Healthy Inside/Healthy Outside

What Does Food Mean to You?

Food means something different for each of us. For me it means satisfaction, indulgence, self-complimentary ( I think I’m a pretty good cook), savory as in savoring the positive moments in life (because I, like many, have had too many negative moments throughout my life), gorging on second helpings because of life’s limitations. My excuse for eating more than I need sometimes is self-justified by ‘because it tastes good’ and I deserve it. Deserve it! Honestly? We don’t deserve much. We are given, blessed with, fortunate, etc. to have abundance of food; let us not gorge ourselves! The answers I gave are almost certainly a result of my past and present emotions; food becomes comfort, memorable, it’s social, it’s personal, it’s public, it pleases, it displeases, it even simply fuels our body but it’s rare that we think exactly that when we are eating; it can become self-sabotage.

We relate food to who we are, who we were and who we want to be. We use food as a tool to bury feelings, to celebrate feelings and to blame our shortcomings on. We often rate ourselves by our commitment to what we eat, how we eat, why we eat and we let food define us.

Once we can understand and accept the reasons we treat food the way we do, once we really get to the bottom of our relationship with food we can develop a new relationship with food; we can let food be our friend instead of our enemy. Food feeds our cells, it fuels our body giving us energy, balancing our moods, our blood levels, sleep, making our health the best it can be given that we eat the right foods and the proper amounts on a regular basis. As Hippocrates said many years ago, “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food”.

The next time you feel particularly connected to a certain food in a sort of disconnected way, stop yourself, go deep inside and try to relate how the particular food makes you feel when you eat it. There’s no right nor wrong about it, it just is and that’s okay. Slowly you will be able to better control the way you relate to and treat food.

If you’re in need or in search of professional help in your eating and lifestyle habits, you are in the right place. Email me to get started on your journey to better health, better habits and heading up the road to happiness. You CAN be in control when you have the tools to help.

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Eat to live! Don't Live to Eat

My Weakness: Portion Control

and coleslaw with plain Greek yogurt and spice dressing

Like many, I love food. I eat and crave healthy food [most of the time], I don’t eat processed food and I rarely ever eat junk food.

I usually have good self-control but sometimes I find myself going back for seconds simply because it tastes so good! That is a poor excuse for overeating especially when my stomach has been satisfied the first time around. This doesn’t happen every day, and when it does, I know I need to go inside myself and re-assess my emotions.

When I go inside myself emotionally, I ask: do I want seconds because it indeed does taste so good that one serving isn’t possibly enough or is there something missing in my life? If it’s the latter, what is missing? What is it that food is satisfying for me? Why does food make it somehow a little better?

Do you find yourself going in for more than you need? Do you feel uncomfortably full sometimes after you eat? Do you sometimes feel frustrated about where you are in your life, or about not being able to reach your goals as easily or quickly as you wish, do you feel like something is missing or off? The we you feel is often the reason we eat more than we should, or why we eat sugar, carbs, crunchy, chewy, gooey things, or soft, cold, or warming foods and drinks.

Assessing your feelings, writing them in a journal and getting in touch with your innermost feelings will help you to move forward. If you don’t quite know where to start, as a health coach, I work with individuals with exactly this type of behavior, help is always available and affordable. You are worth feeling good, looking good and being healthy.

Gaining control over what and how we eat is something we need to accomplish. When we accomplish that goal first, it makes our big goal easier to reach and new goals more exciting to set….and reach!