Healing through the right Food Balance:
Growing up, I never had a concrete idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what job I wanted. I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Even after graduating from college I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I also didn’t know what kind of person I wanted to be.
It might sound strange, but I was floating in the ether of life. I knew I wanted to be good and kind and that I wanted to have fun with my life. But at that time, I was in the midst of my disordered eating and exercise patterns– and keeping up those patterns took all of my energy and focus. Those patterns started to define me. Or maybe I let them define me…or I defined myself through those patterns.
It wasn’t until I healed my relationship with food that I was able to connect with the person I always wanted to be. Sometimes your relationship with food can get in the way of living your life. Disordered eating pulls focus from everything else– food and your diet become the more important thing— pulling your life out of balance.
5 reasons to heal your relationships with food and find balance:
1. Creating your own, healthy approach to food and eating will allow you to free up some space in your brain. When you stop dieting and start listening to your body, eating will come more easily– you won’t need to think as much about food. You can use this new-found brain-space to focus on other, more important things.
2. You’ll worry less about food and life. Feeling comfortable with your food routine will help you feel prepared to make good food choices that support your goals and your lifestyle. When you feel comfortable and prepared, you’ll worry less about food, which translates into worrying less about life in general. Take away one worry and the rest aren’t as stressful.
3. Thinking and worrying less about food will allow the other areas of your life to flourish. You will put more energy into your relationships, social life and your career (all of those awesome areas of Primary Food). For example, going out with friends won’t be as daunting– because you know that you’re prepared to make choices that support your well-being.
4. Putting more energy into your Primary Food will lift you up and nourish your soul and allow you to become to person you’ve always wanted to be. A balanced lifestyle includes balance when it comes to food AND balance when it comes to those non-food areas of your life. By healing your relationship with food and devoting energy to the non-food areas of your life you’ll be able to find a balance that nourishes you as a person.
5. You’ll have more fun! Life gets infinitely more fun when you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to eat, or if eating certain foods will make you gain weight.
Discover yourself:
So you see, healing your relationship with food will change more than just your diet. If you’ve been unhappily stuck in a diet mentality for years, you’re missing out on a lot that life has to offer. For me, healing my relationship with food and transitioning to a diet of whole foods brought a new level of clarity to my life– I was able to see past the food and exercise and get to know myself in a different way.
It might sound weird, but eating whole foods helped me discover what kind of person I wanted to be. By eating healthy foods and taking my food issues (which used to define me) out of the equation, allowed me to see that the person I wanted to be…was who I already was. That might not be the grammatically correct way to say it, but that’s the way it is.
Resolving my food issues through eating whole, real foods helped me to see that I AM already the person I’ve always wanted to be. Chances are you’re already the person you’ve always wanted to be, but you might just need some help seeing that. If you have food issues or a disordered relationship with food or a history of dieting, you might be letting those feelings/issues distract you from who you are.
