What I Know About Food—Eat What You Want. Love What You Eat.

I’m not a health freak.  I eat what I want when I want it.

When I was in junior high, I WAS a health freak.  I went for at least a whole year with no ice cream or candy bars.  I would dab the grease off my pizza.  Then my dad told me that that doesn’t decrease the fat content very much, so I picked the cheese off instead.  Had I been genetically pre-disposed or environmentally pre-disposed, I may have developed an eating disorder.  Luckily, I just didn’t enjoy food as much as I should have during those years, and eventually, I got over that phase.  Now, ice cream and pizza are absolutely two of my favorite foods!  They make me so happy!

Food makes life enjoyable.  One of my sisters tells me she doesn’t know what it is about me, but she gets so hungry and tends to enjoy food more when she is around me.  Best. Compliment. EVER.

Here’s a fact to help you understand how much we are to enjoy food:  Of all the senses in the body (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), those who have lost their sense of taste have the highest incidence of suicide.

Too often, food is thought of as good and bad.  Perhaps you deprive yourself of the bad food and choose another food as a substitute when everyone else is eating what you have forbidden yourself to eat.  You don’t feel satisfied and may end up going for another food which still doesn’t satisfy you because you don’t eat what you crave.  Because of this, you could end up eating more calories than if you had just eaten the food you were craving in the beginning.

I was at a party where a guy was choosing to drink milk instead of soda even though he wanted soda, and as I was explaining this very principle to him, he drank the milk, ate some “healthy” food, and he still wasn’t satisfied.  He ended up drinking the soda in the end.  If he had just drunk the soda to begin with, he would have consumed less calories.

You feel guilty for eating the food that tastes the best because generally, those foods are higher in fat and sugar.  The all-or-nothing thinking may set in and you tell yourself, “I may as well overeat and enjoy as much as I can now because I won’t ever eat it again.”  You think you have to deprive yourself of that food because you feel like you lose control when you eat it. 

You may figure giving high fat/high sugar foods up completely is the only way to gain self-control.  Not true.  The best way to be able to eat anything without overdoing it is to change your relationship with food, or rather, how you feel about food.  You can go from feeling guilt and deprivation to feeling enjoyment and neutrality. 

Also, consider the reasons you eat and determine how to cope with emotions instead of eating to cope.  Are you eating because you are tired? stressed? bored? lonely? sad? angry? or anxious?

Feeling out of control with food is real.  So giving yourself permission to eat certain foods may need to start small.  For example, instead of buying an entire half gallon of ice cream, go out to buy a small ice cream cone.  Enjoy it.  Savor it.  Don’t feel guilty.

The more you give yourself permission to eat "bad" foods, the more those foods lose their “sinful” appeal.  You can make the transition from depriving yourself and feeling guilty to giving yourself permission to eat and enjoying it.  

Food is meant to be enjoyed.  Eat what you want.  Love what you eat.

Rise Up

This week, I sat and listened to an amazing woman speak.   I can’t share everything I learned here, but basically Judy Brummer is a white woman born in South Africa who was raised by a Methodist mother and three black women who worked in her home.  She learned to speak Xhosa, the clicking language, from her “black moms.”  She learned to read and write that language in college.  The Mormon missionaries came to her door one day, and she listened to their message.  She was baptized and later helped translate the Book of Mormon into Xhosa.  She was told in a blessing that she was born where she was by the mother she had for a reason.  Throughout her life, she was placed in circumstances to bless her own life and the lives of others.  As I listened to her story, I recognized that this is a woman who knows her purpose in life and who does not just let life happen.  What in the world would it be like if we were to just sit around waiting for life to happen to us? 

I also received a nugget of wisdom from one of my clients.  I had given her an assignment to write some positive statements about food, what we call food affirmations.  Of the hundreds of times giving this assignment, this was the first that someone used scripture references as food affirmations.  One really stood out to me. 

“Now I, Nephi, did not work the timbers after the manner which was learned by men, neither did I build the ship after the manner of men; but I did build it after the manner which the Lord had shown unto me; wherefore, it was not after the manner of men.” (1 Nephi 18:2)

She told me how she feels strongly that what she is learning will help her break free from her addiction.  She explained how the eating disorder teaches her after the manner of men, and what she is learning in treatment teaches her the manner of the Lord.  Then it occurred to me that everything in our lives should be focused on doing things the Lord’s way.  This is not to say that we have to pray about every single decision made such as what shirt to put on in the morning, but it is important to figure out what we are to do and to trust in God’s plan and timing.

Both Judy and my client have taught me a lot this week and have reminded me to work on rising to my potential.  As Jackie Robinson said, “Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.”