About Proper Nutrition And Conscious Eating Behavior

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Proper nutrition

… it is rational, it is nutritional, it is according to the methodology (a long list of names and surnames) … it is a type of memorized and rigid nutrition offered by the weight loss industry. The key word here is "rules", and it doesn't matter if they are inspired by a review on a weight loss forum or suggested by a professional nutritionist.

The problem with any proper nutrition is that we ourselves are wrong by nature, only partially rational, and the rules of others are, at best, an introject - a sewn psychological organ with a subsequent reaction of rejection. You can write about the futility and harm of proper nutrition as much as there are advertisements on this topic. All such texts end either with a feeling of hopelessness, or with the sale of a new way of losing weight.

The only thing that must be noted is the aggravated medical history of proper nutrition and weight loss methods. They all claim to be called a cure and meet dependent needs. The word "treatment" infantilizes any person, since the target is the child's part of the personality, and not an adult independent individual - "let's put a little fist", "work with a fist", a list of prohibited and allowed foods, combinations, grams, calories and other arithmetic for a child from the age of five to six years.

Kilogram weight loss results according to the rules are the result of human despair. You can lose extra pounds by following the craziest rules, and people who are prone to self-destruction decide on this. The cherished figure on the scales becomes the reward for all the hardships. It is useless and even cruel to tell the lucky one that his happiness will be short-lived. Moreover, the new state is clearly different from when he was suffocating at rest, felt the pressure of collective standards, the daily painful experience of his bad body, undressed only in the dark and experienced many other inconveniences.

The topic of weight return should be discussed only with those who have already had this, and who have entered the category of people who are inclined to devalue even their real non-kilogram achievements.

It is worth remembering and talking about the real results. The man finally went through an important childhood period of autoeroticism, he really corrected his self-esteem for a while and really began to love his new body. And it doesn't matter that it's lost. Just psychologically, with all the victories and gifts, he was still too small and scared:

• I was afraid that my boyfriend, who doesn't like fat people, would see my old photos.
• I didn't know how to fit into this new world where everything was unknown.
• I was even more afraid of food than before, and now I was really afraid of gaining weight.

All this does not mean that after the accomplished victory, the person again turned out to be a failure, and his body remained bad. With all the subjective reliability, all this only seems to be so. All these depreciation are the result not of another unsuccessful weight loss, but of the early experience of violence, rejection and indifference. The very same attempts to improve your weight, appearance, health, quality of life, even if naive, deserve respect.

At the same time, it is important to understand that the way out of the difficulty is not in the search for a new technique and even more correct rules, but the path of growing up and the development of awareness.

Conscious eating

… is no different from awareness in any other area. In all cases, the formation of awareness is good. free labor to maintain production freeattention and states of involvement.

The development of awareness really requires volitional efforts, and it is fundamentally important where the will (libido, energy, vitality, basic intention) of a person will be directed. An excellent guide for the application of volitional efforts, a structuring scheme and a working tool for the development of awareness, including in nutrition, is typology of functions of consciousness K. G. cabin boy.

The typology of consciousness consists of several components:

• the well-known extraversion - introversion;
• irrational functions - sensing (sensation, vision, hearing, smell, taste) and intuition (unconscious perception, sixth sense);
• rational functions - thinking (judgments, rules, order) and feelings (feeling, value preferences, emotional assessment).

These functions add up 8 functional types or attitudes of consciousness

The figure shows one of the possible eight types

The vertical axis is represented by rational or irrational functions of consciousness: thinking-feelings, intuition-sensations. Both functions on the vertical axis can be master or slave. And the horizontal axis of the so-called. additional functions are made up of unused pairs.

Let's consider an example.

1. Intuition (leading function).
2. Thinking (optional secondary function).
3. Feelings (optional tertiary function).
4. Sensing (subordinate function).

Each of the functions can be in an extroverted or introverted attitude

1. Introverted intuition - intuition of time (a high degree of anticipation and prediction of the course of events, a high ability to correlate the past, present and future).
2. Extraverted thinking (practical applied thinking, relying on the judgments of other people, previous scientific discoveries, or quite ordinary everyday wisdom).
3. Introverted feeling (subjective coloration of feelings).
4. Extraverted sensing (activity on the border of contact with the outside world thanks to the senses).

