Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices [Episode #582]

This week’s topic is: Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices

When we see what’s going on with our relationship to food and our relationship to diet in general, it can be indicative of other deeper imbalances in our life. For years I’ve been talking about how skin gives us a deeper indication of our inner health and our inner state of well-being.

For example, what we see physically in our skin, whether it’s acne, accelerated aging, rosacea, or eczema, these physical manifestations on the surface give us clues about how to heal and correct on a deeper level.

What I love about this particular topic is that food is physical in the same way that our skin is physical. It’s more of a dense energy. Everything’s energy, everything’s moving, but it appears more dense. And therefore, it can be physically seen by our eyes.

However, when we look at some of the imbalances that continue to manifest in our lives around food, diet, and cravings and we can’t get rid of them, I truly and deeply empathize from my heart. I’ve lived through a lot of those issues and understand what it’s like to be in it. I also understand the bridge that’s needed to be crossed into healthiness. And I’m so excited to be sharing those principles and ideas in a practical way with you here today.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Emma – Boston  

I want to lose weight. I’m so uncomfortable and self-conscious about my body. I know it’s simple – eat right, move my body. But I’m so burnt out from pandemic stress I can’t get myself to start. Do you have any tips?

Joanna – Arkansas

I’m so tired of bouncing from one diet to the next. I’ve recently been listening to your podcast and curious how you found the right practice for you?

Keira – CA

Hate to admit it but I tend to shove my food down because I’m so busy with my business and raising three kids. What would you suggest I do first, to stop this habit?

Becka – Kentucky 

I’m not very strict about eating when I’m hungry. How badly is this affecting my health?

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When we nourish our soul, physical nourishment and food starts to naturally balance in our lives. 

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Hey Beauties. And welcome back to our Thursday, Q&A podcast where I love this topic today. It is very practical, very everyday life. It is Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices. So we talked about things in such a holistic way here at Solluna and our Feel Good podcast and especially over the past few years, but food is our first cornerstone. The others are our body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. And when we see what’s going on with our relationship to food and our relationship to diet in general, it can be indicative of other imbalances and deeper imbalances in our life. This reminds me how for years and years, since the Beauty Detox Solution, I’ve been talking about how skin gives us a deeper indication of our inner health, of our inner state of well-being. And so what we see physically in our skin, whether it’s acne or accelerated aging, creepiness, rosacea, whatever it is, eczema, when we see these physical manifestations on the surface, it gives us clues about how to heal and correct on a deeper level.

And what I love about this particular topic is food is physical in the same way that our skin is physical. It’s more of a dense energy. Everything’s energy, everything’s moving, but it appears more dense. And therefore, it can be physically seen by our eyes. But when we look at some of the imbalances that continue to manifest in our lives around food, around diet, including feeling controlled by food or overly frustrated, or just food cravings keep popping up and we can’t get rid of them or whatever it is being confused about how to actually feed ourselves in different diets. I have been there, first of all, so I can rattle all of this off so easily because I truly and deeply empathize from my heart. I’ve been there. I have lived a lot of those issues, and so I understand what it’s like to be in it. And I understand the bridge that’s needed to be crossed into healthiness. And I’m so excited to be sharing those principles and ideas in a practical way with you here today.

Please leave a review on iTunes

Before we dive in, you can tell I’m like the racehorse ready to go. I’m ready to get into the questions, but before we do, I just want to give a quick shout out to please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, but I think most of us listen to our podcasts on iTunes. It is a great way to support the show, guys. You know, I don’t need to harp on this too much, but we all know that reviews are important, and it helps other beauties, just like yourself, that may be feeling chaos, confusion in their lives. And my intention with this show from the beginning, and it is stronger and stronger by the day, is to really help support you and others on this path because we are all connected. And I know when something has really resonated with me and it’s helped me whether it’s with food or with meditation or whatever else we’re talking about here, I know it can really help others. And so that’s why we put the show out. That’s why I give so much of my time, energy, and attention to this podcast.

