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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Diet:
- I’ll explain why dieting doesn’t always equal health
- I’ll talk about the two main types of diets that all other diets can be grouped under
- I’ll talk about the one true diet that I believe everybody should be on
- Finally I’ll highlight a few techniques that you can use to fine tune your real food nutrition
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Diet; dieting; to diet; to be on a diet; and for some people don’t even mention the ‘D’ word. For anyone who has dealt with body weight issues hearing the word diet brings up a lot of other words:
- Restrictive
- Tasteless
- Boring
- Struggle
- Willpower
- Low energy
- Anger
- Frustration
- Pain
Notice how there’s no mention here of an improvement in health.
Diets are mainly used to reduce your weight and yes all diets will change your weight and modify your body composition, short-term. It doesn’t matter what diet you go on you will lose both muscle and fat in the first few weeks.
The problem with any diet when used for far too long, way past its due by date, is that you may end up losing a lot more healthy muscle than non-healthy fat and even more importantly you will eventually create havoc, chaos, and a huge imbalance in your hunger, satiety, stress, growth, and reproductive hormones. Meaning that if you follow a diet purely to reduce your weight and to change how you look that diet will work in the here and now, but in 6 months or 6 years this same diet will cause a cascade of health problems making you a very sick, sad, and surly person to be around.
The reason for this is because the main type of diet people use to reduce their weight and to look good in the mirror is a limiting diet. Anytime you limit the foods you eat you run the risk of missing out on vital nutrients. That is nutrition your body and mind need for vitality. Long-term deficiencies in nutrients may make you look good in the mirror, but it’s the hormonal havoc that these nutritional deficiencies cause that is at the root cause of many diseases including cancer.
It’s not just food you limit in these body image diets, but anytime you limit your way of thinking and feelings toward food and your relationship with food you limit your entire human experience. Your mindset, which was once open to the many possibilities in life, is now closed off to a collection of experiences that life has to offer. Limiting your way of being can cause a lot of distress and this emotional and mental stress will change your physiology creating real physical stress in your body. Remember the body and mind are one and the same, the bodymind.
I’ve mentioned one type of diet already, a limited diet where you limit your eating and your way of being to achieve a body image goal. There is a different type of diet and what differentiates this diet from a limited diet is that it doesn’t restrict foods in the same sense because it’s not based on looking good, but based on thinking, feeling, and doing good and this other type of diet accomplishes this goal through healing. This healing diet I call a limitless diet.
A limitless diet is followed for health and life reasons and not for body image reasons alone. The reason this type of diet is limitless and not limiting is because your why is much bigger than just looking good in the mirror. Your why could be to overcome a disease like cancer, to have more energy to play with your family and to get work done, or to be able to think clearly in order to start and finish a personal, a professional, or a community project you’ve been thinking about for a long time.
When your why for following a diet is bigger than just how you look in the mirror than the foods you restrict yourself to eating no longer seem so, restrictive. Whereas a limiting diet is about scarcity where you feel like you lose and miss out on foods in order to lose the weight, a limitless diet is all about abundance and where you feel awesome dropping the foods that will stop you from realising and sharing that abundance.
What I’m saying here is that no matter the diet whether you go on a medical or detox or paleo or vegan or vegetarian or low calorie or low carb or low fat or a crash diet or even a religious diet if it’s to look good naked and nothing else you will feel limited, restricted, and neglected in every ounce of your being. However, if you use this diet to improve your health, to improve your life and the health and life of other people you will never feel like you’re missing out and you will be nothing but thankful for having a way of eating that is helping you make a difference in the world.
Now that’s not to say that wanting to look a certain way is wrong. Far from it. Being a vein person is a great motivator and inspirer for change.
What I’m saying is that dieting purely for looks is a lot more difficult and harder to stick to than when you’re dieting for other reasons. Hence the statistic that 95% of dieters regain all of their lost weight and then some. So unless you’re one of the 5% who can live through a limited period of your life thinking in a limited mindset you may want to rethink why you’re following a particular diet.
A limited diet is very difficult to integrate into your life, a limitless diet on the other hand doesn’t need integration as it becomes a part of your life and following it becomes a part of who you are and your lifestyle.
Now there is actually one diet that trumps every single other diet out there. This diet is one diet that I believe every person should be following and the cool part about this diet is even if you’re on it just to look good naked you won’t feel limited in any way, shape, or form. This one diet for all is a limitless lifestyle diet no matter your reasons for choosing it.
There’s not really a name for this diet because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach with it. There’s no prescribed food list of restricted and allowed foods. There’s no specific end to this diet either. Like I said it’s a limitless lifestyle diet so it only ends when you end.
This diet is many other things. It’s:
- Original
- Individual
- Adaptable
- Flexible
- Customisable
- Attainable
- Relatable
- Educational
- Delectable
- Flavourful
- Nutritional
- Healthful and
- Spiritual
You will definitely find out who you are on this diet.
This diet is unique to your physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs and no other person on this planet will be eating the same foods, at the same times of day, in the same portion sizes to you even though both of you are on this one single diet. Same goes for twins. Just because you can eat broccoli with tonnes of butter with a nice piece of steak at this point in your life doesn’t necessarily mean your identical twin can eat the same way.
Okay so now I’m just trying to think how to describe a diet that is different for each person.
The whole point of this diet is to find the right foods that work for you and the wrong foods that don’t work for you and by work for you I mean after you eat a certain food does it make you look, feel, and perform better in life and if you continue to eat this food overtime is it helping to improve your financial and health status, is it improving your relationships, and most importantly is this food making you a happy, joyful, pleasurable, and peaceful human being full of vitality, love, and laughter.
So I guess you could call this diet a diet of discovery or a process diet because as time goes on you will be fine tuning and figuring out the foods that you should be eating and shouldn’t be eating in this moment. On this diet you will find some foods that worked for you 6 months ago may no longer be serving you now and the right foods that are working for you now in a few years time may turn out to be the wrong foods for you. This diet is constantly changing and evolving and it’s the process that you focus on while eating this way, not some far off distant goal or outcome.
To begin this unique individualised diet it must start with real food. I’ve talked about real foods compared to fake foods in podcast number seven and eight so listen to those for more detail, but basically if it came from a man-made packet instead of a nature-based pasture it’s not real food.
So starting with real food the next step is to find out what foods are creating a low-level inflammatory, immune, and stress reaction in your body and which foods aren’t.
One simple way of doing this is by tracking your heart rate. Fifteen minutes before eating the food you’re testing measure your resting heart rate for 60 seconds to get your heart beats per minute. After finishing the food wait another 15 minutes before measuring your heart rate again. Be sure to keep yourself in a relaxed state during the entire process. If your heart rate increased up to 9 beats per minute retest the food. You really want no increase at all in your heart rate, but anything under 5 beats per minute is fine. If your heart rate increased by at least 10 beats per minute then your body is reacting to that food and it’s best not to eat that food for another 3 to 6 months before retesting it again.
One of the oldest methods to find out if your body is reacting to a food in a negative way is by following a strict elimination provocation diet. This diet integrates well with your unique diet that you are working on discovering as they both have the same basic idea. Eat the foods that work for you and don’t eat the foods that don’t work for you. Plus both diets keep you in a limitless mindset as they’re both about discovering your own unique diet. The main difference being that at the very beginning of your new way of eating with an Elimination Provocation diet you cut down on the highest allergenic foods and other foods that a lot of people are intolerant and sensitive to. The other difference is that most people do an EP diet once and believe that’s how they should be eating from now on until forever. Whereas with the unique diet that your customising for your own needs you are continually improving and testing and removing what works and what doesn’t work over your lifetime.
So after 90 days on the EP diet you begin introducing one at a time 4 days apart a new food and keep track of any changes in your bodymind. If you react badly keep that food at bay for another 3 to 6 months before reintroducing it again. If you respond positively that food stays in your diet until the next time you want to test if it’s working for you or not.
Check out The Elimination Diet book by Tom Malterre and Alissa Segersten for more detailed information including food elimination introduction lists, meal plans, and recipes.
Another method you can use to find out if the foods you’re eating are making your bodymind happy or not is by muscle testing. Muscle testing, also known as applied kinesiology, is based on the energetic being of your body and is used to diagnose and treat many health issues by testing how your body reacts to certain objects or questions. With regards to foods you could hold a food with one hand close to your chest and heart and hold up your other arm keeping it straight. You would get someone else to press down on your extended arm and if you’re able to keep your arm straight and in place then that food would be acceptable to eat. If your extended arm becomes weak and drops down then that food should not be eaten at this time.
Another thing you’ll need to discover is how much fats, proteins, and carbohydrates you should be eating, that is what is your ideal macronutrient ratio. One way to find this out is by keeping a body language log. You want to track your satisfaction, energy, and mood levels after each meal. Regarding satisfaction one thing to keep an eye on is whether you’re still hungry or crave sweets after a meal. If you’re still hungry then you may have had too many carbs. If you’re craving sweets than maybe you didn’t have enough carbs or you had too much fat and protein. When it comes to energy levels if it didn’t get noticeably better after a meal you probably had too much fat and protein and if you feel absolutely wiped out and ready for a nap that’s a sign of too many carbs. Finally, with your mood if you’re anxious or irritable than you most likely had too much sugar and you’re crashing after the meal.
For more information on real food and for a body language log that you can use to track your macronutrients I highly recommend Sean Croxton’s eBook The Dark Side of Fat Loss. It talks about real food and other holistic ways of improving your health and includes a really nice one page body language log that’s intuitive and simple to use.
Remember:
“There’s no one true diet for all.”
So the next time someone says there is and that these are the only foods you should be eating for the rest of your life and they don’t allow for flexibility and adaptability and growth, well don’t accept it blindly. It doesn’t mean you can’t use restricted diets in limitless ways. It just means these diets should only be used for short periods of time before moving onto the next one.
But instead of going on a diet why not make your diet a part of your lifestyle. Because there is one true dieting process for all and with heart rate monitoring, elimination diets, muscle testing, and body language logs you will find out and realise for yourself the one true diet that works for you and that makes you happy, healthy, whole, and complete. Forever.
