How Do We Really Change Our Eating Habits?
I’m going to graduate as a nutritional therapist this summer – bringing to an end 5 years of continuous study, hooray! – and I have realised that I need to have a slightly more complex approach to the treatment of my clients. After all, we are complex beings.
Nutritional therapy is amazing, don’t get me wrong. I have learnt how to use a natural approach to food and lifestyle to potentially make a huge difference to people’s lives; in the treatment and prevention of disease, the pursuit of optimum health, and of course the delaying of a miserable old age and early death. But the thing about nutritional therapy is that as practitioners we approach food in a scientific way, stripping healthy and unhealthy foods back to their chemical constituents, and knowing how these chemicals affect the body, we can use them to aid many conditions.
The practical problem with this in the treatment of our clients is that humans are emotional beings. Most people do not eat food just because it is a fuel as our ancestors would have done; we eat to feel less lonely, or because we are happy, or sad, or to celebrate, etc, etc. Therefore, when trying to encourage our clients to change eating habits we need to realise what emotions or needs are behind those habits. For example, you may have an obese lady who is desperate to loose weight and lonely, but still eating KFC 3 times per week. Telling her to stop isn’t going to work, because she knows she needs to stop, but she is useing the food to fill a void in her life elsewhere. She may be lonely and depressed. She may have a self image that says ‘i’ve always been large, that’s just the way i’m meant to be no matter what I eat’.
Therefore, I intend to study techniques to help people identify their needs and inner beliefs, and to find other ways to fulfill them and bring about a change in the way they see themselves. I believe in this way, change will be easier to achieve and permanent.
