Food doesn’t just nourish our cells but also our soul. It brings warmth to cold winter mornings and togetherness in the afternoons and brings us sleep after dinner.
Our relationship with food decides what it brings to us. An overload of information and options has caused a decrease in the quality of the relationship people have with food and increase in instances of food anxiety and binge-eating.
If having a slice of pizza or a donut at a party with friends and family makes you feel anxious then you are probably suffering from food anxiety. If you head out to have a burger with guilt and shame then that is an indication of your troubled relationship with food. While the ideal thing would be to savor the taste of the burger, you end up hating yourself with every next bite and then that makes you bring in loaded pizzas and then ice-creams and what not.
Steps to make a healthy relationship with food:
1. Don’t restrict certain food groups
This might sound like the most counter-intuitive thing to do for a healthy life but it actually improves your relationship with food. Restricting certain food groups is the diet mentality. Labelling food as good or bad feels like putting a morality on food and that paves way for an unhealthy mindset for health. It is simply oversimplifying to put food into two categories of good and bad. In real life things aren’t so black and white. Restricting ourselves from having a particular food makes us mind pre-occupied with its thought to the extent of even a little bit of obsession but as soon as we give ourselves the permission to have them, they start losing their allure. Giving yourself the permission to have the foods that you otherwise don’t allow gives you a chance to get habituated to them, be exposed to them and eventually shed off their glory. It makes the food emotionally neutral and we become able to judge it for what it is and decide if we even want to have it.
2. Eat Intuitively, follow body signals
Most people live a very chaotic life today. Tuning in to our bodily signals. Chasing deadlines has made us lose touch with our inner child who used to push away food when full and cry when hungry. The idea of intuitive eating is presented in the book ‘Intuitive Eating’ by Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole. If practiced for long enough, intuitive eating brings us affirmation and acceptance of the body that we have. It is a slow process.
The idea of intuitive eating is to eat when you are politely hungry and till you are comfortably full. When we are extremely hungry, we go for the most indulgent food that is sugar rich and deep fried, very similar to binge-eating. We also tend to eat more and that too very quickly and then go to the state of being very full but when we are politely hungry, we can measure the food portions well and also make mindful choices. eating slowly and mindfully will also help us realize better when we are comfortably full. One can also try writing it down and try to realize our intensity of hunger and fullness before and after meals.
3. Eat well most of the time
For living a healthy life, one must adopt the long-term approach and that cannot be done by restricting certain food groups. It is perfectly fine to indulge every once in a while as long we are providing the body with all the necessary minerals and nutrients. If we eat well most of the time, we can eat and drink guilt free while on a vacation. It is important to understand that our health is not determined by a single meal or a single food. It is dictated by what we do most of the time, consistently and over time. The better we understand this, the more we are freed from the shackles of anxiety around food.
The goal is to have a healthier relationship with food. It will help you not just make mindful food choices more often but will also you help you to enjoy the food you have and move on.
A lot of the content in this post is inspired from here and here. I also highly recommend reading the book, Intuitive Reading. The paperback is available here. The audiobook is available on Audible here.
Thanks for reading!
Comments