Has it ever crossed your mind or is it always on your mind? Maybe lockdown has changed how you now eat…working from home, changing shift patterns, furloughed, redundancy?
Eating is one of our most basic needs, it fuels, nurtures, restores and for many of us, it brings huge pleasure and rightly so.
However, for some food can be a crutch or beating stick for emotional turbulence through to a seriously life threatening experience, impacting on emotional and physical wellbeing and greatly narrowing the capacity to live a fulfilling life.
Largely, our food relationships develop during childhood, however many things alter this from lifestyle, hormones, health-mental and physical, plus our tastes often change i.e. we may develop a taste for saltier rather than sweet or vice versa.
Alongside taste, we all have an ability to recognise appropriate intake for our bodies function…so this may be where things get trickier as life can impact our natural ability to understand or attune to our body’s simple needs.
Studies show that the growing volume of diets and health food information often cause overwhelm, confusion and generate food relationship and body image anxieties. The ‘quick fix’ diets sit along the fast pace of living that we have grown accustom to or the ‘have it now’ lifestyle.
On average a UK woman spends £25k on dieting, attempts around 126 diets and uses approx. 3-6 years of time focussed on dieting, in their lifetime.
Do we already hold the answers within ourselves to manage our food relationships?
Yes! You know if you’re running on empty, if you’re truly hungry or thirsty, if you’re body or gut doesn’t feel good after eating or drinking something. Your mind and body is the barometer to your wellbeing, but sometimes through habit, stress, lifestyle, illness or trauma we disconnect from the signals and senses that we naturally have in place to find the best balance or solutions.
Learning to understand what makes you tick in relation to food is a long lasting approach to develop healthy eating and overall wellbeing. This can however feel like a scary or puzzling option for many, after all we’re programmed to believe that a structured generic diet plan is the go-to approach, but as research figures show it is merely a temporary crutch.
How can you develop a better relationship… what makes you tick?
You are the expert, believe it or not! Learning to understand how and what makes you tick may take some professional support but the ability is already there. For many years Scientific/medical research studies into mindful eating has realised the impact of modern day living or trauma on our mental and physical wellbeing which in turn has had huge impact on our relationship with food, our disconnection with our body to know how it feels and what it needs.
So how can mindful eating support food relationships?
Mindfulness is an ability that we all have as humans, its an innate quality that we often need to develop to attune mind and body, something modern living has taken away.
Mindful eating is a journey to understand how you tick, offering professional skills and techniques that join up the dots between science, nutrition, eating behaviour and the body’s needs.
Scientific and psychological researched models and techniques for supporting food relationships through Mindful eating practices have proven, effective steps alongside working with a professional Mindful Eating Coach for a non diet and natural approach to food relationships.
If you would like to learn more about how Mindful Eating may improve or support your food relationships, please contact hello@coachgenie.uk or 07763 632176
