The Stories that Shape Us: Food
We live in stories that shape our relationship to the essential resources of our lives—food, love, and money—are landscapes for spiritual formation.
Laboratories for our growth.
Our relationship to money is shaped by the story we absorbed about it from how our family or other mentors related to money.
We live in a certain story of love too — we absorbed beliefs about love from our family or past friends or partner, and that can limit out experience of it unless we become intentional about re-writing our story of love, choosing and practicing new beliefs about our worthiness of it and boundaries and generosity with it.
I want to focus today on our stories of food.
What stories about food and your body shape your relationship to food and your body?
Let’s breathe deeply into this question and be willing to enter this question:
What stories about food and your body shape your relationship to food and your body?
What was the first thing you learned about food and your body?
Who taught it to you, and how was it taught?
What relationship to food was modeled in your home as you grew up? What about some of the other communities you were part of early in your life: sports teams, sororities or fraternities, college dorms? What cultures of food and eating did they create?
How have you absorbed and repeated that relationship to food?
Many clients I work with, and especially women, say some version of:
Fear. I was taught to fear food and what it could do to my body.
I was also taught to fear MYSELF, my own appetites, to not trust them, because following them, indulging them, would make me undesirable.
“If I follow the desires of my own body, my body and therefore me will become undesirable to others.”
Another theme I hear is shame:
Being ashamed of your appetites or eating. Comments like, “I shouldn’t have have desert, or I shouldn’t eat this.” Or “don’t tell so and so I’m having seconds”
Shame can often translate to habits of secrecy: eating certain things or at certain times in secret, or binging and purging or restrictive eating.
Personally, one of my most vivid memories in relation to this is a high school boyfriend quoting his mother “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips”— note to all the mothers out there: you’re teaching boys how to think of women’s bodies as well their own and girls how to think of theirs.
Let’s look at some of the false assumptions these stories make:
You are an inexhaustible appetite that will never be satisfied. You must tame yourself, and protect yourself FROM yourself.
You are your body. The entirety and miracle of all that you are—your personality, your mind, your soul, your creativity—becomes reduced to how your body appears as an object, rather than an agent
You are someone SEEN (and object), rather than someone DOING (an agent).
What positive teachers about food have shaped you? How have you seen a healthy, celebratory, grateful, pleasureful, and PEACEFUL relationship to food modeled?
Who have been your positive mentors or modelers of the relationship you want to have?
And this is the juicy one:
How have you changed, or how would you like to change your food story?
These types of questions are part of the landscape we dive into in my course WEIGHTY, along with nutrition science, daily meditations, thematic workouts, a cookbook of my favorite nutritionally unleveled recipes, and all I’ve learned in healing my mindset around food, body image, and nourishing our radiance. We re-write and also re-wire your relationship to food. Re-wire, meaning, transform your mindset and your default thoughts and habits into intentionally chosen practices.
WEIGHTY is a 6-week journey to transform your relationship to weight, energy, and legacy-building practices of nourishment and body recomposition on a foundation of radical love for your body and clarity on your purpose.
The course gets its name from a realization I had a few years ago that
The word “guru” means “a weighty one.”
“A person of substance and legacy.” As I was creating this course, bringing together all I have learned about nutrition and how to go on a weight loss or body recomposition journey — I like to think in terms of body recomposition rather than weight loss or weight gain: building muscle, burning excess fat, building an efficient metabolism — from a place of radical self-love rather than the self-loathing that’s buried in many nutrition or weight loss courses — as I was creating this course I decided to call it Weighty because I love how that word calls us to redefine our relationship to weight. Instead of fearing it or being ruled or diminished by it, we claim it. First and foremost, we want to be WEIGHTY people! People who are living our lives to create a legacy.
WEIGHTY is a course to heal or reset your relationship to food as energy for your creative work, sharpen your vision of that work, experiment with new practices and forms of nourishment, and fuel your joy.
