Attempting a Vegetarian Diet
There’s so much I want to share from my Vipassana experience. I’ve been meaning to write up about it. I was holding back to make one large post but I think that’s holding me back from sharing the things that come at random moments to my mind. So I’ve decided to go ahead and offload my stream of consciousness onto Facebook every now and then.
I’m particularly happy about managing to sticking to a vegetarian diet since returning. I’ve been consciously tracking my urges to eat non-veg. And to my pleasant surprise, I have not noticed any particularly strong cravings. My gut seems to be doing fine too — even with some veggies I had blacklisted before as high FODMAP. Last night was a particularly hard test as there was some delicious looking lamb. And I was stress af. And I binge eat when I’m stressed. I picked up a piece and stared at it for 5 min on my plate and did not end up eating it. I’m not sure how “keto” I am now since fruits have made a reappearance in my diet. My obsession with eggs and bacon has been replaced with a new found obsession on apple and peanut butter. Partly because apple and peanut butter reminds me of Adam who introduced me to that snack and that makes me happy and mostly because IT IS SOOO GOOOD. I’ve found a low glycemic load breakfast item that I really love — oats mixed with cottage cheese, flax seeds and blueberries. I also find myself particularly craving cucumbers in the morning. I also discovered a smoothie combo that I’ve really taken to — banana, almond milk, lots of peanut butter and flax seeds.
I was a hardcore meat eater as recently as February. I cut out red meat using a particularly hardcore binge at a Mongolian hot pot place as a trigger event. Stuck to fish, chicken and eggs for March/April. I’m hoping this event will establish my vegetarian diet with some room for occasional meat intake if my body really desires it. Too early to declare myself as a vegetarian. These declarations feed into your identity ergo ego anyways. Best avoided. I’ll have to test it out with a proper workout routine, which I’m easing back into because my hips are sore from logging hours of sitting cross legged on the floor.
Oh I completely missed addressing the motivation behind even attempting this. “Harm no living being” was one of the five precepts we attempted to adhere to during the Vipassana which naturally leads to vegetarianism. I’m not yet totally sure how this relates to spiritual growth but I’m a firm believer in faking it till you make it. And mimicking people you perceive to be better than you in any domain you want to grow in. I want to grow spiritually. I’ve observed a common trend of vegetarianism amongst people I perceive to be spiritually more advanced (whatever that means).
I have a suspicion that optimizing your diet to reduce inflammation is The Right Answer®. And there’s probably some link between your digestive system getting confused by food that is similar to your physical structure and ringing the alarm bells and increasing inflammation in preparation for defending the body. And perhaps keeping inflammation low means that your neural system can better focus on spiritual growth because the house is no longer on fire.
The other piece to this puzzle is that I suspect we’ve been using the wrong metrics to quantify diets i.e. macros (carbs, protein, fat). This is a 20% suspicion partly induced by some reference I came across in Ray Cronise’s work. I came across Ray online from my cold therapy ‘experiments’. He did similar experiments to mine but in a much more scientific manner. He has been challenging the daily macros paradigm. I haven’t read enough into this but he seems like a legit guy. It resonates with what I’ve read about systems thinking. The body is a complex system and the macro split is too simplistic a view of what is needed to fuel such a complex system. Imagine that! Optimizing based on incorrect metric for ages — no wonder we have so many different diet solutions because each probably hits close to home on the actual hidden metric that we don’t know yet.