Eat To Live

You are spirit with a physical body. If you want to go further on your spiritual path, support your physical body.

If there’s one thing I could share with you that is most urgent to your health and well being, what would that be?  You are stressed out.

Just how stressed out are you? Do you even know that you’re stressed out?  Are you just surviving and not thriving?  Do you know the difference?

We are stretched thin,  inundated by chatter from our telephones, televisions, and computers. And that’s not to mention possible interference from the energy output of those devices. Just the noise pollution and the distraction that surrounds us,  numbs us, overloads us and dulls our senses.

As you wolf down that chili dog and swig your third cola of the day, how will you get through the chemical dissonance that kind of food is causing in your body?  Do you know the difference any more between stressed and free from stress?   Most people don’t.

If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?  It was within the last few months that I realized that IF I don’t take better care of my body, I may find myself with no place to live. And I want to live… here, now…  I want to live.

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.  But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst,  let it then be an act of worship.~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

The I AM that I am resides here in my body.  As I began to reprogram the way I eat and exercise, this thought stayed with me. If I’m not caring for my body, how will it care for me?

Four years ago, I stopped drinking soft drinks.  And after years of drinking water with my meals, now if I have a sip of soda, it feels like my mouth is on fire. My mouth burns and I know the difference that makes in how I feel.

And you know, soda pretty much automatically comes when you order the burger and fries.  And when I no longer ordered the cola, then it was easy to drop the burger and fries.

In just the last couple of years, my husband and I stopped eating anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup, HFCS.  We began looking at every label on every product we ate. We found HFCS in saltine crackers! We also found off brand saltines without HFCS. So, guess which we get.

But I was still hooked on sugar. Too much sugar was stressing my body. The more I ate, the more I craved. And so I stopped. I did it with medical advice and a low carb, restricted calorie diet. It was just enough to get myself off the  vicious cycle I had been on.  In four weeks, I lost 15 pounds. My brain feels better, thinking is clear, less stress and I have more energy.

In that time and since, I began to simplify the way I eat. Our lives are so complex and that is where the stress is coming from. So my plan is to eat as close to simple, single ingredient foods as I can. That means a lot more vegetables than I’d been having. And eating as much of that as I can organic, local, pesticide and herbicide free. There are tons of chemicals in our environment that I can’t easily get away from, but I can watch what goes in my mouth.

That’s not always easy, but it’s what’s right. I’m 55 and I plan on being in this body for another 50 years.

What one step can you take today that will begin to de-stress your life? Eat a fresh carrot,  savor it.  And for goodness sake, turn off the television or radio for an hour,  give yourself that gift. Otherwise how will you ever know who you are beyond the noise.