Wrestling with Nutrition through Mindfulness
I’ve been working on the ongoing practice of mindfulness for years now, since I started as a Spa Director in 2004. Mindfulness is something to be honed daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. until it becomes a part of who you are. Being mindful is about presence in the moment and being thoughtful every day about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. How to get the results you’re really going after and achieving them through mindful planning and execution. This is not to say that sometimes your brain gets in front of you for how quickly you put your thoughts into action, it just means that you think about what you’re doing and how it effects the desired outcome and those around you.
MINDFULNESS (def.) – a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
Using mindfulness for the greater good, a few years ago my gut was telling me it’s not happy. Mostly through constant bloating, inflammation and constipation, you know, things that I thought were just normal parts of everyday living, until I started having a pain in my liver area that wouldn’t go away. Not being one to run to the doctor over trivial matters, I ran to the doctor…are you kidding me, this pain in my liver that wouldn’t go away. Pain is a sign in the body that something is wrong and it wants you to pay attention to it. I had been ignoring the other symptoms: constant bloating, inflammation and constipation, so my body gave me something I couldn’t ignore. Well, things checked out well for my liver, and now I was out $900. But I had a true wake up call, that what I was eating wasn’t working for me and I needed to be more mindful about what I was eating and how my body was reacting to it.
Of course being human I would slip, you know how it goes…I’m feeling better, maybe it was just a bug (it’s not just a bug), maybe I’m not as sensitive as I thought I was about what my body can tolerate (yes, I am), but being human, I eat that thing that made me feel not so good and the feeling instantly comes back, no matter the “little” quantity that I eat of it. It’s our way as humans to try to get away with having that thing we THINK we want. It’s habit. It’s comforting. It’s a food I love. However, the more I dove into the mindfulness part of eating, I was beginning to realize that everything that I loved to eat, hated me, because I would react to it. Thus, what I’ve become is a health nut, a food snob or a picky eater, take your pick. I can no longer eat the foods that I grew up eating, thinking that they weren’t effecting my health and making me feel less than. As my nutrition blueprint improved so did my mindfulness in what I was eating, as well as my mindfulness in everything else I do. It helped lay the foundation for me to see other areas of my life in which mindfulness could be applied to achieve the result that I was looking for. After all, that’s what I want…results.
Being mindful has taught me a lot about my personal nutrition, which has lead me to better exercise outcomes, better treatment outcomes for myself and my clients, better outcomes in the classroom…mindfulness has allowed me to see what works and change it immediately if it isn’t. Mindfulness allows awareness in everything else you do.
See how you can apply mindfulness to your daily life to achieve goals that you have set for yourself. Before you know, you too could be getting the results that you’re looking for.
That’s the Rub,
Lisa
P.S. This is an interactive blog. If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas you’d like to discuss or are interested in, please comment below.
