When we chew, our spleen and stomach receive the message of what we are about to digest.  If we don’t chew our food properly, it’s much like ‘miss-setting’ the wash cycle of your stomach.  

If your food is still in large chunks, your digestion has a lot of work to do.  Chances are if you take some time chewing your food and actually enjoying your meal you might feel more energised.  We also absorb what energy has been put into the cooking of our food.  If it has been cooked in a hurry by someone who is having a bad day, then this will be present in what we eat.  This is probably also why for many of us there’s something about mum’s cooking that tastes so good!  If you are preparing a meal for someone then make this an act of love and nurturance.

Often we use food to alter our emotions.  Sometimes this is to fulfil a desire of feeling full (i.e. to avoid feeling empty), and sometimes it is related to how the food might make us feel.  

The easiest way to examine this is to take some time before you eat and observe your emotions without judgment.  Are you eating to change how you feel?  Are you eating to stop an emotion?  Is there some aspect of craving involved – Are you craving sweetness for example?  Do you believe that this sweetness is missing in your life and are you using food as a substitute?

If this is so, then it is not very different to drinking alcohol, smoking, or the other habits that we use to block and avoid our emotions.  What you could do instead is allow the emotion to be there without struggling with it, stopping it, thinking about it in any way, or running away
from it.

In other words, surrender to just feeling it.  Young children do this naturally, which is why often they do not ‘hang on’ or get ‘stuck’ with their emotions for a long time.  They feel the emotion, it passes through them and then they go back to living and enjoying their life.  Whenever we alter or avoid our emotions, the energy becomes locked in our body.  Later on this can manifest as physical and mental dis-ease.

There is enormous social pressure for our bodies to look a certain way.  There are thousands and thousands of ways suggesting that we use food (and often physical exertion) to make our body fit this image.  If you do this, what are you actually saying to yourself?  Do you not love yourself just because you do not look a certain way?  So, you have accepted someone else’s idea of what your body should look like.  If you do this, it is conditional.  Sooner or later your body will not conform to this image and you will face the judgments and subsequent self-hatred.  

Your body is not good or bad, it is just how it is.  If you can do what you need to in your life and you are healthy and fit, then what is there to change?  If you do need to lose weight or make other changes, then this is just a fact and there is no need to add guilt or anger to the equation.  You may end up changing your diet and habits but it won’t be because you’re doing it to look a certain way.
Another trap is to hope that if you change your body’s image then others will love you.  Is this really love if they are not actually accepting you for who you are?  Is it love if you are not accepting you?  Love has no such limitations.  You are looking for others’ approval, which will ultimately be empty because you are saying that you are not good enough (or not beautiful, etc.) just as you are.

Finally, don’t forget to take time with your food. Slow down. Smell the aromas of your meal. Eat a mouthful at a time, chew that thoroughly, swallow.  Then start the next mouthful. Be involved with what you are doing, with people that you are sharing with.  Savour the aroma, enjoy the tastes and textures and actually connect with what you are eating.  Eat wonderful, colourful, varied, interesting, healthy organic food that you and others can prepare and eat with joy and with love.