I've found fullness beyond my belly, a fullness that encompasses body, mind, and spirit, a fullness that is cultivated as much as it is fed. Yes, it starts with food, as the most immediate, outermost layer. Yes, outcomes include lasting weight loss and increased fitness. This is the just the tip of the ice burg. Beyond the metrics, there's so much more.
I feel like I've spent much of my life ravenous. I'd eat breakfast only to be famished two hours later, scarf a snack to last to lunch, and still barely survive to noon. This was hunger of the intense kind and difficult to manage working long hours at the office. I felt embarrassed by the amount of food I toted around and the frequency at which I was eating, as well as the gas and bloating that followed. I was meticulous about food choices, religious about daily exercise and looked healthy on the outside. My insides, however, were a bit of a mess.
My first change was making lunch my breakfast. Yes, it's weird (it was even weirder 10 years ago) and perhaps unpalatable, to eat a salad for breakfast, but I was desperate enough that I didn't care. Since lunch was the only thing that relieved a morning's worth of hunger, it seemed a logical place to start. Nutritionally, "lunch" as a first meal ticks a lot of boxes: there's protein, healthy fats, and unrefined carbs. Giving my brain and body a balanced plate allowed me to better focus on work, but it still didn't keep the hunger away for long enough. Ultimately, I needed to eat more; it took me some time to understand that it was OK to do so.
The second step was shifting my eating schedule. Though I usually woke with an appetite, I noticed I was always hungrier after my first meal than I was before I'd eaten. Thus, I slowly pushed breakfast from 7 am to 10 am. It was challenging - both physically and emotionally - but taking it in stages made it achievable. Eventually I reached the point where I was eating my first meal at noon. This was a game changer. Eating once vs. snacking all morning was much easier logistically and energetically, and over time, my body adjusted. Perhaps more importantly, I started noticing different types of hunger and was able determine whether there was a physiological hunger that needed to be addressed, or if it was something else (anxiety, dehydration, fatigue, habit, etc.).
With these changes, I noticed that my GI issues started waning. Eating less frequently gave my stressed-out system some much-needed down time. Though it wasn't easy waiting until noon to eat (sometimes there were headaches, many times a growling belly), the benefits far outweighed the costs. I stuck with it, continuing to listen to the cues my body was sending me. This led me to my third major change, which was eating cooked, whole foods, mostly vegetables. Cold salads were not the right choice for my body type; warming foods were what I needed to feel nourished and satisfied. Neither carbs nor fat were the enemy; healthy plant-based sources of both were what kept me humming and out of the candy jar.
What began as a desperate attempt to address my hunger became a total wellness upgrade. The heartburn that had plagued my mornings and the bloating that plagued my evenings effectively disappeared. My once blemished skin cleared and glowed and my energy, my focus and mental well-being flourished. My digestion and sleep improved. My anxiety decreased. I also found a healthier balance between nutrition and exercise: when I started caring for myself nutritionally, I also started being kinder to my body. No longer was I exercising so I could stay slim; I was exercising to take care of myself wholistically. My body ended up releasing more weight - and I wasn't even trying.
The eating practices I implemented, driven by personal needs and experience, have much in common with several today's popular nutritional approaches: savory breakfasts, intermittent fasting, reduced sugar consumption, eating the majority of your calories in the early part of the day, and metabolic flexibility. My constant morning hunger was likely the result of my body relying on sugar as it's major fuel source. After training my body to utilize fat as fuel, I can sustain myself for longer periods of time. The fixed eating window is key for me, giving my body time to rest and repair, with the unexpected side effect of reducing my appetite.
How we choose to nourish ourselves is a personal decision. When I allowed myself to step outside conventional norms of when to eat, what types of food to eat, and how much, I finally found something that worked for me. I no longer count calories, and I no longer feel I need to eat in secret because my food is weird or my portions large. I wish everyone the same positive journey with the freedom to explore and discover what health looks and feels like in their unique body.
Comments