Training Good; Diet Bad!

I've really enjoyed my workouts over the past couple of weeks. We've been training really hard in the dojo — our annual "January fitness cycle" with its focus on exercising with ever-increasing intensity and duration over a 6-week period has got me feeling pretty good. I feel stronger and more alert, and I'm sleeping better, too. All good news.

And I've been doing additional physical training, too: I teach a "combat conditioning" class one night a week, and I fit in personal sessions wherever and whenever I can. I've been stretching, hitting the heavy bag, and doing my TACFIT Warrior bodyweight exercises. (I still really need to do some planning to maximize results.)

One thing that has been really slipping over the past week, however, has been my diet. My over-hectic schedule has led me to eat poorly, in a rush, and at odd times. There's been way too much pizza on my plate in the past week, and more than once I found myself eating in the car — a BIG no-no — just to make sure that I had enough calories in my system to keep myself from being ravenous. I have a general rule to not eat after 8:00 PM to allow my body to "rest, not digest" overnight, but more than a few times lately, I've sat down to dinner at 8:30. Even worse, I've found myself eating really late at night: after 10:00 PM upon returning home from the dojo.

This simply cannot stand. I KNOW better!

I've been reading the book Savor, by Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Lilian Cheung. It's sitting here on my desk as I type this. Clearly, I need to do a better job of practicing the art of mindful eating. I went to the grocery store this week with the specific intent of grabbing some healthy, portable snacks — granola, fruit, nuts, etc. — to keep me from starving throughout the day. Just purchasing healthier food and re-establishing my mindfulness around what I put into my body really changed my attitude.

Cleaning Up My Diet

This past week, I sat down with Jill Braverman, an acquaintance of mine who is also a holistic health counselor. As part of my initiative to clean up my diet during my UBBT, I talked with Jill about diet and nutrition and my eating habits. Jill introduced me to the concept of "primary and secondary foods." According to Jill, primary foods include love, hugs, meditation, self-expression, tears, nature, downtime, close friends, and play. These things all feed our souls and our hunger for living.

Primary foods are things that feed us, but they don't come on a plate. Secondary foods, on the other hand, are the things we actually put into our mouths to chew and swallow.

According to this theory, the more primary food we receive, the less we'll depend on secondary food. The opposite is also true: the more we fill ourselves with secondary food, the less we are able to receive the primary foods of life. This certainly puts a new spin on the way I "eat!"