“The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you that you love, well, that’s just fabulous.” – Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City
When Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw said your most challenging and significant relationship is with yourself, she was only half right. Men come and go, best friends sometimes become enemies, and jobs don’t always live up to their end of the bargain, but your relationship with what’s on your plate is constant and unavoidable.
Just as you can tell a lot about a woman by her choice in a romantic partner, what she eats, or doesn’t eat for that matter, is equally telling. A diet in which fried chicken, buffalo wings, and pizza are staples is not only reflected in the size of our waistlines but also in our approach to life.
Juliet A. Boghossian, behavioral food expert and founder of the food behavior research firm Food-ology, writes on her website, “How we act in and around food represents who we are – our character, our motivations, our strengths, and fears – ultimately, how we think and why we do the things we do.”
If you opt for convenience and taste over health, you’re more likely to go for the quick fix in life – the convenient yet emotionally unavailable boyfriend or the job that pays well but leaves you feeling like an emotional corpse. How you do one thing is sure to spill over to other areas of your life.
Food is love or can promptly take its place when your seeming Prince Charming turns out to be another frog looking for a come-up. As a woman in her late thirties with a dating history that reads like a Danielle Steel and Stephen King mash-up novel, I have loved a lot.
I have loved so much that I have eaten an entire Entenmann’s chocolate fudge cake in one sitting. Then there was the kind of love that kept me up at night – and not in a good way. It started with shoveling sleeves of Oreo cookies down my throat at one o’clock in the morning and progressed to eating two to three plates of fried chicken and potato salad. I’d find myself exhausted and sick the morning after. This love hangover wasn’t budging and continued for nearly a year.
Given my family history of diabetes and high blood pressure, my “food is love” philosophy was going to kill me. A week before my uncle’s 38th birthday, he died due to a massive heart attack. Three additional family members with already severed limbs passed away from diabetes shortly after. It was time to make a change, and like every other woman who has found herself in an internal scuffle, I prayed.
For the record, this wasn’t my first time. I’ve had frequent conversations with God and murmured a prayer or two. Prayers that go something like this: “Thank you, God, for this food. Please watch over my family and friends. And God, if you have a second to spare, can you make my ex mysteriously disappear?”
This time was different. I only had one request: to become the strongest version of myself. Six months later, I was logging 19 miles on the running track in one week, lifting weights six days a week, and swapping out fried chicken and ribs for chicken breast, spinach, and quinoa. During this time, I also began reading the Bible every day. Instead of relying on nutrition or fitness experts for the latest trends, God became my fitness coach and confidante.
In Philippians 1:29, the Bible states that to remain in the flesh or not to practice physical discipline only makes you more needy. I knew if I was going to transform my eating habits, I would have to be more disciplined in what I allowed myself to be around. Cakes, cookies, and fried foods were no longer allowed in my apartment, and I temporarily cut out eating out at restaurants until I could strengthen my self-control. I even made my then-boyfriend keep junk food in his car.
It took three months of consistent, clean eating to get to the point where I wasn’t tempted to inhale a slab of ribs every time I went out to eat. Clean eating is an act of self-care. Every time you choose a salad over a greasy cheeseburger or the gym over a binge session, your self-love increases. As a result, you’ll start to demand more out of life and relationships, including the one with yourself.
Your relationship with food shows up on your plate, in your bedroom, in your bank account, and, more importantly, on your body. Throughout your life, you’ll have more than one job and great love; however, you only get one body. If you don’t treat it like a temple, how can you expect anyone else to?
While my obsession with food hasn’t wavered, how I express it has changed altogether. I use food to nourish rather than comfort. My “food is love” philosophy has evolved into “food is self-love.”