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Learning From Our Cravings
Most of us have a love/hate relationship with our cravings and desires.
With wisdom gained from tough personal experience, Alex Jamieson teaches us to honor our desires and cravings. She wants us to change our relationship with our food and our bodies.
Alex was the co-star of the award-winning documentary Supersize Me.
She grew up on a small organic farm just outside of Portland. There she learned to have a sensual and loving relationship with the food that was growing there. This sensual, intuitive relationship eventually changed.
As she grew older she became a vegan for health and body image reasons. Her time as a vegan (10 years) worked until it stopped working. She knew she had to do something different but her identity as a vegan had a strong hold on her. She conducted her own n=1 experiment that led to her giving up veganism.
Your desires and cravings are part of your intuition and your inner intelligence. They can serve as a roadmap to healthful eating and living.
We have learned to lock this intelligence away by people who tell us we don’t look good enough or that we should be eating a certain way. This is a particular problem for women who have been taught to follow other people’s rules.
Food: Friend or Enemy?
Food in the United States has become almost a religion instead of a source of connection. Dietary debates have created division and anxiety. It’s ironic that we spend so much of our day thinking about food and when it’s placed in front of us, we rush to consume it unaware of its effects. If we ate based on how the food made our body feel, we could ignore all the ridiculousness of calorie counting and fat diets.
Alex makes the suggestion that we should avoid what she calls the Toxic 6: sugar, caffeine, gluten, soy, dairy, and corn.
Reclaiming Feminine Wisdom
Play, getting out into nature, a supportive community, and toys are part of Alex’s prescription to return to a more natural intuitive state.
Toys can range from hula hoops to slacklines to vibrators. Using them opens up a path to creativity and spontaneity.
We learn best and make a stronger mind/body connection when we are at play. We need to make more opportunities for play both at home and at work. This will make us better family members and more productive entrepreneurs and employees.
We need to feel more authentic and to tap into our intuition before we are able to make the larger contribution that so many of us want to make.
Alex took a journey that forced her to confront her fear of freedom and fear of failure. She learned to be comfortable with her vulnerability. Our focus needs to be on our strengths and contributions rather than our lack and limits.
We need to prepare to go alone on this journey back to feminine wisdom – at least for a while. Too often, the people around us are uncomfortable when they see us change. It forces a painful reexamination of how they’re living their own lives.
Those closest to us may offer subtle and direct judgments when we make changes in our activities, interests, and way of eating. We can seek out like-minded people to be part of our community as we embark on this journey and hope that friends and family can eventually join us there.
When we stop hiding our desires and cravings, and decide to learn from them instead, we’ll make better choices about our food and our lives.
You can pick up her book, Women, Food, and Desire.
