Food: Friend, Foe or Fuel?
Submitted by Fit and Female Blog
Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat ~ Socrates
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there were three other people ~ Orson Welles.
When I was a kid I had a plate with an angel’s face on it that said, “Be an angel, eat it all“. In fact, when I was growing up we were always told to “clean our plates” because there were, “children starving in Biafra“.
Now I was a sensitive kid, so it made me really sad to think about those hungry children in Biafra. I wasn’t even sure where Biafra was, but it sounded very far away. Moreover, I didn’t understand how my eating lima beans in New Jersey was helping them out.
I thought a more logical solution would be to put those beans in a box (along with that slab of liver that I also didn’t want) and simply send them to Biafra. But for reasons never made clear to me, my parents never went for that.
Now that I’m a mom, I take the opposite approach. I don’t ever force my 9 year old to clean his plate, because he has always had the innate ability to know when he’s full — and stop eating. And that’s an ability I don’t want to mess with.
It’s fascinating to me. It doesn’t matter how much he might be enjoying a particular food (even ice cream or cake) whenever he feels full — he just stops eating. He doesn’t feel the need to finish everything just because its there — or even because it tastes delicious. And that’s a powerful tool which will set him up for a lifetime of stress-free weight control.
If you watch babies eat and then push away the nipple or close their mouths to the spoon, it would appear that all of us are born with this innate ability to self-regulate our intake. But, unfortunately most of us lose it somewhere along the line. At some point in time (for most of us) food becomes more than fuel for our bodies and we start eating for other reasons. In this country we eat because:
- It tastes good
- It’s a social activity
- We are bored
- We are stressed or upset
- It’s “time” to eat
I believe that women as a gender, tend to have a more dysfunctional relationship with food than men, because of the added societal pressures we face to stay slim.
For too many of us food is either something we love but feel totally out of control with. Or something we avoid as much as possible, because we fear we’ll gain weight. Very few of the women I know feel completely comfortable with food.
The fact is, we all need to develop a healthy relationship with food, because we need to eat several times every single day. Food isn’t something that you can avoid — like cigarettes or alcohol. It isn’t (or rather shouldn’t be) a vice. In a perfect world, all of us would view food for the fuel that it is, try to make good choices every day and occasionally enjoy the pure pleasures of taste –without going completely overboard.
