What is Your Relationship with Food?
I have been interested in Mind-Body medicine for many years. My interests have taken me in many different directions – to medical school, to Mindfulness and Psychotherapy programs, to Dr. Lissa Rankin’s Whole Health Medicine Institute, and to many more fascinating educational ventures. These have served me on a personal level, and have become an integral part of my professional practice.
I find it exciting to discover common principles underlying so many successful approaches to improved health and well-being. One of my more recent explorations is the field of Eating Psychology. This exciting field integrates so many important discoveries of psychology, mindfulness, nutrition, and whole health.
Read on to discover how exploring body image and eating habits can jump start your journey to wellness!
What is your relationship with Food? Does your relationship to food run your life? Does it cause you suffering? Do you worry about what you eat? Do you eat when you worry? Do you eat in response to loneliness or sadness? Perhaps you eat to avoid other types of suffering. Or perhaps you’re just looking to create healthier eating habits.
In a world where obesity is increasing at an alarming rate, and the dieting industry is at an all time high, it’s time to rethink the way we approach nutrition. We may know what we ‘should’ be eating, but it can be incredibly difficult to make and sustain these changes.
99% of people who successfully lose weight, gain it all back within the year.
Something is seriously flawed with the dieting industry! So what is holding so many of us back? Often times limiting beliefs including self-critical beliefs and feelings of unworthiness, or avoidance of longstanding hurts, can block sustainable weight loss and health goals.
Marc David, from the Institute for Eating Psychology, has created a new field called Mind-Body Nutrition. This seems to incorporate many of the mind-body principles with which I strongly agree. He discusses the importance of addressing not just WHAT we’re eating, but HOW we’re eating, what is underlying our drive to eat, and how we FEEL while we’re eating food. He uses an approach that encourages seeing body image and eating challenges as opportunities for growth – opportunities to lean into underlying patterns that are in need of healing. In this process, weight loss and physical health can be secondary bonuses to a more deeply transformational process.
WHAT we eat is only ½ the story. It’s also important to understand WHY we eat, HOW we eat, and what we THINK while we eat.
Nutrition, the way our body intakes, digests and assimilates food is much more complex than we have typically acknowledged. Max Stanley Chartrand, PhD, explains this in his Human Digestion Process Flow Chart (accessed Feb 9, 2015). He explains that our nervous system responds to signals of stress in a way that impacts our ability to digest the food we take in to our bodies. Worry, fear or anxiety inhibits the body’s secretions and prevents food from digesting properly and nutrients from absorbing optimally. Cortisol (our stress hormone) impacts the way the body takes on calories and gains weight.
This is SO incredibly important, so let me repeat: How we FEEL, and what we THINK as we are eating, impacts the way the food is absorbed and processed in our body. It may impact weight gain as well. So if we reach for a piece of chocolate, and tell ourselves “I’m going to get fat” or “I’m so ugly” or “I have no self-control” or “This is going to make me sick”, these thoughts and feelings that go along with them, translate into the stress response within the body, and ultimately the way the food is digested and deposited within the body.
This is one of the many reasons I love mindfulness.
When we bring mindful awareness to the present moment, we learn to eat in a different way. We bring true awareness to the food while we’re eating it. We take more time to eat. We bring more gratitude and appreciation into the eating process. We learn to focus on eating, and not on the million other things we are stressed about. So not only can this be a much more enjoyable way of eating, and a way of reducing our stress, it turns out it also impacts how the food is digested and processed in our bodies.
Talk about Win-Win!
So next time you find yourself reaching for a food you feel is ‘less than healthy’, pay attention to how you feel. What are you thinking? What emotion might you be avoiding? Maybe you’ll choose not to eat it. And if you choose to eat it, allow yourself to savour, to enjoy and appreciate it with all your senses!
For more information, check out Marc David’s Institute for the Psychology of Eating at www.psychologyofeating.com.
In health,
Dr. Hannah Snider