Depending on the position, this or that function can be developed in different ways. For example, this is like this:

1. The leading function corresponds to maturity, maximum development, passport age, for example, 40 years.
2. The additional secondary function is also quite developed and corresponds to the youthful level of psychological maturity.
3. Additional tertiary function corresponds to 5-10 years of age.
4. The infantile subordinate function, the weakest, least represented in the light of consciousness and the most unconscious and potentially charged.

Practical application of typology

… for a personal system of conscious nutrition is aimed at first and foremost "growing", develop your auxiliary functions of consciousness … It is they that serve as a support for the leading function, when the total energy potential of a person decreases for one reason or another. Figuratively, this is comparable to switching a high beam to a low beam when driving in bad weather, from a high gear to a lower one when driving on a bad road - from the leading function of consciousness to additional ones in order to use additional capabilities.

Let's look at an example. For a person with the leading function of introverted intuition to maintain normal nutrition in difficult conditions, it will be important, first of all, to have a system of nutritional rules tested by other people and worked out on their own experience (extraverted thinking). Naturally, here you need basic knowledge about calorie content, fat content, hypoglycemic index, diet and other cognitive landmarks - everything that can be assimilated in your personal experience to put things in order in your diet.

Given the childish nature of the tertiary additional function (introverted feeling), it will be important to develop awareness to interact with emotional experiences from childhood experience (resentment, anger, guilt, shame, etc.) and prevent these feelings from seizing.

Access to the olfactory, tactile, gustatory, visual characteristics of food (extraverted sensations) and to the signals of one's own body - hunger, satiety, heaviness, comfort, decrease and increase in energy (introverted sensations) - is likely to be difficult. The function of sensations is in the shadow of the conscious functioning of the psyche.

Individual style of mindful eating

… is equivalent to an individual style of dress, demeanor, speech, and preferences when solving a variety of life tasks.

As K. G. Jung, the typology of the functions of consciousness is not yet a man in his individuality. It is rather latitude and longitude, thanks to which you can find the point of your location on the map and from this point look at the North, South, East and West. Each personality type has its own compass and its own geomagnetic fields of the Earth.

The leading function has the greatest force of attraction for the energy of consciousness. And therefore if we are talking about the usual style of food, which does not require any changes and adjustments - this is nutrition that is directly dependent on the leading function of a person's consciousness: for intuition - intuitive, for sensorics - based on the senses, for the thinking type - schematic-unemotional, for the feeling type - either a holiday or a commemoration …

The sensor will almost always be attentive to what exactly he puts in his mouth, he will always remember in the evening what he ate in the morning, and at breakfast he will easily remember what he ate for dinner.

Intuite - will be relatively indifferent to food pleasure and his contact with both his body and food will always be mediated by past experience, special meanings of food, knowledge of the consequences of eating one or another food.

For a person of a feeling type, emotional comfort from a feast, relationships at the table with the family, etc. will always be important. special sacred food with nostalgic notes.

A thinker in his ordinary days will look at food through the prism of ideas and rules formed in his experience, will eat according to associations, will eat not in the stomach, not in the mouth, but in the head.

The choice of your own power supply, as well as the adaptation as a whole, through the leading function will always occur automatically, faster and most accurately. It is not a fact that the food will be good enough, but for now we are talking about the usual eating style. Power supply via master functionis often seen by a person as the only true and possible

Least of all light falls on the subordinate function of consciousness, and therefore it seems unattractive. This is our so-called personal Ivan the Fool and it is certain that we will never just turn to a subordinate function in order to organize a new style of eating. We will cause a person significant moral discomfort with this or that proposal to adjust nutrition through a subordinate function.

It would be a big mistakeencouraging a person, for example, of an intuitive type, to practice from the first steps the improvement of direct contact with food - recognition of the nutritional qualities of dishes with an emphasis on taste sensations, nuances of aftertaste or bodily satisfaction after eating. Most likely, this will only lead to a feeling of inferiority, to the conclusion that he is a dumbass, and in general "not destiny." The best that can happen is judging mindful eating as unsuitable for it.

