Food Fear & Other Related Topics :D

Hey Y'all, happy Sunday 🥰

I'm coming here today to talk about food fear, the healing process regarding food, and the toxic programs I often see people (myself included) get stuck in during the healing process.

Yesterday I posted a photo of a Honeydew milk tea I had from a local boba place. If you know me, you know boba is a new favorite of mine & although I don't consider this a "healing food" I have 0 issues drinking things like this for fun, to enjoy my life.

As a society, we create emotional connections with other people and with ourselves through food. Whether that be a family meal cultivating connection and togetherness, or something we eat to feel good, just to enjoy it.

Over the years, I thought that connection was not important. I actually bypassed that connection completely because I was using food as a tool to heal myself, so I no longer cared about eating thanksgiving dinner with my family, for example... during the height of my chronic illness, I juice fasted 3 thanksgivings in a row.

Why? To prove to myself that I could #1, stay committed to what I was trying to do for myself & #2, overcome my emotional connections toward food and reframe my "family time & connection" to not include food at all... unless of course, someone else in my family was juice fasting or eating clean with me... then we would bond over that.

This is problematic for me now, but I'll get to that.

Back to my Honeydew Milk Tea :D

After I posted that, I had a TON of people ask me about:

sugar content
is there food dye
is there corn syrup
what kind of milk was used
if this is a healthy option while healing
how can you even stand to drink things like this without knowing all the details

All valid questions for sure, and these are things I would have asked too, if I were still in the mindset of food being the #1 thing that heals & if I was still struggling with food sensitvities.

Throughout the first 5 years of my healing journey with interstitial cystitis, I used food as my main source of healing power. Water fasting, juice fasting, all fruit diet for months, intentional periods of eating raw vegan etc.

Back then, I was convinced all of my issues were coming from the lack of healthy food I was putting in my body, creating an imbalance in my body's overall PH, and that acidic PH was creating the pain. I still believe this to be true, BUT that mentality only took me so far.

After doing all of that for 5 years, I STILL struggled with bladder flares and pain.

In 2021, after watching my friend Alex's process with her nervous system healing in combination with the fasting and raw food, I started to consider that holistic healing, was more than just the food. There were many areas of my life that I refused to look at... either because they were emotionally too hard for me to deal with, or I was resisting the "learning & unlearning" process thinking I had the correct mentality & there was no need to dig further...

I read the books, gained the knowledge, put it all into practice, experienced it for myself, supported by a like minded community on the internet that became an echo chamber for the things I read and made me feel like I was definitely on the right path.

So why do I need to keep questioning these things if I feel like I found the truth?

Because after 5 years of struggling through this diet stuff, pushing the people close to me away, doing all of these expensive and time consuming things to try to heal myself... I WAS STILL IN PAIN.

Being the open minded person I am, I considered that maybe I don't have all the answers and maybe I am missing something.

It wasn't until I met Peter and I felt safe in my relationship, in my life, and in my health, that I felt there was absolutely missing in my healing process. So with him, and my friend Alex (who has a course here in the classroom) that I started to consider this lingering pain was from something else that I had refused could be a factor for me.

In my mind, I had no big T traumas to talk about. You know, those life altering things that deeply effect a person...

Without getting too deep into my own personal emotional stuff, I will say that even if you don't feel like you have any trauma, or that certain events or circumstances in your childhood/early life affected you, if you have chronic illness, they likely did.

No matter how strong you think you are or how well you think you handled it, there is likely still something lingering in the body/nervous system causing pain.

When I started to dive into the emotional and mental side of healing, within 3-4 sessions with Alex, my pain never returned.

Read that again ^, no matter what I have done in the last 3 years since being symptom free, the pain I experienced on a daily basis, NEVER RETURNED. I haven't had a flare since December 2021.

Do I think all the fasting, fruit, raw food, etc. helped? Yes. I definitely think it was part of the solution. But like I said, it was absolutely not the FULL picture.

So now, when I witness people get very hung up on food or say "I eat well but I still have cooked food sometimes"... It makes me feel like this is absolutely a topic that isn't talked about enough. This is why you will see long term raw vegans still struggle with symptoms of chronic illness. This is why so many people will leave the raw and vegan thing behind completely because it didn't get them the results they were looking for.

When you count on one area of your life to solve all the problems, that is not holistic healing. That is a modified version of medical programming. It's another bandaid method that eventually can become disordered eating.

When you push all the people close to you away because they aren't on the same path and "don't know what it means to actually be healing because they're not doing it themselves"...

When you start to look down on people because they "went back to eating meat" or "aren't doing veganism correctly therefore they don't know what they're talking about"...

When you start to look at your own diet and highlight the areas where you feel you are failing, like not being able to maintain a raw vegan diet over long periods of time...

"I'll be better after I do this next juice fast"

"If I just continue to eat only raw foods, this will go away"

"If I can do a period of all fruit for a while, everything will change"

"If I go do this water fast in the jungle, I'll come back completely healed"

These mental programs are not only false, they are also dangerous and create so much separation not only between you and other people, but also you and yourself, and you and ACTUALLY healing.

How do I know? Because I have lived it & these are all things I would tell myself. They held me back in my healing process and when I finally decided to let these mental programs go, that's when the symptoms stopped.

So to bring this back full circle...

Eating foods that bring me joy, is a part of my emotional and mental healing process now. To prove to myself that I can eat my trigger foods and not have to carry the fear with me of having a flare. To unwind the mental constructs I had to create for myself to survive chronic illness. To prove to myself that healing isn't 100% all about diet & that there are many factors to healing chronic illness, that I previously thought were unimportant and not worth looking into.

A lot of my journey has been learning to unlearn, and having to humble myself and consistently show up as the student for my own growth and healing.

If this resonated with you, go and check out

@Nathan Mulder

's course on breaking food addiction. There's a reason why a lot of people in this holistic healing space are moving away from the DIET ONLY mentality and considering different approaches to healing chronic illness.

What is your experience and what do you think about this? As always I am open and willing to hear you guys and have a discussion about it :D

Sending you all love,

Britt

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