A Healthy Relationship with Food
Do you eat to live or live to eat? Asking yourself this question can waive some warning signs on how you view food.
When you eat to live, you are more focused on fueling your body in order to function daily. When you live to eat, you connect your emotions with food and rely on food for sustainability.
Culturally food for us has become more and more emotional rather than vital for survival. Food gives us the excuse to experience pleasure with our friends, family, social gatherings, and many more!
What’s so bad with emotional connection with food? I am not saying that emotions towards food are all bad, but we tend to fall into relying on food to be our end all, be all instead of it being a vital source of life with some pleasure.
People fall into the habit of disordered eating, stress eating, emotional eating, and other negative effects that food can trigger emotionally and may even become very serious for your health. People also label food as “bad” and create negative energy when consuming the food.
Have you ever ate a French fry or cookie and thought, “this is going to make me fat" or "I have to do so much cardio now to burn it off?” Guess what, putting negative energy towards your fuel sources will trigger your body to negatively respond to the food.
Take a good hard look at how you eat and WHY you eat. Are you eating because you are hungry or are you eating because you are bored? Did your boss give you a stressful task so the bag of chips you are eating helping to solve the task? We are all human and tend to hide behind quick fixes instead of solving the problem and a lot of those quick fixes are food. Start to track your daily intake and see how you are truly eating and why you are eating. From there, you should be able to see if you are eating to live or living to eat.
There is no such thing as bad food, only better choices. People claim that they “eat clean” or “cut out carbs because they make you fat,” but have no idea what the hell they are talking about.
Food is FOOD and nothing makes it “clean” unless you are talking about washing it.
Sorry to tell you, but even your organic veggies are still processed at the store. Carbohydrates are a macronutrient for your body along with protein and fat. WHY ARE YOU CUTTING OUT A MACRONUTRIENT!?!?!?! Instead of following the 100+ fad diets that promise you crazy, drastic, physical change, why don’t you just become aware of what you are eating and make the better choices for yourself. Better choices could look like eating oatmeal in the morning instead of Frosted Flakes or using balsamic vinegar on your salad instead of Hidden Valley Ranch. Small little swaps in your eating habits will add up.
This does not mean you can never eat a cookie again, but you can eat them in moderation with your health goals in mind to ensure you are properly fueling your body to survive.
As a NPC Bikini Competitor, I can assure you that I know the mental and emotional challenges of changing up my food and denying food at certain social events with friends and family. It is hard, but in order for me to reach my physique goals I had to make those choices to better MYSELF! I still went to birthday parties and family BBQs, but I just made the decision for MYSELF to eat better while still enjoying the time with my loved ones.
You control you and can only make decisions for yourself. Food is not the enemy; food is a vital source for survival. Making better choices for yourself allows you control on how you feel and look and that’s true self-empowerment!
