Change Your Relationship to FOOD

Eating out of boredom? Stressed? Using chocolate as a reward? Numbing with wine? Feeling as though an edible treat will fix anything and everything that is wrong? Maybe it’s time to change your relationship with FOOD. 

I grew up below the poverty line, so my early relationship with FOOD was scarcity. I wasn’t worried about nutrition, just filling my belly. When I lived on my own, I ate out of vending machines and microwaved ramen noodles. After I got married, I figured I better learn to cook, which was a fun, new adventure that I enjoyed. Maybe too much. With a double income and no kids, the bank balance started allowing FOOD extravagances – eating out, a bottle of wine every night for dinner, etc.

It wasn’t until I got pregnant that I started being concerned about nutrition and health. I would love to blame my extra pounds on the baby, but I think they were already there before I got pregnant. With a screaming baby in my arms, I quickly became a self-proclaimed chocoholic who believed all problems could be solved with chocolate. Or wine. Preferably both together. I actually told people that I ate salads so I could support my sweet tooth. I have literally freaked out on family and friends who ate my last piece of chocolate. Totally out of control. Can you relate?

We don’t have to cling to past identities. It’s not true that I’m a chocoholic, nor do I have to remain one. That is just how I chose to see myself. It was easy, and an excuse to indulge in chocolate. It’s like my client who kept telling herself and me that she just wasn’t a social person. That was her easy excuse to not put herself out there to meet new people. In reality she was quite social at work, but didn’t want to get out of her comfort zone, so she stuck to this crutch. But the crutch was just holding her back. We don’t have to let our past identities hold us back. We can let them go. We can choose instead to believe that we are the person we want to be.

I can choose today to see myself as a person who makes healthy choices and takes good care of herself and her body today and every day. Because that is the woman I want to become and I want to start being today, not someday when. The beauty of believing hard that I am a woman who makes healthy choices, is that belief will actually drive me to take healthy actions, which will create healthy results for me and my body. What we believe in our life, we create in our life. So it pays to believe something good for you instead of something that hurts you, or holds you back.

Of course I’m human, so I am going to stumble along the way. I am going to meet a chocolate lava cake that will look so delicious that I’ll want to try it. But as a woman who makes healthy choices now, I’ll be content to try a bite and share it, and even let my husband have the last bite without making him sleep on the couch afterward. I won’t feel out of control, rather I will look for all the ways I can take control of my choices and my life with healthy decisions.