What roles do food, nutrition and eating play in your life?

Autummn Nutritional Mindsets

Food plays a number of roles in our lives beyond that of meeting our innate survival needs. At its core, food’s primary role in our lives is that of nutrient provider and or fuel for our bodies general functioning, ultimately supporting healthy growth and development. This is its innate role for us. Yet our lives have moved away from the basic role of food being our fuel and means to survival.

Food and or the act of eating now play an array of roles in our lives, pending on our circumstances, lifespans, cultures, religions and so many more other conditional influences. The roles of food and or eating are often weaved within other constructs of our health, community, tradition, family dynamics, socio economic situation and environment and our own behavioural needs in seeking pleasure and or pain.

If we are interested in developing a life long relationship with food that nourishes us in mind, body and spirit, discovering and building a balanced and connected relationship with food and the roles we assume to food and to eating is a crucial milestone in our self awareness.

Roles of Food

In understanding that food is now much more than simply providing us with fuel, we also know and feel that our diets and the food we eat can move us toward and promote health and wellbeing, and yet has equal power to move us away from our health and wellbeing.

So may I invite you into a place of curiosity, exploring what food, nutritional health and eating means, looks, like and tastes like for you? What archetypal roles are playing out here in your conditioning around food? How do you engage in eating food and for what purpose?

Healer

We can use food as a healer and as a way to nurture , to nourish, to love ourselves. When we become sick we often turn to food to make us feel better, to assist and support healing. Food is thy medicine in this case and is utilised in one’s life as a means toward health, as a means to heal from illness, injury, and or convalescence.

Food, real, whole food can heal our bodies, our minds and our spiritual connection to our beautiful earth. It can be one of our greatest transformational healers when we really pay attention to what food has to offer us in its wholeness.

Connector

People have always met together to relax, talk and share common experiences and beliefs. Food brings people, family, tribes and groups or communities together. People like to share food collectively because it makes the occasion even more enjoyable. It becomes a sensual and pleasurable, shared experience. A bonded experience with a collective. It shows great hospitality and friendship when one person shares food with another and we often gather with loved ones over dinner and or a meal shared.

Food can be procured and prepared with a lot of intention and love and this is one of the many passive roles that food can fulfil. As a connector food may play out as an expression of love to another and or to ourselves. An act of self love and good will. The exchange of love in the form of a meal can impact deeply in the lives of those that need this love and care. We often show our condolences through food or proving a helpful meal to a friend in need. Connecting one human need with another.

Social and Personal Celebrant

Eating together and enjoying this sensual experience often helps to form community and union between individuals and groups. There is something innately giving to provide food and company to another, and innately celebratory.

Celebrating with food is a natural joyous thing to do. We have come together to feast and take in our abundances with gusto and celebration for as long as we can imagine. Autumn is a time we gather from harvest and enjoy the abundance that falls in this season before the more scarcer months of Winter bear down.

Usually when we gather in groups for occasions of celebration, food is often central to these celebrations and milestone moments in life. Religious and ceremoniously food has been used to mark sacred moments and reverences for eons. To feast is to celebrate! To celebrate includes feasting! Making a pleasurable experience even more so. Herein food and our eating is for pleasure and joy in this way.

Emotional Enabler

For many of us, we can relate to food at some stage during our lives as being an emotional distraction. Used to distract from a painful experience. We may, for many reasons look to food and or eating to make us feel better when we can not find pleasure or joy in other ways. Or when our pain is great and seemingly chronic, food/eating becomes a way to escape our pain. A way of seeking pleasure. Food and or eating then becomes the enabler of staying in a stuck place of weight gain, self deprecating behaviours, keeping us away from dealing with underlying emotional dysfunction and a way of burying pain and suffering.

Food can also help us connect to positive and empowering memories that we yearn for, that make us feel happy and safe and full of purpose. It can be used as a sensual experience to lift our pleasure responses and feelings of joy, yet we must be mindful to not use food as an un resourceful way to seek fleeting moments of happiness and joy that make us feel worse off in the long run.

Scapegoat

Food and eating for most people is or has been a pleasurable experience at some stage, yet food can easily be made the scapegoat for our not so resourceful nutritional behaviour. Demoralising food and blaming food as the problem for our behavioural choices sets up a deeply negative relationship with food, the cause of your harm. “...If only I didn’t eat that...” simply infers blame onto the food and away from self.

When is the last time you took real pleasure from an indulgence and didn’t refer to it as a “cheat” or a “guilty” pleasure? There is nothing immoral about enjoying food. There are of course foods that when over indulged, have negative impacts on our health yet consuming these foods feels good!! These foods are actually designed to make us feel amazing (high fat and or high sugar foods) Eating them doesn’t make you a bad person. We are sensual and emotive beings. Pleasure has its place!! This simply needs to be managed like everything else in life. Boundaries can be very useful.

Reward

Food is commonly used as a reward in many aspects of our lives, as children, adolescence, and as adults. This reward system sets up a pattern of perpetual gratification from food whenever we feel success and or achievement. Food begins to be the drug to keep the high vibes going. We must be mindful to not perpetuate a continual looping and patterned behaviour of self gratification that will eventually become un resourceful to our holistic wellbeing.

Saboteur

Our food behaviours and choices can for some play the role of saboteur. It can be easier to self sabotage ourselves with food, to override some health achievement or positive feelings with a behaviour and or food that we know will have an equalising and or opposing effect of perpetuating negative and punishing feelings. Many of us can relate to having repeated patterns of behaviours, struggles and triumphs that we continue to play out with a knowing that we are self sabotaging our health and wellbeing outcomes. Food and or eating can also be used as a punishment, denying oneself of food, even as a way to feel a sense of control in our lives.

On the flip side, the shadowed side, food may also be used to harm and cause pain and when used or misused may be knowingly harming us, stacking more pain than pleasure. For some, food and eating may become a way to harm oneself and to punish oneself and becomes instead of the healer is hurting and keeping us a victim of our own doing.

What will food this harvest season and into the contracted depths of Winter play for you? Often there are roles of comfort, familiarity and satiety attached to the roles of our food in these cooler more contracted season.

Observing for what purpose, we reach for certain foods is often a great place to begin shapeshifting the way we relate and consume our food.

The more we engage food as the healer, the connector, the celebrant, the more resourceful our eating behaviours and our relationship to food and self nourishment will be.