Do You Know How Wise Your Body Is?

I cannot tell you how happy I am to get emails from you telling me about your progress.  As I sit here at my keyboard trying to reach out to people to let them know there is another way, it is so rewarding to hear back from you.

So thank you for taking the time to let me know that you are out there.

I want to tell you about another factor this is so important to eating with a thin mentality.

Besides our messed up relationship with food, we have a messed up relationship with sleep.  We don’t respect what sleep does for our body.  On the TV show “Morning Joe” I watched Dr. Nancy Snyderman talk about the relationship between sleep deprivation and strokes and obesity and type 2 diabetes. They spoke of sleep deprivation and a link to heart disease.

And I found it fascinating that the discussion was paying respect to the differences among people and their sleep needs.  Why do we not talk about that when it comes to eating?

And, going along with my mantra to stop listening to the experts and pay attention to your body, they talked about vitamins.  For years, we have been told to take calcium, vitamin d, multi vitamins, etc.  Now, Dr. Snyderman said that she had stopped taking everything, except a baby aspirin!

The only answer that makes any sense is to get in touch with the wisdom of your body.  Take care of yourself by respecting the signals your body sends you.

Eat what you crave when you are hungry.  Stop eating when you body stops asking for food.  Sleep when you are tired.

Then, at the end of the discussion, they talk about a new Burger King sundae that has ice cream and bacon.  It is 510 calories.

They made fun of this dessert.

Ok, I am not saying to go buy this dessert.

But if you think that this dessert is a poison, you are wrong.  If you had a piece of bacon at breakfast with your eggs, for example, and then later in the day, you had a serving of ice cream that you were craving, it would not seem so weird.

But put them in a bowl together and everyone is up in arms.

Eating a 510 calorie Burger King sundae when you are hungry for some fat may be perfectly appropriate for you.  Remember that eating fat is important for brain function, and some studies say that even for mental health and anxiety.   I only point these studies out because I want to show you that science can swing both ways on issues like this.

Then later in the show, a guest spoke of his book Incognito, Inside the Brain to talk about how your brain would perceive that bacon sundae.  Then Mika, the host and a truly righteous dieter, admits that her brain would tell her she wanted to eat five of them!  How sad!  When I was a dieter, my brain would have said that as well.  As a thin mentality person that sundae has ZERO power over me.

I don’t think my body would ever crave that, because that is not the kind of food my body likes.  I like plenty of high fat, sweet things, but not that.   There is no value judgment here.  I simply know me, and my hunger, and what I tend to crave.

You are different.  And isn’t that nice?  And isn’t that what makes the world go around?

So, back to the bottom line.  No food is evil.  The starving children in Uganda will tell you that.

But eating when you are not hungry will cause you to be fat.  Whether you are eating too many vegetables, too much fat or too much pasta, you will get fat overeating anything.

So choose your food based on the biological cues your body is sending to you

The vitamin companies make money convincing you that you need them.

The diet industry makes money convincing you need them.

Fight back!