Arriving home you pour a glass of wine; it’s your favourite wine.
You take a heavy sip,
“Oh Jesus, that’s what I need, what a wine!” (to put it politely).
But what is it about that wine you love so much? I mean, Is it the wine?
My method of coaching is to attend to the relationship between factors to affect the outcome.
I’m talking about the relationship between you and it - food and drink, the deeply personal interaction between what we consume and our mind & body. This interaction is the experience from which our preferences are born. This experience or interaction is what I call the relationship and it’s one of the most important of all relationships.
Our experience of eating and drinking is deeply embedded in our psyche, our upbringing, genetics and humanity. From a driving seat in the oldest part of our brain we journey toward food and sex, the drive is absolute but the relationship can be consciously negotiated as well as unconsciously influenced.
Rather than the judgement of the drive, or expending energy debating every choice we renegotiate the relationship and gain the capability to make small adjustments over time to restructure it (the relationship) based on what we discover to be the best policy for our health now and tomorrow integrating our ‘dietary shadow’. If we are not empowered to influence the relationship then we surrender it to bias and the world of food and drink which, ‘spoiler alert’, has not designed with our best interests at heart; Cadburys marketing meeting is not held with ‘optimal human health’ in mind.
So, when we say ‘oh that’s just what I’m like - always have been’ we could equally mean defeated by manipulation as we identify as the choice.
What’s the alternative?
The relationship, like you, exists through time so when we hold it up and see it from every angle we accept the influence of the relationship on our historic choices. First, comes understanding, then with clarity comes acceptance followed, in time, by chance. This is inordinately more efficient than anxiously negotiating every choice as one part of an outdated and overbearing relationship. For example;
John is 6 years old and lives below the poverty line. He finds a paper round and after giving his earnings to a family who gives it all to gambling he decides to take enough to buy some food. The cheapest highest quantity item is a pack of biscuits which he eats immediately. John grows into a man and becomes financially successful and obese. He is intelligent and tried diet after diet without success. Where can we find a resolution to Johns issue? Does it lie in his past or shall we just put it down to a lack of will power?
Incentives based on a deeper understanding can be far more profitable, and eating patterns that we may have come to believe impossible to change can be made right when we reframe them through the perspective of the relationship. Not ‘Me’ and not ‘The Food’ but the relationship between the two. With a weekly slot for a little relationship hygiene scheduled we can restore and repurposes an eternal relationship.
How to shift to a relationship perspective?
Food is the first relationship we had and its been with us through ‘thick and thin’, my advice is to endeavour to understand the past to find some control in the future. Taking on this challenge will put us on a collision course with our past and an emotional challenge.
Perhaps an example could help. Take a repeated food choice which gives guilt-reflux; when did it begin and why did that younger version of you need it?
We can make choices or have choices made for us in early life which continue to play out in later life. Those choices (eg. what was served on the dining table and how you reacted to it) were not aways your responsibility but the magic of life is that liberation from them is. If a negative choice persists, consider the mental, physical and social environment you find yourself in when you make the choice. Is this where the trouble lies? Are you unfairly leaning on the relationship with food to fulfil needs which are not it’s responsibility? (binge-eating after seeing a partner) With the lens of longterm health attached, is it not sensible to change the friend who makes you feel inadequate than bare the outcome of the choices that come in the wake of your meeting.
Perhaps now you will be more mindful of why you have chosen what’s on your plate. It’s worth reiterating that the contents of your plate reveal the degree to which you value yourself served with a side of ‘untouched trauma - revealed’. Unearthing any trauma held in the relationship, trapped as you evolved, will define the manual for long term change, optimal diet, nutrition, body composition and health….and so much more we never expected.
What could the results be if we attended to our relationship with food as we attended to a longterm relationship with those we love and want to flourish in life? Intimacy means to enact, rehearse and polish modes of connection. Each time we begin to establish a relationship, we have a chance to learn how to be intimate, in both the short and the longterm. Whether the union lasts for a few months, decades or a lifetime, the refinement requires time and attention. Perhaps ‘relationship hygiene’ is maintaining a mIndful and attentive intimate relationship with food - as if it mattered to you.
The goal with each client is to objectively discuss and experiment until we’re able to write the manual of optimal diet and nutrition, one which feels like coming home. It may sound simple but the simple things in life are often the most difficult to get right. Perhaps it’s worth getting some help to renegotiate this one.