Almost halfway there – fantastic! By now you will already be starting to feel fitter and healthier; you will also have more emotional Balance.
These first five days are about bringing more Balance into your life and getting your energy moving.
The more often you bring the 9 Elements into your everyday life, the more you will instinctively become aware of whether you need more Balance or Momentum. By knowing this – and it does change, just like your moods change daily – you will begin to harness a better quality of life for yourself. A life in which, when you feel a certain way, you will just know which elements are missing. Then, by re-introducing those elements, you will restore your mind, body, and spirit to the optimum Balance and Momentum that is needed.
Today, on Day 4, we are going to cover the fuel that gives you energy and helps you to feel fantastic.
In The Way we recommend eating food and drinking water from as close to the original source as possible. We are all aware that it is important to have a healthy, balanced diet that contains lots of fruits and vegetables, and moderate amounts of protein and carbohydrate, but the quality of what you eat, and how you eat it, is equally as important.
The best possible source of food is one that comes from growing your own vegetables, picking them and putting them directly onto your plate. This food will be the very freshest possible because it has taken the shortest distance to reach your table, and has therefore lost the fewest nutrients.
After growing your own food, give some thought to where the next source of fresh food could be. This could be your local farmers’ market, or neighborhood or farm shops that stock locally grown, seasonal produce. Food without pesticides and chemical fertilizers is naturally kinder to your body. I like to choose organic, free-range products whenever possible. Wherever you shop, look for where your food has come from. Eating poor-quality food definitely has an effect on how you feel.
It is helpful to become aware of how many vital nutrients are lost from food during packaging, transportation, and storage. Food that is sourced locally is almost always fresher, as it comes to you directly from nature with the least delay. This is food that has not been chilled, packed, and flown from the other side of the world before reaching your table. Food picked when it is ripe, rather than being picked prematurely and ripened without sunlight.
You connect more with your food and have a completely different buying experience if you get to meet the people who have grown and harvested it. This is why I enjoy buying food from a farmers’ market so much; the stallholders are passionate about their produce. They love telling you what time they picked their produce – sometimes it is that very morning.
Today I would like you to become aware of every piece of food that you eat or drink, and ask yourself the following questions:
This will really help you to connect with what you are eating and help you to make better choices.
A simple way of doing this is to rate what you are choosing to eat with a score out of 10.
So, just before you eat something, think out of 10:
In fact, you can try this rating process with everything you eat, drink, and do. Then listen to your body:
The first step to eating more healthily is to become aware of what your body needs, what energizes you, and what fuels your cells to perform at the level at which you want to perform. I am not looking to tell you to do something, because ‘telling’ creates resistance. Rather, I am suggesting what will help you to feel fantastic, enabling you to become aware of how you feel so you can decide what makes you feel good and become aware of how you can self-manage how you feel.
When a craving comes into your head for something that is not aligned with feeling fantastic, use your breath to connect with the whole of you – your mind, body, and spirit – and then ask yourself:
Take a few moments to decide, or maybe do something else for half an hour and see if the craving passes.
When looking for food that is as close to nature as possible, it is helpful to take a look at the list of ingredients in the product you are buying. Try to buy food that has the smallest amount of additives possible. Food additives are substances added to food to preserve or enhance its taste and appearance. They can be of natural or artificial origin.
I have compared two drinks for you: a typical orange drink and fresh orange juice. Here is the list of ingredients for each item.
Ingredients: 17 oranges.
Ingredients: Water, Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Orange Fruit from Concentrate (10%), Sugar, Citric Acid, Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Metabisulphite), Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrate), Natural Flavoring, Sweeteners (Aspartame, Saccharin), Stabilizer (Cellulose Gum), Natural Color (Carotenes).
The high-sugar, low-fruit content of the orange-flavored drink might not come as too much of surprise to most people, as the difference in quality between fresh orange juice and flavored drinks is well known. But what is surprising is the amount of food additives that flavored drinks contain.
Try to eat natural food as often as possible. Food with fewer additives, the way nature intended food to taste and not a manufactured taste.
Simply, eating food that is as close to nature as possible is a good way to ensure you are feeding yourself healthy food. You can argue that fresh orange juice is more expensive, but at the expense of what? Is it your wallet, or your health? Filtered water would be a cheaper and much healthier choice.
Ingredients are listed in order of weight, which means that the main ingredients in packaged food always come first. This means that if the first few ingredients are high in fat, sugar, or refined carbohydrates, this food is best eaten only in small amounts.
From today onward, look at what you fuel yourself with, and how it makes your body feel. There is a high correlation between what you eat and how you feel.
Exercise helps you manage your weight because when you exercise, you burn calories. The more intense the activity the more calories you burn, and the easier it is to keep your weight under control.
