FIXING POOR NUTRITIONAL HABITS
How is your relationship with food?
Not just with the foods that you love to eat, but more importantly food and nutrition as a whole.
Why I ask this question, is because all too often people are left bouncing between vicious cycles of binge-eating and the next most popular FAD diet.
Which in turn often leads people into the belief that they will never be able to get a grip on their nutrition.
Well, I’m here to tell you, that no longer needs to be the case. You can grow to live a life where you feel in control of your decisions and feel empowered in making the choices that serve you best.
If you’ve seen some of my other content, I’m sure you would have heard me bang on about ‘purpose’. Everything in life has a purpose. But when we lack an understanding of its purpose we tend to abuse it.
This is a little off-topic but stay with me for a second.
If I asked you to describe the purpose of an intimate relationship, what would you tell me? I can imagine your answers may include;
To commit to one another in love
To support and encourage each other
To recognise and cater to each other’s needs
To sacrifice and compromise
I’m sure you could name loads more, but this gives the context that we all have a fair understanding of what the purpose of relationships is.
Where you tend to see an abuse of the relationship, is where one individual lacks this understanding. Because of this, their actions may be continually self-serving, dismissive and demeaning.
Now, when you begin to look at food, its purpose falls under two categories. The first being that food is for performance. The performance of your mind, body and health will all be directly linked to the foods that you choose to consume.
The second purpose for food is the one that we all know so well, what I like to refer to as pleasure. There’s nothing like a good portion of your favourite soul food (for me it’s buffalo wings, deep-fried mac’n’cheese, and a loaded burger).
If more of your food choices were based around the purpose of performance, the likelihood of you having to yo-yo between diets would be a lot less than it is today.
However in most cases, what you’re going to eat is often left until the last minute. Which 9/10 is going to be driven by what will bring you pleasure in that moment, rather than how you want to feel in the next few hours or over the next couple of days.
Of course in the moment you may feel satisfied, but all good things come at a cost. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross put it “There is no pleasure without pain”.
Constantly abusing food as a tool for pleasure over performance is often at the root of people’s poor relationship with food.
If you think back to being a child, most of your decisions would have been led by pleasure. It’s an innate desire for kids to want to play and seek pleasure all the time.
As you grow to be an adult, we learn very quickly that living in such a way comes across as irresponsible and childish.
Therefore even though we may still seek pleasure, we learn to allocate a set amount of time for those things. Leaving you to focus on the more important things and your responsibilities first.
I know what I’m going to say next probably goes against everything you’ve known about nutrition so far, but hear me out. Stop referring to food as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’.
Why?
Well if you’re working towards a goal of fat loss, one of the most important factors will be your ability to stick within a calorie deficit. Despite certain foods being labelled as ‘healthy’ they still contain a certain amount of calories.
This is generally where people tend to go wrong. Because it’s healthy, doesn’t mean you should pile it on your plate without consideration for how many calories it may contain.
No matter if you’re getting your foods from ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy sources if you’re not being mindful of factors such as the total calories you will struggle to hit your personal goal.
So where do you go from here?
To help you start building a better relationship with your food, here are a few points to consider when choosing your meals.
Are you choosing performance or pleasure?
How many calories does it contain?
How well does your body digest this type of food?
What will your mental energy be like, 1-2 hours after consumption?
What will your physical energy be like, 1-2 hours after consumption?
