Why Do You Eat?

Why do you eat?

Obviously, to survive – right?

But why else?

The truth is, you eat for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with sustenance.

If you struggle with your relationship with food, consider examining your past.

It is worthwhile to examine your history in order to uncover a map of the messages you carry about food.

These clues can look like food scarcity, for example. Perhaps you grew up in an environment where there wasn’t always enough food on the table. And now, you’re living a life of luxury where you can treat yourself in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Or maybe there was a time when you held a job where your eating times were restricted. I’ve worked with school teachers and former waitresses who couldn’t eat when they were hungry.

They had to learn how to suppress their feelings of hunger and would go all day without eating until dinner time.

So, what would happen? They would go all day long and not feel that pull to food (because they taught themselves to suppress it), past 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, and then dinner would finally roll along and then…

…BAM.

They would eat from dinner to bedtime.

A pattern took effect because they had mastered suppressing that pull to food during the day.

Here’s another scenario. Say there was a parent in your home who was constantly dieting. And, as a chronic dieter, all they talked about was food and they had their own body image issues and attitudes around food.

Of course, that is going to have an effect on you as an adult later on in life.

These types of events from your past could have everything to do with your eating habits and your attitudes towards food.

I encourage you to journal – just list out as many things as you can remember about growing up around food. Make this list as long as possible. Look at all the reasons why it makes sense that you eat the way you do, or why food issues show up the way they do.

Start piecing it together like a puzzle.

Because at some point, you were presented with a problem, and food was the answer. Food was a solution to boredom, or stress, or pain. Maybe it was a distraction.

Why is it a solution? Because eating – that is, physiologically putting food into your body – shifts your emotional state.

You get to use food to move you from where you are right now to another place. So, any time you're in a place you don't want to be emotionally, you can throw food at it and it's going to work.

I invite you to consider that choosing food and using food the way you have been is not a failure in you.

This is not because your willpower sucks or you're broken in some way. This, my friends, is because you are brilliant at problem-solving and, at some point in your life, food filled a gap for you that you otherwise didn't have the capabilities to look after for yourself.

Food was a solution and now, if you can open your awareness up to see that, you can now move through the food challenges and figure this out from a place of, "Food is a solution. I was brilliant in choosing that at some point in my life. I now know that it's not working for me anymore and I can do something else instead."

Try it and let me know in the comments how it goes – I’d love to hear from you!

I’m rooting for you.

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You may enjoy this livestream I host on at https://www.twitch.tv/thedonutition called Chop Talk! I invite a friend to join me, we chat and meal prep, and stream the party.

Sunday at 4 pm EST (BYOV - Bring Your Own Veggies) ????

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