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I used to wear glasses, and when I did you could frequently find me running frantically around my house, late for work as usual, as I searched for them. If you were looking in the window during this charade, you would undoubtedly laugh, as I would estimate at least forty percent of the time they were on my face or folded on to my shirt. To me, this demonstrates just how disconnected I was from my own body. I could have glasses resting on my skin, making my vision clearer, and have no awareness in the moment of what was, literally, right in front of me.

Thanks to LASIK and mindfulness practice, I am much more connected to myself these days and don’t lose any glasses. I know that I’m haven’t been alone in this disconnection, however. Every day I see individuals who are utterly unaware of their bodies unique signals, and I see how this unawareness wrecks havoc on their ability to properly care for themselves.

When it comes to feeding ourselves, our bodies have an absolutely incredible system for keeping us healthy. Many of us believe that if we really listen to our bodies, it will tell us to eat Hostess cupcakes all day long and send us spiraling into a state of obesity. In fact, our bodies just don’t work like that. That belief itself is worth exploring, and is often tied to messages that we’ve gotten throughout our lives about how bodies just can’t be trusted. We’re told this by our parents growing up (“You can’t be hungry yet – you just ate!”), by our friends (“Watch out or your Twinkee addiction is going to catch up to you.”) and by the diet industry (“Trick your body into losing weight!”), and even by the government and food industry, (“Follow these food pyramid guidelines, not your hunger! Don’t worry that they are the result of dairy and beef industry’s advice to the USDA.”).

What we often fail to hear through all the white noise is the sound of our Inner Nutritionist, despite the fact that he or she is wailing to get our attention. Our Inner Nutritionist is comprised of all of the internal wisdom that resides in our amazing bodies. It’s built on millions of years of collective evolution and decades of your own personal experience. To put it frankly, it knows what it’s doing – a heck of a lot better than your Aunt Sally, Slim-Fast, or the USDA.

Our Inner Nutritionist tells us things like when we are hungry and when we are full. The Inner Nutritionist even has cool hormones at his or her disposal that can make certain foods more or less appealing.  Linda Bacon talks about the restrained eater, the subject of many studies, in her book, Health at Every Size. The restrained eater is someone who has kicked their Inner Nutritionist to the curb, and instead responds to external cues to determine their eating. The restrained eater responds to things like the amount of food available, peer behavior, and their emotions to determine how much and what they eat. While these things can influence all of us to some degree, those with a tight relationship with their Inner Nutritionist are able to observe and acknowledge these factors and return to their own sense of what’s right for their body in the moment.

Utilizing this resource can take a lot of practice, particularly for someone who has long ago fired the Inner Nutritionist. Bringing it back happens when we can practice mindful eating and develop a more balanced relationship with our bodies. An Inner Nutritionist packs his or her bags when her boss doesn’t believe she exists, ignores her, or, worse, berates her.  Just for today, practice being curious as to where your own Inner Nutritionist might be.

Do you believe you can trust your body for your food choices?

Shortly after my post outlining my effort to honor the earth by going vegetarian for a month, I received an email from reader and fellow blogger, Robyn Goddard. As a South Dakota rancher who details her adventures (and yummy recipes!) on her site, The Ranch Wife Chronicles, Robyn commended me for doing some research before eliminating meat and pointed me to some wonderful resources on the misconceptions about her field. Recognizing the importance of seeing both sides of this issue, I invited Robyn to share some of her thoughts on beef’s benefits with Nourishing the Soul readers. I so appreciated her taking time to give beef another voice!

After Ashley’s “Honoring the earth” post, I wrote to her about the misconceptions placed on agriculture and meat consumption. Today, I am going to share a few truths about the beef you eat.

As a cattle producer, beef runs deep in my blood. My husband and I are the fourth generation on his family’s South Dakota ranch. I grew up raising cattle in south central Nebraska.

Our family business is raising wholesome, safe, and healthy beef to feed America and the world. Equally or more important to raising cattle is environmental stewardship. Ranchers and farmers are dedicated to protecting natural resources and passing our legacy on to future generations. If we do not take care of the land, we can not produce high quality meat for your family or our own.

Ranchers work hard everyday to ensure that the land and animals in their control are treated with the utmost respect and care. A few examples we carry out on our ranch include conservation and anti-erosion practices, grass utilization and water quality maintenance. Without compassion for the environment, my husband and I would not be able to carry on our family business. A rancher’s primary goal is to improve the environment. If we take care of the land and improve our natural recourses, they will take care of us and the next generation.