I am also offering a special introduction to the course called A Taste of Weighty, a 5-day Reset beginning January 22nd, including 2 live sessions with me, daily audio meditations I’ve made to lead you through the reset, and a selection of resources from Weighty. If you’re not sure if Weighty is for you right now, join me for A Taste at a special introductory rate. You can find out more about A Taste of Weighty here, and you’ll receive immediate access when you register, so you can begin your reset and gather your questions or requested conversation topics for our live digital sessions together.
This is going to be the 7th live round of Weighty I have offered. I get so much joy from going through this course with you and witnessing the incredible transformations Weighty participants have had. I want to share with you a few testimonials, which we can also add to our assembly of positive role models and mindsets in relationship to food.
Angie, in Washington said:
“Little did I know WEIGHTY would kick off some serious reflections into myself, decisions about who I want to be, and a feeling of spiritual fulfillment. This journey has meant more than I could have imagined.”
This kind of feedback is what I am aiming for in all the courses or retreats I lead, and also reflects my own experience of how we grow:
And I want you to really lean in and hear this, and feel how this resonates for you:
The pain or frustration we feel around a certain relationship (whether that’s a relationship to another person, or to money, or to food, or to a question of what we’re meant to do in the world vocationally or creatively) is usually a surface-level issue, that’s connected to deeper, core wounds. So when we decide, I want to heal my relationship to food, it becomes this occasion to do the deeper healing, this way of getting in to the deeper stuff that actually affects every part of our lives. So for example, to heal your relationship to food probably is connected to the way you see yourself and your value and beauty and how your value yourself, whether you make time care for yourself well; or maybe you’ve always de-prioritized caring for yourself and given your focus and energy to others.
So the great news is that
We are going to walk through this doorway of rewriting our food story, into the cave of the heart, and do the deep healing work that is going to reverberate to every part of your life.
Patti, in Saint George, Utah, who I’m seining a big hug to today said:
“Weighty helped me take my power back. Changes are happening in my long-held beliefs and habits around food—they will be permanent. If you are questioning whether this journey is right for you, know this: You are worth it.”
Amen. You are worth it. In fact,
Your worth is infinite.
There are a bunch more testimonials you can read and learn all about Weighty at nicolemeline.com/weighty.
I would love for you to join me for this next live round, because I would love to get to know you during these live sessions. One of the greatest honors of my life, truly, has been to witness and hold space for how gorgeously vulnerable so many of the weighty participants have been, right off the bat. Sharing their stores of frustration and shame and self-sabotage and the negative ways that we might have been talking to ourselves for a long time. I have witnessed this beautiful truth that
What we reveal can be healed.
When we speak our past, limiting stories, we take their power away. And when we speak the new, liberating stories we are living into, we give them more power. We make them real. So in Weighty, we have intentionally created what I think, knowing this wellness industry, is a truly unique and brave community of radically truthful, compassionate, transformation.
So, you’re invited to the party. It’s not about depravation. It about realigning to your initiation, and honoring your pleasure, this great pleasure we have as human being who get to eat the world to live. What does it mean, for you, to live in integrity with that pleasure, to fuel yourself for your creative work, and to nourish your radiance. Let’s find out.
If it’s time for you to reset your metabolism, and rewrite your food story, and do it from a sustainable, lifelong orientation of gentleness and compassion and love and reverence for your body, I want to support you.
If you are reading this in the future, after this live round, you can join Weighty anytime with replays of the live sessions.
Thank you for tuning in to another episode the Alter podcast. I would love to hear what this podcast has stirred in you. Connect with me on instagram @nicolemeline and @altertogether, and please please follow or subscribe, and rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — I read and appreciate every single review —, and share it with a friend or on social media. Tag me @nicolemeline and @altertogether so we can build like-hearted community. To support this podcast and your fitness and mindfulness journey, join my Alter Together community and digital studio at nicolemeline.com/alter.
Sending you so much love, and deep belief in you,
as we alter, together.
