Healing Your Relationship With Food

I’m seeing more and more people of varying age groups from 12 right the way up to 70 who struggle with their body image or weight spend hours worrying about their food choices and beating themselves up over what they ate, or didn’t eat at their previous meal.

The truth is, for most of us, it’s actually not about the food at all. The foods we’re consuming come in second compared to the way we actually feel about ourselves.

Now don’t misunderstand me, of course what you eat matters. Eating healthy meals loaded with fruits and veggies are very important …but to truly get to the root of your relationship with food, you can’t just look at what you’re eating; you’ve got to look at why you’re eating and how you’re treating yourself and your body.

What we create outside of us is a reflection of our internal state.

It’s not all so dreary as it may first seem. What may immediately come to mind is that you’re saying “ It’s your fault you feel *^%$#$” . The thing is it can be wonderfully empowering.

Creating the life that you want or the body and health that you yearn for is all about taking Self-Responsibility and investing the time and effort to achieve your health goals. 

If you get to work on your inner stuff, getting rid of the 99% useless excuses, then all the external stuff will naturally start to sort itself out.

Take a moment and ask yourself these questions:

Did you reach for junk food, a sugar hit or a caffeine fix this past week?

Are you turning to processed, fast or ready to eat ‘foods’ because you’re ‘too busy’?

Did you skip a meal or ‘forget to eat’?

Do you tend to snack a lot or crave dessert after every meal?

Do you use food as a reward mechanism?

When you ate dinner last night, were you watching TV, sitting on Facebook or surfing the net?

Now ask yourself — what’s really going on here? Open up and be brutally honest with yourself. This isn’t the time to play games and sugar coat what’s really going on.

The first things to notice are any emotions or feelings coming up to the surface. Are you judging yourself, or scolding yourself, are you telling yourself you have failed? Are feelings of anger and guilt surfacing?  Your internal dialogue can get really nasty!

It’s time to give yourself a break… take a minute or two and take three deep breaths and let it all go.

Consciously choose to turn that internal nasty talk to positive empowering talk. A strong, worthy impression of yourself goes hand in hand with a strong, worthy mind and body. Your health and wellness depends upon your self-perception.

Right now, in this moment you can heal your relationship with food.

You don’t have to carry on eating to numb emotions and block out sadness, anger and frustration.

It’s as easy as getting rid of fearful based thinking and substituting it with love based thoughts.

If you are eating out of fear, it’s time to stop. And if you’ve quit junk food out of fear, please stop. Quit junk food because you love yourself and your body unconditionally, not because you are scared it will give you health problems.

Eat to nourish that beautiful body of yours, to keep it healthy and strong. Our bodies put up with a lot of rubbish; it’s time to give them back some love.

When you are not at war with food or make it all about losing weight, then you come to peace with food and start loving yourself and it all starts to shift in a positive way. You start making deliberate and conscious choices from a place of love instead of fear.