As a kid one of my memories from growing up was going out to dinner with my parents every Friday night at a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant in Southern California called Socorros. My parents were both fully bilingual and when we walked in everyone said hello and knew who we were. We felt like th … Read more: Peek Family Fun Night – Patron, Singing and Yoga?
See original here:
Peek Family Fun Night – Patron, Singing and Yoga?
How many of us have struggled with weight and eating? In Ravenous: A Food Lover’s Journey from Obsession to Freedom , YJ staffer Dayna Macy offers us the searingly honest story of her battles with compulsive eating. To discover the root of her overeating, she takes a journey to food artisans, farms, slaughterhouses, and her family home to discover that overeating isn’t a battle she must win — but a journey she must take in order to know and understand her hunger. In the book, the author makes peace with her appetite and her body — a big part of that is her yoga practice. We sat down with Dayna to ask her a few questions before the book’s publication on February 1st. Q: In Ravenous , you take a yearlong journey to uncover the origin of your food obsessions. How does yoga relate to this journey? A: Yoga brings you back into your body. It is the opposite of binging, where you eat to escape or check out. This is why the practice is so powerful. Q: How does the mindfulness you learn in yoga help you make good food choices today? A: It is not possible to eat wisely if your mind is elsewhere. Do you need to eat bread now, or protein? Are you really hungry, or just bored? Are you satisfied, or will you continue to eat to full or even stuffed? This is the gift of mindfulness — it is being present with what is. Q: Tell us how yoga has helped you replace the negative “samskara” (thought patterns), with positive ones, surrounding food : A: My body has a tendency towards the kaphic qualities of slowness and heaviness. So one of my yoga teachers, Scott Blossom, gave me an active practice to balance out these tendencies. I took this notion of practice to counterbalance my tendencies of overeating and began to measure my food. So I am retraining myself to understand what a portion is. The practice of yoga helps brings the mind and body back into balance. Q: Timothy McCall, a medical doctor and author of Yoga as Medicine , once told you, “Yoga teaches you not to get lost in your stories. Yoga helps you see clearly and receive the direct experience of yourself. Not the story you make up about yourself, but your true experience of who you are.” Tell me what this means to you now, after your journey : A: We all have pictures of who we think we are, that includes how we are embodied. I have been overweight for a long time, and, I assumed that that was just how I was embodied. I see now it’s not true. I also see that I am curvy by nature, and at this stage of my journey, I not only accept it, I celebrate it. Learn more about Ravenous and about Dayna Macy . We want to know: How has yoga helped you understand and accept your body and your appetites?
Go here to see the original:
Are You Ravenous?
I’m writing this post from Fairburn Farm on Vancouver Island, a working farm and guest retreat where Neil and I have brought Lucien for a week-long summer holiday. The farm is a bucolic, heavenly spot just a ferry ride from our house in Vancouver. The views of forest and mountain and sky from the windows of the cottage we’re staying in are spectacular, but the real reason we’re here, for our third summer in a row, is the food. The guest operation is run by chef Mara Jernigan, sometimes called the Alice Waters of Vancouver Island. Meals here are a true farm-to-table experience. Breakfast is a two course affair starting with to-die-for homemade granola and berry compote, followed by omelets (with eggs and herbs from the farm, and cheese by local artisans) or frittatas or light-as-air pancakes. Dinner stretches out for hours, with each plate a celebration of local, fresh ingredients: sockeye salmon cakes with lentils and greens and green goddess dressing; rich risotto or homemade pasta or fresh from the brick oven pizza; strawberry tarts and (if it’s hot) refreshing sorbets. For lunch (which Mara doesn’t serve) we stop at a bakery in town where they mill their own grain, and bring the bread to the cheese shop next door for sandwiches that we take on a walk into a nearby park. It’s an idyllic week, and I’m so glad I’m at a place in my life where I can enjoy it. It’s taken me a long time to get comfortable with food indulgences like this. As mentioned previously, I struggled with food issues, and my body image, for years. When I got serious about yoga in my late twenties, I lost the weight I’d accumulated over the course of my unhappy childhood, and finally learned to eat and like healthy foods. My diet came to consist of brown rice, tofu, vegetables, black beans, and fruit–great stuff. But I soon came to be overly attached to healthy eating. If I was traveling and what I normally ate wasn’t available, I freaked out. If I gave in to temptation and ate a chocolate chip cookie, or a scoop of ice cream, or a slice or two of pizza–even if these were made lovingly with high-quality ingredients–I felt that I’d slipped, and worried that I’d backslide and return to a regularly scheduled program of unhealthy eating and ten to forty extra pounds. This made travel-and even eating out at new places-hard. It was no fun when I showed up at Thanksgiving dinner or a Passover Seder or even a dinner party petrified of three quarters of the menu. Or when I’d have a panic attack about “getting fat” on an otherwise romantic (and of course bread filled) trip to Paris with my husband. As a new mom, I resolved to approach food differently. I didn’t want the scale, or my fears, to rule my life anymore–or our family vacations. As I practiced more yoga, and studied yoga philosophy, I came to realize that my food fears weren’t in keeping with yoga after all. The Yoga Sutras say moderation is key, as is non-attachment (in this case to the precise number on the scale.) Becoming nearly phobic about fattening food was embodying neither principle. Through a process of self-study, and the help of a good therapist, I changed. Now I eat healthy most of the time–and enjoy to the utmost the occasional treat. What indulgences make your life a pleasure? What do you still struggle with when it comes to food and body image? And, how do you model a healthy relationship with food for your child/children? Jessica Berger Gross is the author of enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle Pointer (Skyhorse), she lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with her husband and two-year-old son.
Read more:
Food Loving Yogi