But at the same time, it is there, in the subordinate function, that the greatest potential for development and personal transformation, including for the development of conscious eating. That is, for the same intuition, the most stable and radical improvement in the relationship with food is possible through the activation of the subordinate function of sensing.

The development of mindful eating is not a universal algorithm of behavior for one and all, but the development of eating habits that correspond to this particular type of consciousness. C. G. Jung's typology is here to help as a compass and a map.

With age

… a person's eating style inevitably changes, which is associated with the "wear" of the leading function and the entry into its rights of the subordinate function.

For the time being, while solving his current tasks and relying on the leading function, a person acts too one-sided and straightforward. Due to the leading function, he is busy with adaptation - education, family, work, etc. Nutrition is built on the residual principle - we eat, as it is, and the leading function is always to help. At the same time, the subordinate function looks "primitive and troublesome, both for the person himself and for those around him" D. Sharp. At this time, the subordinate function tends to activate only in an unnatural way, giving rise to numerous problems, including with nutrition and weight loss.

As Louise-von Franz writes: Life is not merciful, with a low position of subordinate function.

Including from here, due to the inevitable weakening of the leading adaptive function, the sadness of many people with their age. At that time, this may be a signal of the need to develop other functions. Life itself persistently compels one to develop consciousness and move toward a subordinate function. Often this happens through excess weight and related problems.

In a midlife crisis, early disregard for one's diet and body insistently requires a reappraisal and recourse to a forgotten subordinate function in the human unconscious. It is there that a huge concentration of new nascent life is concentrated - the source of the opening of the second, third and fourth breath.

As the leading function wears out - like an old car's engine rattles and oil runs out - if people are successful in recruiting their subordinate function, they rediscover new potential in life. In this area of subordinate function, everything becomes exciting, dramatic, full of positive and negative possibilities. A tension of tremendous tremendous force arises, and the world itself, so to speak, is rediscovered through the subordinate function * - although not without some discomfort, since the process of assimilation of the subordinate function “raises” it into consciousness and is invariably accompanied by a “lowering” of the leading or primary function” (D. Sharp)

For a person of a thinking type the emotional connections supported by the family dinner turn out to be important, and he recalls his mother's semolina porridge with jam or how he was punished by putting him out of the table.

Feeling type becomes unusually distracted for him and does not notice how many cutlets he put in his mouth.

Intuitive he is fascinated by the preparation of dishes, the color, taste, texture of food, or, unexpectedly for himself, refuses to eat meat, because he suddenly realizes that it is better to look at animals, stroke them and feel them with his hand than to eat them.

Feeling type he is fond of studying diets, peculiarities of national dishes, kitchen accounting and culinary wisdom.

In all cases, a definite and always noticeable inversion of human eating behavior inevitably occurs in the second half of life. In the treatment of eating disorders, it is very important to take this factor into account and promote the development of a subordinate function. However, this should be done gradually and, as already mentioned, primarily by passing through one of the auxiliary functions.

It is from there, from the subordinate function, that an appetite begins to grow especially persistently for a person, and excesses of food debauchery come. Here you need to understand that the appetite is not the same appetite. And when a person asks to reduce his appetite, then, apparently, he is talking about something painful for him.

Appetite, aligned with the leading function, is joy, a way to strengthen the connection with the world through food. It always serves the adaptation of a person, is part of mental immunity and helps maintain psychological balance in the flow of life challenges.

Excessive appetite is something that is almost always associated with an inferior function: these are reserve capabilities of the psyche, hyperadaptation in case of survival. This appetite becomes something of a psychological autoimmune disorder. Just as the accumulation of fat in the body is a hyperadaptation to conditions of hunger and lack of nutrients, so the accumulation of appetite energy in a subordinate function is a hyperactivity ready to turn on at any moment to the conditions of emotional hunger.

If we are not thinking about how to keep or suppress the "autoimmune disease" - to increase appetite and gain fat - but about how to become a slim person, then this subordinate function and the passage to it through the development of additional functions of consciousness should be at the center our attention.