Weight loss - conscious eating
Have you been trying to lose weight by exercising or by trying different radical diets? Do you feel like it is a losing battle? Many people call our clinic asking about weight loss treatments and what we do for the patients. I am going to try and explain what the word diet means and how weight loss can be achieved in a wholistic way.
Weight loss achieved by radical diets are almost always scraping the problem only on the surface. The word "diet" literally means everything that you eat and not a specific type of food. Factors needed to be considered for losing weight are emotional, physical and even spiritual. Happy people invariably tend to be at their ideal weight and healthy. Ideal weight is the weight at which every person is the healthiest. It is not the standard that is set by the conventional medical system. Keeping yourself happy and eating for the needs of the body and recognizing emotional eating are some of the important factors that have to be considered for bringing your body to your healthy ideal weight.
Our body wants to heal, the natural state for our body is being healthy and the natural state for our mind is to be at peace. If anyone says otherwise, it is not true. When we treat our body with kindness, our body naturally responds with love and starts to heal.
Developing healthy eating habits is one of the key points to lose weight, but also managing stress is very important too to stay at your ideal weight, life long. Points to remember are,
1. Love yourself for everything you are. That means, embracing the good, bad and the ugly and knowing that each and every one of us have the same things in us. No one is any different from the other. A simple prescription that I write out for my patients to achieve this is, to look at yourself in the mirror and look into your eyes and say, I love myself unconditionally right now twice a day. When you say this, there will be a lot of negative emotions that will come up, like i am ugly, i am fat, i am worthless etc. Just embrace that too and continue saying it every day for at least 30 days. Before the end of 30 days, a shift would have happened in you, where you can see all the things that you can love youself for. This is key to be healthy and to lose weight.
2. Eat ONLY when you are hungry every time. Become aware of your body's needs and fulfill those needs as necessary. Understand if the hunger is emotional or physical before reaching for food.
3. Avoid eating in front of a TV or while reading a book or even having an interesting conversation. When you don't eat consciously by paying attention to what you eat and how you chew and how you feel, it is very easy to miss the feeling of being full. Also talking during eating, enables swallowing large amounts of air with food and hence the saliva can't mix with the foods properly to aid in digestion.
4. Do not drink water while eating. This washes the hydrochlroic acid produced in the stomach when you were hungry. Hcl is very important in breaking down the foods you eat.
4. Stop eating when you burp the first time. This is usually a good indicator of the stomach being full. It is very easy to miss the burping if you are not eating consciously.
When you start paying attention to how you eat, not only do you notice how quickly you feel full than before but you chew your foods properly and also start enjoying your food. Now, it is easier to make better choices in the foods that you eat. I will write another post soon about the conventional food pyramid and the healthy food pyramid that would help you make better choices with your food.
