Wise actions, wise view, wise speech…wise eating?
So here’s the thing, if I have been eating healthy all day then shouldn’t I have lost a ton of weight…for sure by tomorrow I will have lost 30 pounds or more…right?
Patience is a virtue…but it’s not my virtue…not always anyway. I’m more of a have right now kind of person. Our poor bulldog has been on a diet for months and lost 1 pound…I feel her pain. Why am I so impatient about this? (I don’t need to analyze all my impatience right now.)
In Graduate School we were talking about where we feel emotions in our bodies. I realized that the emotions we were talking about anger, fear, even love I feel in my stomach…you know how we say “I feel it in the pit of my stomach”? That’s where I felt it…the pit of my stomach. I also realized that I was frequently mistaking that uncomfortable feeling with hunger…if I’m angry I eat. If I’m afraid I eat…or happy or sad or anything. That feeling leads me to eat…and that helped me understand how I eat my feelings. It’s too bad that just recognizing something doesn’t necessarily change it.
I heard Shonda Rhimes interviewed by Oprah and she had just lost a lot of weight. She said that she realized that she worked hard at everything in her life. She worked her butt of at work and as a parent so she wondered why she thought she would not have to work at losing weight. I get that…I want my desire to be healthy and live a long life to be enough to completely change any negative habits I have…and immediately please. I have also worked hard to accomplish the things I have in my life and so I should be able to accomplish this.
It seems like all the diets out there have you give up something…except Weight Watchers but you count points and that makes me insane…I feel like all I do is think about food and plan eating and that makes me want to eat all kinds of things I never eat. There’s low carb diets, eating like cavemen (and women), high protein, vegan, vegetarian, no sugar, no alcohol, you can buy premade meals or drink your meals (not alcohol ☺)…on and on it goes…what to do?
Michael Pollan says that we should eat food, not too much, mostly plants…or something close to that. Food being things with no more than four ingredients on a package…primarily no packages…lots of fresh fruit and veggies. Those instructions sound sensible to me.
Buddha was born a Prince. His father wanted to shelter him so he kept him within the palace walls. He had anything he wanted to eat or drink whenever he wanted it. When he left to find enlightenment he swung the pendulum the other way. He almost starved himself to death eating as little as a grain of rice a day. After his enlightenment he talked about the middle way…not being gluttonous and no starving.
I am looking for my middle way…I am pretty sure it is not the same for everyone because we are all so different…and where is the middle anyway? Is it exactly the middle…or close to the middle…or just not to the extreme either way? I’m guessing my questions demonstrate my lack of middle wayness.
Kai Raines 