Amen!
Links and Resources
- WGP 007: Food Nutrition – What is Real Food?
- WGP 008: A Real Food Manifesto
- The Elimination Die — Tom Malterre, Alissa Segersten
- The Dark Side of Fat Loss — Sean Croxton
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring How to get Yourself Back on a Holistic Track after Overindulging on Food:
- I’ll explain how overeating can be a gateway to many other dream-negating bad habits
- I’ll talk about some of the causes for overeating
- Finally I’ll share five tips that’ll help get your bodymind back into a holistic way of being after an episode of overeating
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Overeating, binging, and overindulging on food are habits that other animals don’t seem to exhibit. The human animal, however, practises this habitual way of eating to the extreme a lot more than it should.
When you binge eat there’s the possibility of thinking that since you’re already doing something that’s not exactly health-promoting you may as well do some other non-healthy things like indulge in some alcohol, sloth around all day, or just think horrible negative thoughts like how sucky it is to be you right now for not having the willpower to just say no to food.
As a kid I would binge eat on cookies or crackers and hot chocolate (yummy) and I still have binge eating episodes to this day. I know for myself that once I start going down the binge eating path my return to the path of a healthy way of eating can be a long and difficult one as other healthy habits fall by the wayside as well. My sleeping pattern would go all over the place, I’d forget (on purpose) about keeping up with my usual movement practise, and I’d find my thoughts heading down a dark corridor.
One reason for overeating is not being mindful and conscious of your own actions.
I know many people who literally eat like ducks. They barely chew their food and end up swallowing big portions of food down their gullets. I know many people like this because I used to be one. You can only see what you have within you, so that’s why it’s easy for me to see this because I definitely had this mindless habit for a long time. Back in the day I was one of the fastest eaters on the planet (true story) and I never took the time to chew my food, you know to just enjoy the taste. I was never fully involved in the whole eating process. I guess you could say I thought eating was a waste of time and I had better things to do. Problem is because I ate so fast I wasn’t giving my body the proper signals that I’ve eaten and it’s time to stop now. So I would have seconds, thirds, and all too often a fourth serving. Looking back at it now all I can think is ‘man I really was a pig… or a duck.
Another reason for binge eating is emotional.
Feeling alone or hurt. Feeling like you don’t have a purpose and don’t know who you are and what you want or living a life that you really aren’t in love with. So loneliness, confusion, and fear of life itself will cause many people to turn to food for comfort and this can turn into a long period of binge eating.
Last reason I’ll give for overindulging on food is the season.
What I’m talking about here are special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and holidays, all of these are perfect excuses to get off the health train and on the indulgence express (my kind of ride). I mean who doesn’t love pumpkin pies, fruit salads with ice cream, cakes, and my personal favourite homemade smoked salmon. Smoked salmon, you may be thinking how is that unhealthy? Well let me tell you how. If you can sit down and eat half a whole salmon including the head in less than 20 minutes that my friend is overindulging of the highest degree. Remember:
“Too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.”
All right so let’s get into five ways you can get yourself back to living a holistic healthy lifestyle after an episode of overeating.
So the day after your however-long binge first thing you want to do is to get back in touch with your dream. What is your dream? Do you even have a dream? Have you written it down with specific goals and outlined the steps you need to take to get you there? Have you got clear personal core values on when to say yes or no when it comes to your dream? If you haven’t got a dream with clear goals and core values then you’re living life with no real direction.
A dream is your compass, your GPS that keeps you on your chosen path.
As the saying goes:
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
So unless your dream is to gain massive amounts of weight or to outdo everyone at a buffet meal or to win an all-you-can-eat contest then overeating, binging, and overindulging on food are not dream-affirmative actions. Listen to the Dream Building podcast I did for more information on using dreams to help guide your holistic lifestyle, it’s podcast number 14.
Second tip: get outdoors. Strip to the bare essentials (not fully naked, but if you can get fully naked more power to you) and get some sunshine on your skin and ground yourself to the Earth by going barefoot on the grass, soil, or sand. Connecting with nature will help improve your mood, boost your immune system, and help reduce the inflammation caused by the excessive amounts of energy you’ve been putting into your body.
Third tip is to do a little fasting. Digestion is a 4-6 hour process and your body has to focus a lot of attention on this very important function. Nutrients and energy will be diverted to your stomach and intestines to ensure proper digestion takes place, but this means other functions in your body will be somewhat affected.
One process that happens in your cells only during times your body isn’t digesting and when you haven’t eaten in a long time is called autophagy. Autophagy is when cells destroy, clear out, and recycle old, damaged, and unused proteins. This makes for a healthier, cleaner internal environment for the cell giving it longevity and maintaining its ability to function at an optimal level. By fasting you give your cells the chance to clear out the junk and to repair or get rid of what’s not working.
Now there are many different ways to fast. You could do a 24 hour fast once or twice a week, a 48 hour water fast, 3 day fruit fast, couple weeks of juice fasting, or what I normally practise intermittent fasting where you fast between 12-18 hours and eat only within a certain feeding window of 12-6 hours.
Right now I’m doing a 12 hour fast with a 12 hour feeding window. So I usually finish eating dinner before 7 and don’t have breakfast until 7 the next morning.
Fourth tip is to move at high intensities. High intensity movement patterns include lifting heavy (at least 80% your 1 rep maximum) and high intensity interval training where you go all out for a certain amount of time and then rest for a certain amount of time and you repeat this over and over.
High intensity training helps maintain and build lean muscle mass, which is a metabolically rich part of your body, meaning the more muscle you have the more energy you actually need to maintain it. HIT also keeps your metabolism raised long after the workout, up to 48 hours in some cases, allowing your body to burn energy and fat even while you’re at rest. HIT compared to longer endurance activities stops your stress hormone cortisol from staying too high for too long, which is exactly what you want as cortisol is catabolic, meaning it breaks things down including muscle tissue. Last benefit to high intensity workouts is that they can be extremely short. So instead of going for an hour long run you could do sprints on a spin bike with the whole workout lasting no more than 20 minutes and turn yourself into a metabolic beast.
Last tip to getting yourself back on track after an episode of binge eating is to get back to eating real food. Stick to whole foods from Mother Nature and skip the packaged and processed junk from Father Industry. If for one week you can lower your starch and fruit intake that’d be even better.
Remember:
“Real food is real medicine.”
And by eating real food you’re giving your body exactly what it needs to heal and repair itself. Especially important after a period of feeding it an excessive amount of energy or significant amounts of fake pretend food-like products.
So follow your dream, connect with nature, do a little fasting, do intense movements, and just eat real food and in no time you’ll be back on track to living your dream and living a holistic healthy lifestyle.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Fear:
- I’ll explain what fear is
- I’ll talk about what limiting beliefs are and how they keep you from change
- I’ll talk about how expressing your authentic self helps you see fear in a new light
- Finally I’ll share an exercise you can practise to reframe your thoughts to help you deal with your fear
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Fear can be defined as an emotion driven by the thought of possible danger or the anticipation and expectation of pain and harm. Meaning fear is an emotion based on a thought you have about a future event.
Another way to see fear is that a lot of people believe hate to be the opposite of love, but hate like love is still an emotion that connects you to the object you have hatred toward. In my experience and what many other people have found is that fear is actually the opposite to love as fear has an energy vibration that drives you away and disconnects you from whatever it is that you’re afraid of.
Fear is an energy that you experience in the now present moment based on a future event, and it stops you from moving toward what it is you want.
One major driver of fear is a limiting belief. Now a limiting belief is a thought, an idea that you have downloaded from your upbringing that stops you and restrains you and prevents you from doing anything. This is the essence of fear.
For example you may want to play a sport or join a gym, but you have this belief that you are not coordinated or strong enough so you don’t sign up. You may want to become a fashion model, but you have this belief that you are not attractive, pretty, handsome, tall, thin, or beautiful enough so you don’t even bother looking at job ads for models. You may want to be a scientist, but have a this belief that you’re not smart enough or that people where you come from don’t normally become scientists and have other types of jobs and careers so you stop putting effort into your studies.
Or how about this example. You want to forget the past and start from scratch a relationship with a loved one that you had a fight with many years ago. You want to let go of the resentment that you’ve held toward that person for what they said or did to you or hope that they can forgive you for something you said or did. You want to reconnect with this person so badly it hurts. However, you have this belief, this thought, this idea that no matter what you say or do that person is never gonna’ change and never gonna’ want you back in their life anyway. They will shut you down, you will feel embarrassed and hurt, and you would just be wasting your time. So you don’t reach out to that person and continue to live in the shadow of regret and wondering ‘what if’, all the while missing out on the love that you could be receiving in that relationship.
A belief that holds you back from experiencing life is a limiting belief because it limits you from reaching and realising your full potential and experiencing life in all its fantastic awesome beauty.
A limiting belief is the face of fear and it will always be staring back at you for as long as you allow it. Fear keeps you from changing and you will never be able to change and develop and grow and evolve to reach your full potential if you live in fear.
One of humanity’s greatest fears is to follow one’s own dream. When you’re following your dreams and living the life you want to live and being the way you want to be this is when you shine at your brightest and show your true luminous being, your authentic self.
This fear to dream and act upon one’s dream and shine brightly was summed up brilliantly by spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson who says:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Now you may be thinking how it is possible for someone to be scared of their own light energy and their own awesomeness.
Well how many times have you seen someone else shine and be and do and have awesome things only to see them be cut down by others because they are appearing to be too showy, big-headed, egotistical, and up themselves?
How many times have you personally been told to ‘watch it’ whenever you’ve found success, because it looks like you’re showing off or making others feel inadequate?
Every time you shine you are exposing the shadows of other people, but instead of those other people seeing your light as a motive for inspiration and change, they choose to see it as a threat, so they bring you down to their level and keep you from change.
