Build a good relationship with FOOD (Part 1)

What we eat and drink can have a powerful effect on our ability to focus, mental clarity, mood, and stress levels. 🧐😶‍🌫️🧠

Most of us differentiate our food as good 👍🏻 or bad 👎🏻 and we start to build a good or a bad relationships with these food respectively.

An article in Healthline (a newsletter which offers health and wellness advice that’s inclusive and rooted in medical expertise) suggests that having a good relationship with food has nothing to do with the quality of your diet plan.

A good relationship with food involves welcoming all foods in moderation, eating foods that you enjoy, not allowing food to control your life, showing patience and total kindness toward yourself. 🙋🏻‍♂️💖🙋🏻‍♀️

Having a bad relationship with food on the other hand means restricting or overeating foods, regular dieting, and feeling shame or guilt, even punishing yourself upon eating certain foods. 🙅🏻‍♀️🖤🙅🏻‍♂️

According to research (PubMed Central - Epub 2012 Jun 28), non-dieters (good relationship with food) were much better at regulating their intake and stopped when they felt satisfied, while the dieters (Bad relationship with food) ate significantly more cookies. 🍪🤩✨

This was attributed to a process known as “counter-regulation”. Also, When you allow all foods into your diet, you’ll notice that your cravings for certain foods start to diminish. This process is called 'habituation'.

So start viewing all foods as equal, with no food being better or worse than another.

When you stop viewing foods as “good” or “bad,” you remove the food’s power. Over time, you won’t feel the need to overeat it when it’s around. 🍔🙌🏻🥤