Good Life Cuisine

This is the week of learning how to get the most out of food and eating experience. The more satisfied we are, the more likely we will be able to stop when reaching fullness. I’ve collected 10 tips for you.

This week is about simply enjoying our eating experience. It’s that simple. It links to the “make peace with food principle”, as it requires us to eat what we really want. How can you feel satisfied if you eat a rice cracker if what you really wanted is crisps? This is because you will most probably eat much more of the substitute diet foods than the foods you really crave (provided you’ve made peace with them, cause otherwise you may invoke the power of deprivation). In other words, it’s much easier to feel your fullness if you are satisfied with your eating experience. This principle reminds me of what my grand-granddad use to say: “Stani kad ti je najsladje”, a mantra I intend to adopt.

In this week of self-care, I’ve been asking myself what I need. I seem to observe a slight shift in me after these 6 weeks of deep reflection. The idea of gentle eating and gentle nutrition starts to appeal to me. The idea of feeling light and satisfied most of the time, and feeding my body with nutritious, healthy and delicious foods.

I’ve proclaimed this to be the week of self-care. I’ve been thinking about what I need a lot (this is how I understand the essence of self-care: meeting your own needs). This morning as I was reading a great book called “Health at Every Size” (more about this book later), I had a light bulb moment. I lived with a false need to lose weight for a very long time.

This morning I had a light bulb moment. I recognized a pattern in all my bad habits, past and present: drinking, smoking, over-eating, pot-smoking. They are in a way all a form of self-care, or taking care my needs are met. I had this clear image in my head of different instances of the feelings and situations that preceded drinking, eating, and smoking. There was often a period of difficulty, either emotional difficulty, or stressful times. I then felt a need to recover; to heal the hurt; or a need for fun; for relaxing — a need to be taken care of.

I realized this morning how I paid less attention this week about intuitive eating. I therefore decided to take a bit of time to read and reflect, and pay more attention to the eating process and my thoughts. With an immediate payoff.  I was a witness a two wonderful abilities of my body:

This week's principle is all about feeling our satiety signals. And responding to them. I was very hesitant about doing this principle so early in the process. It is the one I crashed on the last time I tried. I rushed into this principle as I would in a new diet. I couldn't reject the diet mentality, and I searched for a way to lose weight, and then I found this principle. I thought: that's it. All I need to do is practice stopping in the middle of my meals (if I feel full), and that's it. It will start feeling natural after a while. Fake it till you make it. Well, it did not work. 

 Two thoughts I had this morning while walking through a forest:

A first step in challenging the Food Police is even being able to catch them in action. Distinguishing a specific kind of self-talk from the continuous chatter of our busy mind is not easy. But perhaps being perfectly attuned to our thoughts isn’t even necessary. Here are some ideas.

This weeks' topic: Challenge the Food Police. It is about challenging unhelpful, undermining, negative self-talk we learned during years of dieting. Food choices are not moral choices, and we need to learn not to treat them this way. Marking a day good or bad depending on how many diet rules we broke or obeyed is not helpful.