Why We Need Holistic Nutrition

In the past, those wishing to enter the realm of nutritional education had to do so completely under the auspices of Dietetics … but times have changed! Today, the amount of information at our fingertips, about what we should eat and what nutrition can do, is astounding. Anyone inspired to learn more about Nutrition can – and sometimes with just the click of a button.

Nutrition information is everywhere: all our foods are all labeled with nutritional facts. People have become label-savvy. Every other blog, our daily news, and magazine headlines touts the nutritional facts of the latest super-food, or warns us against the latest pernicious threat. And this is due to the fact that over the last 20 years, research has clearly shown that what we eat directly impacts our health and our experience of wellness.

We now know without a shadow of a doubt that when we eat high quality, whole foods, we feel better, and we’re certainly being informed from a variety of sources. More and more people seem to have an idea about what it means to “eat healthy”… but, If knowledge is power, as we’re often told, and we’re all being supplied with more information about our food then ever before — then why aren’t we getting any healthier?

Why is this personal super-power, which so many seek, still eluding us?

It seems that having the information about what food we should eat isn’t the whole story. If it were, we wouldn’t be in the health crisis that we are.

According to the United Health Foundation, Americans are living longer, but are also experiencing more chronic illnesses. In other words, we’ve figured out how to increase our lifespan, but our quality of life suffers. Longevity in this country is said to stem from a higher rate of medical care, drugs, and technology… but going the distance while riddled with protracted disease-conditions hardly makes for an enjoyable life experience.

It’s becoming apparent that “nuts and bolts” nutritional information just isn’t making the changes we need in our society. Isn’t it time for a more comprehensive look at nutrition, one that takes into account that we are more than fact-gathering, nutrient-counting, feeders?  We need to understand the Eater. As our founder, Marc David, says – “Animals feed; humans eat.” We nourish.

So, if we want to improve more than just the quantity of our years, we need to start looking at Quality of Life, one of the tools we need is a good, whole-person approach to nutrition.

This is the entire focus of our Eating Psychology Coach Certification Training, and it’s what makes our program so unique and powerful.

We understand that as humans alive in this body on this planet, we are complex beings, with emotional and spiritual needs, we need to have heart connection with others, we desire a professional purpose and, of course, we all have nutritional needs to help us thrive. We are Holistic beings and as such we need Holistic nutrition. We need to nourish the whole person!

Each of us is hungry for a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.

In order for us to feel truly vibrant about our lives, we’re going to need our nourishment to arrive in more ways than the food gracing our dinner table.

It just so happens there are at least 7 different aspects to life that can satisfy our holistic nourishment requirements:

1. Love in our life – supportive family, friends and partners
2. Spirituality – connection to that which is bigger than ourselves
3. Nature – connection to the natural world
4. Growth and Learning – we are perpetually evolving beings
5. Movement – living fully in our body
6. Self-Expression – our work and creative outlets
7. Pleasure – sensuality, sexuality, pure enjoyment

When we have all of these aspects in our life, we experience Holistic health. Holistic nutrition steps beyond the study of calories and nutritional facts – it addresses the hunger we all have for a satisfying life experience.

Holistic nutrition looks at the whole story of Who We Are as eaters.

It examines all the different parts of life that impact our relationship with food, body and eating. Another way we like to refer to it is Mind-Body Nutrition, which like Holistic nutrition, takes a positive and compassionate approach.

It moves beyond the constricting ideas of our past – whether we had an eating problem, or a weight problem – and instead, directs us towards a more spacious and workable reality: that we have a relationship with food, and we belong to a body that needs some loving-attention and support from us in order to feel optimistic and encouraged to live the life we dream about.

Holistic nutrition knows that the body-shaming messages which society has instilled in us cannot nourish us, and neither does this belief that “we’re just not doing enough,” or “doing it right,” or that “we don’t deserve our health” because we haven’t figured out what healthy eating means yet.

There’s no doubt that our society’s fascination with nutrition information and quick-fix diets can create change – but it’s rarely one that lasts, because it stays on the surface of our health issues.

What’s the Next Step?

What we need now is to take the health conversation deeper as a society. We need an approach that seeks to understand the whole, intelligent, complex beings that we are, versus the mechanistic robot suffering from irredeemable faulty “genetic“ wiring.

To create a lasting healthy impact, we have to look at nutrition through this holistic, body-mind-spirit lens. We need a Dynamic Eating Psychology.

We need to look at:

1. Who – who are we feeding?
2. Why – why are we eating?
3. How – how are we eating?

Whenever we dive into this deeper experience of nutrition and eating, we find our unique personal path, the one that will lead each of us to a healthy and positive relationship with the food we eat and the body we nourish.

The unique quality of each path is an important aspect of Holistic nutrition, as we all have a unique relationship with the world around us, and we all have a story that’s all our own. And only the path leading to feeling our particular best is the right one. Be willing to stay true to your own course.

Walking someone else’s road will only take you to someone else’s door.

If this whole-person approach resonates with you, and you’d like to learn how to work with more than food when it comes to creating a healthy life, the work we do at Institute for the Psychology of Eating can inspire you to heal your own relationship with food, and help teach you to take that healing back into the world.

If you’re interested in learning more about our Eating Psychology Coach Certification Training, or any of our other offerings please sign up for our free information packed video series called “The Dynamic Eating Psychology Breakthrough” here or email us at info@psychologyofeating.com to learn more.