Mindful Eating

Today’s blog is the last of the Body Positivity Series, where I’ve been talking about ways to revise your self-image to a confident loving and compassionate one for greater positive thinking about self and others.

For this final episode in the series, I feel called to cover issues related to eating, food, and weight because this is how body negativity is often expressed.

Key Topics Include:

Uncover the main underlying components of issues related to food, eating and weight I most frequently see in my clinical practice.
Learn ways to access mindful eating behaviours to create a healthy relationship with food.
Experience healing across the Body Matrix (physical, emotional, energetic, ancestral and spiritual) with Consciousness Medicine.

I could do a whole podcast series on the relationship with food and eating since it is a complex and deeply rooted issue. For now, to get us started I’m going to cover the main underlying components of issues involving food, eating and weight that I most frequently see in my clinical practice. These are the things I focus on treating to assist people to create a healthy relationship not only with food but with themselves, others and the world.

When I’m working with this with clients, I always have in mind that issues with food are not really about food at all. The real issue is much more deeply rooted than that, and we must appreciate this for true healing to be achieved. Issues with food can be a sign of energetic disturbances, physical imbalances, repressed emotions, ancestral entanglements, and a lack of life force energy. This is what makes Consciousness Medicine an effective tool for treatment and I’ll cover how to work with each element of the Body Matrix to heal your relationship with food in this episode.

Before I get into how to heal your relationship with food to benefit a body-positive mindset, let me talk about what I mean when I say food issues. It is a broad category and can range from more serious things like eating disorders, being significantly over- or under-weight, food addictions, and body dysmorphia to more minor cases like poor dietary choices, overindulgence, fixation on weight or chronic dieting.

As a naturopath, I know that food is the quickest and easiest change we can make to increase physical and mental health and well-being. Yet in my experience, it can be the most difficult for people to actually put in place, especially for the long term. This is because of the interrelated issues that go hand in hand with such a primal instinct as eating.

We all need to eat (unless you’re a breatharian who lives off prana alone) so healing issues related to food present a unique challenge of how we release unhealthy patterns and install new strategies to support healthy eating and body image. It takes knowledge, motivation, and self-love. It does not, however, take willpower, which may be good news to some who struggle with self-discipline.

The reason for this is that willpower creates an inner conflict between good and bad. What you should do versus what you shouldn’t. When there is inner conflict we can never fully heal from an issue. True and lasting healing comes from inner harmony, balance and peace. Together with non-judgement. In truth, it is these inner conflicts that keep issues alive, by our own hands. The good news is that if we are on both sides of the conflict then a resolution is completely within our power to achieve.

Inner conflict between the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind is the most common dynamic underneath the complex, deeply rooted and challenging issues to release.

For example, your conscious mind says ‘I will eat healthily’ but the patterning in your subconscious mind says differently, with things like ‘If I lose weight I will not be safe, since I need extra weight for protection from the world.’ “If I gain weight I will be out of control, unsafe and disempowered.’ ‘I do not deserve to have what I want, and eating healthily is one of those things’. Can you see that inner conflict? Addressing this is a powerful tool to help release what holds us back and manifest what we want.

95 % of what we do, think and feel comes from our subconscious mind and 5 % from the conscious mind, when these two get into an internal conflict, who do you think is going to win? Yep, you got it right, the 95% stakeholder will win every time of the 5% one. This is why willpower is not an effective strategy because it is a conscious mind activity and cannot win over the strength of the other 95% of our subconscious patterning. This is how we get so stuck sometimes where we can have a clear intention and work at achieving the goal but only have 5% of our self-empowerment available to achieve it.

Luckily, the modalities included in Consciousness Medicine address these subconscious patterns very effectively, to revise them to be more in line with your conscious intentions. Alignment between our subconscious and conscious minds is a main success factor for manifestation.

We get held back by these subconscious patterns for a few reasons. Mainly because it was developed in an effort to keep that younger version of you safe, protected and sane. And to let go of them triggers alarm bells of losing safety. These subconscious patterns also keep us loyal to ancestral suffering by ensuring our belonging to the system, which is needed for survival.

So rather than getting frustrated at your subconscious mind for holding you back, take a moment to appreciate its greater purpose which is to keep you safe, and alive and make sense of the world. This is the first step in releasing the inner conflict between the conscious and the subconscious. To realise both sides are on the same team. Team You. As the two sides find common ground, the inner conflict can be released and the solution can now be supercharged by the two aspects working together instead of against. This is foundational self-empowerment.

And now let’s begin exploring food, weight and self-image across the body matrix so that you can truly heal your relationship with food in an empowered and long-lasting way.

We often think of food, eating, and weight only from the physical perspective. And in truth, it does play an important part in the issue but certainly is not the whole picture. It is a great place to start repatterning old behaviours, so let’s start there, from the physical body element of the body matrix.

