How’s Your Relationship with Food?
Do you love your food?
Yeah? How much?
Maybe that relationship is all good.
Or maybe it could use improvement. Just remember, past relationships may not have worked out, but they serve to make us the people we are today.
Is your current relationship with food serving you? Mine wasn’t.
Food is Fuel.
Coming directly from a bodybuilding tradition, I firmly learned that “food is fuel.”
Every food had a particular code for the nutrients it provided, and I have them all memorized.
Chicken breast and white fish provided lean protein (about 25g per 100g serving!). Both were easy to calculate and digest. I liked the taste of them, although secondarily to the comfort that I was “gettin’ my protein in.”
This mindset was valuable because it helped me understand how the food I put in my body shaped how it looked, felt, thought, and performed.
However, as I developed stronger relationships with my body, my self, my life and my world, so developed my relationship with the food I ate.
Slowly I began to notice how much more nuanced this daily interaction was – especially when my “food is fuel” mindset had directly alienated me from many of my friends during that time.
While my body may have been getting the nutrients it needed, my soul still craved foods that provided little nutritional value just because they tasted good. Not a ton, but this desire never completely went away. It wanted to feel included with others and to eat the foods that were shared with friends and family.
I mean, how do you begin to measure fuel efficiency of the joy and the community shared with you by your best friend’s favorite recipe? The product of years of tradition, passed down through the generations, given to her on her first birthday of earliest memory, and shared amongst her closest friends and family in celebration of accomplishments and unity?
My food scale measures grams and ounces, but I must have missed out on that upgrade.
“Healthy? I Just Love Food Too Much!”
Let’s flip the coin over.
As a fitness coach, I’ve seen people turn a blind eye to their health, hiding behind flimsy excuses like “I just love food too much,” as if giving up food were a prerequisite to building their health when more realistically, it’s the complete opposite.
I’ve also seen people struggle with food addiction, where they seem to love food SO much that they can no longer control themselves around it. Food has caused them great pain to the point of degrading their health and the relationships around them.
Certainly their love of food would be a detriment, right?
What is love?
Let’s begin with a question:
Ideally, what do you do with things you truly love?
So, how much do you really love your food?
[inspired by the wonderful teachings of my friends at PrecisionNutrition]
