Your Relationship with Food
Do you have a healthy relationship with food? Or is food the enemy—a foe you do battle with daily?
According to CBS News, two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. That’s more than 190 million people! Numbers like that raise our panic level. We have fallen so far it seems like we will never recover. How will we ever manage to turn around this trend? What exactly is going on here?
Another recent poll has shown that 7 out of 10 people in theUnited Statesare stressed out about money. There may be a relationship between the two. Financial stress has been linked to health problems like depression, sleep deprivation, and—you guessed it—eating disorders.
Our relationship with food can go from healthy to unhealthy for a variety of reasons.
I created a program to show you a way to change your relationship with food, no matter what else is going on in your life. As I said before, it is not a diet. It is an opportunity to build a new relationship with food that will have an incredible impact on the rest of your life.
This is also a guilt-free program. Guilt is a wasted emotion. I am not going to be the food police, telling you everything you can’t eat. Instead, I will open the doors wide for you to make your own decisions.
Most of us—especially in the United States—have easy access to a tremendous variety of foods. You will be free to develop your own personal and successful relationship with food by sampling whatever you can get your hands on and then very logically assessing which foods are your favorites.
Why Do I Care?
I care because I used to have a terrible relationship with food. I changed that relationship, and I can’t begin to tell you how much better my life is—every, single day.
I want to pass what I’ve learned on to you.
My bad relationship with food started when I was a young girl. Any time I went through a difficult period emotionally, it had a direct link to my stomach. I often turned to food for consolation, but my choices just made me feel worse about myself.
I was bulimic for a while, and then I became anorexic. My stomach shrunk so small that eventually it rejected most food—even my favorites, like ice cream, coffee, pickles, tuna, and strawberries. I would push a plate of food away from me, claiming I didn’t need it. But I did. We all need nourishment to live and thrive.
My lousy relationship with food would never have changed if I had not realized that love, emotions, and food are intertwined.
It was important for me to learn to nurture healthier connections in all of those areas, or food would always be the enemy. I realize now, many years later, that I was hungry for love, not food. I was hungry for attention, not nourishment. That is what set up my dysfunctional relationship with food.
My new book, Eat The Foods That Love You Back provides 3 simple steps how to create an amazing relationship with food. At the end of the day it’s all about relationships whether we accept it or not.
Ana Weber is a blogger for JenningsWire, a blogging community created by Annie Jennings.
