Transforming our relationship with food

I just posted the below on my Your Money or Your Life blog about what I’m doing over here on my 10 mile diet blog. I want to share it with you as a piece of my learning. If you haven’t read Your Money or Your Life some of it might not make perfect sense to you – but it will make sense in terms of my discoveries reported on this blog.

It’s called: Transforming Your Relationship with Food.

I’m discovering with my September 10 mile diet that truly the same principles and practices for looking at money apply to food. By only eating what can produced within 10 miles of my home I am discovering a lot about my relationship with food.

I am seeing my emotional relationship – the feelings and desires that drive me this way and that. To nuts and after 9 PM eating. That would be like people’s money and stuff addictions. The visits to the mall to see what you might want rather than get what you want. To substitute shoes (or chocolate) for love.

I am seeing my cultural relationship with food – especially the food system, how food gets to my fridge, who grows and ships it, and how to participate in a virtuous rather than viscous food cycle. This morning I heard a report about the drop in food insecurity globally – only .95 billion people – down .5 billion –  are threatened due to loss of livestock and homeland. That is still 1/6 of all of us. How is what I put in my mouth related to that? How does the system that brings me food put me to sleep so that I only eat what i want when i want it and never look under the covers? My food conscience and consciousness if being challenged.

And I am getting what food is to me. Like discovering money = life energy (what I invest of my one short life in getting it), I am discovering the life energy that comes from food (nourishment) and goes into food (growing enough which is truly a monumental task). I am, as we say in Your Money or Your Life,disintermediating my relationship with food. Taking our the middle people and directly relating to as many producers as possible, including my productive back yard garden.

In this way I am being empowered. Everyone has something to say to you about food and diet. Atkins, Weston-Price, Vegan, Vegetarian, Fat Flush, and on and on. No carbs. All carbs. Heck, they even changed the food pyramid and for decades that was like cleanliness. Next to God. I have been so disempowered in my relationship with food, depending on experts rather than my body to tell me what is wholesome.

My relationship with food is transforming. I’m guessing with my relational eating (knowing my producers) and respectful eating (honoring my producer’s hard work) and healthy eating (we don’t grow chocolate in my region… though I have given myself coffee as one of my few foreign foods).

I’m not saying this is the right way to eat. Just like we don’t tell you the right way to spend, save or invest. There are tons of people out there to do that. I am now empowered to make my own best choices according to my health and integrity – just like we say in Your Money or Your Life about your money choices.

And here’s the pitch. Of course. My new Whole Enchilada: Money Happiness and Enough course takes the principles and practices of Your Money or Your Life and extends them to food and time and even life and death. Funny though. I used a food metaphor for the title. Just shows you how crazy I am about food. In both senses of the word.

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