What are you hungry for?
I am not a nutritionist, I can only speak from my experience with my own battles of body weight and perfectionism. I used to go at 100 mph, I would work loads, work out loads, eat loads, and repeat that cycle every day, everything was extreme! That resulted in me being a fairly intense, stocky individual – I wasn’t happy, content or calm, I was unhappy.
When I started to practice yoga, the lessons I learnt shifted my values. I started to see that it was my mental state, my beliefs that resulted in my body type. It took me a long time to overcome the idea that I wasn’t ‘wasting my time’ doing yoga rather than spin / hit / running. Crippled by grief and burn out, my body gave me no other choice (I now thank my body and the universe for that hard lesson), and slowly and steadily I began to enjoy exercising in a way which was kind to me, and from there everything changed. Not only are the poses nurturing and feel amazing (even in the tough poses, it feels like your body wants it) the dialogue during yoga classes taught me to swap my negative thinking for positive acknowledgements, so I stopped beating myself up and started seeing all the amazing qualities I had. When I started to practice that off the mat, I actually started to love myself (I’m absolutely not embarrassed to say that). I saw everything I had accomplished, overcome, all the work I had done on myself, despite the odds, and I felt proud of who I was. I loved myself unconditionally, rather than only being able to love myself if I had a six pack. That’s when I started to feel content, or in other words satisfied, and I can now see a direct correlation with my ‘contentedness’ and my diet.
Deepak Chopra askedd the question - ‘what are you really hungry for?’ And now I understand what he means. When I was hungry for happiness, love, attention, self-worth etc. I would eat, subconciously just trying to feel satisfied, content, full! But that was a misconnection. No amount of food can ever make us feel content, only temporarily full.
And there are some really unhelpful pressures and habits out there. We live in a culture where we count our steps, our watches buzz to encourage us to ‘move’. So after an often stressful day in the office, our bodies are filled with the stress hormone ‘cortisol’. And then to get maximum calorific burn in minimal time we go for a high intensity work out in the gym. But, high intensity workouts can increase stress levels in the body, increasing our cortisol. And cruely, high cortisol in the body, signals that we are under threat so our body stores fat in case of emergency. So high intensity exercise can lead to increased fat stores, especially on the stomach. Not to mention the other effects of cortisol including reduced immune systems, inflammation ie pain, autoimmune disease and more.
When I share content like this in a corporate environment or group training, I ask people whether they would swap high intensity exercise for low intensity exercise and resoundingly the answer is still ‘no’. Those who are honest will admit that it’s because they a scared of putting on weight. What’s interesting is that research shows exercise only changes your body weight by 20%, 80% is what we eat. So many people are trapped - stressed and so overeating, overeating and so over exercising, over exercising and so over eating, imprisoned by their own (socially constructed) walls.
We have to apply more wisdom (root of that word vid - to see!). If we can learn the tools to stay calm, adjust our mindset, feel more content, we won’t crave the same foods, and then won’t need to exercise for calorific burn but instead for our minds, to nurture our body rather than punish it.