one serving of it. One night is was a couple of granola bars, when I wasn't hungry and had finished my eating for the day. Another night it was enough Pad That for 2 active women. I had stopped at half, but didn't put it away, and 30 minutes later I was finishing the container. OK, so I'm not eating boxes of donuts any more, but I'm still clearly not out of the woods on this topic. It feels HARD right now, and I seem to be struggling.

I need to review the basic principles of conscious eating, and start making this a priority, recognizing my strengths, and managing my weaknesses. And I need to go back to the concept of remembering that my body is indeed a temple.

From a Conscious Eating website:

Conscious Eating (or Yogic Eating) is a guide to the healthiest relationship you can have with food and with yourself, increasing your health and well-being. The body is a temple - the vessel of your soul in this plane of existence - take good care of it!

- Before you eat, relax your body and your mind. Unhealthy eating patterns are often caused by tension and stress. When you experience stress or negative emotions, you lose energy (prana - see more info on this in the pranayama/breathing section). Unconsciously, you want to eat to replace that lost energy.

- Relax before eating, to allow the digesting system to break down the food more easily. Learning to relax throughout your day and you will need less food.

- Make healthy and wise food choices before you eat, and have them available in your home.

- Begin to connect with your inner self. Learn to understand the attitudes which prompt you to eat. Notice tension, emotions and their affect on you, and you will gain a deeper understanding of the motivations that affect your eating patterns.

- Notice when you are naturally hungry - when your appetite is stimulated by the pure physical hunger for food.

- Satisfaction and gratification only come from natural hunger, not the rich and elaborate tastes and textures of the foods we eat.

- An old saying is "Eat to live, don't live to eat." It holds true today. We eat food in order to provide energy to our body and sustain life. On the yogic path, this is so that our body is healthy and can support us in our quest to develop our highest potential.


Training note: I completed a 4.1 mile run today in just under an hour, the longest of the year so far. Felt decent, survived upper 20s with LOTS of wind, although my quads and glutes were FROZEN by the time I finished. I think staying consistent with the training, and eating to support it, will also support my efforts to eat consciously. It's much easier to make good choices, when your body is glowing from the runner's high, and you've expended so much energy to get stronger and fitter.