ARE YOU CRAZY ENOUGH TO TALK TO YOUR BODY?

Last week I told you all about my #28daygutcleanse but I didn't mention one awareness I had in the last week of it....

I was at work on a Thursday and I had made paleo carrot cake for a colleagues birthday. I made it with brown rice syrup in place of honey, and every other ingredient (beside the currants) was approved on my cleanse, so I had decided that I would have a little piece to celebrate and see how I felt.

It turned out that said colleague had also made carrot cake, and so after lunch we cut it all up and each had two little slices of carrot cake - one made with almond meal, rice syrup, and walnuts; the other made with sugar, cream cheese frosting, and most likely plain flour.

Initially I was hesitant to try her cake knowing I was on my gut cleanse and was feeling really good. But of course, I'm very good at pleasing other people so had my bit. I can say now that I should have just thrown it away, but what I've since learnt has been very valuable.

Eating my cake - I felt really good. I was a little peckish so it filled that gap and went down a treat (it is after all my favourite cake). Cake #2 not so good. I was unpacking an order and got an instant headache, yet at the same time my taste-buds were yelling Give Me More!! I was witnessing two very different physical body reactions to the one piece of cake. And because I've been playing with questions such as "Body, what would you like to eat?" whilst avoiding inflammatory foods the past month, I was very in tune with how my body was feeling. It was less than 5 minutes later whilst wheeling out a trolley full of products I had just unpacked that I felt I could have fallen to the ground. I noticed my vision skip a beat, lethargy set in hard, I felt sleepy and very weak at my knees. My body was not happy Jan. And at the same time, the sweetness on my tongue was craving more.

It was in relaying all this to B that he said I should blog about it. This is the stuff that I want people to know, to learn, to feel in their own body for themselves - not the falling to my knees thing, but the intuitive eating thing.

So... How can we learn to eat more consciously? For the health of our physical body, mental body, emotional body and spiritual body?

1. Speak to your body. Don't ignore the signs it's giving you. When you're feeling hungry for lunch ask your body "Body, What would you like to eat?" and get a sense of that. You may feel/hear/see/sense nothing and that's ok. Still ask. Something will change at some point.

2. If you've got two options in front of you, get a sense if one feels lighter than the other. One will feel heavy and one will feel light. And I don't mean literally (light vegemite sandwich; heavy tin of baked beans). Whichever feels lighter for you is truth, and that's what you're body wants. Right now.

3. Keep good wholesome foods in your kitchen. If you've only got corn chips, white bread, frozen pies and orange juice to choose between, nothing is really going to make you feel amazing over time. By filling your cupboards and refrigerator with fresh fruit and veggies, organic nuts and seeds, smoothie ingredients, yoghurts, raw chocolates, herbal teas... you're offering your body the best already. So naturally, you'll be choosing something amazing as well.

What about cravings?

Don't they mean your body is missing something and needs whatever you're craving? Like craving tomato sauce, you must be in need of salt. Or is it sugar? 

I used to hear this all the time, bought into it a bit, no doubt ate more crap because of it (as a craving for crap leads to one eating crap, and then you're hooked physically on the MSG, processed sugars, refined flours and so on and that keep you eating the stuff). Now I look at it more as an interesting point of view, with awareness around there being truth in it.

And it all comes back to that consciousness thing...

When we are in our body, present, here, now, conscious... we know exactly what our body wants. It may be an apple. Or a glass of milk. Perhaps some sugary lollies. Whatever it is, if we have no judgement around food being either "bad" or "good", then we'll only really eat what we (our body) feels like.

When we are not conscious, here, now, alive, present... the times when we allow everything to become insurmountable and we want to bury ourselves from it all... this is when we crave sweeter carbohydrate foods, because they give us a quick pleasure hit. How many people do you know that actually crave apples? Versus how many you know that crave coffee and some chocolate at about 3pm most days?

By playing with the question "Body, What would you like to eat?" and waiting for a response, a feeling, a pull, we are opening more and more to the intuit wisdom our body is. We're not yelling over the top with a CHOCOLATE CAKE WILL FIX MY BREAKUP PROBLEM, but we're waiting to see, hear, feel, witness what it is our body actually wants. Right now. It might be chocolate cake and that's perfect it that's the case. It's when we project what we THINK our body wants (when really this is when it's only what our emotions want, more often than not as a way of covering up or hiding something we don't want to feel) that we're potentially doing it harm, and definitely ignoring it.

Take coffee as a perfect example for me. As a barista for years, I drank, made and enjoyed it everyday without fail. Then having adrenal fatigue, I tried to not believe it was impacting my health, so continued to have it for a while. Then not. Now I am at a place where the other day I really felt like a coffee, and I had one. The following day I felt like one again, and so I had one. I noticed that I didn't want to fall back into having it (habitually) everyday, and this morning I was surprised to feel that I actually didn't feel like one. And in honouring my body, not my ego and emotions, I had a tea instead. Previously I would have had one regardless, just because it was what I did every morning. Not even stopping to check in with my body to see if I felt like one... I just had one.

So where am I going with all this... I just wanted to bring up my experience with carrot cake, how it affected me, and what I learnt from it.

So play with this yourself this week and ask yourself 

---> "Body, What would you love to eat?" 

or another I recently read... 

---> "Truth body, do you require food now? What do you require?"

and see what comes up for you.