Shawn Phillips | Start Strong Monday

Eating: When Did It Go Wrong?

You eat, at first, because your body requires nourishment. You have to eat to be or die. Food is a life essential.

Somewhere along the line of life you connect eating to a good feeling. As it alters the very chemistry of your brain, you feel a subtle emotional charge that usually occurs in the company of other people, like mom and dad. Hence, you eat and feel less alone which is almost like being connected.

Then comes a life time of hard wiring food to celebration, to family, to connections of all sorts including feelings we like to confuse with love.

And now you simply eat. What was once eat to feel better, to feel love, has become eating to feel less or feel anything at all. You don’t even know why the hell you eat most the time. Some times you’re halfway through a bowl of cereal or a fast-burger when it hits you that have no recall of where it came from.

The wiring which was flawed from the beginning—your programmed relationship with food—has become poison. A deadly mix of emotional regulation and brain chemistry driven addiction.

At the center of this dysfunction is a deep, profound need to disconnect from the present—to avoid the stress of being “here.” Life is difficult, complex, overwhelming. And being with people is at once both wonderful and difficult—while time alone can bring sickening loneliness.

Food, the art or eating, can make the present go away. People serve me things, they give me attention and I don’t need to ask for it. I feel warmth inside and a fullness for a few moments without risk—in total safety.

And the whole joyous experience is free of the anxiety, the emptiness, fear and overwhelm that fills the waking minutes.

But like all forms of avoidance or maladapted coping behaviors this one has a side effect that manifests slowly—sneaks up on you and eventually destroys you. Some pathological behaviors end in prison, others divorce, illness and isolation and this one usually manifests obesity, overweight and related health issues like diabetes. Not to mention the emotional burden.

Finding Fault

It’s not fun nor is it funny. And to coin the most overused and oft abused phrase in fitness marketing; It’s not your fault.

In this case it’s truly not. You were given the genetic and environmental factors, the love and attention the way you were given them. As they saying goes, now you gotta play the hand that you were dealt.

So to this point, consider yourself absolutely 100% free of blame and fault. We will assume you didn’t know and what you did know you did the best you could with what you had. It simply serves no purpose to beat yourself up today for what happened yesterday.

Now you know, or at least you have the invitation to contemplate your relationship with food and the present moment; with avoidance and anxiety. And with that the responsibility has shifted. From this point forward you are the one in charge. You not only get to decide how you want to live, who you want to be, but you also have the full responsibility for your actions.

And the freedom you seek comes only through responsibility.

That’s not to suggest that changing the tracks that have been grooved deeply in your psyche and life is going to be easy. No, not at all. But you and I both know people who’ve been dealt at least as challenging a hand and prevailed.

Where to start? That’s the million-billion dollar question, right? How does one begin changing such a deeply integrated faulty wired system.

I’d avoid the big leaps into major dieting systems, elaborate plans, and all that which provokes the attractive glory of hope and easy answers.

There’s no easy answer. Instead, I point to awareness; to your full and courageous presence. Get intimate with your felt state, check in what is driving your desire to eat. Sit quietly and fully with the feelings inside and be with your eating and food.

(What happens, what is your experience, when you turn your attention inwards, while resisting the urge to eat? Check in, experience it. Name it.)

Slow everything down. Make simple, simple, simple changes. It may serve to eat just as you would and keep a food journal for a week and document what you eat but more importantly what you feel, before you eat and after. Then an hour later to see how the eating, the act—and the nourishment itself—leaves you feeling emotionally and physically.

Create Nourishment Rituals

“Simple things repeated daily without fail is the key to quantum change.”

This is a deep and profound truth. Read that again and take it in. It’s about the simple things, the five minutes here, the ten there. It’s about doing it without fail.

Rituals, as I share about in Strength for LIFE, are the bedrock foundation for true and lasting change. They’re the antidote to the “habits” which wear you down—for rituals lift you up and free your soul.

And when it comes to altering your fundamental relationship with food there may be no more effective and powerful ritual than one perfect meal, repeated daily without fail. This is how and where I, and millions of others, have come to place the nutrition shake—or more accurately the Full Strength >nutrition shake.