have it your way
It hit me one winter night as I sat down to eat my dinner of M&Ms and eggnog:
…this was probably not a well-rounded meal.
A lot of other moments in my life had made mention to myself that perhaps I did not have the healthiest of eating habits. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve noticed halfway through teaching a class that maybe I was feeling light-headed because it was 6:30 at night and I hadn’t had anything more than a cup of tea ten hours earlier. Or how many times my best friend has made me pack a lunch before I left the house for an all-day yoga workshop. Or how often I eat only one meal a day and eat it so quickly that I can’t remember how many bites it took, if I ate my own tongue or if I was even breathing at all during the process.
Because I’ve never been too concerned with my overall body image, I never considered the fact that there may be something disorderly about my eating. I skip meals because I’m in a hurry, because I forget or because I’m just not hungry, not because I’m worried I won’t be able to fit into a pair of skinny jeans if I eat pie. So I didn’t think it was that big of a deal…
…until the day I stared down at the handful of frozen M&Ms. I literally wasn’t planning on eating any more than just that handful. It was late, I had just gotten home from work, and making food seemed like such a big to-do – I knew that just a smidgen of food to please my palate would quiet my stomach enough to fall asleep. And besides, eggnog is very filling.
Alarms went off in my head. Since when was eating a hinderance and not a pleasure? Or if not necessarily a pleasure, at least a life-necessity?? This isn’t good, I thought. I’m a yoga teacher, for cripessake, teaching about taking time to nourish and heal the body and not even paying a penny for my own thoughts.
Like magic, the next day I had an email blast from a fellow yogini e-introducing a group of us to a nutritionist friend of hers. The serendipity of timing was too much for me to pass up and I immediately made plans to meet with Ryah the Nutritionist.
My homework after our first meeting was to eat breakfast. We discussed different ideas for food, how to keep it well-rounded and I agreed to keep a diet diary for at least three days out of the fourteen until our next meeting. By the time we met next, I had kept a log of my eating habits every single day of those fourteen.
It wasn’t until after leaving Ryah’s office that I realized I had been preparing myself to be defensive. To defend my actions (or lack thereof) by saying I-don’t-know-what, but I was prepared to make excuses. I had left there with the diet diary in hand, thinking I would have to eat because I’d hate for Ryah to be disappointed in what she saw… until I realized as time went on that I was eating because I was the one who wanted to see I was taking care of myself. I had put it into the back of my mind for so long that I was ignoring the fact that I was hurting myself. I knew how to get by on a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. It became the normalcy in my life. It was normal to be hungry and exhausted. And because skipping meals was normal and I was still successful at accomplishing day-to-day tasks, I suppose it was harder for me to see what the problem was.
It’s simply not acceptable to diminish the sense of ones’ Self. To put the important things – like eating, sleeping, self-expression, passion, dreams – on the back burner for fear of it “getting in the way” of your current situation is absolutely not okay. To do that reflects a sense of self-unimportance. Thinking it’s more important to maintain a relationship with someone who disempowers you than to step up and declare what you deserve; working overtime at a job that gives you ulcers; endlessly dedicating your energy to everyone EXCEPT yourSELF – that’s to diminish your own heart. To tell it that it’s not important.
And I never thought of it that way until I began eating regularly and discovered that my body was almost literally writing me thank-you notes after each meal. Before, I would shut off communication with my body. Tell it to quit whining, to suck it up through the next few hours. Now, when I get hungry, I have a dialogue about finding food. I assure my body that I will get it what it needs. I won’t put baby in the corner, so to speak.
Today – what can YOU do to nourish yourself? What is it that your body, your mind – your HEART – is calling out for? How long have you been ignoring that plea? And HOW can you feed it?