So thank you so much in advance for supporting this intention. Thank you for leaving us a review, which could literally be one sentence. And while you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these amazing Q&A podcast, which come right from the community or our Monday interview podcasts or solo casts that we also have on Mondays. All right, my loves, let’s get into it right now.

Question #1 around the topic of: Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices: I want to lose weight. I’m so uncomfortable and self-conscious about my body. I know it’s simple, eat right, move my body, but I’m so burnt out from pandemic stress. I can’t get myself to start. Do you have any tips?

Mindful and intuitive eating practices. Right from our community, first question comes from Emma, and she lives in Boston. She writes, “I want to lose weight. I’m so uncomfortable and self-conscious about my body. I know it’s simple, eat right, move my body, but I’m so burnt out from pandemic stress. I can’t get myself to start. Do you have any tips? Whoa. Emma, I was reading your question and I just, ah, like I couldn’t get through the question. I was just bursting with so much. My heart was just wanting to scream out to you in so many ways. So first of all, before I get into all of that, thank you, my love, for being part of our community. Thank you for submitting your question. I think many, many, many people can relate to this.

So first of all, let me break it down for you. It’s not that simple. We have been taught a big fat lie, which is calories in, calories out. I need to manage this whole wheat thing from a mathematical perspective. And it is simply 100% not true. I have played that game. I have tried to play that game. It doesn’t work in a sustainable way, at least from the perspective of balance and overall happiness and joy and peace. Sure, there are people that manage the numbers very carefully and track their calories on an app or something like that, but there’s so much attention that gets pulled away from life and into the way that we’re supposed to track all these numbers. That’s not real living to me. That’s not being really present with the food that’s going to nourish you. That’s about getting obsessed with all these different tracking mechanisms.

So it isn’t as simple as the numbers, but it’s not overly complicated either. A clue to this comes from the next part of your question, Emma, when you write, “I’m so burnt out the pandemic stress.” What you’re talking about here as a reference to our third cornerstone, which is emotional well-being and mental health. And this part is a fundamental part about losing weight and balancing food and having a really healthy relationship with food. If we are holding onto a lot of fear and stress, there is inevitably going to be an imbalance in our nervous system. It’s going to be like our body’s going to feel this woof, like this feeling of anxiety and stress. Wouldn’t it be, in fight or flight, our hormones are imbalanced, our body starts to shut down, our digestion starts to implode, and energy starts getting directed away from detoxification and, again digestion, and it starts getting pulled into all these other aspects that… The over beating heart, the surge of adrenaline through our blood, all these different parts of our body get turned on and lit up.

And that is one of the reasons that this simplistic formula of calories in, calories out, this is how many calories I burned in the machine today at the gym. That doesn’t give the full picture. We are way, way more than numbers. I can’t even emphasize that enough, and this is coming from someone that was obsessed with numbers. I was obsessed with how much I weighed, I was obsessed with how many calories I eat, all of that. So when we actually go beyond, and if I can go beyond, then you can go beyond, we start to understand that we are whole beings, and our power very much does rely on our wholeness and our ability to tune into our wholeness.

Because what happens is, it sort of like, let’s say, that your baby needs healthy food, your baby needs nourishing touch, your baby needs warm, comfortable sleep environment. Your baby needs to be bathed, right? Let’s say you only did one of those things. So you only gave your baby healthy food, but you never picked your baby up, you never nourished your baby with touch, the baby would not thrive. The baby would get its caloric and perhaps nutritional needs met, but the baby still wouldn’t thrive. The baby may actually experience failure to thrive. The baby may experience stunted growth, unregulated emotions, the inability to self-sooth, all these different markers, which just show that it’s not one thing. It’s not just the physical nourishment that the baby needs, it’s this well-rounded approach. And so it is with us adults.

