Gina Benson is a holistic Ayurveda nutritionist and yoga instructor who is also pursuing a career in midwifery. She is available for a remote nutrition consultation and feels free to contact her via gina@yogavedahealth.com. Also, feel free to visit her blog to learn more about nutrition, yoga, mindfulness, and her inspiring personal stories about how she persistently and gracefully overcame many great challenges.
Have you ever kept a food log and recorded your moods, feelings, and ability to focus? If you have, you might already know what foods help or impede your ability to focus! As a holistic nutritionist, I assign all of my clients to start a “Meal & Feel.” It’s essentially a food log where clients list what they ate and drank throughout their day, note when they took a potty break, describe what the consistency of their you-know-what was, and how they were feeling that day. Clients come to me all the time complaining about energy levels, headaches, mood swings, etc. It’s never a one time visit fix. It usually takes a few days, weeks, or months of working together to get down to the root of it all. But the biggest complaint of all is an inability to focus. Luckily for my clients, it’s quite a simple fix and it starts with nutrition!
As an Ayurveda Practitioner, it is believed in my studies that 99% of problems stems from the gut. You’ve probably heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” Similarly, in Ayurveda we say, “What you can digest becomes your strength and what you cannot digest becomes your weakness.” This simply means that there are foods that our gut digests and uses as building blocks to strengthen and heal the systems of our bodies. And there are foods that we are unable to process or digest that wreaks havoc on the systems of our bodies.
Let’s think of the simple nutrition we learned in elementary school for a second. Remember when your teacher told you that an apple a day keeps the doctor away? I remember my teachers telling us to eat a nice hardy meal the night before an exam to keep our focus strong throughout the testing. What they failed to tell us is that you can’t just have one apple or one hardy meal and erase the abuse of processed foods we filled our bodies with. If only it were as simple as one healthy meal!
Each and every one of us is unique. How I assess and lend advice for one client is different from the next. My clients who suffer from obesity are treated differently than my clients who suffer from anorexia. But there are standard rules that I share with all of my clients and they look like this:
- Practice mindful eating. What the hell is that? If you’re anything like me, you probably eat standing, while working or watching TV. You might even shovel the food on your plate directly into your mouth. And you likely chew twice and swallow, gulping air on the way down. Mindful eating is the practice of sitting with your food, looking at it, taking a moment to smell its aroma. Mindful eating is taking one forkful or spoonful at a time and chewing it until it is broken into tiny pieces before swallowing. Mindful eating is putting your utensil down between every bite to take a breath. Mindful eating is taking twenty minutes from start to finish of your meal to give the Vagus Nerve in your gut the opportunity to tell the mind the stomach muscle is full to prevent overeating. Mindful eating is taking the time to appreciate the food you have to sustain your survival. And if you’re really lucky, you even get to enjoy the food you’re eating.
- Portions. What even are the proper portions? When you look at the back of food packaging, it lists the nutrition facts. At the very top reads the serving size. Are we expected to think it the same serving size across the board for people of all ages, shapes, and sizes? Can the stomach of a 4′ 10″ woman like me handle the same amount of a 6′ 3″ man? Probably not, but it all depends on the size of our hands. I want you to take a moment, gaze down at your hands and line the pinky edge sides of your hands together. The size of your hands represents your plate. One hand from the heel of your palm to your fingertips represents the number of vegetables you should take in per meal. Now create a fist and place that on the palm of your other hand. This should represent the amount of grain or starchy vegetables you should consume like rice, quinoa, sweet potato, cassava, etc. And the four fingers left on that hand represents the amount of protein one should have in their meal like meat, fish, or legumes. It might not seem like a lot but if you were to cut a filet of fish in half and stack it on top of each other it would be the height of your pinky finger. These are the proper portions of food for you per meal. Now, the amount of meals you eat per day depends on your activity levels. Athlete versus active versus not active. The more active you are, the more meals one will likely take in to make up for the amount of energy or calories they burn. However, portion sizes are important- especially when it comes to our ability to focus. If you’ve ever celebrated a holiday party with your family, I’m sure you know the sleepy feeling you have after consuming a large meal. We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt too stuffed to do anything other than lie down and sleep. So how can you focus if you’ve eaten too much? And how can you focus if you don’t eat enough? Luckily our hands are proportionate to the size of our stomach!
