I am writing you today from an airport in Istanbul, Turkey. I am currently in limbo, awaiting my connecting flight home. Two flights down and one to go. By the time you are reading this, I will be back on US soil. India is certainly quite a long journey to get to, but one that I find enriching and rewarding beyond belief.
When I travel, particularly when I travel in India, I find that I always come away from that experience more grounded and connected to myself, to my Soul. I come away with more self-awareness and self-understanding. It does it to me each and every time.
When I was in the height of my food and body struggles, I used to get caught up feeling like I had to eat perfectly all of the time. If I ate something that wasn’t “clean” enough or “healthy” enough, then I had failed. As you can imagine, this lead to major feelings of guilt and frustration when I would “fall off track”.
As someone who was, is, and always will be an avid traveler, you are going to come across times when you just can’t eat as healthy as you would like.
I used to find myself in situations, while backpacking abroad, maybe stuck in airports, or in parts of the world where the food quality just wasn't what I was used to, and this used to catalyze a major panic for me.
I would find myself spiraling into a pattern of self-defeating thoughts. I would go into a guilt and self-attack mode, which in turn, created an internal experience of stress for me.
All of which I was creating through my own mind.
The mind absolutely, positively impacts the body. There is no escaping that reality. The power of our thoughts, of our beliefs, of our mindsets, are epic and create everything that you see around you. The human mind is so powerful it is unreal!
While I always intuitively understood the mind/body connection, now I understand the physiology behind it!
In response to stress, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. This boosts heart rate and blood pressure and directs blood flow away from digestion, in order to maintain glucose in the blood stream. This is so your body can use it for immediate energy, for the well-known "fight or flight" response.
In fact, your digestion actually completely shuts down in a complete stress response, and it partially shuts down during a partial stress response. Our bodies are brilliant in that regard. We are programmed to survive.
The list of what stress does to our physiology is incredibly long but I will give you a glimpse.
Not only is your body totally incapable of digesting and metabolizing food when you are stressed, you are literally excreting nutrition through the bowels, the urine, and the sweat. You are also malabsorbing fat at this time, and your hormone levels are all out of whack.
On the contrary, when you are super relaxed, the parasympathetic nervous system predominates. This slows your heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, and actually promotes digestion. In other words, when this system is activated, you have full blown metabolic power.
We can actually change our metabolic physiology by choosing to let go of stress.
How freaking amazing is that?!
Over the past four and a half weeks in India, I found myself in numerous situations where it was downright impossible for me to eat as clean and healthy as I normally enjoy doing.
I ate white bread, fried cauliflower, white rice, banana chips made with unknown oils, and super oily curry. I ate chikki, which is basically sesame seeds covered in different types of sugars and peanut brittle galore. Things I would normally not eat at home.
In the past, this would have set my internal dialogue off into self-attack and panic. And I can honestly tell you that I did not stress once. I let myself enjoy the food and I let it go.
And guess what, I didn’t gain any weight. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I leaned out a bit on this trip.
What you eat is only half the story. What you think, feel, and believe are all dramatically impacting your metabolism. You can be eating the healthiest foods in the world but if your thoughts are stressed out and negative, your metabolic power is severely diminished.