I am sure you have heard the phrase “You Are What You Eat.” I recently came back from a vacation. Although mindful of my diet, eating out every day on a vacation caused me to gain a few pounds of weight! You see, when we eat out, other than salads, mostly what we are eating is processed food. Even when I was making healthier choices, that process food caused me to gain some weight. So I thought today we can talk about what it means to eat healthily and what kind of effect does food has on our body as well as our mind.
Let’s first start with the low-hanging fruit and talk about the effects of food on our bodies. Most of us have sometimes during our lifetime, tried some variation of a diet. We wanted to lose just a little bit of weight. If you had the discipline, you succeeded in losing a few pounds. The problem is if you are like most people, the moment you stop your diet, you gained back most if not all of your weight. Nowadays, there are so many diet options it’s insane! I even saw the so-called psychological-based diet. Not sure how that works but point is that there are just about a million options out there.
I have gone through different diet phases in my life. What really worked for me were two things. One is self-control. If I was particular about not putting any junk in my mouth, it would work. The moment, I gave to temptation, all bets were off. The second thing which I thought was really useful was the lack of processed food in our diet. After my heart attack, I stopped most if not all processed food. And that my friend was a real kicker. My weight just was balanced. My appetite actually increased but the weight gain stopped. So if you are trying to lose a couple of pounds, try that next time you decide to go on a diet. There are other benefits of not eating processed food as well. According to a National Institute of Health study (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-finds-heavily-processed-foods-cause-overeating-weight-gain), processed food is not good for us. In their study, people who ate processed food on average gained 2 pounds in a month. Those who did not eat processed food actually lost 2 pounds. In this study, The ultra-processed and unprocessed meals had the same amounts of calories, sugars, fiber, fat, and carbohydrates, and participants could eat as much or as little as they wanted. Even a bagel and cream cheese are considered processed food so it is important to know what we put in our bodies. Processed foods are full of chemicals. They also tend to be addictive. These products make up 60% of the daily calories in the American diet. They are also full of added sugar.
When we stop eating processed foods, our health improves. There is actually a laundry list of benefits including better sleep, weight loss, better mood, better immune response, and so forth. In the yogic system, there is a whole world about satvik and non satvik foods but we will keep that discussion for another day.
Can food affect your psychology? My dad always says that who cooks your food has an impact on you psychologically. I never believed that or agreed with that for the longest time. Then, I started to notice a trend. Sometimes when I ate out – not always, I would get these violent dreams. I am a lucid dreamer so I generally remember parts of my dreams. After tracking this for a year or so, I am convinced that who cooks your food has an impact on you. When we eat out, a lot of times the line cooks are people who have recently been released from prisons as part of rehabilitation programs, and maybe that is what drove those dreams! Again, I have no scientific evidence to back this up so please take it with a grain of salt.
Mindfulness actually comes very handy when we are trying to eat healthily. Mindful eating allows us to only eat when we are hungry as opposed to eating for the sake of eating. It also allows us to eat what is right for us instead of what is in front of us. And there lies the kicker. When we eat impulsively, we have no idea what we are eating and in what quantity. Mindful eating takes charge of our impulsiveness and helps us stay the course. Research shows that meditation helps stop overeating. It decreases binge eating and so-called emotional eating. Emotional eating is the use of food as a way to deal with feelings and emotions. We all know that meditation reduces stress and a lot of people overeat because of stress.
How can meditation help with all this you might ask? It is quite interesting actually. According to a National Institute of Health study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5324577/), high cortisol levels in our body tend to cause weight gain. Another NIH study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28863392/) found that meditation and mindfulness help reduce cortisol levels in our bodies. Go figure!