Food Relationship: The Vital Junction Between Mental and Physical Health
Weight Watchers made me nuts-o • Suffering is not healthy • How I learned to trust my body
Weight Watchers made me nuts-o
Long before I knew about food relationship, I knew what made me crazy. The running commentary in my head about everything I put in my mouth: whether I was “in control/out of control”, whether the food was “good/bad,” and planning my penance for eating more than the allotted-in-advance 6 tortilla chips and exactly one margarita at happy hour with the work gang.
All the rules and points and strict measurements drove me nuts but had become second nature since achieving lifetime status with Weight Watchers my senior year of high school—¾ cup cereal, dressing on the side, half a sandwich, half a banana, half a cookie, half a bagel (always half, whole was too much), run at lunch so that dinner would be more than a few strips of chicken and a salad, no dressing. Where’s the joy in eating like that? There isn’t any; one of the many problems with dieting.
Suffering is not healthy
Even if you don’t drive yourself nuts with food rules like I did for decades, obsessing over your weight or your 45 minutes of cardio or avoiding sugar like the plague is not healthy. The objectives themselves are not the problem—overweight is a thing, moving our bodies is good, sugar causes blood sugar spikes and when consumed to excess, doesn’t feel good, now or later when you’re sitting there with extra padding.
Rules-based targets fire up the type-A control-freak in me which disconnects me from my body, and brings down-right meanness and bad feelings. When I shifted from control to connection and based my eating and movement decisions on how I wanted to feel in my body versus following rules and checking boxes, my lifelong struggles with food and eating vanished. I’m happier and feel better than ever in my body and this is five years into menopause!
Dr. Peter Attia is right:
“Finally, as I learned the hard way, striving for physical health and longevity is meaningless if we ignore our emotional health. Emotional suffering can decimate our health on all fronts, and it must be addressed.” p. 17 Outlive
How I learned to trust my body
Dieting taught little twelve-year-old me to distrust my body and quickly led to an eating disorder I hid for the following twenty-five years. It’s a long story, but my eating struggles brought me to my lowest low. At a postpartum doctor appointment, I collapsed into a heap of tears. My doctor didn’t seem fazed and went straight into sharing his personal battle with alcoholism. I didn’t fully appreciate his vulnerability but did take the business card he pulled from his pocket—a woman’s name followed by a bunch of letters, MS, LCSW. Oh shit. A therapist!
Step by step I stopped harming myself and began to tune into my body. My innate love of food and cooking over time eclipsed the rules and struggle. I stopped dieting and started writing about my experience and wondering what happened to me. I branched into public health research and pondered the “obesity epidemic” in light of all I had been through, all the while wondering why we think about the body as separate parts—mind and body (sometimes spirit, but only in holistic circles).
Years into my recovery, I studied Intuitive Eating with the co-founders and got certified, a program typically reserved for healthcare professionals. This program spotlighted some residual “diet thinking” and set me completely free; it felt wonderful, almost too good to be true. My relationship with food and body became so foundational to my well-being (mental and physical), that I began to wonder why no one ever speaks of it in the sphere of public health. I’ve moved from wonder to crusade on this front: what we eat matters, how we eat matters, and how we think about food and eating matters, to our whole body—mind and gut, heart and soul.
If you’re new to Intuitive Eating, I recommend this interview with the co-founder, Evelyn Tribole, and Dan Harris of the Ten Percent Happier podcast.
Well, that’s all for today. Tomorrow I’ll let you in on the pumpkin ice cream I made.
