Walking in Beauty
For All Dieters Who Have Failed, Here’s a ‘Cheers’ Your Body’s Wisdom!
For most of us, dieting doesn’t work. Whether you want to change your figure, your ethic, or your palate, most of us grasp on for a while, find ourselves grappling with the edge of the wagon, and soon find ourselves staring at the back of it. Feel like you’ve fallen off...again? Does it feel like you’ve tried every diet? Keto, paleo, name brand diets, paid membership club diets, calorie, carb, and/ or portion counting only to finally toss it to the wind in a feeling of shame, defeat, selfloathing, all surrounded by the short-lived orgasmic joy of the rebound? Then, of course, the fallout from that feast. Maybe you feel, too, like the scales can just never be balanced, like there can be no equilibrium. Okay. What if we break this down into smaller reference frames? What if instead of looking at the diet itself as a matter of success and failure, we instead look at the perceived struggle as a blessed opportunity for us to learn to enjoy our food with a fervor. What if we parse this apart and focus on each moment as an opportunity to succeed, as an opportunity to sponge up every drop of feeling, of sensation, and presence with every single morsel of that meal? What if the goal of this isn’t succeeding in some diet as though we were perpetually on the edge of a cliff doomed for failure, but instead were atop a beautiful vista taking in the glory of this present moment? This is the idea behind both mindful and intuitive eating. Forget the diet. Forget the guilt, the shame, the failure. Embrace now, right now. (Let’s get present here.) Pause. Ask yourself, what do I really want to eat? The first step to becoming an intuitive eater is giving yourself unconditional permission to eat. The body must learn to trust you again, in that you won’t deprive it through austere and often neglectful dieting. How can you re-establish trust again with your body, which is your birthright? Promise yourself that you will never go on another diet again! Why do we eat? Survival (biological hunger), emotion or stress eating, boredom, social eating, and simply eating because food is in front of us. There is such an abundance of food in our culture! The second step is learning to honor your biological hunger and thus feel your fullness. Let your body’s biological cues be your compass. Many 24
June 2019
dieters have lost touch with the orientation of their tummy compass - the physical sensation of what true hunger and fullness feels like in their own body - because they have learned to heed external (i.e., diet) rules for eating rather than feeling and trusting internal cues. When one begins this journey, one needs to become hyper-aware of what both physical hunger and fullness feels like in their own body. This vigilance is necessary because we’re constantly being told what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, instead of feeling it for ourselves. Since early childhood there has been external cueing (a parent or guardian) setting this stage for us, as in “finish your food,” or “you’ve had enough.” So, we’ve learned to internalize external cues for feeding instead of feeling our own internal cues as a guide. For all dieters who have failed, here’s a ‘cheers’ to your body’s wisdom! The last step is honoring your well-being with gentle nutrition, and this step needs to arrive gently, without our forcing it. To get from step two to step three, we must adjust our relationship to eating into one that is not only appreciative but attentive of both food and process. This is an act of mindfulness with our food. In other words, pay attention to how you’re eating as you’re doing so! The first two steps are not so much about what you are eating, but about why and how you are eating. Once we begin to cultivate paying attention, we will begin to naturally gravitate toward foods that help us feel more clarity with our internal compass of hunger and satiety, and our body’s internal wisdom will again take over. Once again, we can take life’s reigns in our hands and feel some direction and focus in our lives, rather than perpetually obsessing over food, dieting, and woulda-coulda-shoulda! Bon Appetit! An excellent resource is Intuitive Eating, by Tribole and Resch. Emily Hornback is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine practicing in Gallup. Trained in Classical Chinese Medicine, she has made it her life’s work to help people find balance in their everyday life through the practical wisdom of Oriental Medicine. She incorporates not only acupuncture and herbal remedies, but also dietary and lifestyle advice. forLoveofLife Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine
