True story – I have a love/hate relationship with junk food. Most of the time I stay clear of it. I am able to convince my hand to leave the chocolate chip cookies alone. The “hate” part of the relationship comes from the facts about junk food that everyone knows:
1. Consuming these yummy, full-of-sugar treats day after day will make my butt grow, my love handles more loving, and my imaginary six-pack even harder to see.
2. I really do feel like crap 20 minutes after I stuff ten Oreos in my face like I have never seen one before. My stomach hurts. My mouth has an aftertaste that doesn’t resemble the first delightful bite.
3. This is the worst one for me… the mind. It blames, shames, and calls me names. “Fat! Ugly! Undisciplined! Loser!” Yep, no lie. I’m not sure if your thoughts can be as mean as mine are, but mine will get downright dirty. This really brings out the “hate” in my junk food relationship. All the food that I have deemed as “Thou shalt not eat” makes my inner mean girl come out. I eat a cookie and all of a sudden I am five pounds heavier in my mind and shouting insults.
Though I hate junk food, there are reasons to love it, too:
1. They taste oh-so-good, with all that lovely refined sugar and over-processed yumminess. My mouth waters to taste the icing and for a moment it is a small piece of heaven.
2. There is a time in the month when my mind can talk me into all kinds of yummy treats, and in that moment stuffing my face sounds very reasonable. In my defense, eating them keeps me from throwing the never-ending pile of dirty clothes in the trash or ramming my car into the slowpoke in front of me. In that moment ice cream keeps me sane.
3. The love/hate relationship surfaces in almost every holiday because we celebrate with food. Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays are always filled with sweet treats. We gather around a table with pecan pie, chocolate cake, and other delicious foods. We share our lives and fill our bellies to the brim. It is an experience that makes us happy. This is where the “love” part of the relationship comes in… taste, sanity, and experiences.
So over the last three years of me making a lifestyle change I have been trying to find a balance with this love/hate relationship. It has taken time to change the way I think about food. It did not happen overnight. It was not because I had such strong will power that I could keep myself away from certain foods. For me it took time, grace and knowing my body. Time in the fact that a lifestyle change is a slow and steady process. If we think it will just “click” and we’ll suddenly be comfortable in a new healthy lifestyle, we will be very disappointed. If we think we can go from a couch potato to Barbie in two months, then we are fooling ourselves. Who really wants to look like her, anyway? Let’s be real.
It also took me years of forming my old opinions on food and it will take years to unlearn those thought patterns. This is where grace kicks in. I will eat foods that don’t serve me. I will eat food being social. I will eat crazy amounts of carbs to keep from killing people. I just will… and that is the truth. At one point I thought I had to change this but I don’t. When moments like this come up I try to show myself grace. I would never call another person fat for eating a piece of cheesecake, so why do it to myself? I try to look at the moment and observe how I feel and what I may do differently next time if my actions made me have a negative response.
This is why it’s important for me to know my body. Our bodies do talk to us and if we listen we will see that change does get easier. I feel a certain way when I eat food that is several steps from the way nature produced it. My performance in the gym is off. My ability to move into a yoga pose is limited. I feel weak and a bit sluggish. These are all normal ways that my body reminds me that I made a poor nutrition choice, and I had to learn to notice these signals over time. People could try to tell me why I should avoid certain foods until they were blue in the face, but I wouldn’t have paid attention. It only became real when I started listening to my body. I started “hearing” how I really felt.
Cookies for breakfast really don’t make me feel like Super Woman. However, I do feel pretty super when, after eating the cookies, I still have the ability to see that I am not defined by what I eat. I can see my moment with the Oreos as just that – one moment – and move one. No need to dwell on it or call myself names. That is truly when I feel good about myself. When I can view my choice this way, moments of eating food that truly don’t serve me get fewer and further between. My relationship with food shifts to a place of enjoyment instead of a place of fear. Slowly I am starting to love food. I love food that fuels my body. I love the strength I feel when foods work for me and not against. I love food that helps me live a full, healthy, and bendy life. And from time to time I will love Coke, chocolate, and corn chips. Be happy and listen to YOUR body. It will talk.