Transform Your Relationship with Food
There are many ways that your relationship with food may have become imbalanced. Irregular work hours, stressful circumstances or trauma, underlying emotional or psychological disorders, poverty, complications from diseases, and plenty of other causes may have left you with an unhealthy relationship to food, and these are rarely easy or straightforward to correct. Many people will go their whole lives with a toxic relationship with food, suffering from malnutrition, obesity, diabetes, and other complications while the underlying cause -- their poor eating habits -- goes untreated.
Dr. Bhandari helps people heal their relationship with food and get them on the path to lifelong wellness by following these simple steps.
Look Forward, not Backward
Many people with an unhealthy relationship with food have difficulty remembering not to recriminate. They get trapped in destructive cycles, where the perceived failures of one day impact the choices of the next day. A person might lapse and continue to make unhealthy choices. They may then decide that, since the damage was already done, they might as well continue and indulge in further lapses. A person might regret one day’s actions, and self-medicate with comfort foods, furthering the cycle.
The first step toward transforming your relationship with food is to stop looking backward, and to begin looking forward. You can’t change the past, but each choice you make will have a direct impact on the days yet to come. Don’t take your eyes off the future, and make choices with your goals in mind.
2. Abandon All-or-Nothing Thinking
One cookie isn’t the same as a bag, and a pretty-good day is just as valid as a perfect one. Many people let small imperfections or lapses get blown wildly out of proportion, fixating on tiny missteps rather than the overall trend. They miss the forest for the trees.
No one will heal their relationship with food with absolutist thinking. It just isn’t going to happen that way. Rather, transforming your relationship with food needs to be a cumulative process where small successes are allowed to lead into larger ones, and each positive step needs to be embraced and rewarded.
3. Deal with Stressful or Emotional Turmoil
Many toxic food relationships stem from underlying preconditions. A stressful work life, for instance, may push a person toward using food as a reward or an emotional salve after a long work day. Food abuse is often correlated with stress, depression, or mania. Emotional or psychological imbalances tend to lead a person toward unhealthy choices, like overeating or indulging certain foods. In order to restore that relationship to food to a healthy, balanced one, it’s critical that a person restore his or her emotional and psychological state to a similarly balanced one.
Look into other self-care options, like yoga, exercise, meditation, counseling, artistic expression, and so on. Speak with Advanced Health’s integrative nutrition health coach Katie Schmidt if you’re concerned about your emotional or psychological state and how it is impacting your relationship with food.
4. Treat Food as Fuel and Medicine
Food, while pleasurable, is meant to be more than an experiential treat. Food fuels our bodies, providing the nutrients and energy to heal injuries, move, breathe, grow, and live. Certain foods can have a profound impact on health. They can reduce inflammation, shorten recovery time, treat nausea, cure headaches, and plenty more. It’s important to make food choices based on the situation. For example, a diet rich in animal protein and/or processed food causes liver and kidney damage along with frequently triggering cortisol production and insulin resistance (aka., diabetes). Eating more than 3 times per day after age 29 causes digestive distress and damages organs in the long run. Natural sugar such as in fruit in tiny doses each week (not each day) can potentially boost energy during the day but harm sleep and repair work at night.
Eat only the amount your body needs and focus on foods which grow mostly above ground. They are full of oxygen, water, and easily absorbable nutrients unlike animal protein which is loaded with industrial toxicants and extremely dehydrating inside the body. Listen to your body, not your emotional response to indulging in eating for the wrong reasons.
5. Stop Counting Calories
Healthy eating is about nutrients and being nourished. Counting calories is not equivalent to being healthy. A person could eat nothing but cheeseburgers, for instance, and stay within his or her daily calorie limit. That person would gain no nutrients his cells could utilize for energy but instead by contaminated with carcinogens and other industrial toxicants which damage cells. Have variety in your cells, especially with an expansive array of plant-based fresh food.
Look for complete nutrition rich in green vegetables, ancient whole grains, legumes, and mushrooms. They are rich in nutrients and fiber allowing you to satiated and light. Keep animal products to a minimum each week. Avoid over-processed GMO grains like wheat, corn, soy, and rice since they are unsafe for the digestive system and loaded with tons of pesticides.
Stay away from sugar, processed food, excess sodium, synthetic preservatives and additives. Although these foods are legally sold in the U.S., they are banned in many other countries globally since their ingredients have been clearly shown to cause cancer, autism, psychiatric disorders, and many other chronic diseases.
Drink plenty of warm filtered tap water and shift away from beverages in plastic containers since the gasoline additives from the plastic leak into the water. Have water in between meals instead of snacks, and try not to drink beverages while eating. Fast for over 4 hours before bedtime and periodically 14 hours at night. Fasting is critical to healing especially since repair work only occurs at night between 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.
When you follow some of these guidelines, calorie counting doesn’t matter.
6. Practice Mindful Eating
Healthy eating is a practice. Healing your relationship with food is just as much about how you eat as it is about what you consume.
When eating, make sure you take your time to sit and slow down. Eat slowly and while eating down. Savour the eating and drinking experience instead of being distracted by working, reading, watching TV, or talking. Treat eating as a pleasure activity unto itself every single time.
AUTHOR
Dr. Payal Bhandari M.D. is one of U.S.'s top leading integrative functional medical physicians and the founder of SF Advanced Health. She combines the best in Eastern and Western Medicine to understand the root causes of diseases and provide patients with personalized treatment plans that quickly deliver effective results. Dr. Bhandari specializes in cell function to understand how the whole body works. Dr. Bhandari received her Bachelor of Arts degree in biology in 1997 and Doctor of Medicine degree in 2001 from West Virginia University. She the completed her Family Medicine residency in 2004 from the University of Massachusetts and joined a family medicine practice in 2005 which was eventually nationally recognized as San Francisco’s 1st patient-centered medical home. To learn more, go to www.sfadvancedhealth.com.