We need, Emma, especially hearing your question, I just want to emphasize, in this arena, especially with losing weight, which is such a charged, frustrating topic for many of us, we need to embrace our wholeness. We need to look at this from the Four Cornerstone perspective. So let’s talk about the stress first. If we don’t have a way to deal with our emotional imbalance and stress, in general, our bodies are always going to be out of whack, and it’s going to be exponentially harder to drop the weight to let your body shed and release. There’s an energetic component to losing weight.

And if you’re interested in some real research here, I suggest you check out my last book, which is called Recipes for Your Perfectly Imperfect Life. The whole section in the front actually references quite a few studies and research around the connection between the gut, your GI tract, and your mind. So the brain, the thought patterns, the circular ways that we talk to each other, we beat ourselves up. We get into a fear loop, whatever it is, this causes bloating and inflammation and all sorts of imbalances in the body. And so let’s talk about that one first, when we’re talking about wanting to lose weight and wanting to feel good about our body, we have to nourish the emotional part of us. We have to let the fear come up. We have to feel the feelings to digest them and to let them go.

So in our Solluna Circle, we take a very deep dive on this. I can’t talk about it in the same depth here on the podcast because we would be on this podcast for hours and hours and hours. But in the Circle, we break it down into daily tips and daily bite-sized pieces of information that we invite discussion around on a daily basis. There’s this very beautiful, intimate, close-knit chat room that’s part of the membership. It’s on the Solluna app. There’s a membership section for the circle. And so I invite you, Emma.

Community is huge. Self-introspection is huge, which is a big theme this month in June for us, where our theme is letting go of control. Big theme, big amazing topic this month. So joining a community is huge. Feeling your feelings. Journaling is a really important part of this, but having different tools is going to really help you feel balanced and centered in your mind. And that will start to manifest into your easefulness in losing weight. It’s all connected. Let’s talk about body. Yes, it’s important to move your body, but I encourage you to do it in ways that don’t feel like torture. It’s not, “Oh gosh, I have to do this annoying, horrible workout. Right now, I had to make myself run even though my knees hurt,” which is what I used to do to myself.

I encourage you to feel flow in your body. Flow is movement flow helps to release old weight, right? Because it’s like we’re taking that fat and that stagnation, the excess, and we want it to flow out and leave the body. So the more we can encourage flow and feelings of easefulness in our life, that energy will start to impact the body. So I encourage you to do things that feel good. For me, it’s going for a walk outside my home, touching the trees, being outside, seeing the snakes, and other lizards. I love being outside. If you tell me I had to do a workout on a stationary bike which, for some people, is amazing and wonderful, I would not be so happy, and it would feel stagnant to me.

So maybe it’s dancing. Maybe it’s doing a yoga video that you love, maybe it’s gardening, but find ways to move that really feel supportive to the energy and flow through your life. Food wise, eat right is what you said. I would say just try to eat in a way that is simple but feels nourishing. So it means checking in before you plop down a huge plate of food in front of you. Ask yourself, “Do I want a warm dish? Do I want a crunchy salad? Do I need something a little bit more dense right now? Am I not really hungry?” Because I’m just… I had this annoying email just coming from my boss. So just start to tune in. I would encourage you to learn some simple recipes. We have tons over @mysolluna.com, our website, that you can sort of rotate and fall on.

For instance, the coconut milky grounding ones are at my fingertips. I know how to make a curry kitcheree, a few things like that when I feel that need. When I want a salad, I make different versions of the Dharma’s Kale Salad, and so on and so forth. Like if I want something that feels a little bit more dense, I make that stuffed portobello mushroom recipe. So it’s nice to have these tools, including recipes, at your disposal. And then spiritually, when you start to connect in through meditation, Emma, you start to get to know the deeper part of you that can feel balanced. That can feel strong without food, without having to rely on food to shift our mood, to shift our energy. So meditation is actually a very powerful way to support weight loss when we nourish the spirit inside of us. We don’t have to grasp for extra food and extra ways to try to nourish our minds and ourselves from food, this dense physical matter. We start to connect on a much deeper level and that connection that comes from meditation, and only from meditation, does start to balance your body.

