I love chocolate. So much. Not the good-for-you 70% dark stuff…no, I love Cadbury, by the block. My guilty pleasure is watching TV. The combination of chocolate and TV is my idea of heaven. For real. I try to limit this to Thursday nights when my other half is playing squash and I get really annoyed when he has a bye and I have to share my chocolate and the remote control.
Oh, and I love coffee. I am trying to give it up because it doesn’t make me feel good after the fact. Don’t get me wrong, I love drinking coffee. That first sip is divine. I get the biggest mug I can get; no single-use takeaway cups for me; I only have a coffee if I can sit in the cafe and enjoy it. But no more. My body has decided that as long as it’s connected to my brain, it will keep sending me nausea and revulsion when I think about having a coffee.
Too bad, so sad. Over the years I’ve found I can ignore the quiet little voice in my head that tells me not to eat things that are bad for me, as long as my body doesn’t get in on the act. Why can’t it be like the voice that tells me how rubbish my art is, or how fat I am? That voice can be LOUD! No, this is a whispery little thing that suggests that just maybe that coffee might not be good for me…but now my body is involved, the game is over. No more coffee for me.
There’s that old saying “You are what you eat” and it is true to some extent. Our bodies obviously reflect our food choices over time. There are some people who can eat pretty much anything they want and remain slim. I was one of those annoying people until I had my son. These days, it’s not about being thin; I find that certain foods affect my mood and I don’t want to be held hostage by my moods. Coffee gives me that warm fuzzy feeling we all know and love but then wipes the floor with me around 3pm. I cop a lot of flak for being on a Gluten Free diet (mostly…it’s hard being a Vegetarian and GF without sounding like an absolute waste of space) but some wheat products and yeasty stuff make me very moody and no one likes me when I’m moody.
The body has a huge role to play in normalising all the stuff we shove into it, but we still need to eat mindfully. The brain, however, doesn’t seem to work like a liver or kidneys, filtering out all the muck and just providing what nutrients it can find. We have to be vigilant that the information we are taking into our minds is nourishing, challenging and uplifting. Avoiding the news is one way of doing it, but I found after doing that for 12 months, I was really out of touch. Burying our heads in the sand won’t change anything, we need to know how to discuss the big things, like politics, religion and sex, all the things we were told not to talk about. The best way to do this is to feed ourselves daily with the truth and to temper that with beauty, so we remember what we are all fighting for.
I’m not saying you need to delete facebook and go live in a tree, I’m just suggesting we all read more books, listen to some new music and go see a show once in a while (well, daily, weekly and monthly but baby steps…) 
I saw a show last week. It was completely mad (burlesque kinda…) but certainly got our minds working.
These are the books I am reading right now.
The French Perfumer by Amanda Hampson
Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields
an oldie – To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Go-Giver Influencer by Bob Burg and John David Mann (The third book in the series. Read the other two first to get the full effect)
Here’s some new music I am listening to. (videos)
ENJOY!
Tom Misch Woke Up this Day
Nas Everything
Saffron Chewed Up
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