- Everything in moderation. Yes, there are certain foods to favor and foods to avoid. A whole food diet (aka foods that come straight from the earth) is the best practice when staying healthy and focused. But a few potato chips now and then won’t kill you. We should be able to have a piece of cake and eat it, too! It becomes a problem when we eat too much of one thing. Ever downed a whole bag of potato chips? I sure have. And I wasn’t proud of it. But it wasn’t the guilt that made me feel bad and lethargic, it was the energetic quality of the food. Food has energetic vibrations just like everything else that exists in this world. A contributor to HuffPost named Maria Benardis wrote an article about how eating high-vibrational foods is good for health and longevity. Fresh vegetables have a higher frequency than frozen veggies. And frozen veggies have a higher frequency of energy than week-old leftovers. Now I want you to take a moment and think of the following foods and the quality of their energetic frequency: strawberries, spinach, cheese, and white bread. Which of these foods do you think has higher energetic frequencies and which have lower? If you guessed that strawberries and spinach have higher frequencies than cheese and white bread, you are correct. When we eat foods higher in energetic frequencies, we mirror those vibrations. You really are what you eat! When we eat foods that have lower energetic frequencies we mirror that, too. That doesn’t mean you should never have cheese again but in moderation!
These three golden rules are helpful to all people, especially when it comes to focusing. When our diet is healthy, our mind responds to that. When we eat clean, we think clearly. When we are mindful while eating, it increases our ability to be grateful and tonic thoughts produce tonic chemicals and ironically builds mental focus through the mere act of being mindful! When we eat proper portions, our energy levels remain even and we are able to sustainably focus on our hard work for longer. Nutrition impacts everything!
A long time client of mine came to me suffering from depression, feelings of rage, and lack of focus. After two weeks of implementing the three golden rules, he noticed drastic differences in his mood and ability to focus. He has since perfected his role as a caregiver to himself. By stepping into his power and looking at himself from a place of compassion, he has given himself the nourishing nutrients he needs to thrive in life.
I challenge you to start a Meal & Feel and practice the three golden rules listed above. Write down all the foods you eat and markdown how you feel. Check-in with your focus. If you’re a science geek like me, conduct an experiment. Eat chips and cake for breakfast one day and try to complete an assignment. The next morning, eat fresh fruit and wholegrain toast with almond butter, then complete another assignment. Compare the difference of your focus between the two days. My bet is your focus would improve drastically on the day you start your day with fresh fruit and whole grains. It’s not always convenient to eat balanced healthy meals, especially if you’re working long hours, but the reward is immeasurable. And the most important thing to remember is to be kind to yourself.
Try some of my favorite focus enhancing meals below:
Breakfast
Overnight chia seed pudding
serving yields 4-6
1 cup milk (coconut, nut milk, any of your choice)
¼ cup chia seeds
Zest and juice of ¼ lemon
¼ tsp. Vanilla extract
1 cup raspberries
2 tbsp. Maple syrup
Combine the following ingredients and leave overnight in the fridge.
Lunch
Rice Paper Wraps and Peanut Dipping Sauce
serving yields 2-4
4 rice paper wraps
1 thinly sliced large carrot
½ thinly sliced large cucumber
½ cup chopped purple cabbage
1 avocado
4 Thinly sliced strawberries
Wet the rice paper and evenly distribute and fill with the ingredients listed above to make 4 wraps.
Dipping sauce
1/4 cup peanut butter
2 tbsp. coconut aminos
1 tbsp maple syrup *optional*
1 tbsp lime
Combine the ingredients and enjoy!
Snack
1-2 bell peppers, sliced
2 tbsp. of hummus
Dinner
Warm Belly Salad
(Serving Yields 2)
1 butternut squash, cubed
6 handfuls of kale, massaged with olive oil
2 tbsp. pumpkin seeds
2 tbsp. craisins
2 tbsp. goat cheese
Extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dress
Roast butternut squash in oven at 400 until cubes are golden
Roasted kale in the oven for 5-10 minutes at 350
Split the roasted veggies in half and top with pumpkin seeds, craisins, goat cheese, and dressing
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