Not only that, but calorie for calorie, beef provides some of the highest quality nutrients the body can get. Beef adds “ZIP” (zinc, iron and protein) to your diet, so you can fuel up with a complete, high-quality protein that provides all the essential amino-acids the body needs.

Zinc, Iron and B vitamins are important in cognitive development and functioning. They play a vital role in brain function, including memory health and the ability to learn and reason. I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get in the memory department!

Beef helps the body remain healthy as zinc aids is maintaining a properly functioning immune system and assists in healing the body. B6 assists the body in defense against infections.

My own body needs high-quality protein when I work out. Iron aids red blood cells to carry oxygen from the lungs to vital organs and muscles. Proteins are essential for normal growth and development, in addition to building muscle mass. Protein is an essential energy source and assists in regulating metabolism and maintaining a healthy weight.

Beef’s fatty acid profile is commonly misunderstood. About half of the fatty acids found in beef are monounsaturated — the same heart-healthy fats found in olive oil! Only about 40% of fat in beef is saturated. The body needs some saturated fat to function properly. Saturated fat helps to increase the feeling of satisfaction after a meal and transports fat-soluble vitamins.

Beef has 29 cuts of meat that meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s requirements for “lean meat.” I recommend you grill a steak or hamburger and enjoy the great taste of American raised beef. Take advantage of all the nutritional benefits of this red meat powerhouse.

When you buy American raised beef, you are not only purchasing nourishment, but also sustaining a treasured way of life. You are supporting the American rancher and the traditions we work so hard to preserve.

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What do you think about the impact of animal agriculture? Do you share Robyn’s passion for beef? Did anything she said surprise you?

photo © 2010 Keith Ramsey | more info (via: Wylio)

I just got back from a sweaty four-mile run, and as I sit here typing I’m noticing the familiar pangs of post-exercise hunger creeping in. My body is signaling to me that it has expended my energy stores – it wants fuel to keep operating. I know that if I don’t feed myself soon (usually within 30 minutes after intense physical activity), I’m going to start getting light-headed, irritable, and unable to focus.

This post-workout hunger – and the necessary response of eating – are what experts consider the reason that exercise doesn’t usually lead to weight loss. Yes, you read that right. Exercise and weight loss do not go hand in hand.

Study after study suggests that, contrary to popular belief, spending more time on the elliptical does not lead to a smaller figure. That might be frustrating news to the 45 million Americans who belong to fitness clubs, a number that has increased since 2001 according to the IHRSA.

While not everyone joins a gym to get skinny, it is the primary reason cited for exercise. Sometimes it’s snuck into a litany of other reasons – to keep up with the kids, get my blood pressure under control, to make my partner happy – but people will usually still identify weight loss or weight control as a reason for hitting the treadmill.

Perhaps disappointing to these individuals, doctors and researchers have fairly solid evidence that exercise won’t result in a slimmer waistline. In a 2009 Time magazine article, Eric Ravussin, prominent exercise researchers and faculty at Louisiana State University stated unequivocally,  ”In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless.”

Ravussin and others in the field explain that exercise tends to increase and stimulate our hunger, resulting in a reversal of the energy expenditure we just created once we eat. And we need to eat! Experts agree that it’s important to nourish your body after a workout to replace glycogen in your body.  It’s also important in order to avoid excessive hunger that could lead to a binge later.

So why I am telling you how ineffective exercise is for weight loss? Because there are so many reasons to exercise that have nothing do with our size – reasons that got so lost in the bombardment of messages of how our cardio routine can blast belly fat.

In a 2009 study, participants who considered themselves sedentary and had body mass indices in the obese range, took up supervised exercise for twelve weeks. What researchers found was that weight did not significantly change. Before you call the experiment a wash though, consider that most of the individuals did increase their aerobic capacity, decreased their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and improved their mood.

Other benefits of exercise include building healthy bones and joints, reducing the risk of diabetes and cancer, and improving circulation. Even more fascinating, exercise, especially mindful exercise, has been shown to improve mood, increase learning ability, and improve body image. And that’s all without the scale changing a bit.

Once we can let go of the association between exercise and weight loss, we can start to focus on doing things that we actually enjoy. Rather than a punishment to whip our bodies into a certain size or shape, we can approach exercise as a way of honoring our bodies as another expression of our selves. This means taking rest as seriously as movement, and finding activities we truly love– even if the calorie expenditure is low.

