Why do I spend so much time thinking about food?

There are few things more all-consuming than obsessive thinking about food, health and the weight and appearance of the body. With both women and men this pre-occupation often over-shadows all other goals, enjoyments and experiences in life.
 
The focus on food and the body fills the same need that alcohol, drugs, gambling and compulsive shopping do: It is a strategy to shut down the inner experience of emptiness, aloneness, disconnection and lack. All of these strategies create in initial feeling of excitement and satisfaction, but this is very short-lived.  You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want, so you keep repeating the same behaviour, in progressively more extreme ways, hoping for a different result.

This preoccupation with finding an exterior solution to an internal problem prevents accessing the real solution, which is on the inside.
 
To get to the root of the problem, it is necessary to address your relationship with your inner Self.  It is in this relationship that the fullness, wholeness, peace and abundance that you are longing for is experienced.  Everything that you have been searching for comes from inside, and you already have it!
 
This is when the journey of healing the obsession starts to become fun! As you deepen your experience of your Inner Self, you can take many practical steps to heal your relationship with food at same time. The healing of your relationship with your Inner Self supports the healing of your relationship with food, and vice versa. At this point you can begin to feel a real loosening of the mental and emotional ties that bound you to compulsive acting out.  Another way to say this is that your focus on your Divine self and your focus on taking loving actions in the world with food dissipate your focus on your drive to fill that emptiness that doesn’t really exist.  When you focus on love, automatically your willingness to suffer and struggle decreases accordingly.  And the more you focus on love, the more you want to, because it is what you have been looking for all along.
 
If you’re ready to end the fight with food and your body, here are 3 things you can do to start to move in your new direction:

1.  Notice how much you talk about food and what a problem it is.  Notice how much you reject the look and feel of your body. Then stop it. Instead, seriously and frequently remind yourself that your relationship with food can bring you back to the memory of who you are in truth.  This is its real purpose……and that’s your journey, so why not embrace it?
2.  Find a spiritual practice you can do and do it every day.  Set a specific time to do it and an amount of time to do it that you are able to commit to.  Do it consistently, as if your life depends on it, because certainly the quality of it does.  Watch how it starts to expand your life.  Here are a few practices: meditation, prayers, keeping a gratitude journal, practicing observing your thoughts, or doing 3x 6-step processes a day, journaling about your day from the perspective of a neutral observer.
3. And on a food level, start by giving yourself permission to eat whatever it is you are eating.  Extend love to yourself and your food by eating it slowly and putting it down between each bite.  Treat yourself as if you have a right to be here, a right to eat and a right to enjoy what you are eating.  Shame perpetuates more painful behaviour and Love heals it.

 
Practice these steps and see how you like what happens!
 
Love,
 
Dawn