Fixing My Relationship with Food
Surprisingly, the Key Is “Taste Combined with Awareness”
“You are what your body does with what you eat.”
Gary Taubes
I’ve worked my whole life to create the healthier relationship I now have with food. Past overeating and over-drinking were the result of a variety of factors. These included the typical food and meals that I grew up on, eating for reasons other than hunger (for example, emotional situations and schedule restrictions), and believing that all food was somehow good for me. These are just some of the issues I have had to deal with to fix my digestion.
Achieving this primary goal – heal my body’s ability to digest food and create a healthy relationship with the food that will support my health and life goals – has been a satisfying part of my journey.
My Early Challenge with Food
A big part of my challenge had to do with the food that was available when I was a kid: Wonder Bread, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Swanson TV dinners, milkshakes, French fries, pizza, burgers, and soda everywhere. The meals I got at home were probably the healthiest part of my diet. As I grew up, I added alcohol to the mix and ate out almost all the time.
Thanks to that poor diet, as well as binging and overeating, for most of my life my digestion was poor. I suffered from constipation, bloating, and flatulence. To remedy these, I would use coffee, strong tea, laxatives, and occasionally even tobacco as stimulants. Sound familiar?
My new eating habits have evolved over time since the first detox I did over ten years ago. Getting to know how and when to eat, for comfort as well as nutrition, has replaced those past troublesome conditions with a mostly wonderful feeling of internal digestive comfort and rhythm. My diet also provides me with steady, consistent energy.
In the 1950s and 1960s, mass-produced food products became part of the “great new future.” Million-dollar advertising campaigns and mounting social pressure encouraged us to eat new foods, like white bread, TV dinners, and soda, and few voices said otherwise.
Today we know such foods are empty calories at best. At their worst, they become toxic to our bodies and cause havoc in our guts due to unhealthy amounts of saturated fat, sugar, salt, and chemical preservatives. The food industry designed them to have longer shelf lives and to keep us eating them. The epidemics of diabetes and metabolic disfunction, probably the root cause of many of today’s worst health conditions, began in that era, have skyrocketed ever since, and are showing no signs of slowing down. The average per capita of sugar consumption continues to increase despite all the health warnings.
Modern Life Prompts Eating an Unhealthy Diet
Many of our modern choices and promptings of what and when to eat are just plain wrong. We’re highly pressured by advertising, false claims, our own taste, and other social factors in our relationship with food. For the most part, we are the unaware, misinformed, and unhealthy victims of this extraordinary and unrelenting pressure. There is just too much evidence to ignore the relationship between modern diets and disease.
This situation can only change if we, each of us one by one, change our awareness and eating habits. Doctors and other health practitioners also need to practice prevention in addition to treatment. In my experience, the only sure-fire way to get off this treadmill is by reclaiming my own health with ongoing education, healthy practices, and experimentation with different healthy diets, such as a vegetable-forward diet, the Mediterranean diet, gluten-free diet, vegetarian diet, and so forth. Each of us needs to examine and rebuild our natural relationship with food from the inside out.
A Major Goal Is to Heal Your Gut and Keep It Healthy
Since my first detox, I have been focusing on a nutritious diet that supports my goal for health and longevity. Today, another major goal is the quality of my digestion – this is what I am aiming for now. The foods I eat support that mission. No food or nutrient magically confers health on me. It is my gut, functioning properly and ingesting the nutrients my body needs without irritation and inflammation, that is the magic ingredient. Health comes from the inside, not the outside.
The choice of foods to eat, or not eat, as well as when and how much we eat them should be based on what keeps our bodies healthy. Taste is a big part of it, but taste combined with awareness of what the foods might be doing to us or how they feel when digesting is a critical point that many people overlook. For example, after eating a certain food, do you feel energetic or sluggish? Do you feel comfortable or bloated?
Interestingly, taste is malleable and can change with awareness. It comes as no surprise that we associate sweet treats and other gut busters with emotional rewards, a practice that usually started when we were kids.
But the flip side is also true. Once I realized which foods were causing irritation, which I learned during my first detox, my taste for them also changed. The very fact that I knew they were causing me harm, causing me to feel bad, or affecting my energy, was enough for me to not like them as much. The feeling of comfortable eating, both quality and quantity, replaced my “taste only” compulsion to fill myself up.
Today, taste combined with awareness guides my food choices. This is a far cry from years of scarfing down TV dinners!