Frustrated with your healing process or emotional connections to food? Check out this take from our Nutritional Therapist, Kristi Brown, NTP.
The Gorilla in The Room
I’ve been ruminating on something for awhile. When we go to the doctor, or really any practitioner we want a prescription or a solution to ‘fix’ us. But, more often than not, it doesn’t work that way anymore, does it? What if we’re looking at healing from the wrong angle? What if healing needs to start in a totally different place?
Let’s talk through two case studies.
Case Study 1
Person A comes in, we talk for a good hour and a half and by the end, she has a short list of action items before our next session. However, as she leaves, she’s uncomfortable. She has always gone through sessions like these and left with a big protocol. (Protocols which left her overwhelmed and stagnant, but still.) In her mind, she really wants the big protocol. That’s how this goes. She asks if she can come back later in the afternoon and at least put together a quick meal plan. So we do.
Case Study 2
Person B tells me all about the various diets she’s done and her various moods on said diets in the past. She really has no desire to go through that again, but something has to change. She’s pretty clear on her goals and her current limitations of what she can actually do. So, we don’t start with a big elimination challenge, it just doesn’t make sense for her. We start at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Food is Emotional
Food is what we use to buffer, to soothe, to comfort, to celebrate and sometimes to punish. How we sit down to a meal has far less to do with what is on the plate and far more to do with how we feel about sitting down to that meal. Are we eating that meal because we feel we should eat it? Are we giving into a craving and feeling guilty? Are we trying to eat it as fast as we can because we feel we shouldn’t be eating that meal? Do we find ourselves eating an entire bag of chips at the end of the night and not sure even how that happened?
These habits, thoughts and patterns are in-grained in us. They’ve become well-worn roadmaps of comfort for whatever reason, but that is the work. We have to find out why are we eating the way we are. What thoughts are we having about the food we are eating? What do these thoughts tell us about how we perceive our own self-worth? When we start here, everything changes.
With Client A, her typical pattern is to get a big protocol, get overwhelmed and then do nothing. Have you ever found yourself like Client A? I sure have. We all want the big answer on a silver platter, that big protocol sounds like an answer, right? But we need to take a step back and see what is under all that overwhelm first.
With Client B, we started differently. We started talking into her thoughts and habits around food, and also gave her some physiological support she needed to help her body rebalance. Do you know what happened? Her incessant food cravings went away, she started making new choices around what and when she would eat, her joint pain started to diminish and she is consistently losing weight week after week.
Isn’t that crazy? She didn’t do a big protocol or any set ‘solution’!
But isn’t that divine?!?
When we really work on the spiritual and emotional side of ourselves, and in turn address what we think and feel around food, making changes to what we eat becomes SO MUCH EASIER.
This is how we help our body rebalance and heal.
The small stuff IS the BIG stuff.
To your food JOY,
Kristi Perry Brown, NTP
Nutritional Therapist at Nourish Your Mind, LLC
You can check out Kristi’s original post here.