Food Attitudes
Does your attitude toward food have a serious problem? Is it getting harder to just dig into your meal with single-minded focus? To just sit at the table and enjoy all that tasty food without feeling guilty? Chances are that you have started hearing voices in your head like “Count all those calories”,”Eat in SMALL portions”, “I’ve read somewhere that a glass of red wine is good for you.”
Suddenly everything that you’ve read and heard and images of obesity that have been plastered in your imagination come popping up. In a diet-obsessed urbanity, eating almost equals gluttony.
This superb post on bloggerdygook called Are we having health problems because we obsess about what we eat? expresses a perspective that the diet-obsessed don’t think about. A lot of the way we react to food comes from our inability to eat heartily.
Sulz quotes Desmond Morris:
“The simple truth is that my mother had lived through almost the whole of the twentieth century without ever giving a moment’s thought to what was ‘correct’ to eat. She never suffered from even a momentary pang of anxiety concerning the possibility that certain food objects might be bad for her. If they tasted good, they must be good, and that was an end to it. I think it was her lack of anxiety concerning diet that kept her so fit. If you are perfectly relaxed about what you are eating, your parasympathetic nervous system rewards you by helping you to digest it well. If, on the other hand, you are tensely nibbling a lettuce leaf and agonising over whether to indulge yourself with another spoonful of low-fat yoghurt, the tension of your mood ill-suits the pleasures of the table. ”
Interesting way to think about the obesity obsession.
March 27th, 2007 at 4:51 am
hi, thanks for the link! just want to clarify that the article was written by dr desmond morris, so that was his mother, not mine.
i think it’s important to know what you put inside your mouth, but don’t obsess about it. it’s okay to pig out on chocolate cake once in a while.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Thanks Sulz…I’ve edited my post abd clarified that.