It has a soothing effect, and this has been measured now in dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds of research studies now as scientists continue to probe into the actual measurable effects of meditation, but everything from reducing inflammation, creating more feel-good neurotransmitters, balancing our hormones, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So I encourage you, Emma, to take your weight loss efforts to the four cornerstones. Apply some of the tips that I mentioned here, food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. And notice how much more easeful losing weight will become for you. And not only that, but sustainable. When we get to this stuff, it’s not just like a little Band-Aid we’re sticking on top. We’re getting into the deep, deep root causes of the imbalance in the first place. So you’ll start to see sustained change through your life. And it’s so beautiful when that starts to open up for you. So wishing you all the best and sending you so much love. Keep in touch with me, Emma, and let me know how it goes. Let me know how you’re doing.

Question #2 around the topic of: Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices: I am so tired of bouncing from one diet to the next. I’ve recently been listening to your podcast, and I’m curious how you found the right practice for you.

Okay, my loves, next question comes from Joanna, who lives in Arkansas. And she writes, “I am so tired of bouncing from one diet to the next. I’ve recently been listening to your podcast, and I’m curious how you found the right practice for you.” Love this question, Joanna. And I think that we go into that mode of bouncing from one thing to the next because we’re trying to grasp for some way something to help, right? It’s magic pill, magic diet. There’s something that we quite haven’t figured out yet that someone else has figured out. So when I started writing and teaching about food, Joanna, is actually when I stopped dieting.

Like you, before then, I had tried everything. I tried high protein, low carb, I tried low calorie, I tried low fat, I’ve tried low sugar. I tried everything. And then what I realized was who… like I started to step back and see things in a much more holistic way. So when I wrote The Beauty Detox Solution, and I started to understand energy, I started to understand digestion, and I started to see our place in nature. So instead of fixating on different diets that had very specific formulas and times to eat and measuring ounces of food, I could see that our GI tracks were very similar to gorillas.

And so along those same lines of biomimicry, seeing, studying similar species to see their ideal diet, it dawned on me that we are meant to be plant forward eaters. Sure, we can handle some meat, but we want to be largely or mostly, or in my case, and those of us that have chosen to, all plant based. And this gives us the ability to get not only the wide range of micronutrients and macronutrients, but to become naturally full and satiated from fiber, which is only found in plant foods. So when I really discovered that, that was the game changer, that was the natural form of portion control that I had been looking for. That was, “Oh, I’m eating according to my natural anatomy, and I’m eating huge piles of food, but it’s digesting well. And I didn’t let go of all the calorie counting, I didn’t let go of all the mathematics.

I started to look at nature. I started to break the diets. I started to break all the constricted eating, Joanna, and I just started to tune in to the natural way, I would say. The natural way being what we see in nature, what we see in our bodies, what we see in our anatomy. And it started to not only make cognitive sense to me, but when I started to go down the path, the results were spectacular. I started pooping every day, my bloating went down, my skin cleared up. I had so much energy. And perhaps, most importantly, from a mental and emotional standpoint, I started to really let go of food ruling my life. Before that, it was… This mindset like you’re suggesting here about, “Oh, maybe it’s this diet I’m missing or maybe I’m doing this wrong, or maybe I need to track this more.” And it was so exhausting and it took up so much of my mental energy.

When I just started to flow along, what happened was this emergence of trust, which I think is a very hard concept for a lot of us. And it used to be a very hard concept for me. Trust in the body, trust in nature, trust in flow, trust that when I’m giving my body natural foods, my body knows what to do. A lot of these diets out there are not natural. It is not natural to put a stick of butter in your coffee and drink that every morning. I’m sorry, but it’s not. We wouldn’t naturally be inclined to do that on our own. It is not natural to eat huge amounts of meat. If we were in nature with our fingers and our nails, we would be grasping for easy to find sources of calories and nourishment like fruit, right? We wouldn’t be eating these huge slabs of meat.

