Monday morning after a great weekend. I'm Rushing to be some place I don't want to be to work on something I don't want to do. I'm late. I catch myself thinking I have to get some food for lunch. Do I need it? Will I be hungry? What can i do to stop eating? How do I know I will even be hungry? How do I know I am going to be hungry at any given point in the day? Truth is, I don't. And to give it further serious consideration, the more I use intermittent fasting in my diet the less hunger happens. The more I follow paleolithic nutrition the more I know how to stop eating, the less I am subject to the vagaries and ups and down of blood sugar spikes and the less food calls me. Unless that is, I am doing something I don't want to do in a place I don't want to be. Then old patterns creep in. Old thoughts break out. Old behaviours rear up and grab my attention.....food, my earliest comfort, my biggest friend.What do you think the biggest addiction is in our lives today? It's not TV, it's not Facebook, cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, buns or wine...it's thought. The average person thinks between 60,000 and 120,000 thoughts a day and most of them, to be frank, are unhelpful..They are limited, points of energy seered into our being usually at a time of great stress offering some sort of coping mechanism which worked at the time and which the brain seems to find in default position when it is searching for a way to deal with a stressful situation. It is a primitive response, a pattern that may have been established in childhood, a record, a notion of something that worked, then. Only it doesn't any more. But at a moment of stress we go back there. And at a moment of stress that solution might well be food. High sugar food, comfort food call it what you like, this is food addiction and each of us knows what does it for us and where to go to get that hit.
So here I am Monday morning, facing a potential stress and going back to my default position: food! Only this time I have caught the thought before the action follows through and I am ready. This time Mike offers to drive me to the venue where I am talking, taking a major stress from me and my day begins to take shape.
Paleo-Works!
So you see, it's not about food and it's not about packing sufficient lunch to get me through (!), it's about finding a different answer and confronting the source of the stress. What is paleo? What is the caveman diet? Of course they are one and the same. It is a balance in every aspect of life, mind body and soul. Use it well and don't dilute this powerful gift from our ancestors.
So...What can i do to stop eating?
Well remember this is paleo, so to thrive you ought eat to live, not live to eat.