Relationship to Food...

Thank you Google Images for the photo

I have been trying to write this post for about a month now. I told myself that I was going to write it, come hell or high water, today. I opened my computer 4 hours ago to start and am just sitting down now. It’s amazing the distractions we can create when we are really trying to avoid dealing with something. Here we go…

My relationship with food has been a dark and stormy one. I can remember the day that I started using food to substitute dealing with emotions.  I can also remember growing up in a household with a mother that was battling her own demons with food, so the habits I learned, weren’t exactly the best ones. Now, before you all jump on the “Don’t blame your mother” bandwagon, she will be the first to tell you she didn’t set a good example in the eating habit department. I ate to my emotions. I was happy, I ate. I was sad, I stuffed the sadness down with food. I did a good job, I celebrated with food. I was angry, I ate. If there was an emotion, I ate. A recipe for disaster developed.

Over the years as I became more and more ashamed of my eating habits I began to hide them and the more I began to hide them the more they began to scare me. Food has had a powerful hold over me for many years. I go to the grocery store, determined to only get the good stuff and as I am putting the groceries away at home I am putting away ice cream, trying to remember how it got into the basket. I go unconscious around food and this is scary.

In working with Emilia, one of the things she does is request I keep a record of everything that I eat, and submit it to her weekly. I’m certain she can write an entire post about her frustrations in getting me to be consistent at this task, because I most certainly am not. Accountability around what I eat has never been existent for me before so I am being forced to deal with all these feelings of shame and guilt around my eating habits.  Feelings I have spent years stuffing, avoiding and covering up. I am no longer allowed to go unconscious.

I would deal with the shame and guilt when I would start a new diet or make a new commitment to my health that would eventually fall to wayside when the emotions became too much, so what now? What has to change to change my eating habits? My answer….I don’t know. My post Relationship to Self, plays a big part in this too. The conversations you have with yourself in your head need to remain positive. Your goals need to remain at the front most part of your brain and your will and determination to not give in to the temptation has to be greater. I love Bob Harper’s expression “Skinny Tastes better than Fat” and Jillian Michaels “Unless you puke, faint or die…keep going”. These are on post-its on my mirror in the bathroom.

This path of consciousness is just one I am starting to walk, I’m certain it will be filled with wins, losses and epic fails, but I am excited to walk it with all of you.