We have a lot of strange relationships to the food we eat. And the
food we don't eat. In this recent google hangout
Is
it Possible to be Addicted to Eating Healthy?, perspectives are
shared from individuals about various food/health addictions, including June, who had spent years being vegan and
a raw foodist and even experimenting with 'breatharianism' – the idea
that you can survive almost entirely off of air alone.Now, in simplicity, food is nourishment for the body, but we've gone and complicated or warped this, through developing some strange relationships to food. So, when we take a step back and look at what are the underlying motives for how and what we eat or don't eat, that is where we find the relationships that were the starting point of our decisions. So, like in the google hangout, when June investigated her starting point for having become vegan, for example, what she found was that that decision was actually based in fear, because she'd seen and heard information that said that eating animals is 'bad' and the people who were proponents of various healthy diets looked so 'healthy' and 'glowing' that she wanted to stop eating animals out of fear and the desire to look good and healthy too.
In my life, I also went through some similar relationships to food just in a lesser degree. I went through a brief time of trying to be vegetarian, and a time of experimenting with raw foods, and 'organic' foods. And I found the same thing within my starting point, was that it was actually fear based, based on videos I had watched which said that eating meat was bad for you, or that eating organic foods or raw foods was good for you.
What's interesting about ideas or diet mentalities such as 'veganism' and vegetarianism' or 'raw foodism', is how we can live these as a 'lifestyle', where it becomes like a self definition of 'who we are', where it's based on the information one has come across and the presentation of a certain diet, and it's like we thought 'yeah that sounds so right', and then from there, we decide to try and put ourself and our body into this diet idea. Which is, interestingly, quite backwards, because what we're doing is trying to impose an idea onto our physical that sounded good to us, but yet we really actually have very little effective understanding of how our body functions and operates in any kind of detail. When really you've got to cross-reference things with the physical, and observe the actual physical feedback. The physical body is a complex thing, and diets tend to be presented as 'absolutes', as if the information applies to everyone/will work for everyone, yet there's no way they can take into account each and every person's individual human body, which aren't all exactly the same.
What's so often missing from the information presented out there, is that point of cross-referencing/testing the information for yourself, to see if it actually works for you. And on top of that, what's taken for granted is if one has been eating a certain way for a long time, if you make sudden dramatic changes to your diet it can be quite problematic, and the feedback you get will not be so accurate while the body is going through such extreme changes, until it manages to finally balance things out. So, that is a very important point to take into consideration, that I hardly ever see mentioned/discussed by proponents of various diets.
Like as June mentioned in the google hangout about her experiences with fasting in trying to live the idea of breatharianism, we tend to even ignore the suffering that we are putting our own physical body through. Breatharianism is really a great example of all of this because it is so extreme, and therefore seems a little more obvious, because we really do need food to live and function. So from looking at that example, we can use that to see what we are doing when we take an idea and try to live it, and disregard the actual physical needs or what is actually best for the physical, or even the state of the physical based on it's entire history/life and what it has been through/exposed to or conditions that it has developed, which can all effect how and with what the body requires to be nourished now.
So we'll go up to here for now, and in the next post, I'll continue and share about how, with the tools provided in DIP, I sorted out the relationships I was living toward food/eating to take a more holistic and supportive approach with food as nourishment.
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