Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
How Yoga and Mindful Eating Helped Sherry Lose 16 lbs Without Effort
As a lifelong healthy eater, Sherry wasn’t trying to lose weight. Sure she would have been happy to drop 5-10 lbs, but she was comfortable with her body and health. She even thought she was a mindful eater until a stressful event in her life caused her to start a consistent yoga practice.
Yoga, it turned out, became a catalyst to help her relieve stress and let go of difficult emotions. As she developed this talent during strenuous yoga poses, she noticed it began to translate into her eating behavior.
Without specifically trying to change anything, Sherry became more aware of her eating habits and started to eat more mindfully. As she did this she naturally started eating slower and being more thoughtful about her food choices.
To her surprise, she discovered she had been eating way more food than her body actually wanted or needed. She also started slowly changing the composition of her meals to be more plant-based, since this was more in line with what she was craving.
While she still enjoys sweets like chocolate cake on occasion, Sherry has embraced mindful eating and over the past year lost 16 lbs without actively trying to lose weight.
Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.
Listen:
If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.
Hi, Darya
I’m a long time fan, and love how you put a scientist’s eye to fad diets, “healthy” products and poorly designed studies. While I get that the nut of this podcast (eat mindfully!) is totally in line with your philosophy, the beginning of the podcast seemed worthy of note.
“Leaky gut syndrome” is generally the stuff of naturopath “doctors” and alternative health practitioners. It’s rejected as a diagnosis by the NHS in the UK; Science Based Medicine says “virtually no physician who has an understanding of the gastrointestinal physiology gives the disease credence.”
I’m not sure what the right approach would have been — it’s not like I expected you to say “I question your daughter’s diagnosis!” because you’re not her (or a) doctor. Maybe getting right into her experience with mindfulness and how that affected her eating?
Anyhow — I’m a big fan, and continue to be — I hope this doesn’t come across as too critical.
Yep, I know and I imagine stuff like this will come up again. My philosophy in health and life in general is to be open-minded if something works for someone. While I know medicine doesn’t recognize leaky gut, it also doesn’t offer a better answer at the moment, which is not at all helpful to anyone suffering from digestive issues. The diagnosis itself was less interesting to me here than the fact that the issue was resolved. Maybe one day science will be able to explain it, but until then I don’t see the harm in people experimenting with different foods to solve their issues for themselves.
I love all of your podcasts! I was hoping you would ask Sherry which method of Yoga she was using, and you did. However, I can’t find anymore information on the DVDs she mentioned. I believe it was Terra Yoga (if I heard her correctly). Do you have anymore information on that? I’ve practiced yoga in the past and it makes me very happy. I don’t know why I ever stop. Listening this morning makes me want to get into it again.
It was Tara Stiles http://tarastiles.com/
Thank you for replying!! 👍 I will check it out.
I had my own pigeon pose moment last night on my yoga mat! Not entirely sure if my results will be as dramatic but it was interesting to experience.
Laurie,
Don’t leave us hanging like that. 🙂 Share your experience! I love hearing people’s stories…they are very motivational to me.
Darya,
I am so sorry to hear about your father’s passing. May you have a lifetime of sweet memories to smile over.
I have been into yoga for several years now and as today I came across this article I immediately loved it and Sherrys story.