Our Relationship With Food Affects Every Part of Us & Every Relationship in Our Lives
An ebook, audio lesson, March links, all my love.
Dearest Reader,
Welcome to the March edition of the Early Sobriety series. The first Sunday of every month, I send love and support to those in the early days (or years or lifetimes) of quitting a thing.
No need to identify as sober to benefit! This series is for anyone examining unhelpful relationships to substances or behaviours.
I created it in part because I missed the aliveness of early sobriety. Each year sober from alcohol brings gifts, but those first weeks and months were special. They felt intense, yes. But also full of presence, anticipation, and magic.
The March edition focuses on food and eating patterns. Many folks who are newly sober struggle with this—swapping alcohol for sugar or binge eating, for instance. And many folks who don’t struggle with alcohol do struggle with unhelpful habits around food.
Our relationship with food and eating is a sensitive, nuanced topic (and a sensitive, nuanced place of recovery for me personally). If this topic interests you, also check out the Eating Addiction & Body Dysmorphia series—a collection of essays exploring beliefs, patterns, and fears around food and body.
If you don’t find reading about food and eating supportive, please skip this one. You know best what you need.
And with that, March blessings! I turn 49 this month and am offering a teensy birthday special if you’re considering a paid subscription:
Below you’ll find:
A short ebook on eating addiction with an accompanying audio: This centres our relationship with food but applies to unhelpful habits and patterns more generally.
Links and resources, including a story of addiction to processed food and finding freedom through abstinence, an intuition-meets-macros approach to eating for holistic wellness, a how-to guide on reducing sugar consumption, an essay that explores choosing to shift a problematic relationship with food while navigating public conversations about weight and weight loss, the best book I’ve found for those suffering from anorexia and their loved ones, and an excellent (plus fun!) book on finding freedom from harmful eating patterns.
Thoughts on how patterns in one area tend to show up in others—affecting every aspect of us and every relationship in our lives.
Thoughts on discovering our best medicine (which differs person to person), shifting our eating patterns in a supportive way, and remembering our body is our ally.
Patterns around food affect everything else.
As a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I notice and identify patterns. Rather than focus on a single body part or symptom, our medicine surveys the constellation that comprises the whole.
From there, we diagnose disease, identify patterns and how they’re manifesting in an individual, and craft treatment protocols that address not just symptoms but underlying conditions and tendencies. Over time, we monitor how such patterns change, adjusting our protocols accordingly.
What’s this have to do with addiction? And our patterns around eating? Everything.