Why the Rush?

I know you have had one of these days: you have been running around all day taking care of errands or sitting at your desk and you don't eat lunch. It is not that you forgot to eat lunch, you know you are hungry, but you just want to try to get some more work done before sitting down to eat. By the time you do eat, it has been at least anywhere from 2 to 3 hours from when you should have eaten and you practically wolf the food down without a thought about what you just ate, how good or bad it tastes or what is actually in your food. I know because this happened to me today. I knew that I would be running around most of the day today and needed to get certain things done before moving on to the next. I do take the time to stop by and grab a veggie burrito, but did not want to waste my time sitting down to eat, hoping I would be able to at the next place I was at. When I finally do take the time to eat, I am so hungry and still engrossed on a conversation with my friend, that my attention is more focused on the conversation rather than on the food I am eating. I am literally just stuffing the burrito down my throat without really getting a chance to enjoy it.

So, why the big rush?

I ask myself this question every time I catch myself, after the fact, of going through ingesting my food so fast that I could eat it in less than 10 minutes. I have fortunately begun to develop a practice of just closing my eyes and smelling the food or looking at the food and just observing its color or smell and giving a simple blessing or thanks for the food and I feel that my body is much more ready to accept it. To my disappointment, this did not happen this afternoon and I have to ask myself why? Was it because I did not want to break up the flow of the conversation, was I maybe embarrassed, or just not even conscious of what I was doing because the primal part of my brain was just saying over and over again, "FEED ME!".

So, besides providing a blessing and taking the time before eating to breath and smell and see my food, I also try, again, I say try, to avoid eating and reading or eating and sitting in front of my computer. Again, it is hugely distracting and takes away from the enjoyment and pleasure of eating. I am not one for following rules to the T all the time and look for ways that it can fit my lifestyle and find it hard for me to follow this one sometimes. You may have heard of chewing your food for a set amount of time. One of the reasons being that you don't fully assimilate all of the nutrients that are found in food. By not chewing and swallowing the food right away, you don't actually break it down with your saliva or teeth and it goes undigested out to your other side. So, in a way, the food is being eaten without not providing much benefits other than making you full if you happen to be this type of person. Although it is not something I do all of the time, really chewing my food, it is something I do think about. Lastly, if you finish your meal in less than 10 minutes, you should probably think about slowing down a bit more, unless it is a melting ice cream than you have free reign :)

I intend to address many of these issues and look at the rhythm of eating in our society and how we can improve it for the better through the community dinners that I will begin hosting this Friday. Even through eating, we can cultivate more awareness about ourselves and our habits. Be on the look out for more information and photos from my pilot dinner!

Is Chocolate a Guilty Pleasure?

What a whirlwind this summer has been, I have gone through some major changes and I am truly loving it :)

I want to talk about guilty pleasures but I first want to introduce a new service that I am offering, it is called Awaken the Senses. I provide community dinners that feature local, organic, sustainable and wholesome, nourishing foods. This may sound like something that you may have heard before like underground dinners or guerilla restaurants, but this is different where there will be more of a focus on the mindfulness aspect of eating. For me, this is a great way of incorporating the teachings of yoga around the way that we eat and the foods that we consume on a daily basis. I am hoping to also begin offering yoga classes and food or "yoga and a brunch", sounds very inviting, right? Take a rejuvenating yoga class and then enjoy a small meal. Not sure if it will be a workshop type format or a biweekly or monthly class. Any suggestions? I want to make eating food be a whole body experience and through yoga it can help to heighten our senses and prepare our bodies for the food that we will eat and bring even more thought and consciousness into our decisions. This will prove to be a very fun and educational journey :)

So back to the topic at hand, guilty pleasures. Now you may have one and you can insert what they may be for you...it can be chocolate, cheesecake, french fries; pretty much anything that you may find pleasurable but have guilt around eating that food and may even be considered bad for you. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and I made this comment about chocolate being a guilty pleasure and she stopped me mid sentence and stated why she didn't understand why it is that chocolate is assumed to be a guilty pleasure when it can actually be pretty good for you, of course all depending on what kind of chocolate you are eating. This idea of guilty pleasures is something that I want to explore even further.

Why does there have to be so much deprivation and denial and guilt around the food that we eat? Especially in today's society. For good reason, some may say that we, as a society, love to indulge ourselves, whether it be in food, sex, alcohol and we have a tendency to overdo it. In a culture of abundance and where things such as food are much more affordable than what they used to be back in our parents or even grandparents days, we have that luxury of being able to have as much as we want whenever we want. So coming back to guilt around the pleasures that we seek, I think that we don't know when to say when and to truly listen to our bodies about what it is that we need or want.

I used to be a self professed chocoholic. I could buy a bag of Snickers snack size candy bars and eat half the bag in just one sitting. I would have them in my freezer (I love to eat chocolate when it is cold!) and get up maybe 5 or 6 times within a day and grab a handful. I knew that what I was doing was not good for me and that I would later regret having eaten so much after suffering from a tummyache, but this was my guilty pleasure. You would definitely see me the next time I went shopping buying the same thing or some other kind of big bag of chocolate. I would put limits and restrictions on how much I should eat, but none of them ever stuck. It was only after switching to some good dark chocolate and also having that knowledge of what was actually in those candy bars that I no longer became a chocoholic. I listened to my body and knew what it needed if I was having a craving for chocolate.

Chocolate is definitely a good health food, but within its limits and all dependent on what kind it is. All other types of goodies that come to mind when you think of guilty pleasure may not necessarily be really bad for you, but I think when we overindulge in those pleasures, that is where the real harm is done.

This is a topic that I want to continue to explore and discover why we have so much guilt around the foods we eat or why it is that we deprive ourselves of food because of a diet we are on or maybe because we know that we will overdo it when we eat it. Food should be a pleasurable experience and one to be shared with community (family or general community), not one of denial, it takes the whole fun out of eating. I would love to hear your comments about this and maybe some ways that you have dealt with this issue.

P.S. Be on the lookout for more information about Awaken the Senses dinners and "yoga and a brunch" gatherings in the East Bay.