Body Love: Yoga, Health and Fitness: Worrying about Fat

The other night I was out for a dinner celebrating a friend's birthday. The guy across from me had taken a recent interest in health and fitness so we were having an animated conversation about do's and don't's of nutrition and exercise. I mentioned my latest fascination with raw food, and that it involves lots of nuts and seeds. "Oh," he said, "I used to eat a lot of nuts because I felt like I got lots of protein that way, but my trainer told me they're too high in fat to eat in that quantity." "They're definitely high in fat, " I replied, "but I still eat a lot of them. I exercise enough that fat doesn't really hit my radar."

There was a brief pause and his girlfriend (who is also a friend of mine) made a face at me and said, "How nice for you!" Some good-natured joking followed but it got me thinking: I didn't mean that I never ever think of it, or that it has never ever been important to me, but that it doesn't hit my conscious radar any more.

Lately I've been reading a great book (You should read it, too!) called The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes?And Why by Amanda Ripley. One concept she returns to over and over again is that our brains are wired in certain patterns which are sometimes useful for survival and sometimes not. When the patterns are not useful, we have to find a way to dig them up to our conscious awareness long enough to retrain them, and then drop them back down into unconsciousness until we need them again.

Oddly enough, this is a central concept in both yoga specifically, physically and philosophically, as well as fitness in general. I tell my Pilates students all the time that the ways that their bodies are cheating the exercises are great if they're trapped on the kitchen floor and need to get to a phone to dial "911", but that in class we're trying to teach the body new and better patterns to make use of.

You can probably see the tricky part here. How exactly do you take something unconscious, make it conscious long enough to effect a change, and then make it unconscious again? With nutrition specifically, I believe that worrying about it or obsessing over some part of it is more detrimental to overall health than the nutrients or lack thereof in the food. The problem many of us have is that we are aware of a problem in our eating habits and we pull it up out of the murk of unconsciousness just enough to grab hold of a tiny piece of it, which we then obsess over endlessly, with the help of the news media who are quick to feed us each new fad as it comes along. So our eating patterns are neither unconscious nor fully conscious, but stuck in some kind of crazy limbo that does us no kind of good at all.

The guy across the table is new to nutrition so he's looking for the rules right now and that's a good first step. But really, I know that I, for example, don't eat late at night, not because someone told me it's bad, but because my body just doesn't like it. I realized long ago that my body feels bad the morning after I have any alcohol so I almost never drink it. I know that too much sugar makes me feel puffy and tired so I self monitor. The decisions are no longer conscious; they're just how I live. I spent some time setting up some internal monitors so when I say "fat doesn't hit my radar" what I really mean is, my unconscious has it covered. I've spent enough time training it that I can let that go, trust it, and enjoy my life.

Really, isn't enjoying life kind of what nutrition and fitness are about?

copyright 2011 J. Autumn Needles

Source: http://bodyloveyoga.blogspot.com/2011/07/worrying-about-fat.html

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