Yes I am up at 2am. And yes I can appreciate the irony of writing on nourishment w hen I am clearly not sleeping. I swear it is due to too many naps today and a flood of nightmares the night previous! I promise I'll get to bed soon.
I have been thinking a lot lately about "stuff". In particular, stuff relating to nourishment and how we intake food. I received an invitation for an event on January 15th which is focusing on Low-glycemic eating and how to make it a part of your every day life. I am really excited about the event and the messages it brings.
Low-glycemic eating in my mind basically boils down to eating delicious fresh foods, as opposed to overly processed or convenience foods. This is over-simplification, but is basically correct. One of my favourite "lazy" product commercials is the pre-peeled, pre-diced frozen potatoes. Golly food processing companies are brilliant. Take something as easy as making mashed potatoes, make it sound hard, slap some packaging onto it and sell it for 5x what it's worth...but I digress. *sigh*
Being a dancer, studio owner and hell, just a woman, I am perpetually inundated with messages from the media, other women, students and myself about weight loss. I, like many other women, struggle with how I view myself, my body and how those two things fit in this world. But I am getting tired of the old dog and pony show and would like to shift the focus from weight loss to nourishment.
I believe that when we focus on weight loss, we focus on deprivation. The idea of "I need to lose weight." already puts you in the headspace that a)you need to deprive yourself of something to be something b)that you are not good enough to deserve nourishment because nourishment leads to extra weight. These are particularily dangerous places to be in mentally because this type of deprivation ideology leads to over eating, starvation/binging cycles and other series food related illnesses like anorexia and bulimia.
What is setting my brain all atizzy is that we are heading into the biggest binge and purge season of the year: Christmas and New Years. I'm sure many of you have already been to several Christmas parties where you ate and drank too much (binge), and then spent the next week feeling guilty (purge), starving yourself (or attempting to) and then binging again because you are hungry and require nourishment. Then, we enter the magical New Year, where everything is supposed to be better and how suddenly there is supposed to be this astronimical shift in the time space continuum where you will suddenly become skinny through deprivation or maniacal amounts of exercise. And when we fail a month later, which we inevitably do because we set unrealistic goals, we feel even worse and hope to god we can manage to not go up another pant size until Spring.
Whew! That was quite the run-on sentence! I'm tired from just typing it! Wow. That is a lot of pressure. I'm sweating and I am just writing about it.
About a month and a half ago, I had a paradigm shift. I was focusing on "lack" and "deprivation". When I realized, I was putting the wrong things into my body for the wrong reasons. I decided to focus on nourishment and filling my body with good food. And to eat lots of really healthy, delicious things. And lo and behold, when I started to focus on nourishment, my body responded with "hey, I like this!" and has started to let go of some of the weight I believe it was desperately holding onto for fear of being starved!
A lot of people say "I don't have time to prepare healthy meals." I am guilty of that. I have some frozen dinners in my fridge for just such an occassion. I am fortunate in that I don't have to go to that well very often, but it's nice having a back-up. I am also a crazed type-A OCD thinker that is constantly churning new ideas and working on new projects (ahem, 2:13am now, yes I know....). So I get it. You're busy. Me too.
But I came to the conclusion that if I didn't stop and focus on nourishing my body through good food and adequate rest (yes I know. I promise I'll get my sleep schedule back. Nightmares are a bitch!) I would put my body into a very bad place that would require a lot of recovery, maybe even doing potential further damage to my body.
I now believe that when we are properly nourished, our bodies will look the way they are supposed to look. I believe that weight issues are at epidemic proportions because we belong to a culture of deprivation and shame, as opposed to nourishment and acceptance. Obesity and weight gain are just symptoms of this culture. The vicious cycle that men and women become trapped in are also symptoms of this culture.
Just as deprivation and shame come in many forms, so do nourishment and acceptance. So what I would like to propose is this: Enjoy your holidays. Allow spending time eating meals with loved ones to fill your being with joy. Let it be ok for you to eat turkey and gravy and stuffing. Because it really is. Those things are delicious. And when you are setting your goals for the New Year, ignore weight and numbers, and resolve to nourish yourself. Whether it is through rest, good food, reading good books, time to yourself, time with friends, telling your spouse and children "NO" (it's ok, I promise) etc., make nourishment your priority and I believe, the things that you want in your life will come to you.
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