About two months ago, I made a decision. I was very unhappy with my current weight, and I was also concerned about my blood pressure, which I couldn’t seem to get under control even with medication. So my decision was to change my diet, effective immediately. I’ve lost weight in the past; at least three times in my adult life, I’ve gone on a weight-loss program that helped me lose forty pounds or more. It was time to do it again.

This time I decided to do it with diet alone, and not worry too much about exercise. (I remembered wistfully the first time I lost tons of weight, back in my twenties, when I did it solely by walking more with the aid of a pedometer. I still ate whatever I wanted, but the weight still came off. Sadly, I’ve learned that my metabolism isn’t the same as it was in my twenties, and this would not be sufficient.)

I have had luck with Weight Watchers in the past, but I decided this time to try to do it on my own, using what I’d learned from Weight Watchers. I made a change to my daily lunch. (I always eat exactly the same thing for lunch – but now it’s different, and smaller, than it was just a few months ago.) I decided that supper would be whatever was served, but I would watch my portions. And I decided – and this is the biggest thing – to cut out all snacking between meals. (Or more precisely, to allow snacking only if it’s fruit. I remember that in Weight Watchers, most fruit was a “zero-point” food.)

I started weighing myself every morning to see how it’s been going. I saw results right away, and over the past seven weeks or so, I’ve lost thirteen pounds. Nowhere near my goal yet, but the regular progress is very motivating and gratifying. What surprised me more is the other side effects that occurred almost immediately. My blood pressure went down to normal within a week. I knew that weight loss can help blood pressure, but that seemed too soon. Then it occurred to me that perhaps this initial blood pressure drop was due to not putting so much junk inside my body – if nothing else, I was certainly not harboring the same level of sodium I’d done before. And then, a few days later, I got a notification on my Apple Watch, that there was a new trend in my health – my resting heart rate was lower than it had been. My assumption is that this is also because of the change in diet.

So what I’ve learned is that changing my diet for the better doesn’t just help me lose weight, it also helps in other ways. This has been delightful for me! Perhaps if I do reach my target weight, I’ll even be able to lower the dosage of my blood pressure meds or even get off them completely. Who knew that what I put in my body would make such a difference! (I should also note that all this started not long after I made a change to my antidepressant meds, upping the dosage for the first time in years. So that change to what’s in my body may have led to this one…)

But I’m not sharing all this to brag about a little bit of weight loss. In fact, I told you that story so I could tell you this one:

I was in my therapist’s office last week, talking about how I still felt stuck and miserable sometimes, despite all the good things happening in my life. After talking about it for a while, I realized that part of this is because of the stuff I’d been reading and the social media I’d been consuming. I have taken to reading Apple News on my iPad at lunch, and because of the way the algorithm works on Apple News, it’s showing me more and more news that I tend to read. So it’s slowly become more and more of an echo chamber of rage-inducing political news, much like my Facebook feed is. It’s not helpful to me to hear these stories, particularly from the sources that it likes to feed me. It just makes me more and more upset. And that’s not to mention the amount of video games I play, which just feeds a numbing effect.

We kept talking about how to break away from consuming such things, and it occurred to me that this might be analogous to my recent weight loss program.

If being mindful of what I feed my body has made a difference and reaped many benefits, then might what I feed my mind make a difference as well?

That idea has been dwelling with me for the past week, and in fact I took it with me on a labyrinth-walking trip I made yesterday. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing posts about those labyrinths, and sharing the insights I came to about feeding my mind, and how I can make some changes in the way I consume information and media.