When I decided that we were going vegetarian for a month – and I say “we” because despite our attempt to break down gendered roles in our home, I am the primary cook – my husband was expectantly dubious.

“Like, no meat?” he asked back in February, when this idea began percolating in my omnivorous mind.

“Mm-hmm, only bean spouts and organic kale,” I teased, pretending to be more certain of my ability to construct balanced vegetarian meals that could fuel my marathoner hubby and myself than I actually felt.

So over the next three months or so, I casually researched really juicy stuff, like non-animal sources of protein, quick vegetarian dinners, and even how to host a party with plenty of veg-friendly dishes. By the time that May rolled around, I felt prepared to embark on our journey, only slightly anxious about the chicken breasts I was leaving behind.

You may be wondering why we decided to do a month sans meat. Well, back in January I had chosen the word honor as my word of the year. I had decided that 2011 was to be a year in which I focused myself on honoring my truest desires, my body, my relationships, and the earth. Specifically, I said that I wanted to live with more awareness and respect, and I decided that shifting from a meat-centric lifestyle to one that was more earth-friendly was one way to do so.

When I learned about the how entire ecosystems are being destroyed across the globe in order to create room for livestock and crops to feed them, I was intrigued. When I learned that producing two pounds of beef creates more greenhouse-gas emissions than driving a car for three hours, I was stunned. And when I learned that the United Nations considers a plant-based diet the most important step to be taken in reducing global warming, I was blown away.

If you’re interested in going meat-free for a month or another set period of time, I encourage you to consider the following:

Do it for the right reasons

As I’ve talked about before, making a change in the way that you eat should not come from a place of fear or desperation. Those who have struggled with disordered eating can be particularly vulnerable when it comes to eliminating a major food group from one’s diet. In fact, research shows that vegetarians are more likely to have had eating disorder thinking or behavior, and young vegetarians tend to more susceptible to binge eating. Thus, it’s important to honestly assess your reasons for forgoing meat or animal products. Consider things like:

• What need might I be trying to meet by engaging in this practice?
• What emotions are behind my decision? Am I experiencing fear, frustration, anger? [If so, eliminating foods might not be the best choice right now.]
• How will I know if my thinking about this is becoming rigid or distorted?

Enlist support

As with any challenge, the buddy system is best. Not only can you support one another when the going gets tough (though if it gets too “tough”, I recommend returning to your normal eating patterns), but it can enhance the enjoyment of this experience. It was fun for my husband and I to search out vegetarian options at new places we visited, and I loved getting to taste test my lentils recipe on him (so, I might have some work to do on that one, given his less-than-thrilled expression). Not only that, but a friend can help you assess whether a meat-free lifestyle is a healthy option for you.

Prepare yourself

As I mentioned, I spent several months researching vegetarianism before delving into this lifestyle. I wanted to be sure that I had a cadre of go-to recipes on hand that would offer me all of the essential nutrients I needed. I visited some veg-friendly blogs, like Daily Garnish and Savvy Vegetarian. I also made sure to not let this month of no meat go by without truly appreciating the choices I was making. For me, this meant reading up on the environmental and economic impact of meat production and doing a lot of self-reflection about my own values and beliefs. I also happened to catch the new documentary, Forks Over Knives, which primarily details the incredible health benefits of a plant-based lifestyle.

Think about what you’re adding, not what you’re taking away

I also wanted to look at this experience not as something to restrict my eating, but something to enhance it. Unsure as to whether this would become a longer-term venture, I decided that I at least wanted to expand my repertoire of vegetarian meals. One can both improve health and reduce their carbon footprint by even incorporating a couple of meat-free meals per week, so I took this month as an opportunity to create more options for myself. What I found is that there is a whole world outside of chicken breasts and bacon! Not that I don’t love those foods, but this month forced me to broaden my horizons and try new vegetables and legumes that I definitely would have overlooked.

Stop if it’s not working for you

If you’re feeling weak, fatigued, restrictive, or just like you’re really missing your barbacoa burrito, for goodness sake, stop! There are endless ways to honor the earth, and yours doesn’t need to be by eliminating a food group. Just as important as the preparation is the self-awareness it takes to know when something is not the best idea for you. Remember, you are part of the earth as well, and honoring our planet starts with taking care of your own body and mind. So do what works for you!

Are you vegetarian or would you consider going vegetarian for a period of time? Why or why not?