Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We categorize food as “good” and “bad” (and the bad list is always longer). We think we have to “earn” dessert and should apologize for wanting a cookie, or even just feeling hungry for lunch. Studies show that half of preschool-age girls worry about being fat; 40 percent of teenage girls use restrictive measures to lose weight and 60 percent of American adults are on a diet—even though many of them have tried and failed to lose weight through restriction as many as twenty previous times.
We’re mixed up about food because we live in a culture that tells us we can’t trust our bodies. But this isn’t true—everyone is born with three key eating instincts. Think about how newborn babies eat. They know when they’re hungry; that’s why they cry! And they know when they’re full—they simply stop nursing or bottle-feeding and fall asleep when they’re warm, cozy, and fed. And, they know that food must provide comfort as well as physical nourishment. Eating is how babies form secure attachments to their caregivers; it’s how they fall in love.
As babies grow into children, they naturally disconnect a bit from their eating instincts, because they learn to eat at mealtimes and according to the customs of their family. But too often, we’re told to ignore our eating instincts for far more arbitrary reasons—because a new diet trend says so, or because a parent thinks we have to clean our plate. Many of us feel guilty if we find comfort in food, forgetting how essential that is to the eating process. And many of us ignore our hunger or our fullness cues; restricting till we can ignore our hunger or overeating past the point of physical comfort. Lots of us do both.
For my book, The Eating Instinct, I interviewed dozens of people about their relationships with food. And it didn’t matter if they were recovering from orthorexia and obsessed with clean eating, or recovering from weight loss surgery and trying to figure out how to eat with a newly shrunken stomach, or living in poverty and worrying about having enough to eat, period. Folks with all kinds of eating struggles, in all walks of life asked the same questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?
The answer is to reconnect with your eating instincts and trust yourself first, around food. Not some wellness guru. Not some new diet plan. Just...
Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar