February 23, 2023
Reflective nutrition is a phrase I came up with to describe the concept of looking back and discovering your lifelong relationship with food.
I know it sounds like I’m asking a lot of you, and this is not something that happens overnight. But I don’t think you can move forward toward good nutritional health without first looking back through your history.
What kind of eater are you?
Grab and go eater?
Stress eater? Depressed eater? Angry eater?
I won’t mention every situation or mood, but you get the point. If your mood is dictating what you eat, you aren’t paying close attention to meeting your nutritional requirements. Like any other relationship, there needs to be a balance between partners. In this case, you are one partner and food is the other.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, non-food related factors also affect our nutritional health.
Reflective nutrition is a process. A looong process. The goal is to recognize some bad habits developed along the way due to school, work, or other demands on your life. Maybe a previously unrealized part of your history, that never seemed to be a cause of nutritional concern, came to light. This could be something that you have done your entire life, possibly because of old familial habits. These are sometimes hard to recognize because they are so well disguised and ingrained It may be things you grew up doing without thought. This aspect became part of my realization, recognizing old familial habits that were gradually changed over time to meet current ideas of healthy nutrition. Making small changes along the way is the best way to improve your nutritional fitness. Baby steps will make those changes stick because they will become a part of your lifestyle, as long as you stay diligent.
Keep reflecting back and discovering how pieces of your life fit in with the way you view food. And keep journaling these discoveries.
We will keep going back to this point, but my advice for the moment is not to try to change many things at once. If you recognize things that you want to change in your nutritional regime, attack one, maybe two things. Certainly no more than that. Setting goals to eventually tweak or abolish each habit is how your quest for a healthier nutritional life can become reality. Being aware of these habits is an essential part of healthy change.
