Food Psychology and YouA critical component to living a "miraculous" life revolves around your food psychology; an exciting new field in the area of mind-body nutrition that focuses on the study of how our beliefs, thoughts,and feelings affect our ability to take in and synthesize nourishment in the form of the food we eat. Food psychology looks at the head phase of digestion, assimilation and calorie burning known as the Cephalic Phase Digestive Response CPDR), a processing phase which has been found to be critical to weight control. This is good news in a time when obesity in the United States has become a major health crisis in all age groups and stress (read that distress) has become an everyday word. Luckily, there are many books that have addressed food psychology from different perspectives. For example, nutritionist Marc David, in his book Nourishing Wisdom discusses an in-depth approach to mind-body nutrition covering games we play with ourselves like "Hide and Go Eat", and the way we often use food as a symbolic substitute for love. He also states that "food is the soul's first experience of miracles" and points out that we are more than just our bodies: "We are of a spiritual source." David ends each eye-opening chapter with a list of "Key Lessons" and "Reflections" to help the reader grow healthier and happier. In another book entitled The Slow Down Diet, Marc David outlines an 8-week breakthrough program to "eat for pleasure, energy and weight-loss". This book builds on the notion that we have to sometimes go slow to go fast, a concept that I used to teach in the Fortune 500 when helping people to become better communicators. Marc David applies the idea of "slowing up" to a new way of seeing nutrition, a way in which you examine your relationship to food and through an improved understanding of that relationship, transform and improve your metabolism. Neuropsychiatrist Daniel Amen, M.D., also approaches the mind-body nutrition connection in his book Change Your Brain, Change Your Body. Dr. Amen begins his chapter on nutrition with a quote from Hippocrates: "Let food be your medicine and medicine your food." He also lists hostility, anger, grief, loneliness, chronic stress and the need for excitement among the many things that are "heart robbers" and positive emotions like love, gratitude, appreciation, connectedness, and forgiveness as "heart boosters". Former FDA commissioner, Dr. David Kessler, tosses his hat in the mind-body nutrition ring in his groundbreaking book The End of Overeating...Taking Control of The Insatiable American Appetite. The bookjacket says it concisely: "Dr. Kessler cracks the code of overeating by explaining how our bodies and minds are changed when we consume foods that contain sugar, fat and salt. Food manufacturers create products by manipulating these ingredients to stimulate our appetites, setting in motion a cycle of desire and consumption that ends with a nation of overeating." For more information on this new look at old questions like "Do we eat to live or live to eat?" or "Are we, in truth, what we eat?" and a new conversation regarding "Does how we think about food matter anyway?", please join us at my blog, www.food-psychology-coach.com. Your opinion counts! Eat well.
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