So as I am heading to bed last night, I do the thing I do most nights and the thing that sleep experts tell you not to do, I go onto my phone and have one last look at my social media. You know, just in case somebody said something that they hadn’t in the last 15 or so minutes, or somebody actually liked or commented on something I posted. Nothing by the way, just in case you were curious. As I am scrolling through Instagram, I see a post from a cool group that I follow, Christcenteredfitness. And from that moment on, I knew I was in trouble.
The post I saw said: “Weightloss is about 20% knowledge and 80% execution. This means that your weight problem is more likely to be a heart problem than a head problem.”
WOAH
As I have stated before, but maybe you don’t know, I have struggled with my weight most of my adult life. This quote, then, has way more impact considering this. And as a result, I had trouble falling asleep. Not because of the ‘blue light electronic thing’ that happens in your mind when you are on a device late at night, but now my brain had engaged and I had some serious thinking to do.
I have always known that food is way more about emotions than nutrition. If you don’t believe me, you have never had food at a birthday, picnic, funeral, baby shower, bridal shower, holiday, movie, ball game, board meeting, charity event, or… you get my drift. Food and our emotions are tied so close that most of us can’t do anything too emotional without attaching some food to it.
The fact that there are some very serious health issues attached to eating or not eating is clear evidence of that. Most of us don’t need to seek professional help in the attachment issues we may have with food, but on the other hand, have you paid any attention to it in your world?
Since I have been writing for you, I have done a whole lot of research on foods, their nutrition, how their nutrition impacts our bodies and how we process that food. But I have to admit that I have not done a lot of research on emotions and food. Part of that is that it is not as widely published as it should be and part may be my own apprehension of what I may learn about myself and my eating habits. Emotional eating is totally real. I know because I know that I am an emotional eater.
As a matter of fact, I am an emotional baker. When we chose to have kids, we chose to have one of us stay at home with them. That was me. I always wanted to be a stay at home mom, so that part was easy. What wasn’t easy was being a stay at home mom, so one of the ways that I loved to ‘destress’ was to bake. I baked something nearly every day. Because there was baking in the house, I ate it. As the years move on, so did the size of my butt.
Here I am my kids are grown and I am still battling the emotions that apparently tend to make me reach for the foods that are not helping me reach my goal but are not making me feel better either.
So at the end of the day, there are a couple of things that you need to spend some serious amount of time thinking about and coming to grips with.
- How attached are you to eat certain foods?
- Do you actually feel something good/bad when you eat?
- Do you eat without thinking about what and how much you eat?
- Do you feel the need to eat everything on your plate?
- Could you feel satisfied without while watching other eat something you are not?
- Have you ever thought about how certain foods make you feel?
- Do you pay attention to how your body feels after you eat?
If we as a society are to continue with having food at the center of our social lives, then we need to come to grips with dealing with food, how much we eat, what we eat, how it makes us feel. The food we eat is changing. We are becoming more and more obese and emotional issues are becoming more apparent. There is definitely a connection and we need to deal with it one person at a time. One meal at a time. One workout at a time.
This week,
- think about each thing you choose to eat.
- Listen to your body and how much it responds to what you eat.
- Learn to love how you feel when you eat well and
- your body will thank you for it.
Food is not just eating energy. It's an experience. – Guy Fieri
