Conscious eating

I have had some really bad eating patterns lately, and it’s been on my list of things to tackle on a self awareness level for a while now.

The time has arrived!

I have been working through the why, when, where and what I eat to try to make sense of my patterns, and really I’ve just discovered that there isn’t that much of a pattern apart from it all just being senseless!

I’ve recognized that almost all of the time I am eating without thinking first.

It’s not like I don’t know that I am making bad food choices; I know how to cook and prepare healthy meals, I know all about nutrition and what my body needs for fuel and I grew up with a very nutritious diet - largely without junk food, yet I find myself with a serious addiction to eating food that just doesn’t do me much good.

If there is chocolate in the house, and by some miracle it makes it through the night and is still there in the morning… I HAVE to eat it for breakfast. Actually, if there is chocolate anywhere in the house at any time, I find myself drifting to wherever I have hidden it from myself, and methodically getting through gargantuan amounts, sometimes in secret from those living with me. Now THAT rings alarm bells!!!

I’ve been trying to get a breakthrough in this area to put an end to what is largely habitual behaviour, so I have been doing my self-awareness thing of observing my patterns, and I have been asking myself for help with this. What has come to me is simple and to the point. Before ordering something, making something, grabbing something from the kitchen cupboard, I am contemplating “Does this serve me?”

In the first couple of days, more often than not the answer was NO… and I was noticing how often I drifted into the kitchen looking for ‘naughty’ food.

It’s been 4 days since I’ve bought any chocolate and even when one sneaky little block found its way into my trolley on Thursday night, I found it EASY to put it back on the shelf after hearing my question.

I’m a little bemused at what has been a fairly easy transition. I’d expected a real struggle giving up chocolate – just the way it has been every other time I’ve tried. Could it really be so simply solved? That I just need to be conscious in my food choices by asking one YES or NO question before making a decision? I’m hopeful that it is as simple as that, now that I am actually asking and listening to my Self.

It comes back to responsibility for self I believe. We are born with a guidance system built in, but we are taught not to trust it. Society, media and advertising bombard us with and tempt us with millions of different products that rely on us being needy and unconscious in our consumption.

If we stop to think before consuming, whether it is eating food off a plate or buying items off a shelf, we can alter our pattern of being unconscious consumers.

So hopefully in getting over my chocolate addiction, it’s also a step towards me being a more conscious consumer.