The current buzz out there is ‘how to use your mind to heal yourself’.  That has been the goal of yoga and meditation all along. Definitely not all, but many of our illnesses are caused or exacerbated by stress.  Pick a disease  and  the list of causes and chances are stress is on the list.  So learning to manage stress can help to both heal you and prevent further illness or flare-ups of certain disease.

“Listen to our body”, we hear the saying all the time. Are you listening?  It doesn’t just mean, stop running 5 miles a day when your knee hurts, it means stepping away from the food when your full.  Or add more fiber to your diet, because your’re having tummy issues.  Feeling tired?  Maybe you need more sleep, or  could it be that you need to replace some of the junk food you eat with healthy fruits and vegetables.

Let’s try an experiment.  First, close your eyes,  and think about eating a bowl of fruit and drinking a glass of fresh squeezed lemonade. Now, imagine what your body has to do to process and use that food.  When  I do this experiment, I imagine all the vitamins, minerals, amino acids and other good nutrients effortlessly flowing through my body making me feel light and energetic.

Let’s try the same experiment again, only this time imagine eating a small bowl of fried chicken nuggets and a glass of caffeinated soda.  When you imagine your body processing this food, do you image all the vitamins, mineral, amino acids and other good nutrients effortlessly flowing through your body? The answer for me is, no.  I do imagine a little kick of energy from the caffeine in the soda, but then I think about all the other chemicals in the soda and think free radicals, and poison.  I also get a good feeling thinking about the protein from the chicken feeding my muscles, but that quickly dissipates when I think about the oily fried breading and how hard my body has to work to process it.  We can do this experiment over and over again, putting healthy foods against unhealthier options and we will get the same results.  We will imagine the healing energy from the good food and the bogged down feeling we get from unhealthy food.

The reason we feel different when we eat different foods is caused by the digestion process. The reason we imagine these feelings, is we have all experienced them first hand.  When we eat something our bodies reacts. Some foods are more difficult to digest and take longer: which makes us feel: tired, sluggish, bloated, and gassy.  In an article by Dr. Oz he states that a steak can take 2 or 3 days to completely leave your intestines, while fruits and vegetables are completely digested in about 12 hours.  Think about that… the steak is rotting away in your intestines for days.  Not a pleasant thought.  Keep that in mind next time you are craving a big piece of beef.

The key here is to remember how you feel after you eat certain foods and use that to make your food choices.  One warning, don’t be fooled by the initial high you get from eating certain foods, this will happen with all your binge trigger foods – that happy feeling is short lived and it is sometimes accompanied by guilt. Associate the good nutritional value of foods with positive and energetic images. Try to see the potassium in a banana feeding your body.  Many people use the healing power of light running through the body. Then associate the less healthy food with a negative image similar to the rotting steak, or imagine cheese for what it is, old milk.

As with all eating choices, moderation is the key. I explain this in more detail in my article, Healthy Living, Moderation in Eating.

Using your mental imagery to help make good food choices is one part of weight loss through mindful thinking, the other is using mental imagery to picture yourself, taller, thinner, and healthier.  Seeing yourself this way will help you to feel better and will help you to continue to make healthier choices.  Use mountain pose to align your spine, pull your stomach to your spine and hold your shoulders back. See my article, The Mountain Pose Challenge, for more details.

An article by Finerminds gives more ideas related to the mind’s healing power.

Enjoy and Be Well!