With this limiting belief that any time you dare to dream you are told to get your head out of the clouds and to do as everyone else does is it any wonder why a lot of people give up their dreams, fail to shine and ride the mediocre train into ‘surviville’ to end up living a ‘just okay’ life like everybody else, instead of dreaming big, shining their light, living an awesome life, and thriving.
The thing is when you shine not only are you exposing the shadows of people around you, but you also see your own shadows, your own fears and it is only during the times that you do shine that you can face your shadows and fears full on.
When you look at your fear in the light you will see it very differently. Expressing your true self your luminous being you will no longer turn away from fear, you will face it head on and do whatever it is that needs to be done.
Fear isn’t something to remove or to forget about. It’s an emotion you must use to drive you, motivate you, inspire you to keep moving forward, through that fear to the other side where your dreams live. Of course this is all dependent on you being able to fully express yourself and to shine your light being without regret. Because you can only see your fears when you’re shining at your brightest.
So how exactly do you shine when you have all these limiting beliefs stopping you from doing so in the first place?
By doing the work – that’s Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’ that is.
Byron Katie is an author that writes about self-inquiry and seeing reality for what it really is. Bryon suffered from depression and one day woke up to reality and realised that when she believed her thoughts she suffered and when she didn’t believe her thoughts she no longer suffered.
Byron created a free online tool called The Work, which is a powerful process of self-inquiry. I’ll put a link to the work in the episode show notes, which you can find at wholeguidance.com/blog.
I highly recommend The Work as it makes you question your own thoughts and will help you realise that your limiting beliefs are only there because, well you believe them to be real. But as you go through The Work you will realise that these limiting beliefs are only as real as you think they are and by changing your thoughts about them you can change your entire life.
I no longer run from fear. I embrace it. That doesn’t mean I’m never afraid. It just means when I feel the fear… eventually I push through it.
By questioning your own beliefs you can use fear to move you toward your dreams instead of away from your dreams.
There’s a saying:
“The obstacle is the way.”
And fear is one of the greatest obstacles to humanity reaching enlightenment, but this also makes fear one of humanity’s final hopes to reaching enlightenment and living an awesome life.
I’ll finish with the full quote from Marianne Williamson that I introduced earlier because it’s such an empowering and non-limiting belief:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Make this year the year you overcome fear.
Links and Resources
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Emotions specifically Anger and Happiness:
- I’ll explain how emotions run your life
- I’ll talk about how anger is a necessary and healthy emotion
- I’ll talk about how the pursuit for happiness isn’t a healthy choice
- Finally I’ll share how to express healthy anger and to choose happiness to get the most pleasure from life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Ah emotions. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.
Your thoughts (your ideas) they create your feelings (your emotions) and your feelings well they determine a heck of a lot. It is your feelings that determine your words (what you say); your deeds (what you do); and ultimately your results (what you get out of life).
Let’s take a look at how ideas and emotions in your bodymind really do lead to the results you get in your life.
Human thought begins with the perception of an internal or external stimulus. This thought then creates subtle energies. These subtle energies influence your physical, emotional, and mental ways of being by mobilising chemical messenger molecules throughout your bodymind. Examples of chemical messenger molecules include immune cells, hormones, and neurotransmitters. So once these molecules have energy and motion they travel to, are received, and used by your cells as instructions that drive both your verbal and physical actions.
These molecules of energy in motion or another way to say it would be these molecules of e-motion absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it determine the course of your life because what you say and what you do will always, always determine what you get out of life.
Now there are two main emotional forces that drive the human experience: pain and pleasure.
One emotion associated with pain is anger. The root cause for you to get angry is because you have a need that is not being met. But I’m not talking about basic needs like food or shelter. No I’m talking about deep-seated, inbuilt, animal, innate, primal, evolutionary-rooted physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. The ultimate human need is the need to connect and to share your self with others.
So when your need for connection and sharing is not being met many emotions can come up and anger is the emotion that people think and feel of when they wish to express externally to another person that they have this unmet need. As I talked about earlier this anger really is a collection of molecules of energy in motion. Anger is an emotion that has very hot, unstable energy attached to it so your words and deeds will also be hot and unstable when in an angry state resulting in a heated and rocky outcome to whomever you are expressing that anger toward.
When taken to the extreme anger turns into rage, which has even hotter less stable out-of-control energy associated with it.
Now when anger does not turn into out-of-controlled rage it can be a very beneficial and healthful emotion. In fact anger is one of the most powerful and impactful emotions as anger alone can cause you to change. Your fits, your bouts, your outbursts of anger are all opportunities for change. To change what? To change anything you want.
Whether your anger causes a change in you, in someone else, in your environment, or a global change it doesn’t matter as change of any kind is what life is all about.
Many inventions, services, businesses, restaurants, and even airlines were created because one person got given a crappy deal, got angry, and then got even… an even better idea that is. For example successful businessman Richard Branson he was left stranded at an airport and instead of moping around complaining, getting worked up into a rage and eventually doing nothing about it, he got over his anger and frustration and asked other stranded passengers if they’d like to charter a plane with him and thus the seed for Virgin airlines was sown.
Unfortunately many people use anger purely as a release valve and nothing else and there’s nothing wrong with releasing pent up energy, but if you don’t do something after that release you miss out on the main benefit of getting angry, the benefit of change.
Anger can be a healthy emotion with the potential for unlimited benefits because who knows where change can take you.
Happiness on the other hand is an emotion associated with pleasure. You usually feel happy when you get what you want and need and when personal expectations are met. I say usually feel happy because even when your needs are met you may still find yourself to not be in a happy place as I’ll explain shortly.
The emotion of happiness has an energy signature that is adaptable and stable. Happiness can warm you when you’re feeling cold and can cool you when you’re feeling the heat. Happiness can help ground you to the present moment and keep you centred, even when you think that everything around you is falling to pieces.
The issue with happiness lies in its pursuit.
The pursuit of happiness is an endless everlasting game that you can never win. When you’re told by others such as your parents, well-meaning family and friends, and the media that in order for you to be happy you must act a certain way, own a certain product, buy a certain perfume, wear a certain brand of clothing, follow a certain political party and you end up getting what you thought you always wanted you find yourself still very unhappy indeed. So you begin to pursue the next false idol of desire, get it, and still find yourself unhappy and this perpetual persistent pursuit for happiness goes on and on for as long as you play it.
Even if you were to pursue your own goals you will find that at the end of that rainbow there is no real pot of gold. Think of all the personal goals you’ve set and achieved and ask yourself after the fact right now in this moment long after you accomplished what you set out to do, are you happy? Are you happy because you fulfilled your dreams and goals or are you happy for another reason?
I used to always wait for something to happen in my life before I would allow myself to be happy such as earn a certain amount of money or lift a certain amount of weight or to see a certain number on the scale before I would say to myself I was happy and I was finally successful. Now, however, not only am I extremely happy and satisfied once I’ve achieved a goal, but I’m also happy during the goal seeking process. For example, I’m happy and satisfied after eating a delicious, nutritious, and tasty dish, but I’m also happy while shopping for, preparing for, and cooking the actual meal.
What I’m saying is that in my experience being happy isn’t something that you can get out there externally. Happiness can only be found in one place, internally, inside of you. No matter how much pursuing you do to be happy, no matter how much money you make, no matter what you own or how many material objects or awards you accumulate you will never find happiness in any one of these actions specifically. In order to express the energies of adaptability and stability, in order to express true happiness you must choose to do so in any one moment.
In other words happiness doesn’t have to be a destination, but can also be the journey itself and the only thing stopping you from being happy is you.
“In order to be happy, you must choose happy.”
It doesn’t matter who you’re with, what you’re doing, where you’re going, or how you’re feeling, I believe that happiness really is a personal choice and it’s a choice that you can make in any moment.
I’m not saying it’s an easy choice to make. For some people choosing happiness will be such a foreign concept that to make such a choice may look impossible. For other people like the Dalai Lama for example choosing happiness comes as second nature. For me personally I am constantly having to remind myself daily to stop waiting for happiness to come to me and to let happiness come from me.
It’s a simple idea seeing happiness as a choice, but boy is it a bloody difficult choice to understand.
Alright so now I’ll talk about how to express healthy anger and how to make it easier to choose happiness.
Firstly, when it comes to healthy expressions of anger you must give yourself permission to express that anger. Do not hold anger or any other emotion for that matter inside your bodymind.
Remember emotions are actual chemical messenger molecules or molecules of energy in motion and when you experience an emotion and a feeling these molecules of energy are mobilised throughout your entire body. When you express that internal feeling and emotion by sharing it externally those molecules get used up by your cells and the energy releases from your body into the environment.
However, if left to linger inside your body these molecules and energy will build up and accumulate in certain areas of your body depending on your genetics and upbringing. If you chronically and consistently hold back from expressing your emotions this bundle of molecules and energy in your body will eventually create a disease and the most common disease associated with pent-up suppressed emotions is cancer.
Secondly:
“Get mad, then get over it.”
Is a quote by American statesman Colin Powell and it’s a quote that you must keep in mind when it comes to healthy expressions of anger.
Back in the day when I was dealing with depression I was also dealing with anger issues (actually I still am). Whereas back then I would attach to my anger as if my life depended on it and it would grow into full-blown rage and I would totally forget what it was that I was angry about in the first place, now I am able to let go of that anger once I’ve allowed myself the chance to fully express it. Plus I’m fully aware of how I am being and what I’m saying during the outburst of anger, which is pretty weird. It’s like I can see how much of an egg I’m being and all I can do is be a witness to my outburst. This is a good thing though because it helps me remember what I got angry about and makes it easier for me to change what it is I want to change so I won’t be triggered as easily the next time I might get angry.
So do not attach to anger and let it develop into full-blown rage. Stay in control of your aggression by fully expressing it and do not confuse yourself with those molecules of energy in motion. You are expressing anger, you are not anger itself.
Healthy anger is anger that is expressed, let go of, and learnt from.
With regards to happiness there’s a brilliant quote by James Openheim that says:
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.”
