If you have ever been on a high fat diet, Paleo diet, dairy free diet, vegan diet, then you have probably stumbled upon… your ego.
Have you thought how often we do something, not because it makes us feel good and not because we feel like doing it, but because our ego dictates so?
If you have been on a certain nutrition plan, that has a name and you have stated it in front of your friends and family more often than not, even if you feel like taking a bite of – potato when you are on a high fat diet, a piece of cheese when you have stated that you are dairy free – you do not dare to do it.
You sit around the table and you stare how other people are eating a particular food and your body is telling you that it wants a bite – just a small piece, yet you do not do it, because you don’t want to hear the questions: “Why are you eating carbs?”You do not listen to your body, because you don’t wanna feel like a failure in your own eyes, because after all – come on! This is a potato!
I am sure that you know what I am talking about. We have all gone through this. But the story doesn’t stop here. Very often, after such a resist to take what you feel like eating in the presence of your friends, you travel back home and on the way you buy exactly that food – but this time it is not one bite, but a whole box of fries, a cup or two of cheese and so forth. You close the front door of your house and you start eating as if you’ve been starving for a whole month.
As a woman I work with told me: “Ines, the paradox is that every couple days I binge on the foods I say I do not eat.”
During the past couple days, I received a couple messages from women who:
-one of them said that everybody convinces her that you shouldn’t eat dairy products and that she is not, yet every night she goes to bed with the thought of dairy products. And that has been the case for the past 6 months.
– the other woman told me that she is vegan for the last 2 years and all her “vegan friends”, as she called them, convince her that she shouldn’t eat meat, yet she feels the need of animal products. She even tried eating them and she felt better, but her friends once again convinced her she shouldn’t. And now she wonders what to do, because her body is showing her that this is not her way of eating.
– the third one shared that she doesn’t eat carbs, because carbs make you fat, and in the same time she thinks about oats and rice all day long.
Are you familiar with this? I’ve been there – in the past, when I constantly used to put labels on myself.
How often do you go against your body, because of your ego? With every cell in your body, you feel that what you do, doesn’t serve your body, but just because you told others that you are “Paleo”, “gluten free”; “meat free” and so forth, you don’t allow yourself to eat these foods or at least not in front of people.
And the worst part is that this is exactly one of the steps towards an eating disorder. Doing something secretly. Eating something only when you are by yourself, and denying that food in front of others. That is when you program your mind that this food is not allowed and that you are breaking the rules, by eating it. You are the one building walls and then you are encaging yourself. You are the one that sets the punishment and the one that constantly creates the premises that make you feel like a failure.
Until the moment when you realize that you do not need to label yourself and that you do not need to explain others, why you ate a piece of chocolate, even though you eat mainly healthy food; you do not need to explain why you haven’t eaten meat for the past 6 months, but exactly today you felt like eating a steak and you did it.
Healthy eating and healthy lifestyle are something simple. But we are constantly making them difficult, because we often become slaves to our ego and to the image we have built in front of others. The image that we constantly try to defend, so it can be left whole.
Healthy eating is something really simple, when we listen to our body. Starting your day with burgers is neither appropriate, nor the will of your body.
More often than not, people say that the advice to listen to your body is harmful, because if you listen to your body you will be constantly eating donuts, pizza and chocolate. But this is not listening to your body, because the exhaustion, the lack of energy, the bloating, the excess weight, the hormonal imbalance, the problems with your skin and sleep, that the constant consumption of junk food causes, shows that our body is screaming from disgust.
Because when you listen to your body, then you take care of it, and taking care automatically excludes the foods that rob you out of health.
And you know what! It doesn’t matter what is the label that you have put on yourself – just tear it down and just be yourself. Don’t say that you eat one thing or another. Just accept the fact that you are in a period, when you choose to eat particular foods. The period might be shorter and it might be to the end of your life – it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in every particular moment, you can change the direction, if what you are doing right now doesn’t make you feel good.
I communicate with so many people and you have no idea, how many of them put up to live, to eat, or to train in a way that doesn’t make them feel good, yet they do it, just because they have built this identity and now they are afraid to change it. But do not forget that you create yourself and that in every single moment, you can change your creation. You have the writer’s rights on your own self and instead of writing the book of your life as a dictation, that other people dictate, write it in your unique and authentic way – even when this means quitting on something that you fanatically used to believe is true. Because the only constant is change and the convictions from yesterday are a reflection of the experience, knowledge and the direction you had. Your present self might be different and it might need something different. Do not burry yourself. Do not label yourself. Today, you are just choosing to eat in a certain way and in every particular moment, if your body feels like it, you can eat one chocolate, 1 potato or a steak. Leave your ego, because your body is wiser.
