Healthy Food Connection

I have always had this love/hate relationship with my bathroom scale. When the numbers reflect a weight loss, I praise its name. But when it does the opposite, I complain to my husband that the scale is off and we need to purchase a new one. I think he finally caught on when I purchased two new scales in less than a year.

I thought about a gastric bypass but I am not heavy enough. I could do what one of my friends did and have a tummy-tuck and liposuction. Problem was she had to have a hysterectomy less than a year after the surgery and it undid the procedure.

There are the liquid diets, grapefruit and egg diet, the water diet, and my favorite: the prepackaged food diet—you know the ones that have a celebrity endorsement? Of course, what they fail to disclose is that most of those celebrities have personal trainers to help them keep from gaining the weight back. For the rest of us, we start to regain the weight as soon as we stop eating the prepackaged food.

The reason all of these diets and procedures fail is that they don’t deal with the true cause of the weight problem, and trust me: the underlying cause is usually fairly significant and emotional in nature. The way I see it, the only way to lose the weight and keep it off is to develop a healthier relationship with food by understanding the underlying emotional issues surrounding the way we eat.  

For most, food is more than a way to provide the body with nutrients; it is a bandage to cover up pain—pain from failed relationships, lost jobs, missed opportunities, inadequacies, and more.

From working with individuals with food issues, I found that their predicament with food would often follow a similar path to the five stages of grief (denial, anger, blame, bargain, and acceptance).

Examples:

1. Denial: I do not have a problem with food; I have a physical disability, which prevents me from exercising.
2. Anger: It is all _______’s fault because he gets me so angry that I cannot see straight and I have to eat something to calm myself down.
3. Blame: I would not have eaten the cake if mom didn’t buy it.
4. Bargain: I really want to fit in that dress, so I promise that as soon as I lose six more pounds, I will start eating regular food again. 

The last stage is acceptance, the realization that there is a problem and you had better tackle it. What triggers acceptance is usually a wake-up call in the form of a health scare or a potentially debilitating illness.

Not everyone experiences the cycle in the same way. Some individuals find themselves stuck in between cycles or never achieve the goal of acceptance. Some bounce around from denial to blame, back to denial, to anger, and so on, taking years to figure it all out.

For me, it took my 20s to figure out that most of my food issues related to feelings of great loss (I lost my mother when I was 11 years old). Now it’s about laziness, really; I don’t have the food issues anymore, just an aversion to working out.

Whatever your issues with food are, don’t let food become a barrier to forming a healthy relationship with your body.