As I said before happiness isn’t necessarily the destination, but also the journey itself and the journey is always where you are in the present moment. Happiness isn’t something to pursue, but something you choose to express while in pursuit of your dream. Yes achieving your dream will definitely be a cause for celebration and joy, but you’re allowed to be happy as you make your way toward reaching your dream.
“Happiness is found in the being, not in the having and the doing.”
So in this present moment and any other moment you wish, you have the power to choose to be happy. The choice for happiness is and will always be yours.
So how exactly do you practise letting go of anger and choosing happiness in any one moment… by practising mindfulness.
How many people today are on autopilot waking up to go to school or work, coming home, going to sleep, and then repeating this all over again without being fully present and aware that there were a thousand other events and experiences they had that day.
Life and the human experience is exciting, exhilarating and extremely complex and full of ups and downs and twists and turns, but too much of modern society today is all about numbing the human experience and reducing it down to the most basic of tasks and needs making life appear to be such a boring experience.
Mindfulness practise improves your awareness of how you’re being, how you’re feeling, and what you’re doing in the now the present moment. Mindfulness keeps you in touch with what’s happening internally in your body and what’s happening externally in your environment. When you live your life with a heightened level of awareness you will find that life is so much more than work and sleep.
By practising mindfulness on a daily basis you enhance your ability to express anger and then let it go. You are also able to learn from that expressed anger what changes you need to make to reduce your chances of getting angry in the future and to learn what changes you see are necessary in order to reduce what may upset other people as well.
By practising mindfulness regularly you will come to see that happiness isn’t a reward, an object, or an end date, but it’s an energy that you have inside of you and you can choose to express that energy of happiness anytime you want. Mindfulness gives you full awareness of our ups and downs and during those times that you’re feeling down you will begin to notice, like an observer outside of your body, that you’re actually feeling down in the dumps and this awareness helps you to choose to continue to live in the sadness (and that’s perfectly fine) or to let it go and to choose happiness instead.
The best way to practise mindfulness is to take time out from your day and to just sit with your thoughts. That’s right I’m talking about meditation.
Meditation isn’t about achieving some divine connection with the universe (although that can be a nice bonus if you can receive such a gift). Meditation is about keeping your mind focused on one thing and one thing only and anytime your thoughts start to wonder, stray, and go walkabout you bring yourself back to centre which is your original thought that you were focusing on.
Meditation comes in all forms and sizes:
- Sitting
- Standing
- Walking
- Gardening
- Paddle boarding
- Dancing
- Sports
Whatever experience you can have that will keep you focused on one thing and crowd out all other thoughts you can make into a meditative and mindfulness practise.
The key words here are regular, daily, consistent, and practise.
Meditation and mindfulness they’re like everything else in life. You don’t just take one breath, or sleep for one night, or eat just one meal, you must breathe, sleep, and eat consistently in order to live and learning to enhance and improve your levels of awareness takes time, takes effort, and it’s an ongoing practise.
There’s a brilliant book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence that gives great insight into how your emotions influence your life and how they influence your intelligence.
There’s a saying:
“When emotions are high, intelligence is low.”
Meaning your levels of emotion determine your levels of intelligence, which brings us back to my original statement about how emotions run your life.
Don’t be scared to get angry. Use that anger to learn and grow and change to improve your life and other people’s lives.
Don’t be thinking that happiness is some tangible external object that you must get. With practise you can choose happiness whenever you feel you need it.
By learning from anger and choosing happiness sooner rather than later you can make yourself a very smart and intelligent human being indeed.
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Calories and Hormones:
- I’ll explain what calories are and how counting calories won’t do much for your health
- I’ll talk about hormones and how they affect your health a lot more than calories
- Finally I’ll give a few tips on how to balance your hormones naturally to turn you into a fat-burning machine
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Calories are all people talk about when it comes to dieting and changing body composition. Funny thing is most people have no clue what a calorie actually is.
Well a calorie is a unit of heat energy where 1 calorie equals the amount of energy needed to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Centigrade.
The way calories are measured is to burn the dry weight of the object you want to find the calorie value of and then measure how much heat is given off. So if you wanted to find out the number of calories in a banana, for example, you would first dehydrate it and then burn it and by measuring the amount of heat it gives off you will be able to work out the amount of calories it contained.
Now this is all fine and dandy when measuring calories using a calorimeter in a stale, stable, stagnant setting like a scientific laboratory, but when you’re talking about measuring the burning of foods in the human body or the metabolic-effect of how food calories are utilised by human physiology then Houston… we have a problem.
You see if you were to ask an aboriginal tribe in a South American jungle or African bushland or Australian outback who are excellent specimens of optimal human health whether they weighed, measured, and counted the amount of calories or energy or foods they ate on a regular basis, they would just look at you sideways, show off their bright-white teeth with a wide grin, and then they’d start laughing their bottoms off. They have a lot more important things to be concerned with than calories like maintaining shelters, hunting and gathering food, and getting back to telling stories and playing around all day. Sounds like the life right?
Your ancestors as far back as 100 years ago were not concerned with counting calories and obesity wasn’t even an issue back then. Today, however, it seems like the more calories we count as a society the more obese we seem to be getting. What’s up with that?
The reason is human beings are not calorimeters. You are not a simple input and output device. Your body is one of the most complex biological machines in the universe. Your body is an interconnected system of trillions of inputs and outputs.
For someone to say that they know exactly what happens to the hundred calories they eat from food or say that they know exactly how much calories they burned during exercise is human hubris at it again, meaning we think we know better than Mother Nature. It is impossible to know the exact amount of fuel energy you get from food and how much energy you burn from movement.
Another thing is that not all calories are created equal. 2000 calories of sugar water, for example, if you were to compare this to 2000 calories of coloured vegetables, yes they are the same amount of energy, exactly the same amount of energy, but when your body begins to digest, absorb, assimilate and metabolise and make use of the macro and micronutrients you will see a totally different effect in how your body looks, in how you think and feel, and how you act in life. A human body made up of sugar water compared to one made up of vegetables would be the same as comparing a house made up of straw and one made up of brick and mortar. One is weak and full of holes (tumours) whereas the other is strong and solid (healthy).
Ask yourself are the calories that you’re currently consuming on a regular basis turning you into a person of straw or into a solid piece of human awesomeness?
There are a number of ways the foods you eat and the movements you perform affect your biology way beyond calories and energy expenditure. You need to stop focusing on calories when it comes to happiness and health because there’s more to your wellbeing than just energy in and energy out.
The foods you eat and the movements you perform will absolutely determine the physical structure and functionality of your organs, they will determine your mood, and food and movement have a huge impact on your hormones.
Speaking of hormones these are molecules that your body uses to communicate between the many different organs, glands, and tissues. Hormones affect your body’s metabolism, immune function, growth and repair, your mood, your stress levels, and your body composition.
The major hormones you need to know about are:
- Insulin
- Cortisol
- Melatonin
- Leptin
- Ghrelin
- Oestrogen and testosterone and
- Thyroid hormones
Insulin is an anabolic or growth hormone released by your pancreas and helps transport nutrients from your bloodstream into your cells. Excessive amounts of glucose (sugar) in your bloodstream leads to the transformation of most of this glucose into fatty acids and high levels of nutrients in your blood causes your pancreas to release large amounts of insulin. Once insulin gets into your bloodstream it then does its job of storing all those nutrients into your cells as well as putting any leftover fatty acids into your fat cells, so insulin plays a major role in fat accumulation.
Cortisol known as the stress hormone is catabolic meaning it breaks things down and it is released by your adrenal glands in response to physical or perceived stress, low blood sugar levels, or low leptin levels. When your blood sugar levels get too low this will cause a cortisol spike. This sudden increase in cortisol then raises your blood sugar levels and when blood glucose gets too high insulin will need to be released to bring it back to a healthy low level and if your blood glucose drops too far then cortisol comes out to play again and this sugar and hormonal rollercoaster continues on and on making for a fatter and heavier you.
Melatonin is your antioxidant, anti-tumour, circadian clock time for bed hormone. Melatonin needs to be low in the morning and high in the evening for the best sleep and recovery as well as for the most growth hormone release during sleep, which helps you burn fat as you dream. This is the opposite rhythm to cortisol. Cortisol needs to be high in the morning and low in the evening. So if you don’t get enough daylight exposure during the day, you’re exposed to too much blue and bright lights after sundown, and if your cortisol rhythm is not normal, this will cause your melatonin levels to be low making it difficult for you to fall asleep and to get a full nights rest.
Leptin is a satiety hormone meaning it signals to your brain when you have enough energy in your body and is released by your fat cells. The more fat you have the more leptin your fat cells release signalling to your brain that you have plenty of energy on board and you don’t need to eat. The less fat you have the less leptin gets released signalling to your brain that you don’t have enough energy on board and that it’s time to eat. The problem for obese individuals is something called leptin resistance where you have so many fat cells releasing a lot of leptin that your brain just can’t take the excessive amounts of communication anymore and just stops listening. So even though your fat cells are signalling non-stop to your brain that your body has more than enough energy on board and that you don’t need to eat, your brain ignores these signals and still thinks you’re low on leptin and therefore low on energy and fat stores. Chronically low leptin levels as perceived by your brain will cause an increased release of the stress hormone cortisol and high cortisol levels keep your leptin levels low.
Ghrelin is a hunger hormone and works opposite to leptin. Low levels of leptin usually mean you are low on energy reserves and this causes a release of ghrelin which then increases your appetite. Once your appetite is satisfied and enough leptin hormone reaches your brain telling it you have enough energy on board then ghrelin hormone reduces which also lowers your appetite. Now if you have high levels of cortisol in your body this will cause leptin levels to be low meaning ghrelin will increase giving you an appetite. So the more stress you have the hungrier you get.
Oestrogen and testosterone are sex hormones used for growth and for reproduction. Women have slightly higher levels of oestrogen hormones compared to men and men have a lot more testosterone than women. Chronically high levels of insulin in your bloodstream (due to a high sugar diet for example) leads to an increase of testosterone in women and a decrease of testosterone in men as well as an increase of oestrogen in men. When cortisol is low testosterone and insulin are high, but when cortisol is high testosterone and insulin are low making cortisol a muscle wasting hormone. Chronically high levels of cortisol interferes with the normal production of your sex hormones, so too much stress overtime leads to low libido or sex drive, infertility, and the end of sexy times in the bedroom.
