Developing a Healthy Hunger

I Ain’t No Doctor

a weekly health column by charles faris, hcc

Charles, 
Like many people, I work too hard and find myself stressed under deadlines on a regular basis. My stress often goes to my stomach and I can suffer from a poor appetite, so I don’t feel like eating and would rather keep working. What can I do to ensure that my work stress doesn’t affect my appetite and I have a healthy hunger when I should be eating?

Stephanie

Stephanie,
Thanks for asking and giving me an opportunity to be of service. As you know, I ain’t no doctor, so nothing that I say today should be construed as constituting medical advice. That’s the legal disclaimer. The realistic disclaimer is by that answering your question without spending some time talking back and forth, without sitting back and doing some of the deep listening I need to do to help me unravel your situation, it’s possible that i’ll end up completely off-track regarding your actual needs. That said, i’ve put some deep thought into your question and I hope that what I have to offer today will be of some help.

A Shift in Perspective

What I hear you saying is that you have a problem with lack of appetite. The bigger picture that  I see is a lack of attention to your body, leading to mental and physical stress (big problem), which results in the lack of appetite (smaller problem). From my perspective, we want to address the root of the problem in order to come up with a solution that will offer you a whole lot more than a healthy appetite.

 I am reminded here of a story of a young boy who was born into poverty in rural india in the early part of the twentieth century. Shortly after his birth he was the victim of an influenza epidemic, and throughout his youth he suffered from malnutrition and a series of diseases which would strike fear in the hearts of most parents living today: typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria. So you could say that this young boy was suffering from extreme physical stress, although given his poor circumstances he probably never suffered from a lack of appetite!

Now, when you begin to look at your problem as something more than a lack of appetite, when you begin to see that your body is actually malnourished in a way, that the stress of your work and deadlines has left your body starving for attention to the point that it has perhaps gone on a hunger strike, then you can begin to understand how a simple shift of focus from mind to body can start the process of balancing your body-mind system, and bring your body some of the attention that it is craving.

A Simple Way to Begin

Sit in a comfortable quiet place, or take a walk in a natural setting, and turn your attention to the needs of your body, asking yourself what you could do to help your body feel at home, wanted and appreciated. By itself, this concern will begin the process of re-balancing, of offering your body the nourishment it so badly needs. You might even find that you can come up with a few simple activities that will easily fit into your busy schedule.

In the case of our young boy, this shift came about rather dramatically. At the age of fifteen he went to live in Mysore with his sister and her husband, a scholar and a yogi. He began to study yoga with his brother-in-law and over the next few years he transformed himself from a sickly child to a healthy young man. He progressed so far that at the end of four years his brother-in-law, a surrogate father of sorts, had the wisdom to send him off to Pune to teach yoga himself. The young boy’s journey from overwhelming stress to amazingly well-balanced health and vitality had just begun.

Your Next Step

And so has your journey from stress to vitality only just begun with the shift in focus from mind to body. Your next step is to actually experience your body on a deeper level, nourishing and rebalancing your body-mind continuum. The key to deepening your experience of your body is to once again find a quiet and comfortable place to sit where you can remain undisturbed for five or ten minutes. 

Sitting comfortably upright, close your eyes and tune in to your breath. without attempting to control it in any way, simply sit and feel the passage of the breath into and out of your body. At first just bring your attention to the large movements: the expansion of the ribs and chest, or of the belly. As you begin to tune in to the rhythm of the breath expand your awareness to include the sensation of the breath coming into the nose and throat, the movements of the shoulders and hips as the breath enters and departs. Have fun! Enjoy the peace and quiet. Scan your body to see how far and wide your breath travels.

The value of sitting for this process is that it is easier to feel deeply when the body is silent and still, and since you probably spend quite a bit of time sitting while you are working it will be easy, once you have the hang of it, to check in with your body for a minute or two during the workday when you feel the stress beginning to rise.

Take a Body Break

From here, it is simply a matter of applying this same type of deep attention to sensation to more and more of your activities, and hopefully you will find yourself taking more “body breaks” on a daily basis: sitting and breathing, a morning walk around the block, time spent in nature, always focusing on the sensations of the body.

As your sense of connection increases your body will get stronger and you should begin to notice more and more of the sensations of the body, from peace to frustration, from muscle tension to ease of movement, from relaxation to…hunger! As you begin noticing this wide variety of body sensations, you will also begin to notice a wider variety of mental sensation, and your generalized stress will become more specific, always pointing you in a healthy direction, away from pain and toward pleasure. As you regain your natural sense of balance your “stress” will subside, and you will become more efficient with your work, thereby easing the time crunch that started the whole downward spiral in the first place. 

Like our young yogi, you will find that by paying deep attention to your body, you will let go of your physical as well as your mental stress, increasing your health and happiness as well as your appetite, and who knows, you may even blaze a trail as bold and bright as he eventually did. His name? BKS Iyengar, Arguably the most influential yogi alive, author of five books including the most lauded reference book of them all, Light on Yoga.

Good luck, Stephanie, and let me know how things go for you, and whether this has been helpful.

Charles Faris, hhc

“i ain’t no doctor”

Do you have a question about health and nutrition that you don’t want to ask your doctor?

Ask Chas right here in comments, or via our contact form. We’ll get an answer for you asap.