How and what we feed our physical body temple with is key to how well it functions. When we can fully honour our body temple, with compassion self-love and devotion it becomes easier to make healthy choices that result in a healthier physique and greater body positivity.

I want to talk here about dieting since it is often the go-to for people wanting to heal their relationship with food. If it is done in a way that teaches healthy habits that are aligned with realistic lifestyle changes then it can work. But if it involves severe restrictions on caloric intake, food types or ways that are difficult to integrate into one’s lifestyle the best one can hope for is short-term success, if at all.

The main problem with dieting as it creates an internal conflict over good food and bad food. Or good eating behaviours and bad eating behaviours. As I talked about earlier, if there is inner conflict, true healing can never be achieved.

In addition to this good eating, bad eating judgement state ignites the wanting for what we cannot have. If you take cake off the menu, for example, this can create a greater desire for it. Which will ultimately end in the failure of the diet plan that excludes foods. It may sound counterintuitive, but the way past this is to be able to allow all foods to be on the menu, without judgement. And then you’re allowed to eat whatever you want. The key is to be able to make choices based on consequences for action while staying mindful in carrying out the action. For example, if you want a food, but know it will not benefit your waistline you have now created an inner conflict. If you stop and assess the negative consequences for the action of eating that food – expanding waistline, sugar hangover, clogged arteries – this can often override the desire to seek positivity in eating that food at the moment.

This is the first step, to keep all foods as allowable with a conscious decision related to the consequences for the action of consuming it. From there, if there is a part that says “Yes! I want to eat this. I don’t care about how I’ll feel tomorrow, I just want to feel better now”. Then allow yourself the indulgence but from a compassionate and mindful place is the way forward. Compassion for the part that needs comfort and eating from a place of the full presence of being, mindfully. Staying present while eating this comfort food will allow you to eat less of it since you will become aware of when the desiring part is satisfied, which may be long before the entire thing is finished. I’ve worked with many people using this approach and have seen people lose weight or stop consuming unhealthy foods.

From the energy body perspective, it’s important to note that what you consume has an energetic signature that comes along with it. Our ability to gain greater life force energy exists with every bite we take, if the food we eat has vibrance. Processed food, for example, has very little life force energy compared to fresh, locally sourced ingredients. We can fill our existential or life force tank to heal our energy body by eating foods with a clear, high vibration. The more life force energy we have access to the easier it is to heal from old patterns that hold us back.

You can supercharge the effect of this by taking a moment before you eat to give thanks to all those who contributed to bringing this to your plate. By doing this you can also track how many steps your food has taken to get to you. The fewer steps, the more life force energy it will contain. This is one of the reasons I like to grow my own food. Because I have known the food on my plate since it’s been a seed in a packet. And I have given it loving energy the whole way through, which brings even more vibrancy and nutrition to it when it gets to my plate.

From the emotional body perspective, food is often used as a kind of medicine to help ease difficult emotional states. Where cravings hit at times of emotional overwhelm and food becomes a comfort in times of heightened emotions or even boredom. Treating the emotions associated with food and eating involves looking at the relationship with food in childhood and even while in the womb. Our first relationship with food is between us and our mothers, in the womb and after birth with breastfeeding, if that was available to you. The circumstances around feeding as a baby can cause early imprints that can be carried throughout a lifetime.

Other places I find food imprints happening are related to the circumstances of the family dinner table. For example, was it a happy and supporting experience or was it a source of conflict and stress? Parental attitudes around weight are also common imprints I find when working with food issues. For example, if a parent was always criticizing or watching the child’s weight this will have a significant impact on self-image. Healing these issues by releasing old childhood conditioning is needed to restore your ability to have a healthy body image and relationship with food.

Ancestrally food issues can be traced back to ancestors who may have had difficulties feeding their families (famine times for example), or who lived in times when food was rationed, due to war for example. Or those who were starved in the holocaust or other historical tragedies. If your ancestors struggled with getting food and died of starvation or malnutrition then you will end up with food issues. The ancestral issues related to food or weight can also be associated with the deep emotional burden that ancestral entanglements bring. Releasing ancestral entanglements, using Family Constellation work, is an effective way to relieve the emotional burden we carry for our ancestral lineage, making emotions more manageable. Eating disorders are deeply rooted in ancestral entanglements as well since it is a big source of suffering and in more severe, life-threatening cases, the way that a person will try to give their life in order to heal the family soul.

Addictions involving food are a spiritual crisis as all addictions are. Seeking the euphoria of communing with spirit with food. Since we need to eat to survive abstinence-based programs won’t work, but 12-step programs that offer guidance, structure and support while connecting with a higher power will assist in healing the fractures of the spirit that lead to addiction.

So these are a few examples of how a whole-person healing approach such as the kind Consciousness Medicine offers is necessary to bring forward effective deep and lasting change to heal your relationship with food, create a healthy self-image and greater body positivity.

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