You Are What You Eat: Intentional Consumption
Why what you eat plays a hand in determining your wellbeing
This won’t be an essay convincing you to go on a raw fruit and vegetable diet, by the way.
Just so we’re clear, I am, in fact obsessed with hot wings and ice cream. I’m also a semi-compulsive baker, so I’m not adverse to the occasional sweet treat.
I am your average human with average vices, just like everyone else.
In fact, I’ve had a really tricky relationship with food for as long as I can remember. I was an overweight child who was bullied for my weight, quickly spiralling into obesity as I leaned into the vicious cycle of emotional comfort and binge eating.
The constant comments and behaviour I experienced when I was heavier took a toll on my self-esteem and really embedded a toxic relationship with food. Eventually, when I went to university and became much more independent, my relationship with food hit its all-time low when I started eating less and less in a bid to lose weight in the attempt to look skinny.
I hated my body - not just aesthetically, but the way I felt in it. When I first found exercise, the only reason I’d wake up super early in the morning to spend hours at the gym, was to punish myself for allowing myself to get ‘fat’. Even when friends and family started complimenting me on losing weight, I was never quite satisfied and continued to be tired and lethargic. I remember eating once a day, and my lowest intake for the day was on average, around 800 calories a day.
I was desperate and broken.
Desperate broken people, do desperate, broken things.
I’ve shared my health and fitness journey here, so feel free to check it out for more details around how I fixed my metabolism, and repaired my relationship with exercise and my body. This article isn’t about trying to convince you to become a gym rat obsessed with dieting and counting calories. It’s intended to help you start thinking more consciously about your relationship with food, your body, and how this can directly impact your wellbeing and quality of life.
Some of us just go through the motions, allowing a busy and overwhelming life to dictate what we eat - often, to our detriment. Others tend to over index on the dieting hype, allowing the pressure of living up to some dubious notion of health dictate our relationship with food - again, to our detriment.
The real challenge is finding the right way to be food conscious, without letting it ruin or rule our lives. It means asserting agency and finding ways to learn more about what our bodies need and want in order to thrive.
So, let’s thrive.
Key Summary (TL/DR):
Understanding conscious eating
Misinformation, social pressures and aesthetics
How to eat more consciously
Understanding conscious eating
Conscious eating is all about making intentional decisions about the food you eat. This isn’t some blanket thinking either - intentional eating must be geared towards your specific values, habits and intentions. In order to be more intentional about what you eat, you may want to consider the following:
Energy levels: Prioritise eating foods which energise you, and ensure you have enough fuel in the tank to complete your daily activities.
Body composition: Focus on eating food to support a specific body composition goal. For example, if you seek to increase your muscle mass, you may want to increase your protein intake.
Environmentally-friendly foods: Try to eat food that is ethically sourced and produced, in order to support the conservation of your environment.
Conscious eating isn’t just about eating a salad or maintaining some form of specific caloric intake. It’s considering the ways in which what you consume reflect who you are.
Misinformation, social pressures and aesthetics
The explosion of social media, the internet and disaggregated knowledge has given rise to extreme pressure towards conformity and collective thinking. We’ve seen the rise and fall of food trends, which practically ensure that we are perpetually unsure as to what we are supposed to eat like, look like, and feel like.
Such confusion has given rise to:
Body dysmorphia: Many of us are left feeling as though our body is not ‘good enough’. Body dysmorphia is when you are preoccupied with slight or imagined flaws in extremities.
Disordered eating patterns: Whether it be extreme variations of intermittent fasting, refusing to eat at all, or eating every single hour, many of us have very disordered eating patterns that could have long term health implications.
Obsession with diets: Some of us are chronic dieters. We’re too skinny or too fat, and spend time ‘dieting down’ or on a ‘weight gain journey’…in perpetuity.
Demonisation of specific foods: No carbs after 10pm…or ever. No sugar. No JUNK food. No ice cream. No chocolate. No this. No that. All we say to ourselves is no, no, and no.
This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the consequences of misinformation and social pressure. Food should not dominate our lives to this extent.
How to eat more consciously
Conscious eating means enacting your ability to choose. Of course, limitations exist, such as structural inequalities, poverty, inflation, access to food sources. There are privileges afforded to those who are not affected by these real issues, so don’t allow yourself to go into ruin trying to be a perfect, conscious eater.
Realistically, it’s about effort within your specific context and material conditions, to make intentional choices about food.
Here’s how you can start applying some of that thinking:
Increase your knowledge around what is ‘good for you’
You need to find out what is ‘good food’ for you. What effect does specific food have on you and your energy? What are you allergic to? What are you trying to achieve with your body? What are specific health facts you may want to take into consideration?
Typically, prioritising whole foods, high protein and foods rich in micronutrients and fibre is a great start. You can then experiment and figure out what kind of foods might not be so good for your specific body type and composition. You may also want to take into account your total calories, or the amount of exercise/ physical movement you typically perform throughout the day. You’ll need to be eating enough food to fuel your body throughout the day.
Identify and tackle your toxic habits and relationship with food.
Are you prone to comfort eating or binge eating? Or perhaps you avoid eating specific foods? Or, you may find yourself constantly eating foods that lead to lethargy and other bodily issues.
Our food intake can be linked to our psychology, linked to key factors like our environments, our stress levels, our cultures, and even our economic status. When left unchecked and unregulated, these factors can sometimes be negative and influence poor eating behaviours. For instance, food may have been normalised as a coping mechanism for stress, or as a reward after an achievement. Both instances of food intake are toxic.
Some of the practical ways you can address your toxic habits include:
Finding other healthy, fulfilling hobbies: If you are prone to overeating, or maybe obsessing in some way over food, finding other hobbies can take your mind off over-indexing on consumption. Take up something relaxing to do in your free time, or schedule some intentional opportunities to focus on passion projects.
Keeping a food journal: Keeping a journal allows you to log when and why you eat, and means you can be more mindful about what you are choosing to consume. You might find yourself eating often, identifying triggers, or even figuring out that you do not eat as often as you should.
Getting an accountability buddy: Sometimes you need an extra push from someone else. Confide in a friend, someone close to you, a community online/in-person, or an acquaintance that may be able to keep you accountable to your intentional food consumption goals.
Being kind to yourself when you fail: It’s all well and good to set up all of these systems to ensure that you succeed, but failure, in some form, is usually inevitable. Use this knowledge to your advantage, and remember to be kind to yourself when you don’t stick so rigidly to your values.
Change won’t occur overnight, but it starts with the decision to say yes. Say yes, every day, to one thing that’ll help you create a healthy relationship with what you consume.
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That’s all from me this week folks. As ever, if you found this useful, feel free to share Optimise Me with a friend.
Let’s all become better humans.
-RK
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