Repair Unhealthy Relationship with Food

Last week, we talked about how a lot of people who eat healthy to clear their skin actually have a very unhealthy relationship with food.

They’re scared to make any mistakes with food. They’re terrified of eating anything unhealthy, ever. Even if it’s a dessert with their family at Mother’s Day, or a slice of cake at their own wedding.

There are many people in the world who just eat healthy without making it into a big ordeal, but with acne, there is so much emotion involved that it makes eating healthy into something that is very stressful; neurotic; full of guilt and fear.

I think it’s much healthier (for your skin and sanity) to not be so strict about food; it’s better to get to a point where you eat healthy most of the time but don’t feel deprived. Just relax a little!

But no matter how much I say that, it won’t make a difference unless you find a way to heal the emotions behind the behaviour and release that fear. Because it is truly about the fear; not the food.

As I was saying in the last article, the only reason that I can now be lenient with my diet without freaking out about it is because I finally emotionally healed from that fear. I used to be terrified of breaking the “rules” with my diet. Just terrified.

So how did I get over it and manage to repair my relationship with food?

As I said in the last article, emotional healing is an individual journey and there’s no one path to success.

I realized this article could get seriously long if I wrote out every thing you could try, so instead I’ve decided to write about how I personally managed to heal my relationship with food. Next article, I’ll give you some additional things you could try out.

Stopped Reading About Health on The Internet So Much

the internet makes you crazy
Is the internet making you loony too?

There’s probably nothing that contributes to neurotic eating like reading a bunch of different opinions from a bunch of different people on the internet about what’s “healthy”.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, can agree on this. Every time you get online, you discover a new diet that is the BEST one, or another evil food group that you must stop eating if you want to avoid certain disaster.

It gets to the point where you feel like you can’t eat anything because you just don’t know what’s right and who’s right.

How are you supposed to not be neurotic?

Again, this is a tricky thing because it’s not like I never learned anything useful and beneficial on the internet when it comes to food and nutrition, but it got to a point for me where it was like “I HATE THIS!! EVERYBODY JUST SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR STUPID DIETS!!” (paraphrased).

So I stopped regularly reading about diet and nutrition, and decided to eat more “intuitively”.

This may have been the single biggest thing that allowed me to heal my relationship with food. I guarantee I would still be neurotic about food if I still actively researched nutrition all the time like a hobby.

I Started Actually Eating Junk Food Sometimes

Facing Your Fears

I believe that the shortest route (and possibly the only route) to overcoming your fears is by doing the thing that scares you the most. And yeah, it’s going to suck at first, but eventually doing that thing won’t be so scary anymore.

So what’s the answer to this scared-of-bad-food dilemma?

Eating it.

See, I used to avoid anything I deemed to be unhealthy like the plague. Nothing of the sort would ever cross my lips. Unhealthy food was on this evil, untouchable pedestel which would spit acne at me if I ever touched it. At least in my mind.

I was downright scared of it.

So to get over that, I had to face that fear and start purposely eating some unhealthy food, and show myself that I would live.

I went slow with this at first, but it did work over time as I got more comfortable with being lenient. It turns out that I did live, and my skin is fine. And now unhealthy food isn’t so terrifying anymore.

Being Aware of the Fear & Challenging It

Becoming self aware

Another way in which I feel contributed to my healing was that I always tried to stay aware of my thought processes and how they may be potentially unhealthy.

If you have a problem in your life like this one, it’s always a good idea to take a look inside of yourself and sort out what is the root of the issue truly is.

With this problem, it might be easy to blame the food or the people around you or society, but when you look inside you can see that it’s the fear of acne talking.

And why are you afraid of acne? Because it makes you feel ashamed and unloveable.

And how can you keep those feelings away from you? By controlling acne, and you feel like you can control acne if you just perfectly control your food.

You have to be aware of these patterns in yourself and how they’re unhealthy and contributing to your miserable-ness. Otherwise you can’t challenge them, and they won’t ever change. If you’re not very good at self awareness, meditation can help you become more in tune with yourself.

And once I was aware of these patterns in myself, how did I challenge them?

I feel like for me it was mostly through The Love Vitamin. I have shared every inch of my acne journey with you here, exploring every last nook and cranny of my emotional acne experience, including all the uncomfortable stuff.

It’s been very cathartic, and gives me an avenue to share and mentally challenge myself (and also practically challenge myself as in the above point about eating junk food).

Of course, not everyone is going to publicly blog their way to emotional freedom, but just journalling is an excellent parallel alternative.

Getting Reiki Sessions

Reiki for acne

Whether you’re into energy healing or not is your own prerogative, but after several years of struggling with the lingering emotional pain and subsequent food relationship problem, I decided to go see a local reiki master in my town who I had heard great things about.

I was always interested in energy healing, but had never really done anything like it before, so it was an exciting experiment to see if it could help me finally shift that fear out of my life.

I had four sessions over four weeks, and it was a great experience. I really enjoyed it, and I loved spending time with her.

At the time and immediately after, I couldn’t definitively say “yes this worked” (and really, I still can’t definitively say that), but looking back now, those sessions exactly coincide with what I realize now is when the fear really disappeared.

It’s been more than a year and a half now and I can definitely 100% say that the fear was way different prior to those sessions, and has been pretty much gone ever since then.

So was it definitely the reiki that caused the change?

I don’t know for sure… I feel like I had been working up to a big shift (via all the things I mentioned above), but I like to think the reiki had something to do with cementing these changes in my “energetic being”, or whatever you want to call it.

Le Video

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0ixMgc7Tyc

Do you have any tips about healing an unhealthy relationship with food? Share in the comments below!