Last group of major hormones you really need to know about are your thyroid hormones. Your thyroid hormones are responsible for your body’s overall metabolism, meaning your cells ability to process energy. The two main thyroid hormones are T4 and T3. T4 is the inactive thyroid hormone and this is produced by your thyroid gland. The conversion of T4 to the active form T3 takes place primarily in your liver and in your gut. If your thyroid, liver, or gut are unhealthy and unable to do the work that they should then the production of T4 and T3 hormones will be dramatically impacted. Your body will either produce too much thyroid hormones leading to hyperthyroidism or having a very fast metabolic rate where you feel nervous or anxious a lot of the time, have irregular heartbeats, trouble sleeping, dry skin, excessive weight reduction, and excessive bowel movements. Or your body won’t produce enough thyroid hormones leading to hypothyroidism or having a very slow rate of metabolism where you feel depressed and irritable, experience hair loss and memory loss, feel tired and weak a lot of the time, find it difficult to reduce weight or have a dramatic increase in weight, have muscle cramps, feel cold a lot, have brittle nails, and constipation. High levels of perceived stress interferes with the production of T4 and high levels of the stress hormone cortisol interferes with the conversion of T4 to T3 causing abnormal metabolic function throughout your entire body.
Okay so that was a lot of information to take in about your major hormones. Now I’m not sure if you noticed, but there was one constant between them all. There was one hormone that popped up time and again and it has an impact on all the other hormones. Do you know the hormone I’m talking about? Yes, the stress hormone cortisol. That’s the hormone I’m talking about.
High cortisol leads to the increase of glucose in your bloodstream eventually causing a spike in insulin and this high insulin release causes fat storage and an increase in fat cell number and fat cell size.
High cortisol at night prevents melatonin from rising leading to trouble with sleep, less growth hormone release, less fat burning, a weakened immune system, and an increased risk of cancer.
High cortisol levels equal low leptin and high ghrelin levels meaning even if you’re obese or if you’ve eaten a big enough meal that normally would have satisfied you in the past, you will still have an appetite and feel hungry and will want to keep eating and you may never feel satiated.
High production of cortisol equals low production of your growth and sex hormones. More cortisol means less growth and more stress means less sex.
Finally high stress and rich cortisol production equals poor thyroid hormone production causing an abnormal rate of metabolism, either too high or too low. The majority of thyroid issues deal with a very slow rate of metabolism leading to difficulty reducing fat cell number and fat cell size.
So the big takeaway from all this hormone talk is that if you can control your cortisol you can control the rest of your hormones and you can determine the overall health of your body.
Not only that, but by taking control of your cortisol levels and the levels of all your other major hormones you can determine the amount of muscle and fat that your body synthesises and burns… without the need for counting calories.
Imagine that your hormones are an orchestra and that when they play in perfect harmony you get to hear wonderful music a beautiful symphony being played. However, when you have disharmony in the orchestra, when there’s a group or single instrument out of tune, out of sync, out of beat and rhythm then you’re left listening to something that would probably even make the walking dead turn and run in the other direction.
Homeostasis is a term that means a system is in balance and functioning as it should. When your many hormones are in harmony and playing sweet beautiful music together then you can consider your body to be in a homeostatic state. When your body is in homeostasis, where you’ve achieved hormonal harmony, then your body’s ability to burn fat and maintain or build health and muscle will be easy peasy lemon squeezy.
However, if your hormones are not in harmony with each other well then your ability to reduce fat and maintain or build health and muscle go right out the window. It doesn’t matter how many calories you count or restrict and no matter how hard you push yourself in the gym because if your cortisol and other hormone levels are not in healthy ranges then your body has bigger issues to deal with than worrying about energy in and energy out.
What I’m ultimately saying is that when your hormones are in balance with each other you’re a lean, mean, and very keen playful, happy, and healthy human being. But when your hormones are ‘out of whack’ (yes that’s a scientific term where I’m from) when your hormones are out of balance then oops-a-daisy you become flabby, fat, and lazy.
So what causes hormone imbalances?
High levels of stress and inflammation and stress and inflammation are caused by unhealthy relationships, disconnection from Mother Nature, exposure to toxic compounds, improper sleep, too much not enough exercise, eating inflammatory foods, not drinking enough quality water, and incorrect breathing patterns.
To get your hormones in a happy and healthy harmonious state you need to reduce your stress levels and lower the amount of inflammation in your body and you can do this by living a holistic healthy lifestyle. If you listen to episodes 2-15 of the Whole Guidance Podcast I go into detail about how to do this, but I will share a few quick and easy tips here on how to keep cortisol your stress hormone in check which will reduce the amount of stress and inflammation in your body.
First tip is to remove sugars and grains from your diet. Pasteurised dairy too if you’re really serious about keeping your cortisol levels balanced. Sugars and grains and highly treated dairy products are pro-inflammatory causing a lot of fire in your belly and in your body and also cause a lot of insulin to be secreted by your pancreas. By removing these foods from your diet for 21 days you can then try reintroducing them again to see how you feel and I bet you’ll notice a difference. With less insulin in your bloodstream your body’s metabolism will gradually shift from burning sugar and storing fat to not needing sugar and burning fat. Replace the sugars, grains, and dairy with more animal and fruit fats and oils.
Second tip is to get quality sleep. Now I said quality, not quantity and this means consistently going to bed before 11p and getting up around 6 or 7a for at least 21 days. This will reset your circadian clock and help restore your melatonin to its correct levels, low in the morning and high in the evening.
Third tip is to breathe deep diaphragmatic belly breaths through your nose. This helps keep your body in a rest, digest, calm, and connect state and so reduces your cortisol and increases your fat burning potential as well as your growth and sex hormone levels. Listen to episode 4 on how to practise proper breathing technique.
Fourth tip is to sprint more and cardio less. What I mean is that instead of doing 30 minute, 60 minute, or 2 hour long duration cardio sessions, why not try 4 minutes of high intensity interval training. H I I T or HIIT is where you go all out at 80-100% effort for 30 seconds and then rest for 90 seconds and repeat this seven more times. Timing isn’t set in concrete so you can go hard for 60 seconds and rest for 60-240 seconds if you wanted to. There’s no set rules. Find what works for you. You can do HIIT on a spin bike, sprinting up hills, or by performing exercises like burpees. Sprint training burns fewer calories during the exercise than long duration cardio does, but it produces a healthier hormonal profile after the exercise is completed meaning cortisol levels don’t stay elevated for long periods after a sprint session and your metabolism remains higher for longer periods after HIIT as well.
Fifth tip is to support your liver and gut health to ensure optimal conversion of your inactive T4 hormone into the more active T3 hormone making you a metabolism beast. Easiest way to support your liver is to reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals in your environment. You can do this by swapping out commercial home and personal care products for organic plant-based ones. Easiest way to support your digestive system is to eat real food. Real food is from Mother Nature. Anything from Father Industry I consider fake pretend food-like products and these will only create inflammation in your gut.
As Michael Pollan an author who writes about real food says:
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Sixth tip is to manage your self when it comes to stress. I did a whole podcast on how stress affects your health and how to identify and reframe your perspective on the stressors in your life so listen to that for more details. Also meditation and practising mindfulness and awareness is another way to move away from past regrets and future failures and to just be in the present moment. The more you can be ‘in the now man’ then the less you will be stressing about stuff in your head.
My seventh and final tip for reducing stress and inflammation and on how to best balance cortisol and all your other hormones is to get some smart sun exposure. Vitamin D is a powerful hormone that regulates over 1000 genes in your body and today about 70% of people living in western society are deficient in vitamin D and do not have enough of this health building hormone. You need to be exposing your skin to the sun on a regular basis to get the right amount of vitamin D, but of course you don’t want to get too much sun as too much of a good thing will burn you on the outside and cause fire and inflammation on the inside. I’ll talk more about smart sun exposure and vitamin D in the next podcast.
I’ll leave you with this final thought.
Throughout human history calories were never counted or measured in order to be healthy. Building muscle, reducing fat, achieving a happy mindset, all of these were and still are easily accessible to anyone living with balanced hormones without the need for calorie counting.
When you focus on the quantity of calories this will cause an imbalance in the quantity and quality of your hormones. So at the end of the day if you want quality hormones you must focus on quality calories.
To learn more about how calories really don’t matter read The Calorie Myth by Jonathan Bailor. This book lays out the science on how hormones beat out calories time and again for achieving the best health ever.
“Health is not a math equation.”
When your body is healthy, whole, and complete you’ll never have to think about calories ever again because health has always and will always be instinctively and innately and naturally easy.
Links and Resources
- WGP 004: How to Breathe for an Awesome Life
- WGP 003: How Stress is Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
- The Calorie Myth — Jonathan Bailor
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Materialism and Spiritualism:
- I’ll explain what materialism and spiritualism really mean
- I’ll talk about the dark and the light sides of each one
- Finally, I’ll share how you can best balance the material world with a spiritual life
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Depending on the definition used you could think materialism and spiritualism are two sides of the same coin or are totally unrelated.
The following set of definitions show how these two belief systems are actually connected.
Materialism is the belief that nothing exists except for physical matter.
Spiritualism is the belief that spirit is the fundamental element of all reality.
What we have here are total opposites and yet this is exactly what makes them totally connected. How?
In the podcast I did on the philosophy of Yin and Yang I explained how these two forces of the Universe are both opposing each other, but at the same time are interconnected to each other. The potential for Yin, the seed of Yin grows from inside Yang and vice versa. You cannot have one without the other.
For example day and night, hot and cold, fear and love, each of these are opposites of each other, but you could never know one without experiencing the other as it is from day that night comes, it is after heat cools that you feel cold, and it is after you’ve faced fear that love can be expressed… and vice versa for all of these.
Matter and spirit are different yes, but they come from within each other.
The physical world is made up of matter, right. The sun, the moon, the Earth, your body these are all material objects.
The spiritual world is made up of energy. The sun’s radiation, the moons gravitational pull, the Earth’s electromagnetic field, your body’s aura and light signature these are all spiritual elements or units of energy.
So here you have physical objects radiating, emanating, and producing energy. But, not only do physical objects produce energy, but physical matter itself is made up of and moved by energy.
If you had a powerful physics microscope and looked at your hand under the smallest zoom setting you would see the peaks and valleys of your skin. Increase the zoom a little and you’d see the individual cells that make up these peaks and valleys. Zoom in further and you’d see the organelles, the little organs inside one of these cells. Zoom in again and you’d see the molecules making up the parts of the cell and organelles. Zoom in even further and you’d see the individual atoms making up these molecules. Zoom in once again and you begin to see protons, neutrons, and electrons the building blocks of atoms. What, more zooming? Yes and this time you’ll see the fundamental building blocks of the universe called quantum particles and forces some of which include quarks, leptons, electromagnetism, and gravity.
Now if you were to zoom in one last time on a quark or a lepton, guess what you’d see? Nothing! You would see absolutely empty space. However, this space isn’t actually empty as it’s full of pure energy and this energy is constantly vibrating, it’s twirling and swirling, it’s moving and grooving. It’s a little vortex of energy constantly in motion.
So ultimately your hand is made up of, held together, and animated by energy in motion.
So we had physical matter producing energy and now we see that energy makes and moves physical matter. Yin and Yang at it again.
Energy is pure potential and unlimited possibility and it’s only when this energy accumulates and concentrates to form matter that you see that possibility come to life. So without energy there would be no matter, but without matter you wouldn’t even realise, you wouldn’t know that energy even existed.
In other words:
“Spirit expresses itself as matter and matter is proof that spirit exists.”
You may want to meditate on the last line I just said there as it’s actually quite a deep philosophical insight that could help you explain certain unknowns and mysteries about the universe.
So that’s how matter and spirit are connected according to the first set of definitions I gave earlier. If you’d like to have personal real world experience interacting with matter and energy I highly recommend two books by Pam Grout, E-Squared and E-Cubed. These two books have 18 experiments that you can do in your own home to see for yourself how matter and energy or spirit work together to create your reality.
Anyhoo… with this second set of definitions I’m about to give materialistic and spiritualistic ways of being look totally unrelated.
Materialism is to place more worth and receive more comfort from physical objects and material possessions. So materialism is all about receiving wealth and admiration through material possession.
Spiritualism is being able to communicate with the spirits of dead people. So spiritualism is all about receiving guidance and connection through spiritual communication.
So yeah according to these two definitions materialism and spiritualism don’t really seem to relate to each other… or do they?
As I go through the dark and light sides of each of these definitions there actually is a connection between the two.
Okay so the dark side of being too materialistic is that a materialistic person sees only what is directly in front of them and believes that they need to accumulate more and more stuff because they have been told that the more you have then the more important and the more successful you are. So unfortunately for people that follow this materialistic belief system to the extreme their self worth and happiness is directly connected to how much they have in the bank, how big and how decorated their house is, how many cars they own, or whether they have the latest clothing or tech gear.
The dark side of being too spiritualistic is that a spiritualistic person does not always see what’s right in front them and they believe that the solution to their physical world problems can only be found in the invisible spirit world. Unfortunately for people that follow this spiritualistic belief system to the extreme their ability to overcome problems in life and real world issues is directly dependent upon their relationship and abilities to connect with the spirits of the dead.
So the negative to both of these isms is that a person who follows them to the absolute extreme is either fully connected to the material world or fully connected to the spiritual world, but totally disconnected from the real world which is made up of the interactions and the connections between matter and energy. That is to say that people at either extreme take more care of their physical possessions and spiritual relationships then they do human relationships with family and friends and other people around them.
The light side of materialism is that you do understand the realities of the world as it is right now. You realise that what’s happening right now in this moment is something that must be dealt with. You understand that by having the best tools for the job you will be able to do the work you are meant to be doing fulfilling your Dharma or life purpose creating a happy and healthy life for yourself and others.
The light side of spiritualism is that you know that there’s more to reality than what you’re told and are led to believe by others. You realise that the possession of matter really doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things and that you can live a happy and healthy existence without the latest and greatest gadgets and do just fine with a minimalist approach to life that works for you and the people you care about.
So both of these isms can be very grounding. Seeing what is right in front of you and living life with the minimal amount of possessions.
So how do you avoid the trap of falling into the extremes of materialism where accumulation of matter is most important and spiritualism where relationships with the dead are more important? How do you balance living in a material world made up of spiritual elements?
First thing to do is to stop listening to all the noise around you as if it’s stated fact and truth. Marketing hype is full of nonsensical noise. Marketing hype comes in two forms.
The first is from advertising. Once you spray on that deodorant thousands of men and women are not going to be chasing you in the streets. Buying that car won’t necessarily mean instant happiness. Wearing those new sports shoes won’t make you a professional athlete overnight. Eating foods labelled healthy will usually end up making you sick. Advertising doesn’t equal fact.
The second form of marketing hype comes from news media. News on television, newspapers, radio, and yes even the Internet are full of exaggeration, scare tactics, and hidden agendas. News is told for a specific reason to make you feel a certain way, usually to feel scared and fearful, sad and unhappy. In between the news they give you the answers to all the world’s problems and your own problems through advertising. Again advertising does not equal fact and news does not equal truth.
Now the biggest noise you will have to learn to stop taking as gospel, the biggest marketing hype you will hear is that coming from your own mind – your thoughts! You think on average 68,000 thoughts a day a majority of which are negative and are thoughts you had yesterday. Most of your thoughts are marketing hype from your parents, your family and friends, your workplace, your community, news media or advertising.
When was the last time you had an authentic personally created thought? A thought that didn’t come from your mum or dad, from your doctor, your priest, or your boss. When was the last time you thought for yourself?
Don’t believe the hype whether it comes from advertising, the news, or your own thoughts.
The best way to filter this noise and to find out what is accurate and truthful information that works for you is to live life in the space of a question and become a critical thinker. Question everything. Everything you hear, see, taste, touch, smell, and feel, question whether it’s real or not for you.
Dietary guidelines, health practises, marriage, drug addiction, human sexual behaviour, religion, modern agriculture, schools and education, career and employment opportunities – I would guess that about 95% of western civilised society takes all of these topics and belief systems at face value.
People who are raised in a western society rarely ever question where cultural ideas come from. How did the dietary guidelines come to be? Where did marriage come from? What does the research actually say about drug addiction? Can modern agriculture really feed the world? Does a child in today’s information knowledge-based economy really need to go to school and pay large institutions large amounts of money for their education?
Some personal questions you can ask yourself include:
- Is that low-fat meal bar really improving my health?
- Is broccoli really as disgusting as I remember it?
- Was my ex-girlfriend really a witch or my ex-boyfriend really a dirty ape?
- Are my children really too much to handle?
- Am I as fat or skinny, mean or kind, forgiving or harsh as I say I am?
- Are my parents really to blame for my current life situation?
- Do I love my life right now?
- Have I ever put 100% effort into being healthier?
- Is what other people say about me true?
When you become a critical thinker and begin to live life in the space of a question you start to see things as they are and not what you thought they were and this gives you more clarity on how you need to be in this moment and the next.
Today people know more about what’s going on on the other side of the planet than they do their own backyard. People know more about certain celebrities and professional athletes than they do the person they sleep with in the same bed every night!
So my final tip for focusing your energy in a world full of matter is to connect, relate, and emote with the people in your life.
Fully engage in an emotional connection with people you interact with day to day. This isn’t restricted to just family, friends, and flatmates. I’m also talking about the clerk at the local supermarket or laundromat or the bus driver who always drives you home after school or work. Do you know their name? How long they’ve worked there? Whether they’re local or drive two hours in to work from out of town as it was the only job they could find at the time? Do you know your partner’s favourite colour? Do you know how your parents met? Do you know your child’s biggest fear and greatest love right now?
Be with the people who are in your life right now.
The more you can question what you’re being told and what you’re thinking and the more you can fully relate with the people in your life then the less you will need to use material possessions and spiritual communication as substitutes for peace and love.
“Having the latest in technology will not make you the best of humanity.”
Being one with the Almighty regardless of your actions here on Earth disconnects you from the rest of humanity.
Ultimately the key to receiving wealth and admiration as well as connection and guidance is through healthy relationships with your fellow human. Not by relating with objects or with people who have already passed on, but by relating to family, friends, and local communities. This is how you balance living a spiritual life in a material world.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Choice:
- I’ll explain how your choices create your life and how your life creates your choices
- I’ll talk about the three choices you can make in any one moment
- I’ll describe how meditation can improve your choice selection
- Finally I’ll share what’s really behind the Power of Choice
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Life is made up of moments and in between these moments is a gap. This gap represents the space between your thoughts. It is in this space where you will find pure potential and endless possibility, for it is in this space where you have all the power in the universe – the power of choice.
Choice has power because the choices you make determine the moments you experience.
Your life and everything in it including who you are, what you have, how you think, feel, and act, the people you surround yourself with, the job you have, the money you have, the happiness and the love you have, your entire life is a result of the choices you have made.
However, only a very small amount of the choices you end up making come from this space of possibility.
The majority of your choices I’d say over 90% of them actually come from your past, from earlier life experience. For example you know you like chocolate ice cream (well I do anyway) over vanilla ice cream because you’ve tasted them already. You know you have an issue with heights because the last time you stood near the edge of a cliff or you were on a bridge you felt dizzy and almost fainted. You know not to make noise at 2pm in the afternoon while your mother is having a nap because the last time you did that she woke up in a very foul upset mood leading to an unexpected meeting between you and her shoe… ouch!
So while you have the power to choose whatever it is you want in your life in between moments, it is your previous life experience that will determine the majority of your current choices which will determine the way you think, feel, and act in the future. Altogether these will lead to the results you get in your life.
Thus we have the circle of choice where:
“Your choices make your life and your life makes your choices.”
I’ve learnt from Holistic Health Practitioner Paul Chek that in life you have three choices.
The first is the optimal choice. The optimal choice involves having open and honest communication with yourself and the important people in your life. This choice moves you toward your dreams and helps you achieve your goals. Not only does the optimal choice improve your happiness and health, but it also helps with growing the happiness and health of people in your life. The choice that unites and is open to joy is the optimal choice.
The second choice is the suboptimal choice. The suboptimal choice means getting what you want now, but at a cost. This choice gives you instant pleasure, but will eventually cause pain within yourself or with another person. The suboptimal choice disrupts and slows your dream building and happiness and health progression. The suboptimal choice also interferes with the growth and improvement of the people you care about. The choice that divides, that is closed and depressing is the suboptimal choice.
The third choice is the choice of no-choice or doing nothing. Doing nothing has both a negative and positive side.
The negative of doing nothing is having an apathetic attitude where you lack interest in participating in life and just don’t care. This uncaring attitude means you will do nothing when in reality you should be doing something. This apathy will cause you to become isolated by creating distance between you and what it is you really want (your dream) as well as creating distance between you and the people in your life. Not only that, but by not choosing you prevent and stop altogether any further progress or growth or evolution of yourself and others.
The positive of doing nothing is you may not be able to make a choice in this moment due to not having enough information. You can use this time out to reflect on your options and to gather more info to learn more about the situation. This time of reflection may not be an optimal or suboptimal choice, but there is potential here for you to make one of the other two choices.
So the first two choices are awesome choices. They help change your way of being. They move you from one thought, feeling, and action to another. The optimal choice does it by being in flow with your dream and your dream team. Remember your dream team is anyone who is involved in getting you from where you are now to where you want to be. With the suboptimal choice even though you experience pain this choice still creates a learning experience from which change can happen.
The third choice of do nothing on the other hand keeps you from growing and evolving. However, there is the potential for change when you take some time out to gather more information before making a well-informed choice.
In today’s society where you are expected to always be on point and available and to not take any breaks to stop and smell the roses your thoughts end up going a million miles a minute and you become disconnected from your true feelings in that moment. Not being able to just sit with your own thoughts and feelings can create distance between how you think you’re being in this moment and how you’re actually being in reality. Meaning you may think to yourself, ‘Yeah I’m happy and healthy. I’m feeling good’, but that work colleague who just said hi to you and who you completely ignored and the oversized clothes in your wardrobe say something completely different.
If you don’t know who you are and what you want in life is it any wonder then that when you’re presented with a choice you either end up picking the choice that doesn’t serve you or you find the available options difficult to understand and end up not doing anything at all.
Mediation is a great practise that you can use to help you make better choices. During meditation you focus on one thing and anytime your mind wonders to different thoughts you bring it back to that one thing. Every time you notice and realise that your thoughts have strayed from what you should be focusing on there is this gap between your thoughts and a space of opportunity to choose to bring your thoughts back to your original focal point or your centre.
Daily meditation practise does one of two things.
First it increases your ability to become aware and mindful of your thoughts and feelings connecting you to your true self and how you’re being in reality
Secondly, and an even bigger benefit to practising meditation I believe is that it forces you to pause, to slow down in order for you to sense what you never sensed before… which are the gaps between your thoughts, the space where you have the power to choose.
It’s during meditation that you train your awareness of self and where you learn more about who you are. It’s also during meditation that your ability to choose improves because you learn to live not just in your thoughts, but also you learn to live between your thoughts. By living in the gaps between your thoughts you get more comfortable with emptiness and space and nothingness and will come to realise that here in this space anything is possible.
Then when you’re outside of meditation during your normal everyday life that’s when you get to put into practise this better knowing of self and improved ability to slow everything right down and to see what’s possible.
The next time you’re presented with a choice or two no longer will you be frantically trying to analyse the options trying to decide which is the wrong or right choice, and no longer will you feel flustered and confused, because now in this moment where you must choose you will know yourself better, you will know what it is you really need in that moment because you will sense your true thoughts and feelings. This will allow you to select the choice that aligns with your dreams, your core values, and your dream team.
Meditation comes in many forms including sitting, movement (such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong), and walking meditation. Whatever meditation you practise focus on one thing. This one thing becomes your centre. For example during sitting meditation you can focus on your breath. During walking meditation you can focus on your steps. You can also focus on a single thought like a mantra or positive affirmation such as ‘I receive love from the world, I give love to the world’ that you repeat in your mind or out loud. Another thing you can focus on is sound such as ‘oooommmmm’ or ‘aaaahhhhh’. No matter the meditation and focal point anytime your mind starts to think about something else bring it back to that focal point. Bring it back to your centre.
The more you practise meditation the more you will know your true self and the more aware you will become of these gaps between your thoughts, giving you more chances to pause, making it easier to bring your thoughts back to centre, giving you better focus and clarity of thought, so that you can make better choices.
I will share a couple of quotes to help show what I believe to be the true power behind choice.
The first quote is from Henri Nouwen a Dutch priest and professor who says:
“We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there… it is important to become aware that at every moment of our life, we have an opportunity to choose joy… It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom of love.”
And along these lines are a few lines from the 80s hit song from the Back To The Future movie soundtrack ‘The Power of Love’ by Huey Lewis and The News:
“The power of love is a curious thing
Make a one man weep, make another man sing”
What these passages are saying to me is that the power of choice lies in the freedom you have to choose love in each and every moment.
“In reality the power of choice is the power of love.”
To be loving, to have love to give, and to do loving things for yourself and others in each and every moment of your life. That’s the true power of choice.
Of course you don’t have to choose love, right? Because as always the choice is yours or as Captain Planet a 90s cartoon superhero would say:
“The power is yours!”
Links and Resources
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Food Cravings:
- I’ll explain what food cravings are
- I’ll talk about three different types of food cravings and what causes them
- Finally I’ll share my top tips on how you can better manage yourself when it comes to food cravings
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Let’s first make the distinction between hunger and food cravings.
Hunger is a normal physiological response by your body meaning hunger is a normal physical function that your body performs. Hunger happens in response to your cells being low on nutrition and energy and information. You know you’re really hungry when you receive growling sounds and feel physical sensations from your stomach. Hunger leads you to eat any food in general.
A food craving is a physical, emotional, and mental want or need for a specific food.
As I always say life is in flow and always in motion and if you’re not moving then you’re not living, you’re not growing, and you’re not changing.
Food cravings come from the fact that your current way of being, your current lifestyle is stuck in a rut.
“I define food cravings as a craving for change.”
Having a fixed mindset or being stubborn or not being able to go with the flow will lead you to become physically, emotionally, and mentally stagnant. You will find yourself repeating the same actions, expressing the same feelings, and believing the same thoughts over and over and this my friend is the root cause of all food cravings.
A physical food craving is due to your body lacking specific nutrients. If you find yourself eating the same foods day-in-and-day-out for long periods of time you will be getting plenty of nutrients in fact probably in excessive amounts from that one group of foods, but you will be missing out on a lot of other nutrients found in different foods. If you’re also eating a lot of fake pretend food-like products aka processed and packaged foods well these have hardly any nutrients in them. I mean there’s plenty of energy and calories in these foods, but where’s the nutrition?
Movement, either too little or too much causes physical food cravings. Nutrients and energy and information from the foods and beverages that you eat and drink get digested, absorbed, assimilated, and metabolised when your digestive juices, your blood, and your lymph fluids are all in flow. When you don’t move and you stay in the same physical position for long periods of time your lymph fluid doesn’t flow and your heart has to pump harder to keep your blood moving causing nutrient traffic jams. When you’re doing strenuous exercise stress hormones increase and this stops your digestion in its tracks.
Now if your breathing is short and shallow and if you’re drinking tap water then the nutrients in your body will not be transported as effectively as they could be. Proper breathing massages internal organs and keeps your cerebral spinal fluid in flow helping to move nutrients in and waste out of your cells. Quality water has no industrial chemicals and has the right amount of minerals to form healthy blood vessels and other fluids needed to move nutrients around your body.
So to sum up physical food cravings while eating the same real foods all the time and eating fake foods may give your cells certain nutrients and plenty of energy your cells will still be screaming out for other nutrients and different building blocks they need to do their job. Now with no movement or with excessive movement not all the nutrients that you eat will even get to where they are needed most due to the lack of lymph flow, inefficient blood flow, and too much stress shutting down your ability to digest and absorb your food. Also proper breathing technique and quality water are needed for effective transportation of nutrients in your body.
An emotional food craving is due to certain feelings triggering physical hunger signals. When emotional needs are perceived to not be met by self or by others then food is used as a replacement for emotional support. If you experience chronic feelings of fear, resentment, apathy, anger, worthlessness, being lost, or pain (yes pain is an emotion) this usually means you’re missing out on love, connection, being cared for, peace, meaning, inspiration, and pleasure and food can act as a substitute when these are lacking in your life.
In fact deep-seated emotions, positive or negative, that have been repressed or ignored or neglected will show up in your bodymind in a number of ways and not just as food cravings. A bit of a sidetrack here, but while what I’m about to say hasn’t been shown in scientific papers I personally believe that cancer, yep the Big C, is the biggest symptom of unresolved emotional issues today. I say this from personal experience having witnessed family members make it through cancer therapy and having to say goodbye to other family members who have died from cancer.
Anyhoo… back to food cravings.
A mental food craving is due to your thoughts being out of alignment with your feelings and your actions. Remember back in the podcast episode about Dream Building I talked about how your dream must align and be in harmony with your core values in order to live a happy and healthy life and to achieve living your dream. Any time your thoughts, feelings, and actions do not correspond to your values and your dream then stress, pain, and suffering are not that far behind.
Another thing is if you’re constantly ruminating about past events or thinking about what may happen in the future this can cause depression and anxiety leading to food cravings.
A foggy head with stinking thinking stuck in the past or trying to forecast the future will cause you to crave foods that do not serve you or your dream.
