A Tiny Word, Unburdened
Nourishing ourselves for real – By Stacey Huget
How could something as basic as nourishing ourselves be so emotionally complicated?
For some of us, it may have been that way all along. As children, endless offers of snacks and meals might have been meant as an expression of love – but foisted on us with more than a little aggression. The picky among us might have been guilted into ‘cleaning up our plates’ amidst frightening images of starving Ethiopian children. For those whose baby fat lingered a little too long for their ‘thinspired’ parents, eating might have been shameful mouthfuls darkened by scornful glances. For still others, eating might have been a furtive affair amidst confusing scenes of rage, abuse, or trauma.
Today, for many adults, eating remains a slightly dangerous act, deeply confusing.
Certainly, because we all have to do it, eating offers up an open season to advertisers and food marketers. No culture before us has ever been inundated the way we are with irresistible images of glossy, mouthwatering solutions to all of our problems. Forget hunger and nourishment, food is happiness, belonging, excitement.
Accompanying this deluge is a steady stream of spurious health claims as to what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for us to eat – each in turn debunked, replaced, and recycled. Little wonder we churn through one after another after another disappointing diets. Little wonder we obsess over our food choices, that dreaded phrase “you are what you eat” hanging over us like some existential cleaver.
And while it’s laudable to care about the impact of food production on our planet and to choose sustainably, we’ve begun to choke on the morality of our food choices. Are we worried more for the planet or about what our choices say about us, and how others might judge us?
And all the while, the fear of enjoying eating too much hangs over us – every time we look at ourselves in the mirror. Our poor, harangued bodies reflecting back our needless guilt or pious pride: the evidence of over-indulgence or stoic deprivation. For all the world to see.
No culture before us has ever been inundated the way we are with irresistible images of glossy, mouthwatering solutions to all of our problems. Forget hunger and nourishment, food is happiness, belonging, excitement.
Or so our food marketing industry and our diet-crazed culture of fat-shaming, body-image hyper-consciousness, and perfection-for-profit advertising would have us believe.
This sick, diet-crazed culture is partially to blame for rising rates of eating disorders, that most misunderstood mental health issue. Over one million Canadians – from all ages, genders, and (yes) body types – are affected by anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, and other eating disorders. Beyond being deadly, eating disorders rob the afflicted of full lives: many of them experience profound shame, fear, and isolation – desperate and without hope. And while recovery is possible, it isn’t easy. Deconstructing deeply-rooted and unhelpful beliefs and thought patterns, resolving unaddressed trauma, or learning to regulate overwhelming emotions is hard work and takes incredible courage.
All that said, there’s an important difference between eating disorders and the more prevalent hypervigilant angst so many of the rest of us experience: the skipping of meals, the picking at food, the faddish diets, the occasional guilt-ridden bingeing.
One is a mental health issue and the other is a choice.
We are choosing to disconnect from our bodies, to experience our own hunger as inconvenient, unsettling, anxiety provoking.
We are choosing to be swayed by slick advertising, by a thousand corporate bottom lines.
We are choosing to imbue food with a power over us that it simply doesn’t have.
And for what?
Perhaps our anxiety around eating is not really about eating or about food at all, but about what’s missing in our lives. We’ve become so alienated – from our bodies, from deep connection, from our sense of truly thriving in this world – that we’re searching for something to make our pain and fear and anger go away.
The nourishment we all crave is for love and safety, for being seen and heard and understood in the world.
We’re just looking in the wrong place.
Because we can’t ‘eat’ our way there.
Perhaps our anxiety around eating is not really about eating or food at all, but about what’s missing in our lives. We’ve become so alienated — from our bodies, from deep connection, from our sense of truly thriving in this world — that we’re searching for something to make our pain and fear and anger go away.
What we can do is eat to simply feed our bodies – to sustain us as we create those other things for ourselves.
So yes, we can choose to:
- Have our hunger, recognizing it as a natural and necessary part of life.
- Make peace with food – the only thing that satisfies our hunger, that nourishes our body, that keeps us vital and alive.
- Stop vigorously policing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, and accept that the real enemy of wellness is rigid black-and-white thinking.
- Reject ‘dieting’ for the totally ineffective trap that it is: deprivation leading to craving – leading to loss of control – leading to overeating – leading to deprivation – leading to yet another spin through the same, endless, soul-sucking cycle.
- Embrace fullness after eating as what we’re supposed to feel and instead of trying to hit some imaginary sweet spot of “permissible” fullness, just listen to what our bodies tell us it is.
- Enjoy the satisfaction and pleasure eating brings, not as a ‘sin’ but as one of the great things in life to which we’re all entitled.
- Recognize the difference between being hungry for love or approval or belonging or relief from the stresses of the world – and being hungry for food.
- Respect our bodies as the vessels for our life that they are.
- Honor our health – not just how we eat, but how we breathe and sleep and move and dream and connect.
Wellness in a sick society is not easy. Because whatever our anxieties – be they from our families, from marketing, from our own lost sense of self – whole industries have risen up to exploit them.
For those of us who are able to choose wellness, do so. For those of us for whom choice is not the issue, muster the courage to ask for help. And for anyone as outraged as I am at how it all went so wrong, fight for change.
So enough of our diet-crazed culture, our glamorous food marketing deceit, our body-image hyper-consciousness.
Enough of this pain and angst.
Let us eat.