Why Do I Spend So Much Time Thinking About Food?

Welcome to part 2 of Dawn Green's 3-part series on "Building a New Relationship with Food. If you missed part 1, you can find it here!
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There are few things more all-consuming than obsessive thinking about food, health and the weight and appearance of the body.  With both women and men this pre-occupation often over-shadows all other goals, enjoyments and experiences in life.
 
The focus on food and the body fills the same need that alcohol, drugs, gambling and compulsive shopping, to name a few, do: It is a strategy to shut down the inner experience of emptiness, aloneness, disconnection and lack. All of these activities create in initial feeling of excitement and satisfaction, but it’s short-lived.  You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want, so you keep repeating the same behaviour, in progressively more extreme ways, hoping for a different result.  This preoccupation with finding an exterior solution to an internal problem blocks access to the real solution.
 
To get to the root of the problem, it is necessary to address your relationship with your inner Self.

It is in this relationship that the fullness, wholeness, peace and abundance that you are longing for is experienced.  Everything that you have been searching for comes from inside, and you already have it!
 
This is when the journey of healing the obsession starts to become fun! At the same time as you are deepening your experience of your Inner Self, you can take practical steps to heal your relationship with food.  The healing of your relationship with your Inner Self supports the healing of your relationship with food, and vice versa.  At this point you can begin to feel a real loosening of the mental and emotional ties that bound you to compulsive acting out.  Another way to say this is that your focus on your Divine self and your focus on taking loving actions in the world with food dissipate your focus on your drive to fill an emptiness that doesn’t really exist.  When you focus on love, automatically your willingness to suffer and struggle decreases accordingly.  And the more you focus on love, the more you want to, because it is what you have been looking for all along.
 
If you no longer want to fight with food and your body, here are 3 things you can do to start to move in your new direction:

1. Notice how much you think and talk about food and what a problem it is.  Notice how much you reject the look and feel of your body.  Then stop it. Replace the conversation, seriously and frequently with a reminder to yourself that your relationship with food can bring you back to the memory of who you are in truth.  This is its real purpose……and that’s your journey, so why not embrace it?
2.  Find a spiritual practice you can do and do it every day.  Set a specific time of day and an amount of time to do it that you are able to commit to.  Practice consistently, as if your life depends on it, because certainly the quality of it does.  Watch how it starts to expand your life.  Here are some practices that people have found useful: (1)-Meditation, (2)-Keep a daily gratitude journal, (3)-Do Six-Step processes to uncover the beliefs that is urge you to eat over an upset, (4)-Observe your habitual thought and emotional patterns and write about them in your journal, (5)-Journal about your day from the perspective of a neutral observer
3. And on a food level, start by giving yourself permission to eat whatever it is you are eating.  Extend love to yourself and your food by eating it slowly and putting your fork down between each bite.  Treat yourself as if you have a right to be here, a right to eat and a right to enjoy what you are eating.  Shaming yourself for what you eat perpetuates painful behaviour and kind permission heals it.

 
And if you forget all this and find yourself acting out old mental and emotional patterns, go back to No. 1 on the list and Choose Again!
 
In the next instalment, we will continue the conversation by discussing 3 more tools you can use to free yourself from the self you made up (you know, the one that has problems with food, body and weight!)

Love,
Dawn

Dawn is a Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor, and has worked with Choose Again for many years. She is currently at our centre in Costa Rica, and is available for Online sessions. Contact Dawn at dawn@choose-again.com, or visit her website at www.dawngreen.org