What else does unhealthy eating mean? It means an unhealthy relationship with food, with our everyday food. We eat out of boredom, we eat to cover emotional pain, we celebrate religious holidays with excess food, we are manipulated into buying and eating food, we create addictions to certain foods.
Our ancestors had a different relationship with food than we do. They didn’t have sophisticated dishes and exotic ingredients, they ate only what their native land offered them, they ate little, they ate meat only occasionally and they ate seasonal foods. Indeed, they lived less than we do, but in their short lives they had no food-related diseases. We live longer, but we are plagued by diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, autoimmune diseases, depression, Alzheimer’s… All these diseases are related to food.
We should only eat enough to cover our nutritional needs. This is in an ideal world, because this has long since ceased to happen. To some extent it is ok to eat for pleasure. And it’s ok to eat WITH pleasure. We were not given the sense of taste for nothing. Let’s enjoy it, but in correlation with a sense of measure. It’s ok to soothe a pain of the soul with chocolate or icecream, but let’s be aware that we’re doing it, don’t exaggerate and don’t make a daily habit out of emotional eating, let’s control the amount ingested.
The truth must be sought somewhere in the middle, in moderation and balance. Let’s enjoy food, but not make it an obsession. Let us be grateful that there is abundance, but let us not abuse it. Let’s recognize what is good for us and what is bad for us in nutrition, listen to our body and not blindly follow paths taken by others. Let’s realize that sometimes we eat to cover an emotional void and not because we structurally need food at that moment. Let’s eat to live, not live to eat.