On Conscious Cravings and why food isn’t the enemy.

You’ve been lied to.

There’s a misleading belief paradigm that runs rampant in the food industry.
It peeks at you through profit-driven food advertising.
It sneaks its way in through the backdoor while you’re distracted reading the nutrition panel on your yoghurt tub.

It has a fancy name, to make it sound more solid.

Nutritionism is a concept based in the belief that only the scientifically identified components in a food, are what gives any value to the food itself.

In short, it hopes you’ll stress about the amount of vitamin C in an orange rather than being pleased with yourself for making a good, whole food choice.

But isn’t that what nutrition is, you ask? Nah. Not really.

Nutritionism only has some merit if we looking at food as pure fuel and nothing more. Food is more than the mere sum of its nutrients, and we know there is much more to nourishment than meets the eye.

Nutritionism causes mental havoc for those not scientifically versed by suggesting that industry giants know what’s better for you than you do. It’s a clear snatching of power, a doubt driver, ensuring consumers look to so-called experts rather than listening to themselves.

Science is a star at simplifying concepts into more readily digestible parts, but if something is unquantifiable by self-made scientific standards it gets tossed into the too hard basket. Food cravings are mistakenly viewed as a nutritional deficiency or a personal weakness. Cravings are multi-layered messengers carting a plethora of precious information, laden with insights from the inside.

While it’s true that food cravings can have a physiological basis, restoring homeostatic balance at the cellular level, they also have an equally important emotional and spiritual connection.

But we can’t see emotions under a microscope or measure our spirituality on a scale, and when something is hard to see it’s easier to suppress, right? Perhaps that’s why we eat our feelings and drown our sorrows.

I’m calling bullshit on food being the enemy. Pointing the finger at failed diet attempts is a cop-out. Controlling cravings is an erroneous ideal, another way the weight loss industry sets you up for failure and keeps you eating out of their hand.

Cravings are natural. We can’t control them, but we can get a grip on how we react to them. The very idea that there is something within us that we need to contend with reinforces the half-baked idea we are separate from our bodies.

This way of thinking, that you need to tame a stray part of yourself, further damages our relationship with ourselves. And we don’t need more convincing. 85% of us are not showing up for our lives, too ashamed of how we look to even socialize. We need to work with our bodies, make peace with parts we’ve been ignoring and start living wholly and harmoniously.

[Tweet “Food cravings are not created equal, most are a temporary fix to feel the way you want to feel right now.”]

Here’s what you really crave:

You crave to feel fulfilled in your life, but filling your stomach is easier.
You crave to quiet the noise in your head that leads to feelings that you’d rather not feel.
You crave to temporarily forget that this is your real life, and that you created it and that you’re not totally rapt about it right now.
You crave to black out the aching and longing for something that you keep telling yourself you don’t deserve.

Run through these and answer truthfully for yourself:

I eat when I’m stressed out or feel overwhelmed.
I eat when I’m sad, bored and lonely.
I eat when I don’t get my way, can’t clearly communicate or feel misunderstood.
I eat when I can’t make a decision.
I eat when I feel bad about myself.
I eat because I want to change but don’t know where to start.
I eat because I wish I looked different/felt different/was different.

Which can you relate to? These statements are the kindling fuelling the fire behind food addictions and cravings. Can you see that your insatiable hunger for a specific food, flavor or texture is really just an internal signal that you’re blindly deflecting onto food?

So let’s talk about weight and food cravings.

Indulging cravings brings instant gratification. When you digest fats and sugars you naturally produce an opioid byproduct, the same chemical compound found in heroin and cocaine. These opioids travel the same neural pathways as heroin and cocaine and keep you coming back for more. Here is where food addiction kicks in. Apart from being temporarily satisfied, indulging your cravings without inner inquiry propels addictive food behaviours and encourages weight gain. The weight becomes a scapegoat, an external focus to divert from inner turmoil.

For some, it provides another layer of excuse:

‘When I lose weight I’ll be happy’
‘When I lose weight I’ll start going out again’
‘When I lose weight I’ll buy myself nice clothes’
‘When I lose weight I’ll start doing aerobics classes’ – said to me by a client.

Here’s what those phrases really mean: ‘When I lose weight, I’ll start loving myself’.
As is being good to ourselves is conditional, a reward for being happy with our reflection.

Weight can absolutely serves as a distraction and your life will continue on the way it always has unless you start inquiring inwards. As overused as this phrase is: change truly is an inside job.

So how do you tune into food cravings?

By taking stock of where you’re at in every facet of your life.
Look at your career, your relationship, your health, your friendships, your dreams.
Where are you satisfied? Where do you want more?

Meet your feelings where they are.
Sit with them. Don’t stifle them with a trip to the fridge.

+ Remember that your reality is a perfect energetic match of your thoughts and feelings. What you secretly say, think and feel in private, you show in public.

+ Realize that food is the fastest way to transport yourself out of your current state of mind into a fleeting, false sense of comfort, but it’s not the only way.

+ Know this: ultimately we’re scared of our light, in both the literal and spiritual sense.

Who would you be without the weight you’ve always carried?
How would your newfound confidence affect your relationships?
What will you talk about with the people who resent you for changing?

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Marianne Williamson.

+ Got a particular food craving that you just can’t shake?

Share it with me in the comments. Let’s see if we can shed some light on it together.x