You don’t have to earn your food!
Food is fuel, food is joy, but food is also, very simply, essential. For everyone. It is not a reward for limiting yourself or working hard. You deserve it no matter what. You don’t have to earn your food.
Food is not a reward.
For those of us who adore food and flavours and celebrate it regularly, it’s important to remember this. It’s fine to be passionate and excited about food, I think it’s healthy, but it’s also important to remember sometimes that food, in and of itself, is neutral.
Food is not “bad” or “good”. There is healthy and unhealthy ingredients, absolutely, and you need to have an understanding of these to stay healthy - but are you remembering what stay healthy means? To me, it is about giving yourself a chance. A chance at a long life, a life where you feel energetic, as free of pain as possible, and good mental health as well as physical health. They are much more closely related than we used to think - and food affects it more than we’ve previously realised to!
More on this in a later post, but I just want to remind you that when you consider what you put in your body, it is for your own benefit, not to restrict or punish yourself.
Without nutrition, we become totally useless. And whether you are trying to lose weight, cutting out ingredients to try to figure out if you have an intolerance or allergy, or deciding to do intermittent fasting to reset your body a bit; you need to eat food still. And that doesn’t have to be an emotional affair at all.
You don’t need to question whether you’ve earned something because by being a living creature walking this earth, you have by default “earned” your food. Whether you work in an office or run around delivering parcels all day, you need energy. It’s fairly simple, uncomplicated.
Now on the flipside of this, you are also allowed to enjoy food - and get excited about it! It doesn’t make you weak or a victim of food that you look forward to a meal. And if you have a treat that you really enjoy, but it isn’t the healthiest thing you could possibly eat, you deserve to have that too. You don’t have to earn it.
It may seem irresponsible of me to encourage eating naughty treats. But that’s not actually what I’m doing. I believe, that when we think about food as something we need to earn, it makes it a lot more complicated and taboo and enticing - and you think you want it more often than you actually do. If it’s just neutral, just available to you and okay to eat whenever, and you don’t need to earn it beforehand or feel guilty after; maybe it takes away some of the brainpower spent thinking about it?
Remember that you need fuel, and deserve enjoyment. You don’t have to earn your food!
What are your feelings around this topic? Post on Instagram and tag me @TheFromScratchBody and use the hashtag #TheFromScratchBody so I don’t miss it!
