Hey. Times traveling pretty fast, huh? Almost done with another month. So how would you be able to get the most out of your food? As you may know, I focus on emotional health. Some of you might think, “How does emotions have anything to do with food?” Well actually more than you THINK. We live in quite an up beat society and many of us barely have time to actually enjoy our food. For many of us, once we have a time to sit down and relax, our minds are going every other way. We try to distract the mind by looking at our phone or watching a movie, but I recommend trying another way to maximize your absorption. The mind has emotions like fear or worry conditioned within and will make you think about what is going to happen tomorrow when you are trying to enjoy your meal in the Now. It may even give you guilt about something you did today that wasn’t “perfect”. Or bring up something from the past that makes you angry. The reason why I bring these up is because all of these emotions can affect getting the most out of your food.
When negative emotions are conditioned in the mind, they will continue to come up anytime it feels necessary. For this blog, let's stick with the time when we are eating and assimilating food. These emotions will continue to come back the more we suppress them and not allow them to be released. When they are suppressed, we dig them deeper and deeper and hope they never come back. Not only does this not resolve the issue, the body will reflect the negativity we have in our minds.
As we are eating, it's best to be in a parasympathetic state and allow our body to assimilate the vitamins & minerals in our food. The Parasympathetic state is our rest and digest state. The other side of this is the sympathetic state. This state, for this blog, is geared towards fight or flight. What’s fascinating is that on average we are in this sympathetic state 70% of the day. That means that our bodies think we are trying to survive for the majority of the day.
What this does is shuts off the parasympathetic system, rest and digest. The body doesn’t know the difference, what you think with the emotions you use will produce chemicals and hormones all over the body. The body is unconscious, it’s unaware of what is going on in the outside world so it will do anything and everything you think. This will not allow you to absorb the nutrients in your food if you're putting your body in this survival state. So many people are at the dinner table with their bodies thinking that it is getting chased by a tiger when they are simply enjoying a Caesar salad and a glass of water. I don’t blame it for doing that! You’re still alive aren’t ya?! I say it's been doing a pretty good job so far! We just have to understand the body and mind are intelligent. Let’s work on how to properly use it, especially if we are trying to get the most out of our food.
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