Staying Slim

“Far more indispensable than food for the physical body is spiritual nourishment for the soul. One can do without food for a considerable time, but a man of the spirit cannot exist for a single second without spiritual nourishment.”
~ Gandhi

Is there a recipe for healthy eating?

The quality of what you eat is important to your overall health and wellness. But is there something that is even more important? The folks at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition think so. Advocates of a holistic approach to nutrition, they postulate that what you eat is secondary to the quality of your life - your relationships, your career, your physical activity, and your spirituality - considered primary food in their unique recipe for healthy eating.

No matter how much attention and care you give to your diet and what you eat, optimal health and wellness will evade you if your sources of primary food are deficient. Focus on what really feeds and nourishes you and you are sure to thrive, even if your ‘diet’ isn’t perfect. This is a key ingredient in their recipe for healthy eating.

It’s the news I’ve been waiting to hear after years of trying to determine the ‘right way to eat’ from all the experts and authorities who appear locked in a violent battle of conflicting nutritional information. When you look around you realize that the science of nutrition has done little to alleviate the modern woes that surround us - obesity, chronic disease, and deep seated unhappiness.

It’s because what we eat can never replace our desire for quality relationships, rewarding work, enjoyable physical activity, and spiritual connection with food. And yet we try to fill all that is missing in our lives with food. In the process we become sicker, fatter, and unhappier.

Once we recognize the importance of primary food in our recipe for healthy eating and begin focusing on improving these critical areas of our lives our issues with the food we eat take their appropriate secondary position and become manageable. We are able to lose the weight and eat better with much less struggle. It seems too good to be true, but it’s not. We are on the path to living healthy, happy, rewarding lives. We have found a recipe for healthy eating we can live with that will support us. Will there be bumps in the road? Yes, but given our increasing awareness of food’s rightful position of importance we will feel equipped to handle them.

If you are you interested in learning more about holistic nutrition or working with a counselor The Institute of Integrative Nutrition has a graduate directory to assist you. I worked with Darshana Weill of Fruition Health by telephone for several months. One of the first graduates of the IIN program, she is a gifted holistic health counselor who helped me fine-tune my nutritional concerns.

IIN graduate, Dani Spies, has a beautiful informative website full of healthy recipes. You can purchase the book, Integrative Nutrition: The Future of Nutrition by IIN Director, Joshua Rosenthal at amazon.com. It’s an informative book full of powerful exercises designed to help you healthfully transform your relationship with food. I highly recommend it.

There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal called, Putting an end to Mindless Munching. According to the article, Mindful Eating, the art of slowing down and paying attention to what you are eating, is being studied at several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health as a way to combat eating disorders and the results are promising.

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Does our clutter make us fat? Simplification and organization expert Peter Walsh thinks so. This is the topic of his book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More.

He makes a strong case for the link between excess stuff and excess body weight. “As a society we keep getting fatter and fatter and our stuff keeps getting bigger and bigger from the size of our burgers and fries to the size of our houses and cars. We keep filling ourselves up inside and out with more and more stuff.”

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I just finished a wonderful ‘non-diet’ book called The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss by Marc David that combines the best of The French Women Don’t Get Fat philosophy with the latest research on body biochemistry and the powerful mind-body connection. It’s complete nutrition for the body, mind and soul.

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People who keep a food journal are more successful losing weight than those who don’t. Studies prove it over and over again. That’s why many weight loss plans like Weight Watchers require it.

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There are lots of reasons that yoga helps with weight loss that go far beyond the physical practice. In fact, calories burned alone can’t account for the the power of this ancient practice. I’m living proof. Yoga helps with all aspects of the weight issue–physical, mental, and emotional.

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Friday night I joined twelve women in a Reconnect with Food Candlelight Yoga Workshop led by dietician and yoga teacher, Beverly Price. The session began with a one hour yoga class where poses were held for what seemed to me an interminable amount of time and concluded with a one hour sharing circle complete with talking stick and a mindful eating exercise. It was a great introductory exploration of using yoga and “mindful awareness” to gain a deeper understanding of self-acceptance and self-awareness, especially as it relates to food and eating issues.

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I have just finished Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and all I can say is wow. It’s his follow up to his bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that attempts to answer the question “What should I eat?”

He sums it up in his eater’s manifesto with seven simple words: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

And then goes on to give background on how and why he developed this food philosophy:

• We should reject science and industry in determining what and how we should eat.
• Science is limited in understanding something as richly complex and multifaceted as food.
• Much of the ’scientific wisdom’ we have been fed over the past several decades is being proved wrong.
• Most of the stuff in grocery stores today is not food, but overly processed, artificially flavored, dyed and chemically infused ‘food like products.’
• The Western diet now consists of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything–except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.”
• We are overfed and undernourished for the first time in history.
• We have become an unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.
• Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
• We have become alienated and confused and no longer think in terms of eating meat, grains and veggies, but their chemical components: proteins, fats, carbohydrates, saturated fats, omega 3s, trans-fats, etc.

He strongly believes, “It’s time to return to tradition, common sense and intuition, our senses, and the wisdom of mom and grandma. We can learn a lot more about eating from history, culture and tradition than science because whole foods are proving to provide much more than just the sum of their parts.”

The rise of the organic movement, and local agricultural renaissance underway across the country allows us to opt out of the conventional food system. Eaters now have real choices. Once again we have real food to eat. And all I can say is hurray for that.

He further defines his seven word eating food philosophy with the following guidelines:

• Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that include high fructose corn syrup.
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
• Get out of the supermarket and instead visit as much as possible farmers markets, CSAs, farm stands, etc.
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves–they are full of phytonutrients.
• Eat small amounts of meat, treating it more as a flavoring or condiment for the plants.
• You are what you eat and what you eats eats too–think grass fed meats and free range organic poultry.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Take supplements. People who take supplements tend to be healthier overall.
• Eat like the French or the Italians of the Japanese, or the Indians or the Greeks…a traditional diet of real foods. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet. Eat a wide variety of foods.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner if you want.
• Pay more and eat less. Eat food of a higher quality and in less quantity.
• Eat meals at the table not at the desk or in front of television.
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Eat slowly and enjoy your food–it should be pleasurable.
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.

And there you have it. A simple nourished way to eat. Thank you Michael Pollan, for helping return us to our senses.

I can hardly wait to get to the farmer’s market!

How do we cultivate healthy habits and make positive changes in our lives? We have two options: we can let go of something that isn’t working or we can introduce something new that will.

For example we can stop (or severely limit) our consumption of french fries or we can commit to eating an extra serving of fruits and veggies every day. Either choice results in a more nourished diet.

To stay balanced it may be helpful to give up something unhealthy and replace it with a better choice, like substituting a side salad for french fries when eating out.

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Nourishing Yoga is a kinder gentler approach to health and fitness that focuses on taking care of ourselves, not beating ourselves up.

We tend to be so hard on ourselves, focusing on our perceived weaknesses and faults, instead of celebrating our strengths. We think that if we just keep working harder, eating less, and denying ourselves, we will lose weight and everything will be perfect.

After a lifetime of struggle, I have learned that diets just don’t work. In fact, studies show that most of us end up gaining more weight than we lost following a diet. It’s time to get off the rollercoaster of deprivation and bingeing. It’s time to take care of ourselves, find balance and stop our extreme behaviors.

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