Healing My Relationship with Food Part 2: The P.S.

I finished Abby Langer’s book, Good Food: Bad Diet: The Habits You Need to Ditch Diet Culture, Lose Weight, and Fix Your Relationship with Food Forever and for the first time in a long time I feel a sense of peace. I feel equipped to make some tweaks and healthy changes that sound good to me, in order to heal my relationship with food. I feel like I can make what I eat work for me, instead of trying to blindly follow the latest “what not to eat,” diet. In short, I feel sane again.

This may seem like big words and feelings and proclamations, but I realize now just how caught up I was in diet culture. How badly I wanted to be able to check a box. To lose the required number of pounds in order to not be classified as overweight by the BMI scale. It’s hard, when the years start to add up, the metabolism starts to slow and extra pounds begin to make your body their home. You feel like you’re fighting numbers and lines and gravity while all you see around you are smaller numbers and smoothness and lift.

And now I feel like I don’t want to fight anymore; I want to make friends with myself and what I eat. The wellness journey I’ve embarked on since I quit drinking is about acceptance, improvement, and living. I can’t love myself if all I hear is negative mental chatter about what I ate, or the numbers on the scale. I can’t live out my potential and continue to improve if I don’t approve of what I am or am not putting into my body. And I can’t truly live with the inner diet voice telling me I shouldn’t or can’t or shouldn’t have.

And the funny thing is that, once I give myself permission to create my own food playlist, I want to make healthy choices. I am motivated because if they are my choices, I don’t want them to result in a bad outcome. I’m done with daily choices that have bad outcomes…been there, done that.

So what happens when you give yourself permission to enjoy the food you eat? When you put in the time to learn about protein, dairy, carbs and fat and they way they function in your body? When you know how to balance what you love to eat with what you need to eat in order for your body to function at an optimum level? When you understand the difference between true hunger cues and emotional eating? When you make peace with the fact that you truly don’t like and zoodles and need never eat them again?

Or what happens when you understand that there is no magic pill, powder, or quick fix that will lead to some idealized skinny mold that most people can’t fit into anyway? When you realize you can save your money and invest in your health instead? How about when your daughter sees you contentedly eating a delicious meal instead of scrutinizing labels and cursing the scale?

I, for one, plan on finding out.

These realizations led to the awareness that I’ve been living at war with myself over a battle I am not meant to engage in if I truly value wellness. A battle I bought into because I absorbed the message that I’m not enough, or I’m too much. What price do we pay in order to be just right?

I needed to share with you my new found freedom, this free freedom. It’s not a secret and actually makes a whole lot of sense. Eat whole, healthy foods that nourish your body whenever you can. Make space to enjoy the foods you love, whether it’s pizza or ice cream, in the right amounts and frequencies. Exercise daily in a variety of ways that feel good to you and accompany them with something else you enjoy like audiobooks, a Netflix show or music. Drink plenty of water, and coffee or tea (whatever brings you joy). And appreciate the experience of eating. Food is meant to be enjoyed, not used as a punishment or a guilt trip.

I had planned to write a post on how I’m learning to embrace sobriety by practicing what I will call, high-value living, but I obviously had more to say about food, diet and eating. I’ll save the other post for another day.

Until then, I hope you take the chance to make friends with food, and yourself again.