Has Our Obsession With Eating Healthy Taken The Joy Out Of Food?
If you are constantly thinking about your next meal, turning down a social gathering because you do not want to stray your diet, starving at a restaurant while your friends eat their meals because the restaurant doesn’t serve food of your choice – then you may need to step back and revisit the way you approach food. While it is great to adopt strategies around healthy eating even while outside - it's more to do with the way you end up feeling. If you feel great about overcoming all the obstacles and challenges, its great. But if it's leaving you feeling “deprived”, “restricted”, “sad” then you are better of eating that meal with joy and content.
It all comes down to what your relationship with food is. Do you eat to nourish, savour, enjoy food or does the mere thought of food shoots up cortisol in your system and surrounds you with fear? Our relationship with food can inadvertently be the biggest obstacle to lose weight and gain health. It is also one of the root causes of eating disorders.
Look at the Swiss people for example. The Swiss eat on an average of 6 to 8 pieces of chocolate every day. They have grown up with that and their body is accustomed to it completely well. They share a good relationship with chocolate so it does not affect them. Now if they had the exact same relationship that we have with chocolate, that is “every piece of chocolate is going to make me put on weight”, then that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Chill, calm down, make peace with food. Food is to nourish you, not stress you.
The obsession also stems from the fact that today we live in the era of “diet culture”. This culture has literally plagued millions of us. It’s very important that we choose words very carefully because if there’s a word running in your mind all the time that’s exactly how we feel or that’s exactly how you become. When you look into the dictionary for the meaning of the word “diet”, it’s nothing but the kind of food that you eat, but today this word has been given such a negative meaning- thanks to social media, magazines and everything we read, for e.g.: someone’s on a weight loss diet or used a diet to change the way they look orto over cancer, arthritis or diabetes
We need to move away from this word because when we think we’re on a diet, we automatically think about all the possible restrictions. This develops a bad relationship with food where we label certain foods as“bad” or tag them as “cheat” or “sinful”.
Consider a piece of chocolate cake. We have all enjoyed it while growing up. Now, when you label a chocolate cake or an ice-cream as bad or calorific, then subconsciously every time you eat that piece of chocolate cake or ice-cream, it is going to behave exactly the same way you have visualised it to be, i.e. fattening. We need to change our mindset, belief system, attitude, the way we think and the way we relate to food.
Everything in balance and moderation
Even though you might arrange the world to work according to your ways, know that there are going to be slip-ups or situations that are not under your control. There will be days where you may have to travel or are probably on a holiday, wedding or are hard-pressed for time or have an official lunch meeting. That one meal – over which you did not have much control, is not going to be the reason for your weight gain, but the guilt and shame that follows after is definitely going to be.
Enjoy what you are offered to eat or have chosen to eat. If we eat our meals – healthy or unhealthy -with gratitude, contentment, chew well, take deep breaths in between – our body will exactly know how to metabolise it. That’s your body’s intelligence. Of course, this doesn’t mean it will be able to digest junk foods every single day. This is in relation to that rare indulgence you are stressing over.
We come across so many people who willingly plan to eat and indulge – but do it with so much guilt, shame and fear. They weigh themselves before and after the meal. They punish themselves by over-exercising or starving the next day. This is not healthy at all. If you tend to carry so much fear around food – you are better off not eating that meal because those negative emotions will only backfire.
Harmful effects of this obsession
Being obsessed with food all the time puts you in a fight and flight mode, which is a stressful mode. This leads to a surge in cortisol levels. High cortisol levels have a connection with every disease – right from obesity, hormonal imbalances, autoimmunity as well as low immunity. You may be eating a salad, but if you are doing it from a space of fear, your body will never be able to digest and absorb it well. Similarly, if you are eating a brownie, but savour each bite with mindfulness, gratitude, contentment – your body will be able to digest it well.
So, even before starting to eat healthy, changing the relationship with food and the way we look at food needs to be changed as a priority. Chill, calm down, make peace with food – healthy or not-so-healthy. Food is to nourish you, not stress you. Remember its not the food alone– but the thoughts associated with it that matter too.
