How You Do Food Is How You Do Life!
I learned that my food and weight issues were masking a much greater hunger, that was the hunger for my True Self. To make peace with food and weight, you have to make peace with yourself.
The path to permanent weight loss can be a wondrous journey of self discovery to reclaim your authentic Self. Food and weight obsessions are a calling to wholeness and spiritual unity. The weight is only a symptom. The larger issue is one of separation: a separation and disconnect of the mind, body and spirit.
The cure to healing these issues is lifestyle and spiritual change: a change in how you approach and perceive life. All healing has a spiritual component, whether you consider yourself religious or not, because this change has to come from the inside out.
Permanent weight loss is about finding a way of being in the world that supports one’s spiritual, mental, emotional and physical health. It is the work of becoming a new self. This path can lead to a spiritual awakening, a true flowering of the human spirit.
Mindfulness is the antidote to mindless eating and self defeating behaviors around food. It puts you on the path to permanent weight loss!
The path to wholeness can be found right in front of you. Change is always found in the power of the present moment. Each moment contains an opportunity for new awareness, new choices and growth.
When you fully inhabit your life with mindful awareness, it brings an extraordinary richness to life. This richness cannot compare to even the most decadent of desserts. With mindfulness, life becomes the dessert!
.People who struggle with food and weight often struggle with feelings of emptiness and self loathing.
When you are at peace with yourself, you will be at peace with food.
Weight Loss Wisdom: Letting Go
Let go of what isn’t working in your life, so that you may enjoy the bloom of new growth.
Permanent weight loss is about letting go of old behaviors, and embracing the bloom of new growth. Nature can teach us a lot about letting go. Fall is a time of letting go. The leaves fall so that the trees can bloom even greater once again in the spring.
We are like the trees – in order to enjoy the bloom of a more nourishing life, we need to let go of the patterns, beliefs, and behaviors that no longer serve us. We need to clear a space in our life to have room for the new to come in.
Questions
What thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors do you need to release and let go of? What is no longer serving you? How might you begin to clear away the dead weight in your life?
Meditation: What healthy new habits do I want to bring in my life? What needs to be cleared away, so that I can manifest better health in my life? What are the habits and negative beliefs standing in the way of my achieving “thinner peace?”
Affirmations
I let go easily of the things that no longer serve me. Life is a series of endings and new beginnings. I surrender the old, so that I may receive the new.
Yoga for Weight loss
Successful long-term weight loss has more to do with an increase in mindfulness than the number of calories burned.
As we are increasingly barraged by the food industry’s skillful marketing of fad dieting and processed foods, we gradually forget about the simpler food choices, like eating whole foods. Yoga can help improve your lifestyle by leading you on a path of healthy and mindful eating, without the guilt.
The truth is that success in weight loss has more to do with mindfulness and the relationship you have with yourself than it does pushing your body through grueling bootcamp exercises and painfully restrictive diets. These techniques are short-lived and unsustainable – most burn out quickly from the overzealous demands.
There are so many contributing factors to weight loss such as, food addiction, personal lifestyle, individual willpower, and genes. Properly practicing yoga goes well beyond doing just poses; it touches the consciousness of the mind, which can have transformative effects on your life. By marrying the body and mind through one pointed concentration, your life can find brand new meaning.
While it is true that yoga is partially about self-acceptance, let us not confuse this with acceptance of self-destructive habits – ones that lead to obesity and deteriorating health, a life filled with lack of willpower, and taking the easy way out. In yoga, we have a word “ahimsha” – meaning non-violence or to not harm. Ahinsha is a reminder that we need to take care of our bodies and that we are hurting ourselves by being unhealthy or overweight. Bad health is not only a burden to you, but also to those who love you and even society. Another yoga term is “tapas,” which refers to self-restraint and an inner strength of conviction – this helps us build the necessary willpower to accomplish our goals. An authentic yoga practice is a lifestyle that builds character, transforms your life, and teaches you how to transcend obstacles – not run away from them in denial. Far too many have the misconception that yoga, at least indirectly, is all about escaping problems, sugar coating things that need to be changed, and being complacent and lazy. There are no quick fixes that lead to lasting long-term success. There is no easy way to self-transformation, although weight loss can be a great first step.
