Is Our Addictive Relationship to Food Actually About Our Need for More Pleasure?
How the way we nourish ourselves has become a socially acceptable way to experience pleasure
I’ve been thinking about the nature of our relationship to food, and I’ve begun to wonder if it has more to do with pleasure than with nourishment.
If it were just about nourishing ourselves with what was healthy and beneficial to our bodies and minds, we wouldn’t eat half of what is on offer. Food could still be fast, but it certainly wouldn’t be junk. There would be an emphasis on vitamins, nutrients, and balance, but we were blessed/cursed with taste buds, and therein lies the problem.
Things that aren’t good for us taste good, and we have bodily systems that allow us to consume way more than we need, storing energy for a rainy day that never comes.
This is nothing new. We are all aware and working with our own levels of struggle as we try and balance what our brain knows to be good for our bodies, and what our bodies actually need.
The factor that seems to be the tipping point for many women, is the need for pleasure.
We experience pleasure when we eat. The whole process of seeing something we like and the anticipation of having it, the tasting, as different flavors interact with our tongue. The texture and temperature. The sensation of being satisfied and comforted. All of it combined into a physical action that reconnects us to bodies, that for the majority of our day we completely ignore.
Perhaps in a culture of doing everything as fast as we can, so we can fit in more and more, our relationship to food has changed in part because we are craving contact with our bodies and access to a source of pleasure we don’t need to be ashamed about.
The positive sensations we experience while eating have been shown to be similar to those of sex.
Think about it, the social rewards we receive when we have positive interactions and feel liked by others are pleasurable. The dopamine responses which we now know are responsible for many addictive behaviors are intimately entwined with our need for pleasure in the most accessible way. Evolution is reliant on procreation and offspring survival, both of which are insured via the fundamental reward of pleasure.
Giving ourselves pleasure can come in many forms but the majority of them are associated with sexual pleasure and therefore have all the attachments we have picked up in relation to sex. Self-pleasure is still somehow a taboo subject for most women, and not only do we rarely talk about it, a women may feel so much shame about herself as a sensual being that she won’t touch herself for the purpose of sexual pleasure.
On the other side, when thinking about non-sexual pleasure, we have the notion that it is indulgent. A luxury that most cannot afford in time or money to offer themselves. We think of pleasure as either for those where the grass is greener, or perhaps the lazy or non-hard working folks who have better uses for their time. Food allows us to bypass both these inhibitors, we must eat after all.
We have long left puritanical times behind, but it seems that perhaps they have left a residue we are not yet free from.
Perhaps if we could find a way to offer ourselves pleasure that didn’t have the negative consequences that overeating and eating unhealthy food does, we could not only use food primarily to nourish ourselves, but we could also enjoy much more pleasurable days in a variety of ways.
It seems as though many of our senses are underused and undervalued. We can receive pleasure by listening, whether to the sounds of nature, the laughter of friends, or your favorite genre of music.
The things we see can be a huge source of pleasure as we indulge our eyes in images and words. Scents can transport us to different times and places, returning memories long forgotten, of moments of joy and pleasure.
And then of course there is touch. Our skin is the largest organ we have, the interface between us and the world, and its range of sensations is immense.
Perhaps we could all do with getting curious about pleasure, and the many ways we could be experiencing it if we allowed ourselves permission to leave behind the imagined judgements of the external world.
Our bodies are designed for pleasure of all kinds, and if we can take our critical minds out of the picture we no longer have to settle for just one.
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