Self help tips: Listen to your body and feel better

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TOGETHER MAGAZINE SELF HELP

In her latest self help article Intuitive Healer Katarina Winslow explains that the body has its own intelligence.

Media is full of quick fixes on how to obtain the body of your dreams.

Unfortunately, the reality is often a bit disappointing, and it is more challenging than what the miracle cures promise. Don’t be discouraged, because there are many logical reasons why dieting often brings you to an endless struggle of repeated failures. If you listen to your body and try to understand it as if it were a separate person from yourself, you will understand why. The body has its own logic, just like your friends might not think, feel and behave like you do. After all, the body is there as a vehicle to ensure that you stay alive. To maintain life, it has a survival mechanism installed in the genes to assure that it has the vital essence to keep you breathing. What happens when you starve your body is that you put it in a state of fear and want. Instead of the body feeling confident and reassured that it has what it takes to make its organism function in a peaceful and safe manner, your body withdraws itself and enters a zone of fear.

We all know that things in life run smoother when we are in a state of love instead of in a state of fear. What happens in a state of fear are tension, lack and stress. To compensate the insecurity that the body feels – of when and how it will make you function – it slows down and tries to store as much energy as possible to reassure your survival. This is one reason why diets usually fail as your body is fighting for its survival.

In the fight for survival, it is no wonder that when you succumb to temptation the body gives off signals to binge. When more fuel finally is available to it, it is as if it says, go ahead eat as much as possible because I never know when I will have what it takes to get you going. On a psychological, emotional and intellectual level, there is also you. What are you telling yourself in the moment of temptation and defeat? Your own feelings and reasoning are probably not that far from the intelligence of the body in the moment of compulsion. You certainly want to enjoy the moment as you know that you will have to diet the next day again.

So, you tell yourself, I’d better eat the three bars of chocolate now as tomorrow I am not allowed to eat anything sweet and forbidden. I’d better take the chance when I have it. To resume, the metabolism of the body not only slows down by dieting, but there is also a double pressure to go for excess once you fail. The pressure from your body to stock up some security and the pressure from yourself to take the chance to allow yourself to savour and satisfy your taste receptors.

When you really think about it, your mouth is full of them. Your tongue is designed for flavours; bitter, sweet, sour and salt. The good news is they are there for a reason. They are there to make sure that you keep feeding yourself so that you may live a happy and long life. Not only is your tongue designed for an exquisite experience of taste, but nature is also reassuring that you will survive by offering an abundant source of infinite flavours. When you look closer it is almost too good to be true. Raspberries and cacao beans, basil and cheese, chili and ginger, and all the other marvellous things we find in nature are there to be able to satisfy your sense of flavour.