Whether New Year resolutions, the latest diet fads, or whatever, there is a lot of attention paid to how we eat, what our bodies look like, and the need to maintain good health by paying attention to our BMI (Body Mass Index). I believe a key to understanding the situation as to what is a weight-loss strategy has to do with the fact that we humans have emotions and are relational creatures.
Yes, we have a relationship with food. One of the features of relationship dynamics is that relationships have an eternal quality about them. Relationships are not measured in time and space; rather are not confined to time and space and thus have an eternal and infinite quality about them. Anything that is eternal and infinite makes no rational sense, because features of being rational are the boundaries we understand when we measure something in time and space. When it comes to relationships, we have been trying to figure out the situation between a man and a woman for millennia, and no, nothing makes sense! 🙂
But it’s not as if we can’t try to work within the realms of eternity and infinity, because we also definitely live within the bounds of time and space. So how do we make sense of fitting something with an eternal quality into time and space? As time and space are measured with physical dimensions, so relationships are measured with social dimensions. So, to start, it appears that relationship dimensions have a function of allegiance about them, that is, whether you are “for or against” someone, or someone is “for or against” you. In other words, we have ideas of who our friends are and of who are not our friends.
Let’s explore our relationship with food and how we eat. With various cultures in our world, there are numerous and unique ways of relating with food. Every year in Edmonton there is a Heritage Festival, in which the multicultural community of Edmonton displays features of their country and culture of origin, including demonstrations of music and dance. But another major component to celebrate is the food that is prepared, with so many creative and spicy ways to mix and enjoy various proteins, carbohydrates, and oils.
We humans are also emotional creatures. Emotions serve as detectors of right and wrong (which I call “potatoes,” not to be confused with actual potatoes since we are talking about food today!). But since stress happens, and stress has an uncomfortable feeling about it, it is easy to have a relationship with our stress and the negative emotions that can go along with the stress. It becomes as if our feeling of stress is the potato (what is wrong), and we relate with our stress response as if it is our enemy, rather than relating with the actual potato (the problem) that our stress response is designed to alert us to and relate us with.
Hence, we can develop a relationship with food as the stress reliever to deal with the problem of the stress we experience. There are foods that activate the so-called pleasure centers in our brain. Therefore, if we seek a way to relieve stress as if stress is the problem, we can discover a solution (read: treatment) in food. Food becomes our friend. Food becomes an ally in our war against ourselves. That’s right: if our stress response, and the negative emotions that can go along with it, becomes our enemy, then we are making ourselves to be the enemy, and we are at war against our very own emotions and hence ourselves. Food becomes a way to treat our stress and we become emotional eaters.
When we are in the situation of relating with our emotions as the enemy and find a way to treat or fix our emotions, we lose the ability to use our emotions in the way they are designed to function and help us. We are left only with the sensitivity of our emotions, but have lost the specificity; we merely and specifically treat our emotions and stress as the problem rather than using our emotions to alert us to and engage with the various problems we encounter. We lose the ability to tell the difference between a mountain and a molehill. If our emotion engages and is intense, down goes that bag of chips or tub of ice cream. We don’t know when enough is enough because we are treating a non-material psychological experience with a material substance.
Many treatments, however, have side effects. A major side effect of emotional eating is weight gain. And in many cases we become aware of it. We don’t like it but don’t know anything else. Food now becomes both our friend and our enemy. What doesn’t stop is the fact that we have the emotions that sense the stressors in our life, and also the fact that there are stressors (the potatoes). It is easy to feel helpless and caught in the slavery to our emotions and the food that is both friend and enemy.
And this is where diets and diet fads come in. I believe the success of most diet approaches is largely due to the changed relationship with food that they bring or enforce. You have lived with a unique relationship with your food, and this relationship is an eternal dynamic. But since you also live in the temporal reality of time and space, it is possible to do something to change the relationship.
A “diet” is a way to at least temporarily change your relationship with food. Some diets may be scientifically sound and make sense to us, others may be obvious fads, but the success in achieving weight loss is likely due to changing your relationship with food. Your relationship with food is either directly affected, or you relate with and give control to a diet or diet company over your food and food consumption. If you are an emotional eater, your food consumption becomes linked with the protocols of the diet and less so with your emotions.
Unfortunately, if the diet is only a temporary change to lose weight, rather than a practically sustainable change in your relationship with how you eat, it is very likely that when you end the diet, you revert back to your old relationship with food. You then eat yourself back to the weight you were before you decided you needed to shed pounds. You are also likely to feel defeated, knowing you had success but then feel bad about yourself for failing to keep off the pounds in the long run. The feeling of defeat is an emotional downer, which you consider a problem, and so you treat the problem by eating to feel better. What a rollercoaster! 🙁
I believe we need to address the relational component of our humanity when it comes to designing and implementing weight management strategies and diets. Let’s get away from the actual diet that is marketed and touted as the greatest thing (coaxing us into forming a relationship with the diet or the company that promotes the diet), and think more about developing a healthy relationship with life that incorporates the creativity that comes with preparing and enjoying good food. Let us learn to let food be food and us be us.
To summarize:
1) If we are emotional eaters, then we will tend to eat too much, for we will not know the difference between a mountain and a molehill when our emotions engage.
2) If we suppress our emotions, we accumulate a heavy sack of potatoes on our back (see Put Your Potatoes on the Desktop).
3) Eating becomes the management of the problem of too many potatoes on our back, but produces more potatoes. We form a love-hate relationship with food.
4) We may have an unhealthy relationship with food. A diet changes the relationship and may break the unhealthy relationship we have formed.
5) The root adjustment and management of emotional eating is linked with learning to form the constructive mindset – potatoes get put on the desktop rather than in the sack. Potatoes that have been in the sack get transferred onto the desktop.
6) If the sack of potatoes is less heavy, there are no potatoes to manage by eating for relief of the emotions/stress that go along with a heavy sack.
7) We are free to make life be about life rather than about emotions. We become able to distinguish the difference between mountains and molehills. We are free to form a healthy relationship with food, relishing the creativity that goes along with what we prepare and enjoy.
Training yourself to form and live life within the constructive mindset is a piece of the puzzle that facilitates a healthy relationship with food. Food and emotion needs to be seen as a part of our life, in which we have a relationship with life as a whole. We must learn to incorporate the experience of all emotion as part of our life, in which emotion aids us in navigating our life story, and we need to include our culinary experiences as part of our life adventure. Living life constructively is a more liberating and fulfilling way to live. It is far better than living the precarious and destructive life of being in relationship with emotion and stress as our enemy, with food as the treatment (saviour) against the tyranny of being subject to emotion, and with the impossibility of stopping our emotion and stress. The conclusion is that living life constructively is a liberating and fulfilling way to live.