Perfect Hunger: Uncovering our patterns
Plus, the nuance of “food rules,” financial streamlining, and cultivating calm at home
Perfect Hunger is a new, twice-monthly series delivering bite-sized nourishment and heart-sourced guidance on food, body, wellness, and spirit. You can upgrade your subscription for full access here:
I realize that some of you might be hankering for specific, actionable guidance on what to eat or other aspects of physical caretaking. Maybe you’re even thinking: Just give me some food rules already! (Alternatively, maybe you’re thinking: Get away from me with your food rules!)
Whether you fall into one of those camps or somewhere in between, you’re in the right place. Similar to my three-part series on Quieting Food Noise (Without Ozempic), Perfect Hunger offers a holistic approach—one that tends to our physical body along with our mind and our spirit.
What’s with the nuance? Why not pick a side?
A major problem in today’s healing and self-help space is the tendency to focus primarily on either external actions (e.g., what to eat, how to exercise, whether to take a drug) or internal practices (e.g., meditation, mindset, self-talk, or reflective exercises like journaling).
For integrated, lasting change in body and mind, we need both external actions and internal practices. (Spoiler: the body and mind aren’t two separate things!) Everything that happens to us physically impacts us mentally and emotionally—and vice versa—all the way down to the level of our hormones, cells, and beyond.
Today, to begin integrating external actions with internal practices, we’ll first examine our current patterns. When a pattern appears in one area of our life, it’s almost always reflected in and influences other areas as well.
For example, Fear of Not Enough can manifest as patterns that include overeating certain foods or all foods, excess consumption of alcohol or other drugs, shopping addiction, or overdoing it in relationships (which can look all kinds of ways).
Fear of Too Much can manifest as patterns that include anorexia, orthorexia, obsessive-compulsive patterning, and rejection of relationships and true intimacy. (For more on these fear-based patterns, including how they show up in my personal relationship with money, head here.)
Another way to explore patterns is by noticing what’s happening in other areas of your life when you experience more (or less) peace in your body. Are there patterns that mirror or intersect with periods of ease or dis-ease? Do predictable cycles show up in your physical body, home life, work life, relationships, consumption habits, or elsewhere?
