Why & How you eat

On this page I am going to provide you with some information to help improve your Health Score numbers focusing on the section ‘Why & How you eat’.

Why we eat

Food & The Body

Food provides the basic nutritional components needed for us to function such as proteins, fats and carbohydrates, (which in turn provide calories to enable us to make energy). It also provides micronutrients in the form of vitamins and minerals as well as phytonutrients, (these are like chemical messengers that can have profound impacts on our health).



Ultimately food provides the building blocks and information for life to exist. Understanding how food impacts your body can ultimately help you make more conscious decisions about foods that are more supportive of your health and perhaps physique goals.

If you are interested in learning more, I discuss the relationship between food and the body in more detail in this article.

Food, Emotions & Connection

Food can impact us in many ways, and we can make food choices for many reasons. What is clear is that there is a strong emotional and social connection to food.

In clinical practice I find that many people have the knowledge of what food to eat to support their health, or at least have a pretty good understanding. However, their nutrition choices don’t always reflect that knowledge.

In truth, food is not just about understanding what we should eat, it is also about appreciating the connection between nutrition, our thoughts and emotions and social interactions.

I begin to explore this emotional connection and why it influences behaviour as well as bringing awareness to the social role that food plays in this article. It also contains a couple of interesting talks on breaking habits and how we can get caught in a pleasure trap.

Creating balance and flexibility

In the following article below, I provide some tips so that you can start to explore your relationship with food. Observation and awareness are the first step in creating lasting behaviour change. I explore the use of a food, symptoms and emotions diary to help you engage with your true relationship to the food choices that you make.

I also discuss why I don’t typically write food plans for people and why it is important to be flexible at times. I have no issue with planning out your food, but I believe that is something for you to do and not me. My role is guidance, education and support, this is not a dictatorship!

Please read Why We Eat: Exploring your relationship with food, finding balance & flexibility.

How we eat

Unbeknown to many, how we eat (including our relationship with food), plays a significant role in optimising health.

With our fast-paced lifestyles that have us striving for convenience, we often find ourselves not chewing properly, skipping meals, eating whilst working, driving, watching TV, standing or rushing out the door to catch the next train.

Many of us pay little attention to how we eat, and we’re often disconnected from the link between the food in front of us and our well-being.

In the past, mealtimes were seen as a sacred occasion. A time to reflect, give thanks, socialise and nourish the body. Yet nowadays, eating is often considered somewhat of a disruption to our current way of living. The truth is that how we eat contributes to the myriad of health challenges we’re currently faced with.

Below are 3 more articles that I recommend you read:

• Stress, emotions and mindless eating
• Understanding hunger
• The importance of mindful eating

My forthcoming book Sleep, Eat, Move, Breathe, Repeat, it covers my five foundations of optimal health:

• Sleep – All things sleep
• Eat – How, Why, What & When you eat
• Move – Exercise & daily movement
• Breathe – Impacts of stress, solutions, mindfulness etc
• Repeat – Behaviour change, motivating change, scheduling, long term success

When it comes to ‘Eat’, I will be discussing all things why, how, when and what we eat.

For ‘Why We Eat’, I go into detail about the physiological, psychological and social roles of food and the relationships we have developed with food and what we can do to improve our relationship to the foods that we eat, and to some degree the relationships that we have with ourselves around food.

How we eat relates to what we do around mealtime, our state of mind, the environment we find ourselves in when eating, how we approach meal time and how this can impact the choices that we make and also how well our body is able to process that food.

Additional Resources

Books

• Mindless Eating
• Eating Mindfully
• The Zen of eating
• How to eat
• Mindful Eating

Articles

• Are you using foods to self-sooth?
• My Top 10 Mindful Eating Tips from Thich Nhat Hanh
• Understanding your hunger meditation practice

Mindfulness Practice