Check up on your emotions, OFTEN

For most of us, we’ve been fed a steady diet of the following set of beliefs:

Being fat is bad.
Food makes you fat.
Therefore, food can be bad.

In reality, food is a necessity in order to survive. This means that these negative feelings we’ve associated with food can actually cause us a lot of harm and undue stress. In fact, it can create a cycle that might feel familiar to you:

You feel hungry.

You eat.

Maybe you eat a food that you’ve learned to associate as “bad,” so you internally feel “bad.”

Or maybe you eat too much of a food that is “fine” but not “good/clean/healthy/low-calorie.” So you still end up feeling emotionally unwell.

Or perhaps you only eat “good/clean/healthy/low-calorie” foods but still don’t feel full, which makes you more likely to gravitate toward “bad” foods later.

Or it’s possible you don’t eat because all that you are craving are “bad” foods, but you won’t allow yourself to eat those foods because you believe that “giving in” to those foods makes you inherently “bad” as well.

Basically, there are a lot of ways that we can internalize feeling badly about ourselves based on the foods we choose to eat. Those negative thoughts and emotions cause stress in our bodies and our minds that can create real, medical issues and affect much more than our weight or the shape of our bodies

Share provided by Linnette Johnson, MS, MA, CNS, RALC, LDN
(She/Her)- Nutrition Coach and Educator, Registered Ayurveda Lifestyle Consultant,
Mindfulness Meditation Coach, And Herbalist.