And on a side note, I was just talking to Dan Buettner yesterday, who’s my friend and my wonderful podcast guest in here, an inspiration to me, and the founder of the Blue Zones, as well as being a National Geographic fellow. And he was talking about a new book he’s working on. I won’t give it away, but he was just astounding how much of the natural diet, pre-modern times, was really almost completely plant-based.

And this is not the sort of thing that you hear about, but when you tune in, you really start to tune in, you start to realize the truth that underneath the layers of food cravings and addictions, and it takes some time to shed them, the sugar and the salt and all the chemicals and the flavors underneath all that, it feels really good to bite into an apple, it feels really good to eat a big salad, it feels really good to have natural foods, to eat a little bowl of walnuts or almonds. And there’s a different heaviness. There’s a different energy that comes when we eat an enormous slab of sugar or meat. So it goes back to nature, Joanna. And to me, nature involves a more intuitive knowing than just straight book facts or science and studies, which do point the way and do help reinforce concepts.

But I do believe there’s a limitation to science as well. We know that not everything is completely studied. We know that the tools in science still have limitations. And so we get to a point where we have to transcend that, where we have to go into our hearts and into our guts, literally, and to listen to our own intuition. And when we can start to into it, really from a mindful, deeper consciousness place of the foods that are really nourishing to us, we will start to break these habits from dieting, the habits of confusion, and constantly looking outward and bouncing from this to this. We’ll get to a more centered place, and we’ll start to feel clear. Clarity will start to emerge more and more, and we’ll start to feel so much more relaxed about it. So let me know how that lands with you, Joanna. Let me know how you do. Keep in touch with me. And sending you so much love, sister.

Break

Okay, my loves. We now have a short break. And when I get back with you, I have two more amazing questions on this topic, mindful and intuitive eating practices.

Question #3 around the topic of: Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices: I hate to admit it, but I tend to shove my food down because I’m so busy with my business and raising three kids. What would you suggest I do first to stop this habit?

Okay, my love, we are back from the break and we have two more questions for you, guys, on this important topic that affects us in our day-to-day life, in our day-to-day world, mindful and intuitive eating practices. We all have to eat every day, right? Unless you’re doing a specialized fast from time to time. Food is part of our life, so the energy and the approach with which we manage the food aspect of our lives is surely going to impact our overall energy, and our overall happiness, and our overall ability to feel peaceful. So this is a really important topic. The first question comes from Kira, who lives in California, and she writes, “I hate to admit it, but I tend to shove my food down because I’m so busy with my business and raising three kids. What would you suggest I do first to stop this habit?”

So Kira I love the practicalness of this question and the intuition because you’re asking this question because, on a certain level, you know that you’re not deeply serving yourself and your body when you shovel food in. I actually a bit of an experience with this today because I’m working on the book edits, and Moses was napping, and I had this feeling I have to maximize when he’s napping. So I made a Dharma’s Kale Salad, and I put a lot of love into it, but I was like trying to eat it. And I was trying to get through these book edits, and I started to get a stomach ache, and I was like, “This isn’t good. This isn’t serving anybody.” So it’s okay to take 10 minutes to eat my salad and take that away from the book edits that are going to get done. I know that, and it’s okay to slow down. So there’s a practical part. And then there’s the extra part.

The practical part here, Kira, is consume smoothies, right? And I get it because even with two kids now, there are times where I literally can’t sit down to really eat and chew, and so smoothies have been wonderful for me. I don’t chug them, but as I sit here doing this podcast, I have the remains of a power protein smoothie on my desk. I get so much daily nourishment in a very efficient form because it’s ground up chia seeds and sprouts and vegan protein powder and sprouted almond milk. And I add in different things, sometimes spirulina, sometimes maca, sometimes shatavari, which is an Ayurvedic herb for women different things, but it’s pre-digested because it’s blended. So it’s a wonderful practice to incorporate smoothies because when you’re really busy, smoothies are a way to still get good nutrition in your body and still be able to absorb nutrients.

