Do You Have a Healthy Relationship With Food?
Many of us have don’t have any connection when it comes to healthy food. We alienate healthy food in many ways and push it out of our diets in favor of foods that resonate deeply with us, but are often unhealthy.
This article is about getting to the core of the problem of unhealthy diet and establishing a healthy relationship with food as part of my Weight Loss Awakening system.
The Culture Code
Some years ago, I read a great book called The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille. This book discussed the codes behind our culture. As an example, the author talks about food and reveals that in France, the cultural code for food is actually pleasure, whereas in the United States, the code is energy.
What this suggests is that many of us need to determine underlying cultural codes for food. Is it pleasure? It is energy? Is it culture or ecology? Think about it. There are many people out there who are vegans and they are sometimes doing it for ecological reasons.
There are many reasons behind our food choices. Sit back and try to determine the underlying reasons for these choices. Your reasons for eating food may be due to reasons related to family, culture, or pleasure. If you had to pick one thing, what does food represent to you in your life? What’s the code?
Eating Out of Instinct
The second concept we need to determine is whether we are eating out of instinct or not. I’ve mentioned this in many of my blogs, and I’ll continue to go over it. This quote from Viktor Frankl hits the point home:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our power to choose. And in that choice lies our power and our freedom.”
This Viktor Frankl quote resonates with another quote from the Bible in Deuteronomy. “Every day I set before you, life or death, choose life.” That means every time you have to make a choice, you have to ask yourself whether it’s a life-affirming or a life-denying decision. When we apply this piece of wisdom into our life, it will deepen our relationship with the food choices we make.
The importance of making a conscious decision is echoed further in another quote from the bible when Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Let what you say be simply yes or no, anything else comes from evil.”
You’re given a healthy choice between eating healthy or unhealthy food. However, if you don’t understand the cultural code and your personal code beyond the food, then you might not be able to make lasting changes.
It is important to understand that eventually choosing healthy food will yield pleasure. As you train your body to understand and listen to higher aspects of yourself, it will come around. Of course, you may always want to have a piece of chocolate cake, but once you start feeling better and get more energy, you will start associating these positive feelings with the foods you’re eating.
Use the Power of Emotions
On an emotional level, we need to use our feelings. Some people avoid emotion, but for the purpose of your enhancing your connection to food, let’s use the power of emotion to reinforce what you wish to achieve.
Avoid going completely intellectual on this. Don’t skip over the physical aspect and go right to the intellectual aspect because we can use emotions to have the strength to continue fighting. When we reinforce our desire to become a healthier person, we can use our emotions to stir up our energy. Engaging our emotional faculties and choosing positive emotions can magnify our choices and allow us to make these choices with a much stronger power.
Now, I’m not talking about deciding to eat something that we don’t want to eat, while emotions are telling us that we should be eating that chocolate cake. What I’m talking about is that you need to be able to distinguish between that little devil on your shoulder telling you to eat the chocolate cake and that little angel on your other shoulder telling you that it’s better for you to actually have healthy food. We need to get above this.
It reminds me of that quote by Albert Einstein that said: “We can't solve problems at the level of thinking which we created them. “
This means we need to step up on the ladder of growth and understand things from a different perspective. We need to be able to identify which particular part of ourselves craves for that chocolate cake all the time.
When we are able to isolate that craving part of us, then we can supersede it and use our emotions, our desires to live a better life, to be healthier, then we can overcome craving. It doesn't mean that that little devil on your shoulder won’t always tempt you to eat that chocolate cake. It just means that we are going up to a level to see it from a different perspective, a different level of thinking, just as Einstein said.
Use the Power of the Mind
When we talk about nutrition facts, we understand them from an intellectual perspective. When we reach the intellectual comprehension level, we elevate ourselves again so we can scoff at that little guy on our shoulder who's telling us to eat the chocolate cake, reinforcing ourselves with emotions and with scientific knowledge to fight the temptation.
Spirituality and Food
Spirituality is a big part in the Weight Loss Awakening system. I want you to be aware of that there is something called decision fatigue, when we just get tired of making decisions. It can get tiresome to make decisions continually and that’s a fact.
When we make the decision to establish a habit, however, that’s a different story. A big reason I call this course Weight Loss Awakening is because when we start making those decisions for ourselves, even if it's just a simple decision between a piece of cake and some delicious salad, we are becoming more active participants in our lives, and that can affect the rest of our lives.
It is like waking up from being hypnotized and controlled by society, chance, and consequences and taking control of our lives again. This awakening can affect other aspects of our lives as well. I call this Weight Loss Awakening because I see such incredible potential for us, for anyone who is engaged on this path of trying to get healthier and losing weight. Because we can make this a deeply spiritual path that can affect everything in our lives and affect the people around us, we can inspire others and become people of action.
There may be times we think we are not given choices, where decisions are made for us by other people and by consequences and chance. In these instances, step up and say yes or no. We need to make our own choices, and make our choices our own. Choose to make your own choices, because from your choices, you will receive strength. It's as if you are making that step, and you will be met from the other side by strength.
More Things to Keep in Mind
There are a few other things we need to keep in mind when establishing a healthy relationship with food. One is these four levels of existence—physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. The second thing we need to recognize and implement when we start making decisions is to make sure that we feel happy. We can do that by using our emotions, by realizing that we're on the right path, and by even spending the time to find alternatives that give us pleasure or foods that are healthy that give us pleasure.
Therefore, we can look at all these choices that we need to make and reinforce them through the four levels of existence, through replacing emotions, and we can start reinforcing and reconnecting with healthy foods and healthy choices.
I hope this helps you. Let me know how you plan to insert the space mentioned by Viktor Frankl and which level really hits you the most. Is it the physical level of feeling better? Is it the emotional level that's going to give you the strength to continue? Is it the intellectual level or the spiritual level? Leave your message below so I’ll know what's really resonating with you. I look forward to your comments.
