Feeling or Feeding Your Feelings? Part 1

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Continuing my series, I’m talking eating.

There’s enough information and evidence from experts supporting the importance of eating fresh, whole, unprocessed food. Ideally in season, from close to where you live. Free from harmful pesticides. Non-Genetically Modified. A balanced diet providing all nutrients for optimal health. Balancing colours, tastes and flavours.

Primitive, Paleo, Mediterranean, Carnivore, Vegetarian, Vegan, Pescatarian or other? That’s a personal choice. Ideally one made around what your body needs to be well. If you choose to eat animal protein, there are options. Like buying from sources that are organic or free range, respecting the animals and our environment.

The basics, follow them or not, are pretty clear.

So what about when to eat?

There’s lots of to-ing and fro-ing around when to eat. Three meals a day without snacks. Grazing. Intermittent fasting. Eat nothing after 8.00pm. ‘Eat breakfast like a King, Lunch like a Queen and Dinner like a Pauper’ is an oldie all about eating your biggest meal in the morning.

Is it best to eat breakfast before exercise? Dr Oz and Mark Wahlberg have thoughts on that!

What you do when you eat matters too. So eat more slowly, with more awareness and focus, and you’ll feel full with less food. Savour each mouthful. Away from devices. Away from your desk. Understanding the benefits of sharing a meal with family, friends or colleagues.

So that’s what, when, and what to do when we eat. What about why we eat?

The simple answer? Eat because you’re hungry. Or following whatever regime meets your needs. Making sure you balance the nutrients, which comes down to tastes, flavours and colours too, over a few meals.

Then again, simple is often easier said than done. Especially with food. Sometimes it’s just there in front of you. It gets complex when socialising, boredom, or emotions, get involved. Or deprivation related to dieting.

With options often not far away, why we eat can take on a life of its own. Think fast food, supermarket checkouts, lunch rooms, take away shops, snacks watching movies or TV. Throw in special offers to impulse buy and we can be navigating a minefield to get from one ‘meal’ to the next with nothing in-between.

The word diet refers to food we consume to provide the nutrients we need. Yet today, diet tends to refer to a restricted eating program adopted either for medical, health or training reasons, or by choice.

Credible diets to address medical, health or training needs can be essential for wellness. The need to follow them is clear. Balanced and properly designed, they can become a way of life as a permanent adaptation of how you ate before. Understanding the consequence of following, vs not following, goes a long way to remove feelings of deprivation when foods you love are off the list.

Fad diets are vastly different. They generally promise big results in no time, with no work – and plenty of deprivation. Depriving you of certain foods or food types, of calories or amounts of food. Telling you when to eat. There is much research supporting one thing: that these diets don’t work. That many of them can be dangerous.

Part of the reason diets don’t work is to do with mindset. It’s the same for good diets and fad diets. Tell yourself you can’t have something and what’s the first thing you want?

Exactly.

So, the more you tell yourself you can’t have that chocolate, or bread, or piece of steak, the more you want it. If you’re not careful you can become fixated on it. All you can think of is what you know you can’t have.

What to do?

How about telling yourself what you can have? Or telling yourself what you choose to eat. Anytime the focus is on what you can do, or can have, you’re already in front. When you remind yourself you choose to eat this way, or at this time, you feel in charge of your life and your decisions. That’s one step closer to reducing the risk of a future health crisis forcing your hand to make changes that are no longer a choice.

With a better mindset, you open up the possibility of eating a little of what you really want. You let yourself have one piece of chocolate, an open sandwich, or a small steak. You feel in charge. You reinforce it.

So what about cravings? Ever had one? It may have been for a food, or type of food. Like chocolate. Ice Cream. Hot salty chips. A big salad. A piece of steak. Nuts.

If yes, was it, in my words, a good craving or a not-so-good craving?

In Part 2, in a few days, I’ll tell you the difference. Plus cover strategies to manage cravings and emotional eating.