The mentality of "deprivation"

Hello out there from your ever-neglectful blogger! :) I have been having a busy time and I've had lots of stuff on my mind, but nothing has felt blog-worthy or new until now.

I've just begun to do some work in regards to developing a more healthy relationship with food, and part of this has meant I'm currently re-reading this book, and reading it more closely.



The book, as you can see, is by Dr Rick Kausman, who is THE foremost expert in Australia, pretty much, when it comes to the mental/emotional side of eating, and it's called If Not Dieting, Then What? The fitness/diet industry are probably quite horrified that books like this exist, because if people actually followed its principles, nobody would be caught on this awful diet/deprivation/binge/feel guilty cycle that so many of us seem to be on.

It's hard to sum it up in a few words, but basically, what the book theorises is if you are one of these people who, even when they are doing the "right" thing, find they are constantly at war with themselves over it, you need to make peace with food, and that means ALL food, not just healthy/clean food. Doing this covers everything from the actual words you use to describe foods that aren't as healthy as others to changing your eating patterns with these foods to a far more conscious one so that if you do make a rational, reasoned choice to eat a "sometimes food" (see, I'm doing it already!), make sure it is exactly what you want to taste, and also make sure you make like a MasterChef judge and eat slowly, deliberately, and savour it. His theory is that those foods are never, ever going to disappear from the world, so if you have issues with them, you always will have issues with them until you find a way to handle them that is comfortable and easy and not the constant internal "will I? won't I?" which has charactertised a lot of my own eating. And yes, that's happened EVEN when I have been successful in losing weight too.

So I'd say I feel pretty excited about working with this new theory. They always say if you don't change anything, nothing changes, and I've certainly never taken this approach before. And yet, for someone like me, that's probably exactly where I was going wrong. People can talk until they're blue in the face about how if I were to eat low carb/clean, I wouldn't feel hungry and therefore I wouldn't want to eat "sometimes foods", but since the craving is an emotional one, not a physical one, I just know it's not enough to only treat one part of the problem.

I'll post more when I've got the idea straight in my head. Peace out. xx