Every
person has a relationship with food. Each
individual is unique in regard to his or her personal connection to food and
everyone has their own story.
The
relationship that a person has with food starts long before even their most
distant memory can take them back into their childhood. A baby’s brain is starting to develop and
create pathways related to food from the very first time the mother feeds
them. For many years to come following
that first feeding a child is given food by the caregiver and these pathways
strengthen in the brain. By the first
time a child actually makes a food decision completely by themselves, there have
been years of previous behavior and conditioning that will influence that
decision. A child that has been fed
nutrient dense and natural foods will most likely make different decisions than
an individual that was raised eating highly processed, highly palatable foods.
This
is an important concept to consider, because it can help to remove some of the
burden a person may feel when dealing with his or her own relationship to food. The fact of the matter is that individuals do
not wake up one morning struggling with food addiction or in a dangerous place
with food, but rather reach that situation through many years of
conditioning. This is one of the reasons
that recovering from eating disorders and food addiction is difficult, and in
some cases can be trickier than even treating substance abuse problems.
As
an individual eats the highly processed, highly refined foods that are
commonplace in today’s food environment, they excite the areas of the brain
that produce pleasure. Over the years,
individuals often times start to seek out food for the sole purpose of pleasure
or as a way of changing their mood, much in the same way that a drug user
would.
For
an individual in recovery, an important shift in thinking with regard to food
is a change from considering it solely as a source of personal pleasure to
thinking of it as a source of fuel and energy.
Through years of conditioning and the intake of highly processed foods,
it is common for individuals to stop thinking of food as a source of nutrients
and how it will effect them in the long term, and only focusing on the instant
gratification and how it will make them feel in that one brief moment.
One
very important aspect of healthy recovery from substance abuse or eating
disorders is the ability to look farther down the road and see how choices that
are made today will impact things in the future. For many people in recovery, this is a new
concept, and it is a far cry from their self-serving and shortsighted behavior
of the past. This way of thinking is not
only beneficial in terms of abstinence from chemicals or behaviors associated
with eating disorders, but also in starting to build a new relationship with
food altogether. By shifting a person’s
thoughts away from foods that make them feel good in the moment, and focusing
on making choices that will benefit them in the long term, new behaviors can be
learned and new pathways in the brain can begin to emerge.
Eating
delicious food is one of life’s great joys and can bring an individual a great
amount of pleasure. Food should be
enjoyed, but the problem arises when a person only considers the pleasure of
the food without considering the impact.
On the road to recovery, if the thoughts surrounding food can shift from
those of pleasure exclusively to those that include the idea of food as fuel
and energy, an individual has started to make some important changes.
Every
choice a person makes has an impact. By
expanding one’s vision from one that is small and micro focused, to one that is
larger and paints a bigger picture, a person has more of a chance to succeed in
recovery.
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