Part 01 Action: How I changed my problem with food...
The world hands food problems out on a silver platter. Here is one way to break the cycle and using food or your body as the scapegoat. THE ACTION PLAN TO LESSON ONE!
"I'm not an emotional eater," I told my husband.
"Then what's with the cereal in your hands?" He asked.
"I just like it. Can't I eat things I like?
"Sure," he said with a smirk.
A smirk that crawled right under my skin and exposed the truth more than ten spoken words could. The same truth most of us face. We don't like to admit things, especially the things that happen in the secret spaces of our minds.
Honestly, I would never have called myself an emotional eater. I got into the health space to save other people, not myself. I didn't think I had problems.
I know that sounds absurd and extremely prideful. Not because it wasn't true but because I couldn't believe it could be. There was a stigma among nutritionists, making you feel there was no room for anything but perfection. I was certain if I were anything less (if I were human), my very existence would get ripped out from underneath me.
Forever labeled a hypocrite.
I thought nutritionists were expected to eat perfectly like others assume doctors' kids should never get sick.
But I did have a problem with food.
Arguably, we all have a problem with food because, on some level, food is emotional. While the emotional aspect is not always bad, it can turn bad, and when it does, it's not always at fault to you.
That's because;
The need to eat is part of your DNA. Therefore, you will always have an emotional drive for food.
The emotional aspect of food is trained in you. Society uses food for celebrations and grieving. In good and bad times, food is part of life.
The food industry works hard to get you to connect with food in emotional ways. **
**They probably wouldn't use the word addicted because that's terrible marketing. But they know what flavors and textures make for a more pleasurable experience. The higher the pleasure, the higher the reward, and the greater the need to repeat the experience. They use your taste buds to tug on your heartstrings and pull out your pocketbook.
The world does nothing but walk you right into having food problems. They practically hand them out on a silver platter.
And it works because we don't know how to make it not work.
We don't know how to cope with the emotional aspect of our lives, so we transfer our power over how we feel to other things, like giving Starbucks the ability to decipher our level of joy that day.
We become codependent on other things or people to change how we feel.
To really understand this, we have to back it up and learn what codependence means.