Weight loss requires both “diet with mindfulness” and “physical exercise.
Yoga: The Physical Exercise
The right combination of yoga postures offer flexibility, a solid core, and lean muscle while cleansing and strengthening the digestive system. Digestive health is related to your overall health and has a direct effect on the way we break down food, vitamins and minerals. Digestion not only helps eliminate water retention and constipation, it also improves blood circulation to major endocrine glands (thyroid and pancreas) that are responsible for mood swings, control of appetite, and sleeping patterns.
The best way to achieve weight loss through yoga is attending a “power” yoga type of class three times a week at your local yoga studio. Supplement this with a workout session with a home instructional DVD twice a week. If you are really serious about weight loss, you must organize life around this commitment, including your practices off the mat, which include diet and getting enough rest.
Do a regular meditation practice for 10 minutes or more each day followed by 20 minutes or more of power yoga at home, moving fast enough to raise the heartbeat and making sure you do physically demanding movement that challenges your strength and endurance. The movement and breathing link the poses together, building heat which results in greater calorie burn. Make sure to take a beginners class if you are unfamiliar with power yoga and build the intensity of your practice over time.
When the mind plays the role of the harsh judge of our appearance, it helps push some of us to reach a new standard of excellence, but for most, it leads to self-destructive behavior like weight gain. With yoga postures, we learn to take a seat inside ourselves and generate a renewed sense of control to transform our bodies and thought processes. This process helps counteract the counterproductive messages that often arise in our minds.
Your yoga practice does not start and end on the yoga mat. Since most of your life is off the yoga mat, the transformation needs to continue when class is finished. Ideally, returning to yoga class simply serves to help refresh and reaffirm. On the mat, not only do we practice yoga poses called asanas, we cultivate the power of mindfulness – a power that stands at the very crux of changing your life! The focus on breathing, seated meditation, and the ability to be in the present moment (for at least an hour long class) translates well off the yoga mat into every aspect of your life. These techniques help you consciously decide how you want to react in situations instead of responding mechanically with conditioned reflexes.
Notice that the more you develop this muscle of mindfulness on the yoga mat, the more you utilize it throughout your day, through your thought, eating, and behaviour patterns. This is what is going to help you attain your goal of weight loss. Meditation, diet, and asana practice form the points of a triangle, complementing each other to help you lose weight and develop new empowering habits.
Yoga: The Mind
Now, take what you have learned from the mat (as discussed above) and apply it off the mat.
1. Start with taking time to sit and clear your mind. Acknowledge your thoughts – how you feel and your perceptions about food. You need to develop clarity on whether or not you are eating because you are hungry or simply trying to deal with emotions like stress or depression. By listening to the body’s hunger signals, we also develop sensitivity to emotional or thoughtless eating. This helps us choose foods that contribute to our health and satisfy our hunger instead of loading up on empty calories.
2. Become mindful when you start to feel 80% full and stop there. Keep in mind it takes about 20 minutes before you truly feel how much you ate. This will help with overeating. Overeating slows down your metabolism, makes you feel sluggish, and adds extra wear and tear on your internal organs. Overeating also leads to consuming more calories than you burn, contributing to unwanted weight gain.
3. Instead of fighting with unhealthy foods and making it about denial, move toward foods that make you feel better hours after you eat it. Make small changes by slowly incorporating the right foods into your diet. It is better to slowly introduce the right foods week by week, even if it takes a year to fully implement. This gradual process sustains healthy eating habits in contrast to the “total transformation in one week” regimen, which is most likely to end in failure. Remember, we are focusing on the long-term marathon, not the quick sprint. Keep your mind focused on long-term results and don’t worry about small bumps along the way.
