Feed Yourself
Have you ever been so overwhelmed with meals that you want to call up someone to do it all for you? Chances are you have given the sheer amount of “meal delivery” services these days. Today’s guest author is someone I’ve known for several years now. She is a lover of food and people. Through her life she has put both of these in many different ways from owning a restaurant, catering events, hosting multitudes of get togethers, and being a registered dietician. Grab a cup of your favorite Joe and take in the words she has for you. Don’t miss the meal planning template she has for you as well. It’s the easiest way to plan!
Food is a basic human need. It is the fuel we are designed to run on. In fact, food is so important to our survival that as our hunger increases our brain begins to slow down other cognitive processes and speed up food seeking thoughts and behaviors. We are born hardwired to seek food just as we seek warmth, water, shelter, love and belonging. So when we either don’t have food, have less than enough food or even are just afraid of not having enough food, our brain stays stuck in a food seeking mode. Anyone who has dieted or gone hungry for any length of time can attest to the experience of “not being able to stop thinking about food.”
This is where my work comes in. My passion as a dietitian is to help people learn how to feed themselves reliably with food they like and people they love. Imagine being able to eat all the food you need either with yourself or others and then be able to get back to your life’s work physically and mentally satisfied from your meal. Imagine being able to truly give food a place in your life but not all of your life. I wish this for my clients, my friends, my family and I wish it for you too.
While repairing a difficult relationship with food takes time and often additional professional help, there are some gentle and practical things you can do to begin to heal.
Create an Eating Environment: Set up your surroundings by clearing off a space or a table where you can eat. Recovering from food restriction takes time and lots of reassurance that you won’t have food taken away again. Having a clear kitchen table set with napkins, salt, pepper and whatever other condiments you enjoy can provide visual reinforcement that meals are a priority and you will eat again! Your mind loves to have that security!
Make a Schedule: Look at your schedule and brainstorm a time and place for you to have breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Rigidity and perfection are often a big struggle for people who have dieted but the goal here is simply to make a space in your day devoted to pausing and giving yourself the opportunity to eat. Do you know how Shannon is always helping you make a space for the things in your home by giving them a place to live? By jotting down a quick schedule, you are giving eating a designated place in your daily routine. If you find yourself getting hungry before the next meal, consider adding a snack to your routine or moving that meal closer to the previous meal. Trying to see how long you can go without eating is a dieting practice and doesn’t serve your body or your mental health. When you put eating into the context of mealtime, however, it enables the creative and problem solving part of your brain and your intuitive appetite to guide what and how much to eat rather than the part of your brain that is still rooted in restriction, trauma or chaos around eating.
Think of Meals as Anchors: It can be hard to switch your mindset to making time and space for eating if you have been used to trying to avoid it. If it is helpful, think of mealtimes as “anchors in the day” that provide you with an opportunity to take a break to calm down and make sure you’re on the track you want to be on. Eating helps us regulate our bodies and do better thinking. Further, meals can give you the opportunity to have other needs met such as rest, warmth, safety, security, belonging, love, esteem and even opportunities for self actualization!
Consider your Values: What matters to you? If you value beauty, allow yourself to use pretty dishes or take extra time to arrange your food in an attractive manner. If you value money, challenge yourself to make dinner with a certain budget in mind. If you value intimacy or connection, look for lists of dinner table questions to ask your friends or family. If you value calm, try to have at least one meal a day all alone where you can practice this.
Structure Supports Fun: I know it’s obvious, but eating requires food. Structure should be anything that makes planning, purchasing, storing, cooking and cleaning up food easier and therefore mealtime more fun and enjoyable. Both extremely rigid structure and zero structure simply make life hard when it comes to getting meals on the table. Your structure should be specific to your lifestyle, skills and values.
Create a Meal Template: For my family and clients, I like creating a “meal template” to provide structure. To make a meal template, you think through your typical week, consider your schedule, skills and resources and then assign each night of the week either a category, theme or cooking strategy.
For us it looks like this:
Monday: Mediterranean food
Tuesday: Taco Tuesday
Wednesday: Use up stuff from the freezer
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Pizza
Saturday: Husband cooks
Sundays. Sandwiches at the creek
I pretty much keep the same meal template on repeat for months until something major changes in our family like school getting out for the summer or when we all decide we are sick of eating spaghetti. This eliminates making a detailed list or being held to an exact meal plan but provides just enough guidance that if you have a busy day all is not lost for dinner. Heck, the other night I threw some feta cheese on a salad and reheated up leftover pizza and called it good enough for “Mediterranean Monday!”
If this sounds like it may work for you, you can consider downloading our meal template tool here ($7). You can totally create your own template for free using pen and paper and follow along with me on @southern_scratch to see how I use ours in action. The download helps you walk through the steps of creating your own template by walking you through your schedule and family dynamics with questions to consider. The planning pages and “final version” pages are fully editable so you can make your meal template fridge worthy. Plus, there’s a resource list of different categories, themes and cooking strategies to help fuel your creativity.
Below is a quote that I keep near my desk from my “dietitian hero,” Ellyn Satter, from an email correspondence we had about whether simply “having meals” worked as a viable nutrition approach. This is what she wrote:
“Once people establish the meal habit, they gradually evolve dietary quality on their own--by whatever food preferences and set of values are right for them. The bottom line with health and nutritional status is sustainability. Only by eating in ways that each of us find richly rewarding do we achieve sustainability.”-Ellyn Satter, MS, RD, LCSW, BCD
I know that doing the above, simply “having meals” can be much harder when put into practice than it sounds. No matter how many jokes are made about dieting and getting your “summer body” ready, any disruption in eating is, frankly, traumatic. Be patient with yourself and consider help in the process of learning to become a competent eater. There is so much joy to be had!
Best of luck and strength to all of you who are either decluttering with Shannon to find peace in your home or are searching to find peace in your eating. It is valuable work you are doing!
Love,
Kathryn
Kathryn Filipiak, RDN, LDN is a non-diet, weight-neutral Registered Dietitian Nutritionist based in Washington, GA. Using the Satter model of Eating Competence, her passion is to help individuals recover from dieting and learn how to eat and feed with joy again. You can find her on Instagram @southern_scratch, Facebook @southernscratch and southernscratch.com