Moving away from fear

We live in a nutrition-obsessed world, particularly in the blogosphere and social media realms. Many bloggers and online wellbeing entrepreneurs, including me, have shared their stories of how good nutrition caused a positive transformation or healing experience in their lives. When we feel the benefits of eating healthy food, we want to shout it from the rooftops, and with good reason: our bodies will always welcome real, fresh nutrient-dense foods. Nutrition just works.

But there can be complications. We all have a unique and incredibly fascinating relationship with food. You may already be passionate about eating healthily, but perhaps your relationship with eating is somehow tainted by a body-image disorder, fear of gaining weight, emotional eating, chronic dieting, binge-eating, overeating, or some other challenge that makes the everyday, natural act of feeding yourself a battle.

Even if your plate is regularly full of organic, green, beautiful food, you can still have a niggling lack of peace within yourself. Perhaps underlying your love of filling your body with nutritious food is really a fear of dying, or a fear of losing control of your health, your beauty, your energy or your capacity to maintain your high-powered life, or maybe some other emotional issue is at work. Maybe healthy eating has become more of a burden than a blessing due to the underlying emotional motivations.

Another barrier to enjoying food is the constant avalanche of conflicting information from the internet and media regarding what’s healthy and what’s dangerous to eat. It seems we can’t win. One day a particular superfood will be in the spotlight, and the next day it’s slandered as dangerous. Even the ‘experts’ can’t agree.

Nutrition is an incredibly complex topic, and it can be difficult to stay confident in our choices when there is a cascade of information from research laboratories. To remain truly peaceful in your relationship with food, and to live a supercharged life, your motivation must extend beyond what’s printed in the media.

I believe that in this era of clean-eating, kale-smoothie obsession, we’ve lost our pure enjoyment of food. We’ve become so afraid of gluten, sugar, fructose, dairy, meat, unfiltered water and grains that many of us have eliminated them completely from our diet with no balance or moderation. Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?

•	‘I’d love to try a bit of that spelt sourdough, but aren’t grains supposed to kill my brain and cause Alzheimer’s disease?’
•	‘That yoghurt looks divine, but will dairy give me cellulite and an autoimmune condition?’
•	‘I’d love to have some of that mango, but will that extra fructose have a negative effect on my body?’

If these types of thoughts dwell in your head constantly, the chances are your attitude to food has shifted from joy to rules and restrictions.

While some foods can be genuinely harmful for some people, the reality is that not everyone responds to food in the same way. I know people who have lived to 100 on a lifetime of bread, cream, meat and a good few decades of cigarettes, and they enjoyed greater health than people who obsess over their daily shot of spirulina. There has to be more to the picture, and there has to be balance.

I believe food is on this earth to be enjoyed and we think about it way too much. Fair enough, if you know you’re not feeling your most vibrant self when you eat a certain way, seek out a professional to help you find a diet that works best for you. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Avoiding a natural food out of fear, ‘just in case’ it might cause an autoimmunity issue, an imbalance of gut bacteria or cancer down the track is not living. It’s crippling, and it’s the opposite of a supercharged approach.

My greatest hope is that this book will help to reignite your love of commonsense eating and free you from the fear of food.