Body – Diet – Avoiding Eating Too Much
by pre.
We discussed last week how to alter your tastes so that you want to eat, crave to eat, the kinds of foods which you know intellectually you should eat. If you’ve been going over this month’s guided meditation file you’re probably already starting to see changes in your tastes.
You will likely find that, as you learn to love foods which better suit your nutritional needs, you are automatically starting to eat the appropriate amounts. As your nutritional needs are covered you aren’t craving that burger just to get the tiny trace amounts of vitamins in it.
However, especially in our modern advertisement-filled social sphere, some still find that they are eating too much, even if they start to eat the right things.
There are several things you can do which will help you to overcome, even eliminate, the desire to eat more than is healthy for you.
The first is to pay attention when you are eating. Eat as slowly, deliberately, and with as much focus and concentration as you can manage. The skills you have learned in previous months should help here, you’ll likely find that the more attention you pay to the food as you eat it, the more your body will remember eating it, and thus it’s filling effects will last longer.
Eating slowly has the added advantage of giving your body’s blood-sugar levels time to adjust as you eat, so that they more accurately reflect your actual need for food. Immediately shovelling in a ton of ice-cream and cake won’t give your body time to react and let you know when you’re full. The more slowly you eat, the more attention you pay as you do so, the more clear and accurate your body’s signals to your mind will become.
Of course, eating slowly and paying attention also have the hedonistic advantage that you’ll enjoy your food more, get more pleasure from it, eke out your eating out. And since you find each mouthful so much more rewarding, you’ll need fewer of them.
If all this isn’t working though, if you’re suffering cravings for food you know you shouldn’t eat, there is still something that you can do: distract yourself.
This tip is helpful not just when concerning food, but whenever you find your mind wondering in unproductive directions: Craving food, moaning or complaining, berating yourself, obsessing miserably. You’ll be practised at a few of the excercises or improving the Spiral Skills by now, so distract yourself by doing one of them.. Perhaps not one based on food if you’re trying to forget food, but you can run over the things stored in your Loci map or just practice staring intently, paying close attention to something then recalling it, or indeed simply blanking your mind with a calmness meditation. As you get better at controling your own thought processes, you’ll automatically turn to these excercises to fill time when bored rather than allowing your mind to drift to fake-hunger or contemplating your misery.