Melissa Spiesman, CHHC, AADP, is the Featured Guest Blogger at DietsInReview.com for September. She is the director of Nutrition for Your Life, a nutrition program that focuses on health and wellness through whole foods. Melissa develops individual integrative nutrition plans that focus on the total health of her clients. In her private practice, she regularly counsels individuals and groups on a variety of health/nutrition issues, including: cravings, weight loss and management, healthy food preparation, coping with stress, and having more energy.
Melissa received her professional training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition which is affiliated with Columbia University in New York City. She is certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.
Melissa is a featured contributor of girlawhirl.com. Girlawhirl.com is an online magazine for busy women. It’s updated every weekday with the latest fashion and beauty news, home decorating, nutrition, fitness advice and more.
Our society is obsessed with food. The strongest, most committed relationship we have is our relationship with food.
There are people who eat to live and people who live to eat, people whose appetites are altered with any change in their emotional or physical temperature.
It is rare to find a person who does not have some sort of disordered eating; calorie counting, safe food, comfort foods, diet of the day, secrecy or addiction. There is so much conflicting nutritional information that it is difficult to eat without some sort of food neuroses and it seems that everyone finds something, we follow food rules to give up control and to not deal with choices. We have become a society of dysfunctional diners, never ordering from the menu as it appears but rather, “dressing on the side, no sauce, no carbs, plain grilled”. We have comfort foods and we have celebratory foods and we have foods that connect us to the best (and worst) times of our lives.
We talk about food all the time, for some it defines who they are. We talk about good food, bad food and confess our “food sins”.
Some plan vacations around a specific food experience or spend time researching the “best of” food at their destination. Why is it that some people have to eat all of the food at a buffet because it is there, and there are those that can peruse the buffet and make choices? There are people who spend hours in the supermarket reading nutrition labels and looking for new products and those who do not stray from their lists.
Food is sustenance; it is nourishment, it is a response to a physical hunger. It is gratifying, fulfilling and fun; it can be interesting, creative and social. Food is versatile; it can be used as a reward, a distraction, or an ice breaker. Food is also dangerous, addicting, frightening. It is often used as response to an emotional hunger. Food can bring pleasure and food can bring pain.
If we could make peace with food, get in touch with our intuitive eating, change our way of thinking and our behaviors, feed our emotional hungers, we could learn to truly experience and enjoy food without the angst that so many have attached to it.
What is your food issue? Are you in touch with it?
Do you want to share a story?
Guest Blog Series: Look for the following badge on your favorite health sites to see if they have been a featured guest blogger on DietsInReview.com.
See other posts in the Guest Blog series. If you would like to apply to be featured as a guest blogger, please contact us.