In order to lead our most inspired and fulfilled lives, we must fuel all aspects of the mind, heart and soul. Let behavioral health coach and nutrition Expert Rachel Harvest guide you towards making the choices that honor your wants and needs.
Let’s begin to become more familiar and connected to what foods you need for fuel. What you need differs from person-to-person for many reasons – desires and dreams, past experience, beliefs, what you’re working on and working through.
Let’s break down what types of ‘food’ we need to fuel ourselves:
Physiological food is the literal way that you feed yourself.
These are foods that you need to eat in order to receive the nutrients, energy and satisfaction to be fulfilled, and able to have your body operate at its best state.
What you choose for nourishment depends on what you need physiologically: at baseline, in times of sickness or disease, at any stage of life, at whatever physical fitness level/goals, incorporating variety and preference, ethnicity and belief systems.
Emotional food is a figurative way you feed yourself.
Ask yourself the following:
- What kind of emotional development do you need?
- What do you need to let go of to have a viewpoint that is empowered and let’s you allow for and accept your emotions and feeling and those of others without judgment or ridicule?
In order to be surrounded by those who also allow you to feel and emote, you must also be comfortable with being yourself. That’s where the next form of food comes in.
Interrelational food is how we feed ourselves through interactions, conversations, communication and relationships.
How well you relate to others starts with how you look within yourself:
- What feels like it’s missing in how you relate with others?
- What do you need to ask others for, and give to others?
- What is your ideal life when it comes to being with others and feeling you belong there?
Intellectual food is everything you process from your senses – what you see, hear, smell, taste and feel.
Pay attention to what you are stimulating your mind with:
- What are you allowing in that may not be the best form of nourishment?
- What music are you listening to?
- Does the TV you watch and the things you read benefit your calmness and faith in the world, or are you unintentionally marring your view with trash and gossip?
Get real with this one. You always have a choice as to what you let in and surround yourself with. Get straight about what is positive, what is punishing, and what you want to change.
And lastly,
Spiritual food…this is what you believe you see.
Your words are your world – both conscious and subconscious:
- What do you need to become more in tune with and bring to conscious light?
- Do you have stories about things that “always happen to you”, relationships that mirror past negative experiences, things you just can’t get “right” or have given up on because you just don’t think are possible?
Get present with those thoughts and the words that you use. You are magically (and not so magically) finding evidence that you are right, even during the times you truly wish you were wrong. And those deepest beliefs may not support what you really want, and it’s running the show.
- What spiritual work – meditation, healing, groups, prayers, rituals or ceremonial experiences can support you to let those limiting beliefs go?
Sure, you could do it all in psychotherapy or in a gym workout that exhausts you physically to the point where you give up your emotional resistance. You can also live in the misery of limitation.
Or you can find the spiritual fuel that supports your growth. Get what I mean?
Just feed yourself.
I hope this provokes some thought and action, because there is nothing special about the people you see who seem to have it all figured out, and appear to have free and love-filled lives. They simply understand that what they take in and fuel themselves with will have a direct effect on their experiences, moment to moment.
It’s time you feed yourself the best way possible.
Adapted from the original article.
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Rachel Harvest, MS, RD, CDN is a NYC-based Registered Dietitian, behavioral health nutritionist, and wellness coach. With her philosophy centered around the love we need to give ourselves before finding our health and happiness, Rachel is on a mission to help you dig deep within to create the life you want for yourself. To work on you with somebody who loves you no matter what, visit Rachel at The Harvest Method.