In this article, Angela Stokes shares on inner wisdom and surviving food cravings. Angela Stokes is a raw foodist, teacher and expert on raw food weight loss.
Kevin: How can someone tune in to that sort of inner wisdom when it comes to health? Because I think a lot of people they deny the fact that maybe the answers are coming to them. How can someone tune?
Angela: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Something that I wrote about in my most recent book “Raw Emotions” , is the difference between mind hunger and actual hunger, true hunger coming from your stomach. I think that’s a really key thing to start trying to tune into on this path. Because it can be really, really confusing when we first go raw especially. Where are these messages coming from? It’s like your body is being riddled. For most people, for so many years, with foods that the body cannot recognize, it doesn’t know what to do with them. And so you’ve got all of the remnants of those things floating around and your body is trying to make sense of everything. Then you start to put in the foods that are actually nourishing you and yet you still have this old waste in there and it’s just like this big quagmire of messages floating around and you don’t know how to make sense of things. It seems like your body is asking for bread. Where is that coming from? S food survival kits o trying to tune in to the difference between the mind hunger and the true hunger, the true desires of the body, and being clear that what the mind wants isn’t necessarily always healthy for the body.
The body is almost like a machine. You can kind of think of it as it’s always working towards optimal health. That’s what the body is all about. It just wants to take things to the next level all the time. But the mind, the mind is like out there playing all kinds of games. The mind wants to eat this, and have fun with that, it’s like it sees food like entertainment. And so trying to tune in to those differences is really, really key. So maybe if you’re feeling something and you feel like, “this is like hunger,” just try and get quiet with yourself and feel into it. “Am I actually, physically hungry right now? Is there a feeling in my stomach, a pulling, an actual physical ready for something to eat feeling?” That’s what hunger is, it’s not something in your mind saying, “I must eat that Snickers bar right now.” And that’s another easy way to tell where the hunger is coming from.
Are you actually fixated on something, on one particular thing? “I have to have that piece of chocolate cake.” Or a bowl of popcorn, it has to be a bowl of popcorn. Or are you just hungry and you’ll eat anything within whatever limits you’ve defined for yourself? You know, anything raw vegan or vegan or whatever it is. In this moment would you be willing to eat a piece of watermelon rather than that piece of chocolate cake? Are you actually physically hungry, physically ready for food?
Because when you look at things logically there’s a big difference between that mind hunger and the physical hunger. People are just so addicted to food and so used to using foods for comfort and for entertainment and all these kinds of things. And when you look at it logically, it starts to not make that much sense. Let’s take someone, maybe someone 100 pounds overweight, and they say, “I need to have some chips or something.” Where is that need actually coming from, this supposed need? This person is 100 pounds overweight. They have 100 extra pounds of stored energy sitting on their body. They don’t need those chips for energy any more than a cigarette smoker needs to smoke cigarettes to physiologically find the place where they optimally balance out nutritionally. It’s got nothing to do with that. It’s all to do with nutrition. Biologically your body is not asking for nicotine or alcohol or refined sugar, you know? But your mind, yes. Your mind might be very interested in those things and you might have become physiologically addicted to those things to the point where your not having them, you’re going through withdrawal. So it’s a complex thing. Addictions have all these different elements to them, primarily the physiological addiction and the psychological addiction. And with food addictions especially people have both of those elements going on and that’s why we get so trapped in them, because you’re physiologically addicted to these things and you also have so many patterns around eating, around using food for entertainment and comfort and all those kinds of things.