Okay so how do you go about managing yourself when it comes to food cravings? First some prevention tips.
With all types of food cravings physical, emotional, and mental you want to nourish your body with nutrient, energy, and information rich real foods from Mother Nature. When you nourish your cells with all natural ingredients and building blocks your feelings and thoughts will also be in alignment with the principles of nature meaning you will feel happier, healthier, and start to think how you can be of service to others as opposed to how others can serve you. You want to eat seasonally and locally as well as. This will ensure your diet is varied and fresh and changes with the seasons.
Something to take note of is that different physical food cravings relate to different nutrient needs by your body. For example if you crave chocolate this may be a sign of magnesium deficiency. If you crave cheese this may be due to not having enough fat and/or calcium in your diet. A craving for sweet foods could be due to a lack of sulphur and the amino acid tryptophan. Craving salty foods is often due to a lack of chloride.
So based on what you are craving have a look at your current diet and see if there may be some room for improvement by including different foods with higher sources of the nutrients that you may be missing out on.
Okay do yourself a favour and do a ‘Kitchen Cleanse’ or ‘Pantry Detox’. This is where you remove all processed fake foods that you crave for. Out of house, out of sight, out of mind.
Do not stay in one position all day long. Sit, stand, walk, squat, lunge, and fidget if you have to. Set a timer to 25 minutes and change positions or go for a one minute walk every time it goes off. The more you can move your body the easier it is for nutrients to be transported to where they’re needed most.
Remember to breathe diaphragmatic breaths. Breathing through your nose with your mouth closed and tongue resting on the roof of your mouth behind your teeth and expanding your belly for the first two thirds of the breath and then allowing your chest to move only in the last third then letting the breath out naturally either through your nose or mouth gives your internal organs a nice massage and expands and contracts your muscles as well as your spine creating movement of fluids and nutrition.
Make sure you keep yourself properly hydrated with quality spring or filtered water. Depending on your body weight, your activity levels, and your environment your H2O needs can range from 2 litres a day to 4 litres a day.
So move often, breathe deeply, and drink real water.
Now when a food craving does hit you what can you do?
First thing to try is deep belly breathing for one minute. Count 4-8 seconds on the in breath and the same amount of seconds on the out breath. Do this for a minute and wait and sense if the craving is still there.
If you still got a craving try drinking a big glass of water and wait 20 minutes.
Still got the craving?
Try a spoonful of extra virgin coconut oil or a shot of extra virgin olive oil. Yep you heard me. Get some real fats into your body. Again wait 20 minutes and see if the craving is gone.
If you still have the craving what I’m about to suggest next may not make sense, but give in to the craving. Now this doesn’t mean to go chomping down on whatever it is you’re craving okay.
I’m about to describe a mindfulness ritual that you can practise that will help you to give in to the craving, but at the same time stay in full control and awareness of how you’re being around that food.
Okay so pick up the food you’re craving and smell it. Take a deep breath in… really sniff that scent in.
Now break up the food and crumble it between your hands and fingers or dip a finger into it and pick up a bit of the food listening to the sounds that are happening as you do this.
Fully be present with the smell, sight, sounds, and feel of the food. Does it have an intense smell or is it mellow? How many colours can you see? Does it sound hard and sharp or soft and quiet between your hands or fingers? Feel its texture and temperature and notice the differences. Is it cold or hot? Does it feel smooth or rough?
Now put a piece of the food in your mouth allowing it to rest on your tongue, but don’t eat it! Just savour the flavour. Can you describe it? Can you describe the taste?
Finally, start chewing. Don’t swallow it. Just notice what your senses are telling you as you eat the food. Does it taste good? Does it feel good?
Alright, choice time. Now you have to choose whether to spit out the food and be done with the craving or swallow it.
If you do swallow it you will have another choice to make. Do you take another bite and continue eating or are you done with the craving?
This mindfulness food cravings ritual doesn’t work for everyone and if it didn’t work for you then what you have on your hands is not a physical food craving, but more an emotional or mental one.
To help with emotional and mental food cravings daily affirmations and daily meditation can help.
Affirmations don’t have to be overly positive and they can be as simple as, ‘I am here in this moment and this moment is all there is’. This type of affirmation removes past and future thinking keeping you in the present.
Meditation helps train you to be aware of your thoughts and to keep yourself focused on one thing. There are many types of meditation. You can do sitting, breathing, movement, walking, even gardening meditation. All of these will help balance your bodymind. You could do two minutes a day, two minutes every hour, two hours a day, whatever works for you just make meditation a daily practise as consistency is king when it comes to changing habits and ways of feeling and thinking.
Again meditation is about focusing the mind and one of the best ways to meditate or focus your mind is through play. Go outside and play tag or hide and seek with family and friends. Climb trees, fall off a tree, play fetch with Fido. Whatever it is you do for play let go of any expected outcome and just have fun. That’s what play is all about.
Another way to manage your emotional and mental food cravings is to keep a Food Mood Diary. This is where you note down date and time, place, people nearby, and how you’re feeling every time a food craving comes up. Over time you will notice a pattern begin to emerge. Emotional and mental food cravings can be triggered by a number of things and you may be able to find out what your personal triggers are by using a food mood diary.
Your ability to manage yourself when it comes to perceived stress plays a huge role in balancing out your thoughts and emotions. Self-management in terms of stress comes down to how much integrity you have with your thoughts, words, and deeds. If you say you’re going to do something then do it. If you write down a date that a task needs to be completed by then when that date comes that task better well be completed. And if you fail to do something that you said you would do apologise to the parties involved and if it’s just you apologise to yourself.
Integrity and harmony are key to having a clear bodymind that includes clarity of thought and a light heart.
Listen to the podcast I did on stress (podcast #3) to learn more on how to manage yourself and the perceived stressors in your life.
Here’s a quote by American philosopher and psychologist William James:
“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
Emotional and mental food cravings fundamentally come down to not feeling appreciated when you expect to be and by not showing appreciation when you should. This includes self appreciation and giving yourself a pat on the back and loving your true authentic self.
So put down that pint of ice cream, that piece of pastry, that sugary cookie, that bar of milk chocolate, those salty chips, that crispy fried chicken, and choose instead to give yourself a hug and I want you to think, feel, and say to yourself, ‘I appreciate my life. I am worth it. I love me’.
If you find that difficult and don’t believe those words (and I know for some of you it is a struggle to show yourself authentic self love) how about thinking and feeling and saying this, ‘I have the potential to appreciate my life. I have the potential to be worthy. I have the potential to love myself’.
If you’re listening to this to my voice right now hear this, what I’m about to say for it is true: I Jason Marinovich appreciate you and your life. You are worthy for you are the reason why I record these podcasts. I thank you and give you all the gratitude I can give for listening and for giving me purpose. I love you my dear beautiful listener.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
Sameness begets staleness creating an unbalanced lifestyle leading to sickness, disease, and food cravings.
So keep moving forward.
Don’t let yourself get stuck in one way of being.
“Be water and keep in flow.”
Links and Resources
- WGP 014: Dream Building – How to Create the Life You Really Really Want
- WGP 003: How Stress is Making You Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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Tuning the Human Biofield – Eileen Day McKusick
(Buy from Amazon; Buy from The Book Depository)
A guide to the practice of Sound Balancing, using tuning forks to clear trauma stored in the human energy field
• Provides a precise map of the energetic biofield that surrounds the body, showing where specific emotions, memories, traumas, and pain are stored
• Details how to locate stored trauma in the biofield with a tuning fork and clear it
• 2015 Nautilus Silver Award
When Eileen McKusick began offering sound therapy in her massage practice she soon discovered she could use tuning forks to locate and hear disturbances in the energy field, or biofield, that surrounded each of her clients. She found these energetic disturbances correlated with the emotional and physical traumas her clients had experienced throughout their lives, the biofield acting as a record of pain, stress, and trauma from gestation onward. Passing the forks through these areas in the biofield not only corrected the distorted vibrational sounds she was hearing but also imparted consistent, predictable, and sometimes immediate relief from pain, anxiety, insomnia, migraines, depression, fibromyalgia, digestive disorders, and a host of other complaints. Now, nearly 20 years later, McKusick has fully developed her sound healing method, which she calls Sound Balancing, and created a map of the biofield, revealing the precise locations where specific emotions, memories, ailments, and traumas are stored.
In this book, McKusick explains the complete practice of Sound Balancing and provides illustrations of her Biofield Anatomy Map. She details how to use tuning forks to find and clear pain and trauma stored in the biofield. She reveals how the traditional principles and locations of the chakras correspond directly with her biofield discoveries. Exploring the science behind Sound Balancing, she examines scientific research on the nature of sound and energy and explains how experiences of trauma produce “pathological oscillations” in the biofield, causing a breakdown of order, structure, and function in the body.
Offering a revolutionary perspective on mind, energy, memory, and trauma, McKusick’s guide to Sound Balancing provides new avenues of healing for energy workers, massage therapists, sound healers, and those looking to overcome chronic illness and release the traumas of their past.
Disclaimer: This page contains affiliate links that may provide monetary compensation to help support the Whole Guidance Vision of Creating a Happy and Healthy Planet should you make a purchase. We very much appreciate and thank you for your support.
Extreme Ownership – Jocko Willink, Leif Babin
(Buy from Amazon; Buy from The Book Depository)
The #1 New York Times bestseller
“An incredible book… you teach guys and gals about leadership and you’ve helped not only military guys but families.” – Megyn Kelly
“You show in the book how to motivate… thanks for writing the book Extreme Ownership.” Bill O’Reilly
“[Jocko] is the co-author of an incredible new book – which I’ve been loving. Trust me. Buy it.” – Tim Ferriss
“This is a life-learning lesson for everyone… the book is awesome.” – Sean Hannity
Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership―at every level―is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.
Now, detailing the mind-set and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult missions in combat, Extreme Ownership shows how to apply them to any team, family or organization. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, explaining what they are, why they are important, and how to implement them in any leadership environment.
A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.
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