I’ve been on another cooking binge (as you can see from a few of my recent posts), and in talking bout it on Twitter more than few people have been commenting to me on how they don’t cook, and someone asked me “How do you find your balance between eating to live and living to eat?”
This reminded me of an article on Zenhabits that has been sitting in my “topics” pile for awhile… and I thought it was time to hit this one up. Cause whether yer pre-op or post-op, married or single, there’s a pretty good chance the most intimate relationship you have is your relationship with food.
My basic response, or maybe even philosophy is that I still love to cook, I still love to eat, but now my challenge is to find food that I can enjoy that is better for me…. meeting my protein needs as well as being low in fat, sugar, but still just tastes good. I don’t eat as much as I did, I want to enjoy what I do eat.
But that’s me, that’s my relationship with food.
The article from Zenhabits is called It’s Time for a New Relationship With Food, and you know… I do have one. Gone are the days of “quantity vs quality”. Now it’s quality, in small a quantity.
The article is a pretty good read, it touches on how food is often used for pleasure, for comfort, for rewards, and goes on to point out that while food seems to be the answer for so much that we tend to forget it’s really there as fuel for our bodies.
One of the points made that one of the best things you can do to lose weight is to just eat less.
Despite what the food industries have convinced us, we don’t need to eat as much as we do to survive. Sure, maybe eating that much is fun, and pleasurable, and will stave off boredom, and is fun to do with friends and family, and so on. But we don’t need to eat that much. Actually, we need to eat less.
The problem isn’t that it’s so difficult to eat less. The problem is that we have a complicated relationship with food that started when we were toddlers and has become more and more complicated through the years, through endless amounts of advertising, of eating when we’re sad and lonely and happy and bored and at parties and going out and on dates and watching TV and dieting and so on.
Our complicated relationship with food makes it hard to cut back on how much we eat.
The article then goes on to give some tips on dealing with this, from just being more aware of why you are eating to finding other ways to entertain ourselves and socialize that don’t revolve around large meals.
Easier said than done for most, but luckily I have a pouch to help me out there.
That’s not to say I don’t still have my issues. I still have my lapses (like the bowl of EasyMac I’m having with lunch today), and I still am fighting “boredom snacking”. Maybe I always will. But this tool has given me a new perspective, it’s bolstered my overall changes in my relationship with food in a very positive way.
I don’t think there’s much in that article that any post-op hasn’t heard before, but give it a read… it can be a good reminder for us all.
The thing about food is, it loves you, even when your hair is messy, you have a pimple, you’re bloated and hormonal. Even my hubby struggles with that last one (and he’s a saint!) Great post (as always) Rob!
Sigh.
Definitely a tweet-able blog post. Thank you Rob.