Eat with no regrets

Written by Lauren
It’s time for me to jump on the soapbox here… just a polite warning.

Ya know what I am sick of? I am sick of hearing people regretting their food choices.

I’m sick of people being afraid to eat dessert on their birthday. I’m sick of people who can’t even enjoy their food because it’s not primal approved or jenny craig approved or any diet approved. I’m sick of hearing people beat themselves up over one choice they made, toiling and worrying how this food choice will affect their body or how it will or won’t make them feel. I’m sick of people NOT CLAIMING THEIR OWN CHOICES.

I have been working on this lately. For those who havn’t read my Primal Story, I have, rather I used to have, an issue feeling extremely guilty when I feel as though I’ve “overindulged”.

Eating the Primal way is not about breaking old negative thought patterns and habits and creating new ones…. And It’s definitely not about feeling guilty about what sort of food you ate.

I can’t tell you how many times I hear in some form of this sentence, “I had _______ and it was sooooo good but I’m still regretting it”, even two or three days after eating said food. It disheartens me that the phrase “sooooo good” and “regretting it” are combined into one sentence. What sorts of things are we holding on to when we say this? What kind of message are we sending to ourselves and those around us we want to EMPOWER to eat the Primal way? And then we wonder why our closest friends and family won’t even look at a blog or a book about eating Primal. When I finally heard this come out of a mouth other than my own, it finally hit me how this sounds to other people… and life changing, awesome, healthy and fun is NOT how it sounds.




So all you people trying to force your significant others or moms, dads, sisters, and brothers onto the primal plan and have been wondering why they are so resistant, try looking at how you talk about food and your relationship with food to them. Do you think you would want to eat the same way as your friend who's always guilty over eating food and complaining about not being able to have certain foods all the time? Uh... I wouldn't.

So, I’d like to break down the aforementioned sentence and look at it from my perspective on the message it sends to our minds and to those around us.

I’ve written before about the power of truly receiving the nourishment that food gives you, in whatever form that is. For example, let’s say you have been conditioned to think that fat is the devil and if you eat any fat at all it will make you, well, fat. This belief will strongly determine the way that your food is received in your body. A person who believes that fat is a healthy part of their diet and an adversary for providing energy and helping to lean out, will digest a fatty food like an avocado or almond butter better than someone who believes it will “go straight to my hips”. And for the record if you find yourself saying this, that’s probably where it would go. Food can nourish you with nutrients and energy, but food can also nourish you with enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction.

I want you to take 10 seconds to think about how it feels to regret something. Create the feeling in you, right now so that if I asked you to describe it to me, you could.

So how does it feel? When I think about regretting something I feel sticky, guilty, heavy… I feel stuck. To regret something is to hold on to it, to not let go, and often when we hold on to things we stuff them away so we don’t have to feel the heaviness of it; so we don’t have to feel stuck and guilty all the time. From my acupuncturists perspective when we don't let go of stuff, it often shows up as an imbalance in our lungs or in our intestines... which are the places we physically "let go" of things. Coincidence, I think not.

You might be thinking right now, "So are you saying that I could be causing myself more bloating or backed up GI tract due to my holding on to this guilt of eating "bad" foods" and yes, yes I am saying that.

Our beliefs could be sorted into the same category as a habit. And for each habit/belief we have about something, our brains have created a neuronetwork around it. Those nueronets are connected to other nets, watch this video for more info from Dr. Joe Dispenza. Nerves that fire together, wire together. So if you consistently associate guilt with eating " bad" foods, you are creating an associative neuronet that is creating your experience around the food you eat. The good news is, nerves that don't fire together, don't wire together, so you can break these associations and habits.

Interesting FACT: It takes 21 days for a new neuronetwork to be fully formed. Which explains why we always hear that it takes 21 days to form a new habit.

When we hold onto regret about food we eat, we hold onto that food and our beliefs about how it will negatively affect us. If you hold on to the idea that ice cream will make you feel bloated for days and slow your digestion, then you might have a hard few days complaining about how bloated you are because you ate ice cream. This is completely separate from the fact that dairy probably does make you physically bloated, it is something you are creating on top of it based on your belief systems.


The key point here is that you have two choices: You can choose to let the bloating ruin your day ( or next few days for some) OR …. not

So when you choose to eat your gratitude meal:

1) You can choose to pretend to enjoy your food but really be too busy thinking about how terrible of a person you are for falling off the "diet" and how“bad” you are going to feel after you eat it, thinking about all the things that will suffer because of this one meal and making yourself feel guilty, shameful, and a failure because of it.

2) You can fully enjoy the pleasure of eating food you love. Enjoy the way it smells, the way it looks, the way it tastes, and the way you feel when you get to eat it. And then move on with your day and life.

I personally, choose the second choice. And I choose to claim my choices: “Yes, I ate _______ today, and I enjoyed every bite of it.” What do you choose?