A few months ago we were on holiday and the strangest thing happened. First I have to tell you that I had been dieting on and off for a few years… well actually I had been feeling guilty and promising myself to be good with food for a few years but to no avail. I have slowly but surely been gaining 25kg in 12 years.
Yes. 25kg in 12 years. 2kg a year doesn’t seem terrible, especially if you add extreme physical en emotional stress and twin babies but it does make one wonder where you’ll end up and I can’t shake the built in nagging urge in my heart to be a good role model for my 4 year old twins by cultivating good eating habits myself.
What they see in me, they will be!
I’ve come to a point where I’d rather eat what I like and exercise to keep healthy.
So to come back to that holiday. We’ve had so many food depriving holidays that I can’t even count. I have no idea why we feel the need to diet when we are supposed to be having fun but for some or other reason we end up eating junk anyway and always feel guilty about it. So when we had this amazing holiday at Crawfords in the Eastern Cape we were just fed up with trying to diet. Nothing seemed to work and the ones that worked well made us gain twice as much after so we decided to give up and just start to enjoy all food in moderation.
This holiday had three meals a day included in the price so we were going to enjoy whatever we wanted to eat without overdoing anything and oh my how we loved the food! We didn’t deprive ourselves of anything but when we were full, we stopped and when we were not, we ate. Low and behold we each lost 2kg!
Till this day we still talk about that eating-holiday where we actually lost weight. Forward a few months and I spot a book while standing in line at Woolworths called “Living the Healthy Life” by Jessica Sepel.
The moment I read “heal your relationship with food and provide balance in your life” I knew that this was what I was looking for. I knew that there was something my body was trying to figure out and I needed something to guide me on the way. I put it in my trolley without thinking twice and here I am… about to change my life around.
There will be NO before and after post. I am NOT going to weigh myself to see how much I loose, because the whole point of living healthy is enjoying food without looking at the scale.
We are supposed to feel good in our bodies and enjoy the food that surrounds our everyday life by listening to our bodies and to eat what we need without chastising ourselves for eating “bad” food and rather enjoy what we need “for the soul” as Jessica calls it and by listening to what our bodies need after that.
What broke my relationship with food?
By looking at the “what breaks our relationship with food” section in the book I can see that I am an emotional eater. I eat when I’m anxious and when I do, I feel guilt which makes me feel that I am not good enough and that makes me eat.
Get the picture?
Another problem of mine is society’s constant obsessive focus on healthy eating. I can’t eat anywhere anymore without someone commenting on how unhealthy the food is that we are about to eat and it puts constant focus on weight. As Jessica says, this modern approach to healthy eating is good but there’s a line… obsession is never good.
How do we manage our relationship with food?
Jessica has a 80/20 percent approach to maintain daily food intake. 80% of the time she says we should be good and eat the food that serves our bodies, but to make sure to indulge 20% of the time or we will end up being so deprived that we binge. She makes a point of using the word indulge instead of cheat when you eat what you want, because cheating implies that you are doing something wrong, which has a negative effect on your body. Indulging simply means you treat your body with food for the soul and you know you can because 80% of the time you ate well.
Another way is to think light thoughts… There’s a spiritual connection between how heavy we feel and how heavy we are. If we believe we are huge, we will be.
Another thought is chewing… have you ever tried to focus on how you are chewing your food? It becomes exhausting to finely chew your food which indicates how we tend to swallow and chug food down without really thinking about it.
We need to sit and think! No tv or smart phones on the table. No reading (yes I do that) whilst eating, just food, glorious food!
The fact of the matter is that this is a life changer and its not going to just happen. You should be prepared with the right foods on your shelves and have the right recipe’s on hand to make sure you eat healthy 80% of the time. This book has great recipe’s that I’m definitely going to try out and I’ll let you know how it goes!
