This is part of a loooooong story that lasted many years, but I wanted to share a snippet of my tumultuous journey with food and how much better life is with satisfaction and actually enjoying food. What. A. Concept.
Finding satisfaction is the focal point of Intuitive Eating. In my opinion, it is the thing that sets Intuitive Eating apart from other dietary theories/diets/ways of eating. It also is one of the things that we, as Americans, tend to forget about, while other cultures see it as an integral part of health and living life.
When I think about my journey to healing my relationship with food, I can’t help but reflect on when I stopped looking at food as something to be enjoyed. Once I had my foray into the “magical” world of dieting, I was really good at looking at food first as something I needed to limit and then something that should only be ingested as a means for what nutrients I could get out of it. Conversely, I would have spells of overeating where I ate and ate and ate until I felt sick (which I now understand was a response to all of the deprivation).
The common theme here was that I never allowed myself to really enjoy food. I was either scared of it or I felt guilty about it.
And then I met my husband and things started to shift. (If you don’t already know this, I’m married to a really handsome Sicilian. He has zero issues with food. Food is life for him. Food is family. Food is enjoyment.) When we started dating, it was really uncomfortable for me to eat the way he ate. But I couldn’t not eat pasta, right? So I started going out to restaurants and eating in ways that I had never imagined. We ate multiple courses per meal. We ate pasta. We ate appetizers. We ate pizza. We ate dessert. We had drinks. The whole 9 yards. And at first I felt incredibly strange because I had never let myself eat like this in front of another human being, let alone one that I was attracted to.
But here I was slowly changing my mindset around food. I began to really taste and experience meals. I was finally beginning to enjoy eating again. And a meal didn’t have to follow some new fangled dietary requirements that I had thrusted upon myself in the name of health.
So all this to say that finding satisfaction and pleasure in eating was the first step to healing for me. It was the first step into getting out of my head and into my body. Of beginning to listen to my inner cues and blocking out all of the rules that I had bought into.
And I know this is so common for us as a culture full of dieters. But I can tell you first hand that if you find satisfaction in your food, you’ll be less likely to overeat and you’ll seek out the foods (and nutrients) that your body truly needs for optimal health. You don’t need a set of rules to be healthy. You need to be able to listen to and trust your body.
So here’s to you finding more joy, more satisfaction, and ultimately better health through your eating experiences. If I can do it, so can you.