Food is our medicine. It is the foundation for healing, wellness and vitality. Food has the power to regenerate, restore, rebuild, re-energize and it connects us to ourselves, to life, to Mother Nature, to farmers, growers, and the planet. Food and the eating experience also stores memories. For many these memories are positive and joyous but for others memories around food can be negative and filled with anxiety.
I recently had a client tell me she remembers she couldn’t breastfeed because she didn’t like the smell of her mother’s skin. Her mother blamed her for not being a good baby because she wouldn’t latch. She recalls family dinners being scary and stressful as she grew up in an abusive home. Her mother hated cooking, often burned their meals and forced them to eat everything on their plate before they could leave the table. Perhaps this introduction to food is the very reason why this woman has suffered her entire life with food allergies, sensitivities, low immunity, digestive difficulties, eating anxiety and a complete disconnect to food, cooking and nourishment. These early stressful moments around eating may have set her up for a lifetime of health challenges. When I am doing an intake with a new client, this information is vitally important and plays a key role in how I would approach reconnecting a client to food.
Our first connection to nourishment is through our mother - via the placenta, then nursing or bottle feeding, being fed from hand to mouth, in the kitchen and around the table. If the relationship with mother is severed or untrusting at the earliest stages of development it is my belief that there will likely be food and digestive issues until that relationship and memories are resolved, which I can do using The Demartini Method® - a series of scientifically proven questions that neutralizes an individual's emotional charges, balances their mental and physical reactions, opens their heart and clears their mind. It is a reproducible science and procedure enabling individuals to discover the underlying order governing their apparent chaos. [Resource. www.drdemartini.com)
When we look at the mind-body connection and according to German New Medicine, digestive issues are often related to indigestible anger conflicts about a person, situation or circumstance. Anger, stress, fear and anxiety put the body into the sympathetic state, the fight or flight response which causes the digestive system to shut down and impacts the ability to effectively digest, absorb and assimilate food. If you have unresolved conflicts it is possible that each time you get triggered and something angers you, the gut which has stored unresolved memories from the past may get triggered as well, keeping a person on a constant track of reactivity to life and food.
The woman I have been working with and for others who have severe health and eating challenges have often been around the healing block of Nutritionists, Dieticians, Naturopaths, Doctors, Functional Medicine Doctors and other practitioners and have tried so many therapeutic diets, supplements, have had food allergy tests and extensive lab testing to look for the root of these challenges and although these all have great intentions and serve specific purposes and may have helped in some ways, they don't look past the physical body. The area that is not yet explored is the connection between the possible emotional, mental and soulful disconnect to nourishment, which is what I focus on when getting to the root of food and health issues. Once we make these connections and heal these areas it is then that the physical interventions begin to work more effectively.
Hippocrates said, “Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that made him sick.” This could mean unhealthy foods, sugar, alcohol, poor lifestyle choices, but it can also mean the angers, resentments, stressful memories and relationships and a hurtful past. As I work with these most challenging clients, these emotions are most commonly what need to be released through the work of the Demartini Method® in order for the body to begin to heal and to be able to receive nourishment again. It requires creating a new connection and relationship with food with Dynamic Eating Psychology. It can often mean leaving behind restrictive food lists and going on a “no-diet” diet and allowing the intuitive body to be awakened and to trust what the body would love to eat vs. all the years of messages and beliefs about what it “should” or “shouldn’t” eat.
This is my approach to helping some of the most difficult cases I have. I truly believe that every BODY deserves nourishment and is capable of being nourished. As a Nutrition Expert practicing for 17 years, a Certified Mind-Body Eating Coach and Eating Psychology Coach and a Certified Demartini Method® Facilitator, I can help you and those you know who are suffering with the eating experience. Please call (587) 436-2692 or email amy@amybondar.com to set up a virtual consult.
Food is the essence of life and nobody should ever feel like they are starving to death because they can't eat anything. There is hope.
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