4. Before eating, make sure you are not in a hurry or stressed out. We want to eat with a relaxed and calm state of mind, savouring the food. Chewing until your food turns into a liquid helps you receive more nutrients.
5. Keep in mind that the desire for an enhanced spiritual life requires the willingness to go through discomfort in the short-term in order to achieve desired long-term objectives. Tapas (willpower and inner strength of conviction) also means you do your yoga practice daily even if you feel lazy and want to watch TV.
Yoga: The Diet
Eating is an integral part of yoga, as well as any activity you do. What you eat forms the basic infrastructure upon which your emotions, clarity of thought, and physical performance can build upon. Imagine if you ate nothing but sugar and caffeine for an entire week, how emotionally stable would you be? How calm and clear would your thoughts be? How long would you be able to keep up with a physically demanding job or activity? It is clear that the nutrients that are taken in by the body are outwardly reflected in your thought, behaviour, and physical ability. The question then becomes, what does it mean to properly nourish yourself? How does one eat like a yogi?
There is an overabundance of diet programs that will continue to emerge to accommodate current trends. Because there is no such thing as a “perfect” diet, you need to monitor what you eat in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t work for you. The diet that works for you may not work for another. The general rule of thumb is that food should enhance clarity and lightness of the mind, keep the body light and nourished, foster a greater sense of wellbeing, and improve sleeping patterns. Your yoga practice should make you feel in an optimal state instead of an exhausted one, so avoid foods that tend to cause bloating, sluggishness, or any type of discomfort.
One of the few areas that nutrition experts have consensus over is using plant-based foods. Refrain from eating processed foods and replace them with whole foods. If meat is part of your diet, stick to lean meats like fish and chicken. Being mindful about the food you eat will help avoid quick fixes that may alleviate short-term energy needs. Your intake of processed carbs and prepared foods will gradually taper off as a result. This is not to say that you should restrict yourself from any sort of comfort food – eat what you want, but be aware of your choices and opt for healthier options. For pizza, choose a thin wholegrain crust and use fresh vegetables; for hamburgers, use lean ground beef or try a tofu burger for a change! Try to eat clean and centre your diet around organically grown food. Organic foods will help avoid consuming pesticides and artificial fertilizers which can be hazardous to your health – if these chemicals are detrimental to insects, fungi, and weeds, it is probably safe to say that they won’t be beneficial to us in the long run either.
When we eat processed foods, our body still looks for an adequate amount of nutrition, so it asks for more food. Eating empty calories contribute to unnecessary weight gain. When we eat clean, we don’t need to eat the same large amounts because the body is getting the nourishment it needs. The pleasure of tasting the food that you love (like dessert) peaks in the first few bites and diminishes afterwards. So, instead of removing sweets from your diet entirely, reduce the portions consumed. Sometimes the trick to weight loss is eating more. Eating 5-6 small meals a day speeds your metabolism up, sustaining energy levels and feelings of satisfaction.
Western science has proven that a poor diet can result in a wide variety of diseases, including high blood pressure, type II diabetes, some cancers, and heart failure. Having a proper diet boosts overall health which in turn diminishes the need for medication, sometimes even reversing signs of disease.
Logging your food is also reflective of the Svadhyaya (self-study) part of yoga (niyamas or yogic observances). “If you bite it, write it!“ Create a food diary. If you write down everything you eat and how you feel afterwards, you will establish a successful recipe for your own personal diet in no time. A specific food may taste great, but if it impedes your sleep, causes less-focused meditation, or leaves you feeling lethargic, the food you are putting in your mouth probably isn’t the best.
The end goal is to create a new relationship with food and eat guilt-free. Your success will center around the mindfulness learned from yoga and will be a series of small changes that cumulate over time, gradually becoming part of your natural lifestyle. Success won’t happen overnight but as you continue to practice, you will build the willpower, patience, and appreciation towards both yourself and your ability to overcome any daunting obstacle. May you feel weightless in guilt and heavy in happiness in every step of your new journey.
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