Found these mother and child vegetables sharing a moment together in my garden

My answer was immediate: this is not a topic I am new to.

A friend asked the other night, “How do you know when you are restricting because you’re trying to maintain control over your appetite and food intake or because a food genuinely doesn’t work for your body?”

I have spent years teasing out my motivations with food, with binging and restricting. It’s been said that our biggest struggle is often our greatest gift and as a result of my years of food and body struggles, I am now blessed to be helping other women caught in the same web of confusion around food and body.

My response to my friend was simple: It’s about being in relationship with, rather than controlling, food and body.

Any good relationship is based in feeling. This has become my compass for any and all decisions around food. Our feelings get us closer to the heart of our motivations more than any thinking, analyzing or rote control. As such, I pay attention to the relationship I have with my body as the sole indicator of what food I choose to put in it or not.

This can be a slippery slope because we have been hardwired in our culture to strive for thin-ness.

I can easily say, “I am choosing what’s best for my body because this will keep me thin.” However, this is not a friendly thing to do, this is a controlling thing to do. When I am friends with my body I make much different choices than when I am at odds with my body or trying to control it. No one, in any relationship, likes to be controlled—especially our bodies.

To really consider why I am making the choices I am with food and body, I consider what’s fueling the choice. Is there a sense of pride or righteousness that I was able to stay away from that food? Or is there a sense of relief that I escaped the craving and as a result I feel good about myself for avoiding, restricting and withholding what I wanted?

If any of those things are at play, I know I am in a destructive pattern of restriction and control; of trying to achieve a moral high ground and feeling good about myself through my food choices; of choosing healthy because really, I’m trying to maintain thinness.

It is a place based in fear and reaction rather than a loving and inclusive choice.

On the flip side, there are those of us who just don’t do well with certain foods, foods that genuinely don’t feel good in our bodies. I have come to realize this is true for me when it comes to many common culprits in the American diet. I should be clear here that I didn’t know any of the foods that did or didn’t feel good in my body when I was in the throes of my crazy behavior with food.

I used food merely as a way to help cope with my life, my emotions and my daily experience. We all need coping mechanisms, but when we use food as the sole way to do that, we twist the role of food from one of basic pleasurable nourishment into a co-dependent, can’t-live-without-you experience.

I turned to food when I was anxious about my next work meeting, and when I was happy about how great that work meeting had just gone. I turned to food when I was longing for connection, love or sex. I turned to food when I felt shame about those desires. I turned to food when my head was spinning with insecurity and uncertainty about whether my coworkers liked me, if that guy was gonna ask me out or if I was afraid my boss wouldn’t give me the raise. Then days later, or even the next meal later, I would feel a lot of guilt and then restrict and control what I was eating in an attempt to make up for my out of control emotions and eating strategies.

It was a crazy-making roller coaster ride of good and bad, of shame and control.

I had to re-write my relationship with food and body to really know what works for me and what doesn’t. I only came to find these things out when I was brave enough to interrupt the habit of using food to numb and actually listen to what my body and soul needed.

Here’s how to do this in your own life:

Start Listening: Begin to pay attention to how food physically makes you feel after you eat. Do you feel energized or lethargic, satisfied or craving more food? Do you feel bloated and heavy or fueled and well nourished? Approach this step with a sense of curiosity and think of it as research. It is not an opportunity for you to beat yourself up for the choices you’ve made.

The information you gather from this research is information you can use in the future to make choices that serve you in feeling the way you want to feel. Remember, all good relationships come back to feeling good.

Choose Pleasure: Please note that pleasure is not the same as over-indulgence, binging or an unconscious free-for-all for whatever your impulse grabs. Instead, find food that brings a sense of real satisfaction, emotionally and physically. Food is a sensory experience and as such, you want your senses to be engaged, and to find pleasure in the food you’re eating. Choosing pleasure breaks up dogmatic, rigid rules so many of us use with food. It also breaks up the unconscious overeating we find ourselves using as a salve.

When we stop and put our focus on pleasure rather than staying stuck in these patterns, we invite new energy and perspective into our food and body relationship. Relationships thrive on new energy, especially our body relationship.

Forgive Yourself: We’ve all done things that didn’t support us to have a positive, kind relationship to our bodies. The diet culture we live in actually encourages us to go against our natural rhythms. This doesn’t make our bodies or souls happy in the long run, as you may well know. So, offer your body an apology. Be kind to yourself. This isn’t another reason to institute new discipline and rigid eating and exercise plans—that would defeat the purpose of this step. It is an opportunity to re-write your patterns and truly treat your body as friend; to apologize for the places where you’ve tried to control it or have ignored it or tried to fit it into eating or behaving in a way that simply wasn’t natural to who you really are.

I recommend writing this body apology down and then saying it out loud to yourself. No joke, this is powerful in its simplicity. Make it come from the heart.

We all want great relationships in our life. The key to a great relationship is a lot of listening, care and compassion. Like any relationship, the relationship with food and body takes time and effort to get right.

It means listening and caring and acting with kindness and compassion the way you would with any other friend in your life.

Now when I choose food for myself, the restriction and binging behavior doesn’t even come into play. I have such a strong friendship with my body that I’m able to hear what it wants and needs, physically and emotionally, and respond in kind. I don’t choose to use food as a substitute for dealing with my emotional experience or to make me feel like a good person or to control my body. I’m a good friend and I listen, feel and provide my body what it needs. It’s one of the best relationships I have.

 

Author: Amy Jones

Apprentice Editor: Alicia Wozniak / Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: nodecentnamesleft/Imgur