BRINGING THE JOY BACK TO FOOD

⎨My Happy Food Project⎬

I have recently felt the need to regroup and reset my intentions regarding my nutrition, and make some progress in this area of my life, too. I’m ready for deeper healing.

Even if I’ve already integrated new habits and new behaviors (really, I should say I’m back to mySelf, since I used to eat in a certain way, before my marriage was the catalyst for a lot of problems in my life, including my nutrition and an abnormal weight gain), there are things that can definitely be improved.

And one of those things is a new attitude towards food, because unfortunately, all of my history has created a lot of wounds in that realm, and I now need to really take my life into my hands and heal this stuff once and for all.

Recently, while checking on myself and really looking at my current relationship with food, I’ve realized that I still have some beliefs that resurface from time to time, and as a result, I don’t have a relaxed attitude towards it.

Over the past several years, I have had some problems in this area of my life: my stomach had kind of “closed”, because of emotional trauma and lots of stress, and I couldn’t eat very much. Then I started developing very bad habits, among which eating some ultraprocessed food (that I had never eaten in my whole life!), and also because of all the somewhat tumultuous events in my life during the past decade or so, I gradually developed a lot of stress in the realm of nutrition. In the beginning I didn’t realize that, but it eventually became more and more evident to me. Until I realized that I had completely lost all of my JOY regarding food and eating.

I used to love it- now I eat just because I have to survive, not finding any pleasure in food. On the contrary, eating ended up being frustrating and stressful for me, almost traumatic at times. Lately, during an intentional trip to the supermarket with the only purpose to see what I liked, and find something that I wanted to eat, I was shocked to acknowledge that there wasn’t (almost) anything that I wanted to eat. I felt just disgusted by food.

Now, I had already become aware of the fact that I needed to bring the JOY, my JOY, back to food. I’m Italian, and I’ve always loved food and cooking. As a matter of fact, I come from a family of cooks. But I’ve allowed (consciously and unconsciously) the circumstances in my life to take that JOY away from me. Now it’s time to bring it back! :)

I started looking for ways to bring it back, and the first thing that came to my mind was to go back to check my old IG photos of a period of my life where I had started making progress (when I started running!), I had changed my nutrition considerably (because of the running thing), and had found types of food that gave me pleasure. I used to document my meals back then. I wanted to remind myself of what I used to like, what gave me JOY, what felt satisfying, what tasted good in my mouth.

The only thing at the moment that I always want to eat and gives me JOY is fruit. In particular, my smoothie bowls, that for years now have been my regular everyday lunch. Some of you following me for a long time both here on my blog and on social, may remember that I’ve quit being vegan, and so, I now place a yogurt in my smoothie (sometimes a robiola cheese, or caprino- both fresh Italian cheese), to give it a bit of proteins.

I also am experimenting with chocolate: really, I am not a chocolate type of person, I always tend to prefer things without chocolate… so I’ll definitely choose a plain or cream croissant, or a lemon cake, or an apple cake… but I’ve found out that a bit of chocolate in my smoothies gives me JOY and tastes good, and so I am trying various types of chocolate.