Intuitive Healer Katarina Winslow
reflects on the body
Media is full of quick fixes of how to obtain the body of your dreams. Unfortunately, the reality is often a bit disappointing, and it is more challenging than what the miracle cures promise. Don’t be discouraged, because there are many logical reasons why dieting often brings you to an endless struggle of repeated failures. If you listen to your body and try to understand it as if it were a separate person from yourself, you will understand why. The body has its own logic, just like your friends might not think, feel and behave like you do. After all, the body is there as a vehicle to ensure that you stay alive. To maintain life, it has a survival mechanism installed in the genes, to assure that it has the vital essence to keep you breathing. What happens when you starve your body is that you put it in a state of fear and want. Instead of the body feeling confident and reassured that it has what it takes to make its organism function in a peaceful and safe manner, your body withdraws itself and enters a zone of fear. We all know that things in life run smoother when we are in a state of love instead of in a state of fear. What happens in a state of fear are tension, lack, and stress. To compensate the insecurity that the body feels - of when and how it will make you function - it slows down and tries to store as much energy as possible to reassure your survival. This is one reason why diets usually fail as your body is fighting for its survival.
In the fight for survival, it is no wonder that when you succumb to temptation the body gives off signals to binge. When more fuel finally is available to it, it is as if it says, go ahead eat as much as possible because I never know when I will have what it takes to get you going. On a psychological, emotional and intellectual level, there is also you. What are you telling yourself in the moment of temptation and defeat? Your own feelings and reasoning are probably not that far from the intelligence of the body in the moment of compulsion. You certainly want to enjoy the moment as you know that you will have to diet the next day again. So you tell yourself, I’d better eat the three bars of chocolate now as tomorrow I am not allowed to eat anything sweet and forbidden. I’d better take the chance when I have it. To resume, the metabolism of the body not only slows down by dieting, but there is also a double pressure to excess once you fail. The pressure from your body to stock up some security and the pressure from yourself to take the chance to allow yourself to savour and satisfy your taste receptors.
When you really think about it, your mouth is full of them. Your tongue is designed for flavours; bitter, sweet, sour and salt. The good news is they are there for a reason. They are there to make sure that you keep feeding yourself so that you may live a happy and long life. Not only is your tongue designed for an exquisite experience of taste, but nature is also reassuring that you will survive by offering an abundant source of infinite flavors. When you look closer it is almost too good to be true. Raspberries and cacao beans, basil and cheese, chili and ginger, and all the other marvelous things we find in nature are there to be able to satisfy your sense of flavour.
Nature is designed for life, and your mouth is designed for life.
It is all arranged like that for a reason. The one and only good reason is for you to appreciate, enjoy and welcome the pleasure of eating. If you see food as something cursed and bad, you are not in line with the creation of life. To bring your body from a place of fear to a place of love you need to allow yourself to enjoy your food. To enjoy food should be a pleasure in everyday life, not only at parties and birthdays.
Of course, you should feed yourself to feel physically and psychologically good. If you go against nature and feed yourself mainly artificial and processed food, certainly, you won’t feel good. As with everything else in life, fake won’t bring you to a beautiful place. The sacred truth is that the more you feed yourself with high fiber fruits and vegetables, the more you may eat of everything. Fibers heighten your metabolism and put your body in a place of love, as it has a lot of nutrients and vitamins to make it feel safe. Fill your plate with a lot of fibers and fill it less with the things that are more high-calorie intake. When you feed yourself healthy food, your metabolism creates an optimal state of functioning. We are created to be able to enjoy a lot of food and stay slim once we live in accordance with nature.
To put it simply, we are not made for diets, and that is the simple reason why they don’t work.
Instead, we are made for laughing and enjoying, which actually heightens your metabolism. Other things that heighten your metabolism is the cold, so don’t hesitate to go out for a walk when the weather is a bit chilly. A good thing to do is also to turn down the heating in your bedroom at night. You sleep better and you are helping to reduce global warming. Spices also heighten your metabolism, and we all know that life is a bit more fun if we add some spice to it. Ginger, black pepper, cinnamon, mustard seeds, and chili are the top spices to heighten your metabolism so spice it up!
Water is also part of our essence, so drink a lot of water to give your body what it needs to feel good and secure.
Let yourself change the view you have of your body and stop feeding it from a place of fear, consolation or compulsion. When you eat for these reasons, throw it in the bin instead of using yourself as a bin.
A golden rule to have is, ‘In one bin or another.’ Never use yourself as a bin.
I know a lot of people are starving in this world, and even here in Brussels, but you are not saving humanity by being bad to yourself. On the contrary, the better you feel about yourself, the more good you can bring into the world. Embrace the pleasure of taste and feed yourself well because you are hungry, hungry for life. In the end, life is supposed to be joyful.
If you trust the intelligence of nature and you move your body, you will reach that dream.
Let us live the good life, with intelligence and pleasure.
Together.
