What is your preferred diet?
A long time ago, diets were prescribed to those who were ill, recovering from a long illness or suffering from chronic conditions. Today, being on a diet is seen as a normal part of life. A top New Year’s resolution or more recently, ‘intention’, must be the desire to lose weight. There are plenty of diets to choose from – flexitarian, intermittent fasting, keto, omnivorous, vegan, raw food, vegetarian, the 12-hour fast, probiotic, Mediterranean, and more. Take your pick.
Unfortunately, most diets never seem to work and dieters never seem to lose weight for good. Many give up and go through the same cycle when they come across the next fashionable diet. Why does this happen?
Perhaps because diets are not simply about willing ourselves to eat less or swearing off junk food. It might be time to acknowledge that there is a deeper connection; that emotional wellness needs to happen we launch into yet another unsuccessful attempt at physical transformation; that junk thoughts need to be removed if we need to rid ourselves of junk food.. We are more manipulated by our mind, feelings, and emotions than we would like to admit. Take sensory cues, for instance. The smell of a cake or seeing an ad for ice cream or other colorful, attractive junk can make us experience a physical craving for that food. We then go buy and eat it. Feeding yourself a healthy inner diet is the first step towards succeeding in any physical diet you may undertake.
“Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.” -Dorothy Day
There is a Cherokee legend about an elder talking to his grandson. “There are two wolves inside me, and they are constantly fighting. One is greed, anger, resentment, jealousy, arrogance, ego, and everything that is negative. The other is joy, peace, love, fulfillment, truth, compassion, kindness, generosity, and everything positive,” says the old man.
“Which wolf will win?” asks the grandson.
“The one you feed,” his grandfather responds.
Which wolf do you feed? You owe yourself a truthful answer.
“Nurture your mind with great thoughts.” – Benjamin Disraeli
Start feeding the right wolf because your inner transformation needs to happen before you can start moving towards your physical transformation. This is not easy for most because it means addressing the fact that we all have two wolves inside us, not just the good one. Acknowledging your darker wolf means facing all those pesky issues swept under the carpet for years or treated with superficial consumption for instant gratification.
Once you acknowledge your two wolves, you – and only you – must decide which wolf to feed. No one can tell you what to do with the wolves residing inside you. This acceptance can be liberating. Instead of insisting, like many, that only the good wolf dominates you in every thought and action, acknowledging that you are a flawed being can help you move forward in a far more conscious way than most.
“To accept ourselves as we are means to value our imperfections as much as our perfections.” – Sandra Bierig
What happens now? You deliberately start feeding your good wolf and starving the darker one because feeding the better wolf makes you stronger and more confident. You will find yourself enjoying life as you never did before. You will find yourself eliminating, rather than accumulating, ‘dark wolves’ in your mind and life. You willingly make the tradeoffs required to enhance your existence instead of going the path that you think is right, copying what others are doing. Letting go is not hard. Now, there is no doubt, only relief and certainty.
Initially, it seems like the good wolf leads you through seemingly strange paths. Once you learn to trust it, though, you experience precious discoveries that help strengthen your sense of self. You learn to reduce superfluous noise that smothers its wise counsel. Your mind, instead of wandering on autopilot with no sense of direction, does your bidding. The healthy inner diet you are feeding yourself helps the mind become a streamlined tool customized to your unique needs.
When you continue to feed your brighter wolf, the physical transformation that never seemed possible becomes a reality. Eating well becomes a way of life, not a chore. Your disobedient body now obeys you. A miracle made possible by the rich inner diet you feed yourself.
“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” – Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Mt. Everest)
