“Why are you about to put that in your mouth?” I started asking myself this many years ago to bring guilt-free consciousness to my nutrition. As I became increasingly more mindful of my eating and drinking patterns, several reasons for why I consumed food and drink appeared: 5. Survival: In some places I’ve traveled, people were desperate for anything upon which they could subsist. When I was homeless, I was grateful for anything I could find to eat, especially when given as a gift. When you’re starving, no one cares about organic, local, whole, grass-fed, or nutrient density. You just want to eat.. Anything. That includes fast food, junk food and everything categorized by anyone as “unhealthy.” No one should argue quality with someone having insufficient quantity. 4. Energy: Only slightly above subsistence, when you can afford food, but your work and time demands intervene upon your ability to plan and schedule, then you eat what will give you the ability to make it to through the immediate task. Many times in school or while working abroad, I bought the nearest food I could ingest so that I could endure my job, continue to study, train or get home. How many people do you know who must have something immediately so that they can continue to face the heavy burdens of their job? When time is urgent, it’s not the time to discuss meal timing. 3. Mood: Above the hard fact of needing immediate energy, you can choose to eat to improve or alter your feelings. Too much of any one thing, or too little of another, can wreak havoc on our emotions. They comfort you based upon how the drug anchors to a specific positive period in your past. My comfort food is pumpkin pie which my mother and grandmother would make from scratch; so, when I was really stressed, I’d devour one to relax. Sweets, carbs and fats cause us pleasure but snare us to eating more for the same effect. It’s difficult to argue with someone who FEELS better by eating something, especially when so much of their lives appears to be going wrong. 2. Performance: Above energy and mood, you can eat to fine tune your work, training or activities. Not that you elect the healthiest approach, but rather you create a specific physical, emotional or mental effect with what you eat. I’ve been in great “shape” in my past, but not actually my healthiest. We adjust the portions, the combinations of fats, carbs and proteins to elicit a target result in output. There are many effective ways to do this, but they don’t necessarily have to be healthy. It’s difficult to argue with results, especially when youre successful in your job or in your fitness as a result. 1. Health: Eating to improve your health, to live longer (or at least to not shorten your life with illness and disease) remains controversial. Only with surplus abundance and luxury, do you find these arguments. It is a first world problem to CHOOSE to eat unhealthily. Health exceeds performance, because you can eat in the short term to achieve an objective, what ultimately will bring about illness and disease in the long term. Your health is an opulent luxury, as you will more effectively survive, have exuberant energy, be in a great mood, with a clear mind, precise hand and powerful body... For longer. But it is difficult for people who have the opportunity to become healthy to remain sensitive to the challenges of those facing survival, energy, mood and performance. We downshift our nutrition when challenges arise; instead of up-shifting it to optimize our life. Some would like to put “Joy” or “Pleasure” or “Love” above Health. Eating for an emotion, regardless of the positivity of the emotion, is still eating for a mood-altering experience. We can eat unhealthy foods for “joy”, as we can “savor” low-performance nutrition. However, we can also eat high-performance, healthy food which cause no shift in mood, can be difficult to savor and enjoy, as the medicinal quality of food which we need for performance and health often isn’t “pleasurable.” Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food, advised the founder of modern medicine, Hippocrates. When you open your mouth, and insert a substance, we must do it consciously. We must decide, “I am eating this to survive, for energy, to change my mood, to perform sufficiently, or to improve my health.” Then, be guilt-free. Choose exactly why you ingested it. You don’t need to carry any baggage when you’ve done this consciously. No one has a right to judge why you eat. If you want to change the purpose of why you’re eating, bringing mindfulness to the behavior will empower you. Diets won’t help if you follow them mindlessly. And your intuition will guide you to your optimal nutrition, if you remains mindful of everything you eat or drink. Let’s stop arguing about how others are eating. We don’t know what life is like for them, or the choices they feel they need to make. Be compassionate. Let them be. Let’s focus on ourselves. And be mindful in our decisions. We are Legion, Scott Sonnon Chief Operating Officer RMAX International RMAXInternational
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 18:19:10 +0000
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