Why Getting Healthy Isn’t As Simple As Eating Healthy
If only losing those extra pounds, getting rid of the bloating, reducing your pain and sleeping like a rock were only a matter of eating more kale. I mean, life would be so much easier right?!
While we all understand that vegetables are healthy and fast food is not, we still struggle to eat foods in favour of our health. I’ve heard everything from it’s an issue of taste, or texture or perhaps even convenience. Some will say that money is the obstacle, but truthfully in many cases it is a case of priorities. Now before I lose you, there is no doubt that sure eating healthy requires an investment more than a $2 box of mac and cheese, but it is more do-able than we may think.
So what is really the obstacle?
Often, it’s the emotions. We know what we 'should' be eating, but we can't get ourselves to eat it, why? This is why I refer to myself as the hybrid nutritionist. If the world simply needed nutritionists to go around and tell people to eat more vegetables, than my job would be a hell of a lot easier and we would all be healthy.
The truth is it isn’t that simple. We are emotional beings and our emotions play into our food choices, which is why in order to heal the body we must heal the emotions. This is where the term emotional eater was born.
Signs you have an emotional blockage
You feel stuck and don’t know the way out
You find yourself blaming others
You struggle to stay committed to a plan or goal
You have endless excuses as to why you can’t get healthy
You judge, resent or compare others who are healthy
You replay past events over and over again
You dwell on how you look and how your close fit
You refuse to be vulnerable and be honest with yourself and others
You avoid eating healthy because you are scared to fail or “fall off the wagon”
You are busy fixing and helping everyone around you
You want someone else to fix it for you
You expect your partner or friend to join you in getting healthy
You feel like a victim to your health or diagnosis
You sneak food or secretly eat behind closed doors
You binge eat
You get upset, defensive or angry when people question what you are eating
You experience anxiety
Emotional blocks are rooted in past experiences that are now surfacing today through people, places and things that bring a trigger (reaction or feeling). In order to work through these blockages you must first become aware that they exist so that you can work to resolve them.
An example of this is an individual may have grown up with parents that had more emphasis on commenting on all the places that the child could have improved or made a better effort, with little recognition of what was accomplished. While intentions may have been pure, the focus was always to be better next time leaving the child feeling as though they always fell short or weren't good enough.
Another example is perhaps as a child the parent always made comments on how much was being eaten and began restricting food consumption to help manage weight. While again this is out of concern for the child, the child interprets it as they are over weight and they must restrict their food.
This programming gets downloaded and begins to affect us as we grow into adulthood.
Typically these experiences manifest themselves into self sabbotage. The unconscious thought could be “I am not good enough, therefore I am not good enough to be healthy, I am not good enough to get promoted, I am not good enough for this relationship, etc.” So the belief creates their behavious and that becomes their reality. If we don't believe we are good enough or deserving to be healthy that means we must self sabbotage and eat unhealthy.
From a conscious perspective this seems, irrational and you might even be thinking, "who would do that to themselves?" Let me just tell you, just about everybody is self sabbotaging in some way and absolutely every one has pieces of themselves worth healing. The first step is becoming conscious.
So as you continue to embark on your journey to health, I encourage you to explore the emotional blocks that might be holding you back from living freely.
