When we use food to meet non-food-related needs
Food and eating meets a variety of our needs beyond just supplying our bodies with calories and nutrients. It can provide comfort, entertainment, and connection. It can punctuate holidays and celebrations and be a means of expressing our heritage.
As with anything else in life, how we use food and eating can be to “wake up” in our lives – to work with the reality of what is unfolding for us moment to moment. Or we can use it to “go to sleep” – rejecting reality and trying to alter our experience to be more to our liking.
For the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing excerpts from the books Eat to Love: A Mindful Guide to Transforming Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Life and Intuitive Eating for Life: How Mindfulness Can Deepen and Sustain Your Intuitive Eating Practice. These are meant to help you contemplate the ways in which you use food to wake up and to go to sleep. I’ll be pairing the excerpts with some journal prompts that I hope you’ll explore in writing or conversation or creativity or even just internal contemplation. As always, I’d love to hear how it’s going for you.
Excerpt from Eat to Love:
The main ways in which we substitute food for our true needs are to hold onto pleasure, to resist discomfort or pain, and to numb out. We eat to grasp onto pleasure, or we have uncontrollable cravings for foods we believe will bring us pleasure; we eat in order to resist or change our experience of painful emotions; or we eat to numb out and not feel anything. Though the foods we are eating are not literally poisonous, this type of relationship with them could be; using food as one of the three poisons obstructs the recognition of what is actually happening and how to authentically respond.
Journal prompt:
Think about your own relationship with food and eating, specifically when you find yourself eating when you are not physically hungry. How does that eating feel for you? Is it satisfying? Pleasurable? Painful? Shameful? What kinds of foods do you choose? Are those different than the foods you eat when you are physically hungry? Do you notice any particular patterns around how you eat when not physically hungry?