Once you have completed the 9-day program, you will begin to notice how your mood and energy change whenever you do or you don’t exercise. See if you can feel the energy shift and change in your mood today before and after you have exercised.
It usually takes two to three days of not exercising for you to notice that your energy is starting to feel sluggish.
You can fit exercise into your life in many ways. You might like to go for a walk during your lunch break, although don’t forget to take time to eat a healthy lunch as well. Do jumping jacks, sit-ups, and press-ups during commercial breaks while watching television. Or even better, switch off the television and go for a run. You could jump on your bike or walk briskly to make a local journey instead of using the car. The physical activity you accumulate throughout the day helps you to burn calories, and adds to your energy levels. It also turns exercise into a healthy habit.
The pace that I find is most beneficial to exercise is one where a moderate sweat is created, and where I am totally focused on doing the exercise in question, whether this is running, tennis, mountain biking, or karate. When you are ‘in the zone,’ you switch off from everything else and nothing else matters. This is a great way to manage daily stress, as it gives your mind a rest and brings your awareness back into Balance.
Getting started off is the hardest part. Once you have, after a short while (for me it is about 20 minutes when I run) you will find your mind switches off and you move more into your body and your spirit (by connecting with your breath). It is only when this mind, body, and spirit Balance is created that you are positioned to move into and experience Flow.
This is Day 4 and you have come a long way already. You are using your body in the way it evolved to be used. Fantastic, well done!
Find a comfortable spot to sit down – this can be as easy as sitting on your lawn or the deck with a cup of tea, or perhaps in a park, but preferably in a natural environment and somewhere you can have a moment of peace.
Find a place just to be. Just to notice what is going on around you with calm observation.
Take in your environment. Look out and see the colors surrounding you, observe the shapes. Take in objects close to you to start with, and then increasingly further and further away. Then bring everything you see in together.
Slow down, and take a few moments to notice the detail and texture in what you see: the small things that usually go unnoticed in a typical day – perhaps a spider’s web or a dandelion seed floating in the wind. Notice how nature is in constant Flow, and take note of the variation in shade and depth in the objects you see. Watch birds in flight. Just feel at one with your surroundings. Try not to label and analyze the things you see, just ‘be’ and let everything just come and go with quiet awareness.
If you feel the temptation to start thinking about your day ahead, or something from yesterday, just bring yourself back to the present moment. You could try connecting with your breath, as a subtle way to connect with your body and inner self, rather than your mind. This can really connect you with the essence of the objects you are looking at, rather than mentally giving them a label.
Breathe in the colors, shapes, and textures, and look at your surroundings with fresh eyes, as if you were a young child seeing them for the first time… and just be.
I have seen massive improvements in people’s lives when they do this element alone. With the hurried lives that many of us lead these days, taking time for personal space can help us to stop rushing. It also helps to connect you with your more intuitive and creative side, as well as Balancing your emotions.
Each day we will be connecting with one of your senses to bring you into the present moment. When you are present, your perception of time will also slow down because your attention is focused in the moment rather than always searching ahead for the next thing. When you stop searching for a better moment, you start to see how beautiful life is already.
With sleep today I would like you to follow a similar pattern to yesterday: allowing yourself time to wind down in the evening. But today I would also like you to avoid any caffeine or sugary drinks after midday.
This will be easier for some than others; it is all about Balancing how you feel. Some people live with extremes of mood and energy swings, so eliminating sugary drinks and caffeine after midday can help to break this pattern. If you feel a slump in energy and you would usually reach for caffeine, ask yourself ‘Why do I feel this way?’
People find themselves in a vicious cycle in which caffeine contributes to sleep disturbance, but then, because of the sleep disturbance, they feel tired and want more caffeine.
Try not to cover up your body’s messages with a stimulant. You could be feeling tired because of a physical cause, such as anemia or an underactive thyroid, or an emotional cause, such as stress and worry, or because of your lifestyle. Are you dehydrated? What you eat and drink can have a big impact on how you feel. Alcohol, like caffeine, is a drug that can lead to a cycle of tiredness. Some people drink alcohol to help them to relax and sleep, but alcohol can disturb your sleep cycles. You may get your eight hours, but because your quality of sleep has been reduced, you still wake up feeling tired.
So today try to make the best choices of food to fuel your body and, most importantly, always listen to your body first and your mind second. That way your thinking will be connected to the whole of you.
If you have managed to keep up, and have completed all of the days and elements so far, you should be feeling fitter, and have more clarity and awareness in each day. Your energy will definitely be becoming more Balanced and calmer.
You might also find it a little strange that your increased awareness means you begin to see people and situations in a slightly different light than before. You are possibly becoming more objective, less judgmental, and less confrontational.