Now, I’m not suggesting, again, that you chug the smoothie. You still want to chew it a bit, you want to swirl it around in your mouth, you want to honor it, but it’s a great tool. Now, I’ll say that the other part of this is to embrace practices that involve your kids. So we all slowed down as a family at dinner because we don’t know how crazy the day gets and packed with different things. But at dinner. We sit down. Moses is in bed. So the three of us, hubby, Bobby and me, and we take a moment to pause. We bring ritual to dinner, we put our hands together and we say grace. And then, we go around and we say what we’re grateful for. So this, to me, is a way of bringing in the children and teaching them about honoring ourselves that we can sit down as a family to eat, that it is important to carve out that time, and it is important to carve out time to highlight what we’re grateful for and bring gratitude into our life on a daily basis.

And so it’s about reframing some of the priorities, I think, and saying, “Okay, not every meal am I going to eat slowly, but I’ll have smoothies, and I will take the time when I can.” Being practical here because it’s maybe not going to change overnight, but for dinner, let’s say we focus on one meal. I have three kids, and I’m going to bring this in for the whole family. We’re going to eat dinner together. We’re going to slow down. We’re going to chew our food, and we’re going to be together, want to be present. And that’s such a beautiful thing to do for yourself and for your family, Kira.

And another practical note I would say is in the morning, which is a wonderful time for really honoring your energy, again, I recommend meditating in the morning. It sets the energetic tone for the day. And as I was saying earlier, all the cornerstones are connected. So even though we’re primarily talking about food in this podcast, remember that your emotional well-being and your spiritual growth and your body practices do affect food. So when we meditate in the morning, and I know it can be challenging with kids, but you can make it happen. And if I could make it happen, then you can too. I do it in the quiet moments in the morning. I do it before Moses gets up sometimes, or sometimes it’s shifting now when he’s in his first nap and Bobby’s playing, but I really do that first thing as soon as I can in the morning because it gets me into my breath and it gets me into my body. And it gets me into the present moment.

And if we start with that energetic tone for the day, it’s going to be easier for you to slow down, to make space for your meal, to chew better, to be present with your food, to see what can drop away, that you don’t need to give so much attention to in your business or wherever in your life, so that you can create space for this very important function. That should be honored every day, which is nourishing our body. And when we do that, ironically, we enjoy our food more and we digest our food better and we don’t need copious amounts of food. We don’t need to give into all the different food cravings all the time because we just start to feel more and more connected to ourselves.

And we notice the great irony of life, which is as we slow down more and we’re more mindful, ironically, more things get done. And it’s a funny irony, but it’s one I’ve discovered myself and I continue to discover more and more in my daily life. So sending you so much love, Kara. Mama, let me know how you do. Keep in touch with us, and lots and lots of love.

Question #4 around the topic of: Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices: I’m not very strict about eating when I’m not hungry. How badly is this affecting my health?

Okay. The next question comes from Becca, who lives in Kentucky and she writes, “I’m not very strict about eating when I’m not hungry. How badly is this affecting my health? So I love this question, Becca. And I think that this is a common occurrence for a lot of us, the mindless eating the eating just because we’re bored or because it’s there or because we want to shift our mood, maybe we want to feel a little bit comforted, or a little bit relaxed, or whatever it is. There’s many reasons that we engage in mindless eating, and I will say that this does affect your health for a few reasons.

Number one, it’s a Band-Aid on something that is placating yourself to the point where you’re not looking at what the deeper issue is. Why are you feeling bored? And I’m just using this as an example. Is there not enough passion in your life? Are you not pursuing the dreams that you really want to? Have you outgrown your job? Have you outgrown some of the friendships in your life? Are you opening the door? Would you like to open the door to more exciting, exhilarating experiences, inspiring friendships, whatever it is, or maybe you need to be soothed? How can you do that without food? Can you comfort yourself? Can you feel into the feelings and then feel them and release them and look at the situation from a logical standpoint once you’ve cleared some of that fear? Right? So it affects your health because it’s a Band-Aid to deeper healings that could potentially come up for you.

