I’ve recently watched the movie, The Hunger Games – where, in one world, excess exists and the other depravation – and there is no middle ground.
Are we playing a game with food at every turn? If so, does the body always lose when we are extreme with food?
When was the last time you actually felt hungry? Eating is obviously essential to our survival, but nowadays we don’t have to get it with a bow and arrow. Though sometimes the market on a Saturday morning feels like a battle field!
I’m sat here now on a Sunday morning having just returned from a walk and done my stretched and weights. My tummy is rumbling a little and I’m pondering the connection I’ve just made with my body and how that needs nurturing and building.
Consistency with my connection to myself is something that has been a challenge for me. I connect deeply and return to myself quickly. I have chosen not to build that in my body to have as a reference point or marker to return to. Hence, the relationship I have with food can either build love in my body, or take me away from myself.
I’ve never been in a situation where I have been neglected or hungry. My life has been relatively middle class, so I’ve always known there would be food on my table. So there’s a comfort for me with food. It fills me up and satisfies me. It’s not like we are eating to survive anymore – or am I still playing out some old pattern of filling the void that isn’t needed anymore?
When I am in disregard with under or over eating, my body hardens. The hardness doesn’t allow the flow of my natural expression and I shut down my light. The middle ground is to be aware and slow down and allow myself to truly listen to my body and what it needs.
My Hunger Games are about how I playfully engage with food and the choices to build or to diminish love in my body. There’s a deep underlying care I have for myself and a wisdom that doesn’t need the extremes of excess or to deprive myself of anything. A simplicity that only eats when I need to and listens to my body’s signals.
Race ya? First one to the fridge wins!
Healthy Cooking for Beginners - Heal Yourself With Food 
Recently, I gained over half my body weight. A situation arose which I felt absolutely inadequate to deal with and so I turned back to old ways of deliberate and excessive comfort-driven eating. In truth, it was a situation that for some time I had not been coping with, and whilst I had been eating gluten and dairy free for years, I most certainly was also playing Hunger Games with my self and my body. At 189cm or 6’2″, I had, at age 30 become only 20kg heavier than an adolescent weight of 50kg. This was by eliminating lunch on most working days, certainly by not eating sweets as a general rule (to the extent than even honey had gone off the ‘list’), and crucially, denying myself food whenever I felt nervous or unsettled.
I had neglected my body to such a degree that my health, clearly began to suffer, and when things came to a head in November last year, I snapped.
The games we play with ourselves and our food can be downright dangerous, as I have learnt.
Thanks to Sarah for providing a space where I feel the most comfortable expressing this – it has been an isolating journey – largely by my own choice (if not entirely).
So as I return to common sense, with smatterings of love and the sense that I in fact deserve a level of care I have previously not brought to myself, the forum Sarah provides here is enormously healing – both in the observations she makes and through the recipes shared, as well as the chance for us all to share our own healing journey and how it is not only the food we eat, but our approach to it that can either harm or heal us.
Thanks Stephanie, everyone will benefit from your beautiful truth
And the rules are different for all of us – so healing for me too – with love, Sarah x