Food Is A Great Teacher

Life is chock full of lessons, and lucky for us, we have lots of teachers to help us with our homework along the way. Some of these teachers stand in front of classrooms. Others come in the form of parents or friends, authors or celebrities, our children or our lovers. Sometimes our relationships themselves have a lot to teach us about the places where we need to grow so we can live life to the fullest potential. Our relationship with food is no exception! If we find ourselves experiencing the same eating-related challenge over and over again, it might be time to take a good long look at the challenge and see what it is asking us to learn. Join Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, as he explores some of the many possible lessons that food can teach us in this thought-provoking new video from #IPEtv!

Below is a transcript of this week’s video:

Greetings friends, this is Marc David, founder of the Institute for the psychology of eating.

Today’s Topic: Food is a Great Teacher

You know, I’ve had the very good fortune of having a lot of great teachers in my life. Some of them have been amazingly inspiring, some taught me through their intellect, some taught me because they knew how to love in a big way, and others taught me because they were very hard and direct and were delivering lessons that I didn’t quite like – but that I surely needed to learn.

My assumption is this:

If you’re alive on planet Earth, then you’re here to learn.

There’s no escaping it.
It’s essential for survival and for evolution.
And evolution and growth is our imperative – at the level of our DNA, and I believe at the level of our soul.

If you never learned how to read, write, dress yourself, and wipe your behind – life is just way more difficult. And learning such basic things isn’t always easy.

Our teachers are everywhere. Not just in the traditional classroom, but in the classroom of life.

Here’s my point:

Food is a great teacher.
More specifically, our relationship with food is a great teacher.
Even more specifically, every one of our eating challenges, no matter what they are – weight, over eating, binge eating, emotional eating, and any unwanted eating habit – are great teachers for us.

And it’s even quite likely that what food is teaching us, and what all our eating challenges are teaching us – are essential lessons that we must learn to graduate, so to speak.

When I was a kid, the worst thing that can happen in school was if you got left back. If you had to repeat a grade in grade school because you didn’t pass, all the other kids look down on you. No one wants to have to do the same stuff over and over and over again and keep failing at it.

Well, one of the reasons that our eating challenges tend to persist is that we’re not learning the lessons that they’re teaching us.

We’re not doing our homework.

We’re not paying attention in class.
We’re not clearly getting whatever the lesson is that we need to learn, so life keeps giving us the same lesson until we pass.

It’s kind of like getting left back. But in truth, getting left back is not so bad. Life is very generous. It will give us every opportunity to keep learning until we finally get it right.

So my friends, consider all of your food and body concerns – as a great guru.

Of course, the powerful question to ask yourself, and to keep asking is – what am I being asked to learn? What is my eating concern teaching me? How is it asking me to grow?

Our eating concerns may have a straight-up nutritional challenge or deficiency that lives underneath it – so we might be asked by the wisdom of life to make some clear nutritional course corrections. Our eating challenges may be connected to issues we’re having at work, or with money, or in our marriage, or with our parents, or with any challenge in life. So the lessons can be in so many different possible dimensions.

And that’s the beauty of it all.

I think we need to truly be life long learners.

If we stop learning, a part of us dies.

And when it comes to our eating concerns, if we stop listening to food as our great teacher – or if we never choose to listen in the first place – we can expect to keep facing the same challenge over and over until we finally break through.

And that by the way, is the some of the core philosophy that forms the foundation of the very practical and results-driven strategies that we teach here at the Institute for the Psychology of Eating.

Our professional trainings and public programs are designed to help uncover what each of us is here to learn through the vehicle of food. Our trained practitioners are skilled in working in this way.

So, we’re all paying a good amount of tuition, so to speak, to learn the lessons that food and body are teaching us.

We might as well get our money’s worth.

It’s time to do a little speed learning so we can graduate sooner and move on from unnecessary pain or suffering with food, and step into a more powerful and nourishing relationship with food.

I hope this was helpful, my friends.

Please email us at info@psychologyofeating.com if you have specific questions and we will be sure to get back to you. In the comments below, please let us know your thoughts. We love hearing from you and we read and respond to every comment!