Day Two Hundred and Fifty Eight!!!!!

Food and Your Blind Spots
There are three main reasons for conflict with food,

1. Misunderstandings

Misunderstandings are based in just not ‘getting’ what it is that your food is composed of. Being confused because you do not have a label to read or you make an assumption about what your food is composed of.


2.   Disagreements 
Having conflict about what it is that you eat causes internal upset. If you really “feel” like you “should” be able to eat it, then you have a disagreement with your core values. 


3.   Personal Identity
Your personal identity is to do with your personality which includes your values, how you look at the world, how you look at food. If you are not in agreement with yourself, you won’t be in agreement with how you eat.


There are also three main components to having a healthy food environment. The first is that you need a supportive environment for the way in which you live your life. That means that you have the food around you that you need, that supports your food goals. The second is that you need to have the respect of others in your environment as well as the respect of your diet choices and respect of your own self identity. The third is that you need to have an engagement with what you are determined to do. You can say all you want, but it is the actions that speak louder than words. 


Based on my Intro to Psychology Book, the definition of personality is “personality is a pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that distinguishes one person from another and that persists overtime and in situations.” So how do we break the unhealthy eating cycle? The unhealthy eating cycle looks like this;
First there is your personality. 
Then, when you link into bad feelings and thoughts and/or events you become an unhappy person. 
An unhappy person has the tendency to engage in unhealthy personal practices, meaning that you are no longer focussed on a healthy self which in turn,
Leads to a decreased engagement with your healthy lifestyle practices. 
At this point stress starts to magnify everything and the stress has impact on your personal identity.


To break this unhealthy eating cycle you need to be able to gain in self-awareness of who it is that you are, personality wise. Our personal identity is our personal expression, it can be our greatest strength and it can also have the potential to be our greatest liability.


Understanding our own personality means that we have our own unique persistent set of motivators. We need a solid core of our own understanding to be prepared to food, and to respond appropriately. So here is a great opportunity to sit down and describe yourself and your relation to food, then my suggestion is that you sit down and write out how those close to you would describe you, and then find it out by asking. See if what you have written is aligned or if there are any discrepancies. 


There are four different ways in which we have a tendency to process, we process cognitively, meaning that we are mostly in our head. Dr. Laurie calls this being ‘heady’ or cognitive processor. Next are heart based processors. Heart based processors have a tendency to be feeling based people. Next, are gut processors, people who are gut processors listen to their sixth sense, they feel it in their gut. Then there are people who are based in action, these are the people who process by doing.


We all process in these different and various ways. However, we all have a preference, a dominance to how we have a tendency to process as our core sense of self. Tonight I am going to do my homework and you do yours! Then we will meet again tomorrow and I will let you know what I find out about who I am, or who I think I am.