Beyond the Plate: A Dietitian’s Perspective on Food (Part 2)
- Vishrutha Thulasiram
- Nov 15, 2023
- 2 min read
The act of eating may seem rather simple. You simply pick whatever is available at home or order it online and we eat it up while staring at a bigger screen and/or a smaller screen. But what if I told you that the act of eating (also called Eating Behaviour) is much more complicated and intricate than that? The eating behaviours of human beings began as a daily act of survival and has now progressed to rather rewarding behaviours and is highly dependent on environmental and psychological cues than it does on our body’s hunger cues. That sentence went above your head didn’t it? Don’t you worry, I will break it down for you.
Early humans ate food because it was a necessity for their survival everyday and was solely based on their own body’s and tribes’ hunger cues. However in today’s day and age, eating has become more of a rewarding behaviour and is highly linked to mood and emotion and because food is often abundantly available in our environments, eating is triggered even in the absence of hunger.
Food choices (what/how much we eat) today are heavily influenced by the environmental factors including advertising, packaging, portion sizes, lighting, etc. Which also means that on an individual level we need to be constantly aware of what we eat and should be able to self-regulate our food choices, in order to be healthy. One of the main causes of obesity and nutrient deficiencies is because of poor dietary habits and eating behaviour and not because of compulsive binge eating.
Why is this important? Because being healthy and maintaining a healthy weight is literally in our hands! And since eating is a behaviour, it can be modified and made better. But how do we do that? The first step is “awareness”. Which includes both a) being aware of what affects our eating behaviours and b) how healthy our eating behaviours are.
Here is a list of 6 main factors that determine our food choices:
Biological determinants such as hunger, appetite, and taste
Economic determinants such as cost and income
Physical determinants such as access, education, skills and time
Social determinants such as class, culture, and social context
Psychological determinants such as mood, stress and guilt
Attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about food.
Okay, now that we know what role food plays (part 1) and how environment and other factors affect food choices. Here is the next step: “identifying” how healthy our eating behaviours are! And here is a super simple way to do that
➡️➡️ 15 Days of Tiny Healthy Habits Challenge!!
This challenge is completely FREE and will
1. help you understand what healthy habits actually look like in daily life
2. help calculate your tiny habits score
3. introduce you to the potential of small habits
🔓🔑🔓🔑Simply signup by clicking this link – JOIN HERE
That’s it for part two of the blog; in the next one we’ll see how our food choices impact the environment and how we can make our diets more sustainable.
Until next time, let’s #growwiththeflow🌈 and remember that small habits = BIG MAGIC ✨
xVishrutha 🌻
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