Are you too reliant on food?
The title may sound a bit strange since food is such a necessity. By reliance, however, I am referring to a person who is reliant on food, not in a nutritional sense but more on an emotional level.
We all love food, we all love to eat and enjoy ourselves. Food is so much a part of our culture. We must remember, however, that food primarily serves several important functions.
It fuels our energy.
It fuels our mood.
It fuels our muscle, skin, organs etc.
It fuels our immunity.
It fuels the place we call home - our bodies.
These important functions can either be optimised with a totally clean diet, they can function sufficiently with a relatively healthy diet or they can outright stop working or breakdown with a very poor diet.
If you form part of the latter, you may need to question - am I too reliant on food for my temporary well being? I probably shouldn't even refer to this as food - rather sugar, junk and processed food. Basically anything other than: lean meats, fruit and veg, eggs, nuts, seeds, legumes, dairy and whole grains.
Now the next part of this requires AWARENESS. Ask yourself, each time you prepare or purchase a meal: Am I eating for function and health or am I eating to satisfy a craving? Am I eating because I feel down? Am I eating because I feel like something delicious? In short, Are you eating for comfort?
How often are you eating in this manner?
Even the cleanest of eaters succumb to comfort and there is nothing wrong with this, BUT, how often is it happening to you? If this happens once or twice daily, then your weight loss efforts and efforts to live healthily may be hampered by your emotional state. If your whole eating regime is dictated by this, you are probably a comfort eater who uses food to fill an emotional void. Either this or you have developed a very bad habit over the years.
There are 2 solutions to this:
(1) Awareness followed by action, which is strictly an exercise in discipline. Discipline may help to break a bad habit but discipline often fails when your decisions are emotionally driven.
(2) If repeated attempts at discipline fail, it likely means you will need to work at an emotional and psychological level to overcome issues of obesity and/or health. Get to the heart of why you are using food as a crutch? Resolve this problem first in order to resolve the problem of weight gain and poor health.
The ultimate aim is to see food in a positive light; to view it as a form of function and sustenance; to choose meals that will ultimately help you promote good energy, mood and well being for yourself.
Imagine getting to the point where you can order a pizza or a slice of cake and not feel guilty about it! The guilt will cease because you are making good decisions most of the time, whilst rendering the odd poor decision meaningless. Poor decisions will become the exception, not the rule.
Don't let food rule you...
