What does it mean – Eat Like A YOGI?
The food we eat and our dietary habits play important part in our life. I hope you agree on that 😊
Table of Contents
Nourish your body & mind
Everything is energy so food itself has energy too. In Yoga, it’s called Prana. What we eat is directly connected to how we feel. Everything affects everything else. Food affects body then mind. Our body responds to food by creating feelings. Feelings create emotions. Emotions create thoughts. Thoughts create our world. It is a chain reaction.
The food we choose to eat, contributes greatly to not only our physical health but also our mental health. We all know that proper food and drink nourishes the physical body. At the same time, the first level of nourishment for the mind comes through the food we take in.
What is your relationship with food?
Eat Like A YOGI is all about your relationship with food.
We have relationship with everything around us. You have relationship with your partner, your friends, family… even with material things around you like money. Your relationship with food is the longest relationship you have, and will ever have.
Like any other relationship in life, if we don’t nurture it, it can turn against us.
My relationship with food wasn’t healthy. There were a lot of guilt, restrictions, ignorance… I was prone to emotional eating. I would snack more than eat real food. You know that feeling when you indulge in chocolate even though you know you will feel even worse afterwards. And you do it anyway, like you want to punish yourself.
How Yoga helped me change my relationship with food
Through my physical practice of yoga, I got to know my body better and understand its messages. In every yoga pose, body communicates with you through physical sensations, and if you don’t regard them you end up hurting yourself. I became aware of how my body was feeling in the moment and really started listening to those sensations.Â
Meditation has introduced me to the content of my mind, and its thinking pattern. I got curious about my inner world- thoughts, feelings, emotions… It taught me how to be. To be present in my body, to accept my fears, to simply allow myself to feel what I feel. Finally I started to understand myself on much deeper level.
There is one thing we all have in common, and we all do it at the same time. It stays with us from the moment we arrive into this world, until the moment we depart from it. Breath. Through my breathwork practice I have learned to live more in the breath.Â
All of these powerful tools helped me to understand my relationship with food. It’s important to ask questions in order to find the source of anything happening within us.
Self-Reflection
Every time I would reach for a certain food, I would pause and ask myself a simple question: “ Why are you reaching for this now? Do you feel a physical or emotional hunger? Well, I was feeding more my emotions than my body.
That’s how I started exploring the relationship between what I eat and how I feel. I realized how much food had control over my body and mind. This led me to my discovery of a whole-food, plant-based diet.
By simply becoming more aware of WHY I was reaching for certain foods, my diet completely changed. I switched from looking for the pleasure in the moment, and not caring about how my body felt afterwards, to paying a close attention after every meal.
That feeling after a meal became more important than that short-term pleasure during a meal.Â
Eat Like A YOGI
Our dietary habits are shaped by our culture, family, friends, and social status. They are based on our beliefs and knowledge about food. We are attached to a taste that was formed by our experience. Have you noticed, when you eat certain food, it brings you back a memory of a person, or a place, or whole experience?
Let go of all your beliefs & ideas of why or what you should or shouldn’t eat. In order to change our diet, we have to switch from autopilot mode to manual. You are not driven by your habits or likes, but by your bodily needs instead. Does the food that you eat make you feel lethargic, or make you feel energized? Does food that you eat support you in your life?
One of the best way to take care of our mental and physical health is by providing the proper nutrition. Make a choice about how you want to feel, and choose foods which make you feel that way!
Observe how food affects your physical body and your mind. How do you feel afterwards – tired, light, sleepy, lethargic, energized, good, clean, satisfied, grouchy, gloomy, low-spirited, heavy, delighted …Â
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