Why Our Values Hold the Key to a Healthier Relationship with Food.

It may seem a little strange to think about personal values when we talk about our relationship with food, but hear me out, it might just be what you need to move the needle, especially if you are feeling a little stuck trying to disconnect from diet culture.

I first reflected on my own personal values after seeing a wonderful counsellor at Uni, who I fought with myself about needing to see. He was the first counsellor I had ever seen for my own 'stuff'. With a steady flow of shame mixed with relief, I opened up about how stressed and worried and overloaded I felt coming back to study. How I just couldn’t stop thinking about how grateful and happy I should be. How lucky am I, to have this opportunity to completely change my career direction as a mature age student and mum of 2 small kiddos. How many people dream of being able to follow their heart rather than figure out how to pay the bills, but I’m just feeling completely exhausted and taking it out on the people I love the most.

To my surprise, I didn’t combust after saying it out loud.

He said something that felt like he'd switched a light on. He said;

Kate sometimes the pursuit or the expectation of happiness above all else leads us to feel the most stuck. What if your efforts to find happiness are actually preventing you from achieving it? Have you heard of the happiness trap?

No I replied with tears in my eyes, I haven’t. I was a little confused but intrigued.

He went on to explain the natural and normal ebb and flow of emotions that we as humans totally ‘should’ be experiencing daily and told me about an incredible therapy modality called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT.

ACT invites us to include and learn to accept all the parts of us. All the feels, all the stories, all that noise. Not to identify what’s broken but to accept what simply is.

You might have heard me mention how it can be helpful to simply name what is coming up for you in a difficult moment, or as Russ Harris the creator of ACT says, name it to tame it.

If I’m having a tricky body image day simply stating out loud, I’m having a difficult body image day, rather than buying into the narrative around why, helps me move right on through it.

The next part of ACT is to identify and ground in our own personal values. We are continually told what we should be striving for, given instructions on what will make us feel happy or successful or feel that we are enough. But maybe we feel so wiped because we are chasing someone else’s moving target (I see you lurking diet culture).

Are we following someone else’s north star when it comes to looking after ourselves?

Exploring the personal values that resonated with me, not only was incredibly insightful (and fun) but gave me a different map to take direction from. When I’m living in line with my values things feel like I’m going in the right direction.

So what has any of this got to do with food?

Well, our values shape our decision-making and our behaviour, whether we realise it or not. To eat we need to make decisions, ("what am I going to eat, what should I eat, what is best to eat") and then the actual eating, is the behaviour part.

When we take some time to connect and determine whether our values align with our actions, we can explore if there is a disconnect. This disconnect often leads to some of the uncertainty and confusion I commonly hear about healthy or supportive eating. When we focus our attention and energy on values, we are able to engage with our choices in a whole different way. We get to make decisions based on what we want or need or choose rather than being swept up in the current of 'shoulds'.

Our thoughts and beliefs about food are shaped by our world. This will be slightly different for all of us, but unfortunately, most of us have been educated about nutrition through a diet culture lens. Diet culture puts its own value on food, and if we aren’t clear about where we stand, it’s likely we will get swept up by this multi-billion dollar industry.

Diet culture encourages you to distrust your body.

It tells us in direct and sneaky ways that you are broken and can be fixed by following this plan or protocol. It doesn’t want you to connect with your values because then you might actually recognise dieting isn’t about health or wellbeing, it’s about money. If you connect with your values you might realise there is nothing to fix after all.

Maybe you’re not broken, but part of a broken system.

We need to remember that there is no one right way to eat.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to nutrition. For many of us, nuts are a powerhouse of nutrients and would be considered healthy, for some, eating nuts will lead to a deadly anaphylactic reaction, not so healthy. Black and whites do not belong in the nutrition world but diet culture has confused us about living in the grey.

You have very unique needs and preferences and are supporting different health conditions and lifestyles, which means you have different requirements to your partner or friend or parent. The way food feels in your body is part of the intuition, in intuitive eating. Nobody but you knows how food feels in your body.

Most of us learnt about the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ things to eat before we could tie our shoes laces.  These ideas started to create our food rules and attach stories to food that, in my experience, are more fable than fact. It is very rare that individual foods cause problems for people, it’s the relationship and the 'noise' we have with those foods.

One of my personal values that I discovered way back was kindness.

A values-aligned life has meant I have had to learn how to include myself in the things I show kindness to.

My decades of body hatred and restrictive dieting were not kind. They were far from it. For me body kindness has been about focusing on what my body needs rather than what it looks like. Leaning into my own values, rather than being swept up in the ‘shoulds’ of food and nutrition.

100% I try to get in plenty of omega 3 fatty acids each week by eating oily fish and walnuts and chia seeds because they support my immune system and heart health.

You bet I (mostly) include veggies with lunch and dinner (where I can) because fibre feeds my microbiome and being constipated sucks.

Absolutely I will get the ice cream when I have a mummy daughter date if it sounds good, looks good, tastes good and I feel like it, even if I’m not remotely hungry. Nutrition for the soul is underrated. We just have to learn how to turn down the food noise to be able to hear what she (our bodies) really want.

Yes eating protein will help my brain feel satiated and support my body to do all the cool healing work it does behind the scenes and if protein is not front and centre of every meal that’s ok too.

The kindest thing I could do for my body was remove myself from the harms of diet culture's narrative.

Nutrition can be a wonderful tool for health and supporting our body to do all the things it does for us every day. For me, focusing on kindness as a value helps me quiet the noise that kept me stuck for so long.

I am yet to find someone swimming in the dieting/disordered eating/eating disorder pool (sure, dieting may be the shallow end of the pool, but that shit gets deep, real quick) that is truly aligned with their personal values. Knowing who we are and what we stand for (and won’t stand for) lets us live with meaning and purpose.

It stops us from chasing shiny things and instead helps that little spark in us shine a little bit brighter. That little spark that the world stamps out for far to many of us.

If you are curious about how this would look for you or exploring how your values align with your relationship with food and your body, reach out here, I’d love to connect with you.