They Got It Wrong...You Are NOT What You Eat
TOM CRONIN
We’ve been told over and over again, “you are what you eat”, which inspires us to gulp a green smoothie or eat our organic quinoa salad with organic virgin olive oil dressing. Yes, this healthy food regime will be good for if…only if... your body is able to digest it and assimilate the nutrients into your system.
If your body is in a particular state whereby digestion is inhibited, then all the healthy food in the world won’t mean much to your body and could actually be causing some extreme dis-ease.
Across the world, we are seeing record increases in irritable bowel syndrome, leaky gut syndrome, allergies, ulcerative colitis, and digestive issues. We are also seeing a marked increase in stress in the world today. To the point where the W.H.O. says stress is an ‘epidemic of the 21st century.’
It’s been proven in many studies that stress severely impedes the digestive process. There’s a very good reason for this too. It’s in our body’s ancient design to enable us to focus all our energy and attention into survival when we are in a life and death situation. When we are faced with a marauding tribe or sabre tooth tiger our body switches instantly into sympathetic nervous system mode, otherwise known as fight/flight. Your breathing speeds up, your blood sugar levels rise, you store fats in your body, your blood thickens and your digestive system shuts down to conserve fuel (hence the dry mouth). This is an amazing design in your body, quite remarkable…. if you’re in a life and death situation. However if you have a deadline at work, you are constantly in traffic and busy cities, you are worried about money, relationships and family situations for long periods of time, then these fight/flight symptoms will be sustained also for long periods of time. This has extremely dangerous ramifications on the body.
Dr Bruce Lipton from Stanford University’s School of Medicine suggests that stress is the cause of 95% of all sickness. Stress will have an extreme impact on our body’s ability to digest food. You are not what you eat; you are what you are able to digest. If your body can’t break down food and extract and assimilate the minerals, vitamins and nutrients out of it as well as eliminate efficiently the toxins, then your diets are going to waste.
To be healthy is a holistic approach. If you want to be truly healthy then along with your diets and quinoa salads you might like to consider a daily meditation practice. It’s been proven that meditation is very powerful at reducing stress and restoring balance back to the body. When you sit in meditation, your body switches from sympathetic nervous system mode to parasympathetic nervous system mode, which is known as 'rest and digest'. It’s in this restful state that your body begins to revert back to its natural balanced state. Often meditators will tell me they noticed a lot of saliva in their mouth and gurgling in their tummy. This is a result of the digestive system returning back to doing what it does best.
There are numerous ways to meditate. I recommend 2 sessions a day, one in the morning before breakfast and one in the afternoon before dinner for 20 minutes each. At first you may feel like you don’t have the time for this, but when you function each day in a calm state you will notice you will be 10 times more efficient and 10 times healthier AND your body will be digesting properly.
Have You Noticed How Stress Takes A Toll On Your Body?
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Tom is the founder of "The Stillness Project", a global movement with the mission of inspiring 1 billion people to sit in meditation daily. Prior to this he led a very successful 26-year career in finance as a broker, trading swaps and bonds for global investment banks. A few years into his career Tom embraced meditation as a tool for stress management. His experience from meditation was so profound that he was compelled to complete his teacher training in India, Bali and Australia to help others find the same inner peace that he did. Now Tom devotes his time fulfilling his mission through "The Stillness Project".