Secondly, from a practical physical standpoint, when we’re eating all the time, when we’re not hungry, hunger indicates to us that our body does need food. It’s a sign. It’s a real message from your body to you. But when we go past that sign and we’re just eating, we wear down our bodies. It’s a tremendous amount of energy to engage in digestion. It’s mastication, assimilation, absorption, elimination. There’s so many processes that come in, so many organs that are involved in digestion that, over time, it’s very aging. It does wear your body out. If we’re just mindlessly eating, of course, I’m not talking here at all about eating when you’re truly hungry, you should eat when you’re hungry, you should absolutely nourish yourself.

But at times when you are not hungry, and we know in our hearts when those times are, how can we introspect? Can we journal? Can we go for a walk? Can we take a nice warm bath? Can we hop on the Solluna Circle app and take a deeper dive into ourself? How can we go beyond food and nourish ourselves in a deeper way from the four cornerstone approach spiritually, emotionally, potty wise, and maybe chill out on the food part, look to the other ways. And this is so powerful and when we do this, we find that mindless eating starts to drop away without all this attention, without trying to dig into our willpower and make it this big battle, it just starts to drop away. Then that’s what happened with me. I used to be so reliant on food. Food was like everything, and it was treats, and I was just planning for these treat meals and treat snacks and all this stuff.

But when I started to nourish myself on a deeper level, and I started to get to know myself more through a really consistent meditation practice, I just don’t rely on food as much. I just don’t care about it as much. It doesn’t mean I don’t eat when I’m hungry, it doesn’t mean I don’t love having yummy food, but I don’t think about food. I don’t rely on it in the same way I got a lot more tools in my toolbox now. So that’s what I would say to you, Becca.

Thought of the Week

And to consider all that and to consider how you can go beyond food to really nourish yourself, which reminds me of the quote of the week, which I wrote out right before the show, just from hearing the show topic, which is, “When we nourish our soul, physical nourishment and food starts to naturally balance in our lives. When we nourish our soul, physical nourishment and food starts to naturally balance in our lives.”

When I say nourish our soul, I’m talking about connection, self-awareness, meditation, really tuning in, that deep connection brings joy and peace in a way that nothing else can. Physical nourishment meaning food. All the dieting, all the calorie counting, all the obsession about this diet or this, or jumping from this to this, that just starts to balance. So this is why the cornerstones are powerful. We go wider, not deeper. We don’t go deeper into the obsession, which we already have. We take a wider approach. We start to see things in widescreen. We start to zoom out and that’s where the solution is. The solution is inside of us. The solution is nourishing our wholeness. The solution is tuning into our true power by knowing that we are not just physical beings that eat food, but we are spiritual, emotional, mental, beautiful beings, completely unique, and when we really start to see ourselves in that way. These daily grievances, the food imbalances, the frustrations around diet, they will start to self-correct. And it’s so powerful when it starts to happen.

So along those lines, I have lots of different resources for you. So passionate about everything I share with you really. And the number one thing I can say right now is the Solluna Circle that I mentioned earlier. It’s a wonderful sisterhood. It’s less than a cost of a yoga class a month, that is only $14.99 to join us. You can check out the information over in the free Solluna app. Our website as well has lots of supportive products, like our SBO probiotics, our high-performance skincare, as well as courses and free meditations and free recipes and lots over there. I’m also on social @_kimberlysnyder. So hopefully, we will find each other. I will be here for you in cyberspace and all these places. I love you so much. And I’m so grateful for our heart-based connection. I know there’s a reason that we found each other. So keep reaching out to me, keep letting me know your questions, how I can support you here on the podcast. I will be back here on Monday for our next interview show. Till then, take care. So much love and so much gratitude. Namaste.

The post Mindful and Intuitive Eating Practices [Episode #582] appeared first on Solluna by Kimberly Snyder.