Food Tracing Charlottesville VA

Food Tracing

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Connect the dots from favorite foods to unmet needs

For an interesting take on what’s behind overeating, author Linda Spangle, RN, MA, suggests looking at your unique history with specific foods. In a practice she calls food tracing, Spangle describes how to recognize connections between emotional experiences from your past and foods you associate with them.

Try this technique and you may gain some insights into both your emotional and nutritional needs.

Exercise
1. Choose a favorite food (e.g., chocolate ice cream, coconut cake) that triggers you to overeat. Focusing on your childhood, think back to events or situations in which you ate this food. You might remember family celebrations, certain friends, or perhaps lonely or difficult periods in your life.

2. Try to recall one of your earliest memories associated with eating this food. Picture the scene in detail. Where are you? Who else is there? What emotions do you sense as you’re eating? Are you feeling warm, comforted, safe, nurtured? Was this a time when your family was happy or peaceful? Maybe the food provided an escape from negative emotions like anger or fear. Notice whether your food memory is associated with grief or sadness.

3. Identify one or two of the strongest emotions that arise from your food memory and write down what you were feeling. Now think about your present struggle with this trigger food. When you crave it most, you may actually be longing for the emotions or people you’ve just identified in your food tracing.

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