Are you Feeding or Depleting Yourself?

Food is meant to feed us. It is meant to give us fuel to motor on through the day. To nourish and sustain us. Real food is grown in soil, energized by the sun, watered by the rain. Nature has perfectly created edible fuel and nourishment for us to feel good and healthy.

Food and eating has become incredibly confusing. We have taken some of these already absolutely perfect foods and manipulated them with added colours, chemicals and processes. We put them in boxes and slap on labels so they look like they will nourish us. We try to convince each other that these foods are better than those foods.

What I am noticing now is the importance of listening to our own bodies for answers to some of these confusing messages. We can do this by asking ourselves one simple question:

Is what I am eating feeding me or is it depleting me?

This is a very important question to ask when choosing what to eat. I’ve been practicing this more and more. I usually get a clear response right away. Even if the response is deplete, sometimes I just get too excited about eating it and ‘screw that inner voice, I want it anyways’.

Sure enough after the high of flavor sensational processed whatever that has begun its digestive journey, I start to feel tired, or irritable, or achy or suddenly dis-like myself and my body.

How many times do I have to go through that experience to consciously stay further away from depleting foods? Apparently hundreds!

This brings me to the next question. Why on earth would we want to feed ourselves something that depletes us and makes us feel worse? Why would we intentionally choose foods or actions that deplete us.

There can be many reasons why we choose to feel depleted.

Perhaps we are not all aware of this process. Perhaps not everyone feels depleted after processed foods. Perhaps people would rather feel bad than feel good? Perhaps people are just in a cycle of wanting to feel good so they eat the crap that promises good feelings but then they feel bad so they eat more of the empty promises in empty calories. There are a million and one reasons.

That is when it comes back to ourselves individually.

Just start with asking the question:

Is what I am about to eat going to feed me or deplete me?

(Or is what I am eating feeding or depleting?)

(Or did that meal feed me or deplete me?)

The responses for each of us will arrive differently. Learn how your body is speaking to you. It may be speaking through symptoms, through feelings, through a gut inclination, maybe through a voice. But I believe that just by asking the question we get to know pretty quickly what is nourishment and real fuel for ourselves.

xoxSus