The Headspace Diet, by Andy Puddicombe
Book Review 🥑🥑🥑⚪️⚪️
Women report thinking about food at least twice as many times as they think about sex. 🤔🍫
How many thoughts do you have about food on a day? Chances are well over hundreds. We are obsessed with food. Heck, even my books rating system is based in avocados! (well, avocados rule 🥑).
The large majority of times we do not eat out of necessity. Rather, we eat out of emotion. We eat out of habit. Why is it that the number of overweight people continues to rise? Why is it that the number of obese people continues to rise? We can blame it on the bad scrupulous corporations. But in the end of the day,
the decision of what to consume stems from our own mind. The mind is a powerful thing, and untrained, is a slave to both emotion and habit, what can feel overwhelming.
Who doesn’t here have zombie attacks where you don’t realize you’re eating until you are about to vomit? I’m ashamed for it, but count me in 🤢. Actually as profiled by the book, I’m a spot on “Binger”, where I eat a perfect healthy diet 90% of the time, just to be derailed into chaos in a few moments of madness ✋.
Worth repeating: what, when, and how much we eat depends on us alone. We alone have the responsibility for our actions.
What if the middle of the frenzy, we just stopped and observed our emotions? Without reacting. Without stopping us. But just accepting our emotions and thoughts, and letting them go.
The author, Andy Puddicombe, should not come as a strange name to many meditators: he is the co-founder and narrator of the for many beloved Headspace app. In this book, Andy proposes mindfulness as a way to observe our behavior around food and regain control. It is not about losing weight. It is about having a healthy relationship towards food and eating.
Meditation is a way to stop. To observe. To let go. We can use this same mindset to let go of our compulsive emotions and habits around food.
To have a healthy diet and lifestyle, we actually need one single thing: listen to your body. And that is the essence of meditation: to listen.
And to listening well requires training (practicing meditation) and requires silence (mindfulness). How often do we eat while occupying our mind in all things possible but actually eating? Reading news, youtube binging, worrying about your TODOs… The food is being eaten, but you are not there. As a result, you end up eating more than needed. So practice mindfulness.
When you sit, just sit, when you walk, just walk, and when you eat, just eat.
Finally, the book gives an interesting alternative for meditation practice: instead of the usual observation of breathing, we can be mindful of our behavior and actions around food. For example, next time we prepare a dinner, we can be curious and fully aware of all the aromas, touches, and tastes we perceive. Even the next time you eat a piece of chocolate 🍫 , you can still patiently observe it, smell it, and savor it with full and dedicated attention. Practice that. It’s helping me 😉👌
Links
- Review on my GoodReads profile 📚.
- Review on my Instagram 📷.
