This week marks the end of the Food Diary experiment that we began back in October with our Listening To Your Body: Engaging With Food In A Conscious Way article. Those of you following our Food Is Sacred series will have seen the reports that we’ve been posting from my food diary on our blog over the past month; here’s a summary of the results.
The first week involved a lot of headaches, general moodiness and a lack of energy. This went on into the second week, with Melbourne Cup weekend involving a lot of alcohol and unhealthy foods. I’d begun to be more conscious of how I was eating, adding maqui and gubinge to my breakfast cereal every day and eating more salads. The headaches and mood swings continued with my energy constantly waxing and waning, and it was only by Saturday of the second week that the initial detox period seemed to have passed. By the beginning of week three, my energy levels were extremely high, leading to restlessness and frustration…cutting out unhealthy foods meant I was feeling too active to relax! So, I joined a Melbourne city gym and started training Muay Thai. Around the same time I started to feel as if I didn’t need coffee to wake up anymore, and began to cut it out. The fourth and fifth week made it apparent that when I did drink coffee, it was making me feel frustrated and irritable. At first I was really disappointed; it would drive me mad to smell my wife’s gorgeous coffee in the mornings and not partake. But I quickly got over my embarrassment at ordering decaf (in a Melbourne café, ordering decaf is tantamount to asking for crack cocaine!) and I’m now experimenting with dandelion coffee, with encouraging results.
Six weeks after beginning my food diary, I’ve come to some important conclusions. Lighter food means that I have a brighter mood and more energy. More energy makes me more productive, but also more restless. Being restless and energetic means I need regular training and exercise. Regular training and exercise means that I’m losing weight and my body’s looking and feeling better. This makes me feel better in general and wake up easily without caffeine. I’ve also come to realise that caffeine’s making me feel frustrated and short-tempered with the typical pressures of everyday city life. And now, a month after my first gym session, I’m training five days a week and eating more consciously to support my development. I’m feeling amazing!
These findings go to show that even if there’s no dramatic health issues in your life, you can still discover some important facts about yourself, your habits and your patterns, simply by listening to your body. With the result being that you’ll feel better, live healthier and be more productive, it’s definitely worth the effort. Better yet, no external motivation can compete with the feeling which comes from within yourself.
Eureka!
Up until last week, our only feedback was coming from within the Loving Earth crew. You can imagine our excitement when we got our first public confirmation of success! This is what April Alexa from California had to tell us:
Hi Loving Earth!
I would love to share with everybody at Loving Earth the story about my journey that I recently experienced. Let me first start off by saying that within this past year I have been trying to live a healthy and balanced lifestyle. I can be the first to admit that it is not easy, but the health benefits can be truly rewarding. I am an avid reader of the Kora Organics Blog (led by Miranda Kerr and contributors), and recently came across an article written by Loving Earth. The whole article really caught my attention as it was all about listening to your body...something that I quite honestly never have done. I struggle every now and then with fatigue and digestive issues. While I do try to eat healthy, it never occurred to me that I had to see food in a "conscious" kind of way. I figured that eating "healthy" foods was all I need. Once I begun recording how I felt after every meal, I was extremely amazed by the results. Starting in the middle of October, I have been recording my body's feelings after every meal. By documenting my meals and feelings, within a week I already realized that eating bananas made me feel extremely weak and delivered foggy thinking. Why was this? I often wondered. From then on I had slowly started to remove bananas from my diet. To learn that bananas were contributing to my weakness, was a big surprise in itself for me, as I always have a strong moment of fatigue everyday. I was finally starting to get answers. Since I could no longer have a banana in my oatmeal, I switched to raisins. Within that week, I realized that raisins contributed to my fatigue and foggy thinking as well. I started eating just plain oatmeal and I felt great! To make a long story short, after 3 ½ weeks, I realized that high potassium foods were not coping with my body. High potassium foods were the culprit. By eating bananas, raisins, melons (anything really high in potassium)...I felt awful. From then on I started educating myself about high potassium foods and the connection it was having with my body. Before I knew it, I realized that I had Adrenal Gland Fatigue! Not only can people with Adrenal Gland Fatigue not tolerate potassium rich foods, but they experience digestive issues as well as acne. I had every single symptom! I basically gave myself my own answers all by just listening to my body! So I would like to send a BIG thank you to Loving Earth for inspiring me in the first place to take on this project. I have changed my nutritional habits, and I feel like a new person! Thank You!
Sincerely,
April Alexa
This response has made us so happy! Even if it’s just this one person who’s experienced the power of listening to her own body, this whole project has been more than worth it! April is the first to get her free Loving Earth goodies, with a package of Maqui Berry Power, Kale Chips, Orange & Gubinge Dark Chocolate and Deluxe Buckinis winging its way to sunny California. 49 more people who respond to us with a summary of their food diary findings will be receiving the same package to help them on their way to a healthier diet, and it’s not to late to submit your report if you haven’t already done so. Until next week, stay conscious and stay healthy!
