Part 01: Food is NOT the problem
Part one inside the mini course on food freedom. Stop making food the problem. Learn what is inside.
There's a problem with food being the problem.
It distracts you from the real problem.
Honestly, I don't believe anyone chooses to have a problem with food. It's not like you willingly walk yourself into binge eating on purpose. Just like one doesn't obsess about food without reason.
They may not be the healthiest reasons, but you have to offer yourself grace in understanding your actual problem with food.
You must be willing to look without judging yourself for your current food beliefs.
In many cases, what you believe about food isn't always your beliefs but the beliefs you picked up along the way. They may be your mom's beliefs passed down. Or the last idea, the health space, scared you into believing.
No matter what you believe, shame and guilt have no place in changing your view of food. They only exacerbate the problem you already have.
As we start this mini-series, I'm asking you to show up with a new perspective- or at least a clean one. I'm asking you to take a seat outside your mind, what I call the witness seat, and evaluate what you believe so you can begin to influence it in healthy ways.
It’s time to put food back in its intended place so you can experience healing in a new way, revolutionizing your beliefs about food and its role in and for your body.
My greatest hope is that you can stop living so distracted by what you should or shouldn't be eating and focus more on living. To help bring you to a place where you see food as a tool to support your body, not change it, and eat without overthinking what you consume. Breaking up with the need to deprive or binge.
It's a lofty goal, but it doesn't need to be overly complicated.
It starts by understanding your drive to survive.
Your Drive To Survive:
I can't pretend food isn't important. It is.
Because of that, food will always be part of your life and thoughts. But overthinking or having consuming thoughts is a sign there is more at play.
Whenever I look at health, I like to understand it from our most pure form or what I consider to be the closest to the intended form, which is often ourselves before the world got ahold of us.
Think of how a baby or small child interacts with food.
They go from zero to one hundred in sixty seconds. When they need to eat, THEY NEED TO EAT, and when full, they move on to other things.
You can't console a hungry baby for long, just like you can't force one to eat when they are not hungry. Babies are so attuned to their bodies that they literally only consume what they need - nothing more and nothing less.
Unlike many adults, they certainly don't obsess about it the other 20 hours a day.
Yet, at the same time, food or the act of eating is highly comforting and even pleasurable because it's an act of survival. A bottle can soothe a baby just like ice cream can comfort you.
This proves that there is an emotional element to food and the act of eating which can't be denied. That component comes from your drive to survive.
Food, and the how, when, and what of eating, determines your survival response.
Because of this, it will always contain an emotional aspect and produce a drive and desire within you. Just as your need for connection or your desire for reproduction.
Your cravings are not there to destroy your life but to help keep you alive. As is your need to overeat when you've spent too long restricting.
These are signs your survival response is at work.
The drive and desire for pleasurable food is designed within you.
The key is not dismissing the emotional aspect but learning how to use it for your own good.
You must learn how to emotionally eat.
You are always emotionally eating. The key is learning to use your emotions to take your eating patterns and health from surviving to thriving.
Using your emotions is the difference between feeling in control of food and being controlled by food. Feeling in control of food changes how much you think and obsess over food.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs proves why emotions are linked to your physiological needs.
Without emotions, you lose the desire, will, and drive to meet these needs. When these critical needs go unmet, your entire life structure gets thrown out of whack.
As the law of balance states, what becomes imbalanced will always fight to regain balance, especially your physiological and psychological needs.
Because of this, your survival response ignites your emotions to help you regain balance.
When your life and body are out of balance, everything feels off, leaving you fighting to feel better. And sometimes better, when untrained in emotional eating, comes in the form of eating a piece (or three) of chocolate cake.
At the moment of survival, it's never about what you should do but what you must do to maintain survival.
It's why restriction often turns into binging and why neglect turns into cravings.
The traditional diet cycle paints this picture so well.
Most diets leave you restricting some food or another. That restriction induces a famine response that, over time, pushes your body out of balance.
When pushed for too long, your body will ignite your emotions to help you regain balance.
This moves you into the feast response, the place of quick rewards and intense pleasure used to counter the famine. You stay here until you fall too far out of balance to the opposite extreme, leaving you running back to the famine response. And the cycle repeats.
Unfortunately, this cycle is the perfect storm for creating a dysregulated life.
It doesn't just happen with food but within all aspects and tiers on the hierarchy of needs. Yet it doesn't happen on purpose, but out of survival. And the bigger the survival response, the more extreme the coping response.
Honestly, survival is why smart people still do dumb things.
And it's exactly why you binge on cookies and chips even though you know they're not good for you.
In survival, all of us will neglect what is healthy to keep ourselves alive.
Survival neglects what you know.
It diminishes your thoughts and forces your body to do whatever it needs to stay alive. That's why controlling your physiology, cravings, and responses is much easier when you're living from a state of thriving rather than survival.
This is perhaps one of the hardest understandings of the human body. Your body can and will neglect what is healthy for you in an effort to stay alive.
When you deprive your body of nutrients and energy, high-calorie, high-fat, high-pleasure foods are the fastest way to get them back. This is exactly why most people don't crave broccoli or carrots but chocolate and chips.
‘Junk' foods help regulate what you need right now.
All because your survival response is designed for the immediate, whereas your thriving response is designed for longevity.
You must know, your food problems are not a knowledge problem as much as a survival problem.
You don't necessarily need to know more about what to eat. You need to know how to nourish yourself to move into a state of thriving. When you learn how to do that, you remove the emotional need for food and open up to the intended pleasure of nourishing your body with healthy food.
Let me state that again because it's wildly important.
When you learn how to regulate, you stop needing food to change how you feel, and you get to choose what foods you want to eat to feel better. Not just emotionally but physically.
Healthy food becomes pleasurable and desirable strictly out of the nourishment it's offering your body.
When you eat well, you feel well, creating the reward that food was really intended to provide.
But that means regulating your survival response so you can eat well and stop living co-dependent on food.
On Thursday, I'll explain how to break up with your co-dependency on food.
For now, I want you to pay attention to your eating patterns. Ask yourself if the behavior pushes your body out of balance or supports balance.
Are you eating out of survival or thriving?
Now, lets check out the action items to put this into practice:
