6 Tips on Having a Beautiful Relationship With Food

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Dhrumil Purohit shares on what it means to have a beautiful relationship with food and how to deal with cravings.

Renegade Water Secrets with Dhrumil Purohit, the lead contributory, visionary and creator of welikeitraw.com and giveittomeraw.com.

Kevin: Let’s get this abstract and let’s nail it down here. Can you explain what you said by a beautiful relationship with food? Because that sounds really appealing, what does that mean to you?

Dhru: Absolutely. So nobody would ever want to become a vegetarian or a vegan or start eating more raw foods, or even just people, it doesn’t matter what you eat, most people on this call are probably thinking about including more whole foods in their diet. Nobody wants to do that and make their lives more complicated. If eating healthier would make your life more complicated then why the heck would you want to do it?

So what I see as a beautiful relationship with food is a relationship where you no longer are fearful of counting calories, you no longer are fearful about, is this food going to bring me this level of disease. You’re no longer fearful of getting the level of nutrition that you want to. And you also, on a daily basis are not fearful of what you’re going to eat. When you think about it, most individuals think so much about food. Especially if they’re visiting or traveling another country or just some other city, they think so much about food. What am I going go eat next? They’re a slave to whatever they eat. And nobody wants to make that worse by embarking on a natural diet of some sort, whether that be raw foods, or whole foods or whatever else.

So having a beautiful relationship with food is using food as a vehicle of nourishment instead of treating food as the destination. We all know people that are out there that get so caught up with being perfect when it comes to their diet that they spend more time thinking about food and stressing about food then they do enjoying life. Food is not the ultimate goal, it’s just a vehicle to take us somewhere, to enjoy life further, to live more in the present moment. Food is not that destination where we want to end up. We don’t want to be reading labels all day long. We don’t want to be using the Internet to count calories. We don’t want to be researching every single new supplement that comes out there, hoping that it’s going to fix us or bring this to us in our life. So having a beautiful relationship with food is having an authentic relationship with food, when you use it as a vehicle to take you to where you want to go in your life and to nourish your body, rather than a destination. Does that make sense Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah. How do you know you're there?

Dhru: Well, the simplest way to look at it is to look at your life right now. Are you struggling? Right? As I mentioned, the difference between a struggle and a challenge is only one thing, and it's resistance. So just look at your day. Look at your day, and at the end of the day when you think about food, do you feel good? Or do you feel not so good, or other than good? Right? So that's the easiest way to look at it. Nobody can tell you, right?

I'm turning 26 in a couple of months. I'm probably half the age of most individuals that are probably listening in or even reading my websites that are out there. I'm not claiming to know anything. All I'm simply doing is saying that, let's look at the most basic and fundamental things. Take a look at your life. Take a look at your relationship with food. Look at today. It's 8pm on the east coast, a little bit earlier on the west coast, look at your day. Did you have a beautiful relationship with food? Were you obsessing about it? Were you scouring the Internet or the forum boards worrying about this and that and other things? It's all right to do some research and say, 'Where can I find the best source of B12?' But fretting about stuff, worrying about stuff, that's not a beautiful relationship with food. So the easiest way to do it is take a look at today, and see where you ended up. Are you happy? Are you happy where you are? Or are you at least complete where you are? You may want to make some progress, but are you complete where you are today? Or are you worried? Are you fearful? Are you stressing about where you aren't?

Kevin: That's great. You said that it's not resisting desires, and people do have desires from time to time. What do you suggest? Desires can be translated to cravings. We got a couple questions about cravings. So desires, cravings, it's very similar. How do you suggest that someone deals with that based on the philosophy that you're explaining now?

Dhru: Sure. I'm not saying that people shouldn't take practical steps. Right around 8 months is when I started experiencing all these levels of cravings for foods that I didn't really even enjoy previously. And I thought it was that my diet wasn't set up appropriately to get rid of those cravings. And on a practical level, there were some things that I needed to adjust. I could use more greens in my diet to bring in more minerals so that I wouldn't have as much cravings. Because if you're having a lot of cravings for food, sometimes it's very nutritionally based. You may just not be getting enough minerals in your diet. So there's some practical things that you can do, such as having green smoothies a couple times a day. Bring in more green juice into your diet. You know, it depends on what area specifically that you notice the cravings that show up.

But generally, what I find is that most of the cravings that show up for people, they're simply coming from a place of, “I'm not treating myself. I've been really good now, and I'm not treating myself or I'm denying myself.” It's like being bored. Most of the individuals that have cravings, I would say, that email me are people that are having cravings or are feeling like they are bored with their diet, or that they should be treating themselves because they're not. So in that particular case, what I suggest is that, OK, let's just look at it. First of all, I would say, are you yo-yoing? Right? And I just want to explain that a little bit further for people that are not familiar. Yo-yoing is people who treat life, and specifically diet, with good and bad. They have their good and bad days. They have a day that's really good, and they're eating almost all raw food or whole foods, and all organic and things like that. And then the next day, they're binging on a pizza. Not just eating a slice, but they're eating like a whole half a pizza, or they're drinking like five cups of coffee when they haven't had coffee all week long. So that's yo-yoing.

Now, if you're going through yo-yoing, then my suggestion is actually to scale back whatever dietary regimen you're trying to do. Let's take, for instance, raw foods specifically. If you're trying to eat mostly or all raw foods, and you notice that you're having a lot of challenges yo-yoing, take a step back and find some transitional foods that you can eat on a daily basis that are still good for you. Kevin I know you're a very big fan of quinoa, right? So including thinking like quinoa, including things like steamed vegetables, that still are things that you can enjoy, that you might feel that are warm foods if you're craving warm foods, that might give you more substance. It's better to take a step back than go back and forth between this yo-yoing exercise.

Now for other individuals who might just have a desire here and there that might show up, and if they're doing good overall, and if they're fine using discipline, then use it! By all means, if discipline has worked for you so far, who am I to tell you not to use it? What I would suggest though, is notice if your dietary journey stops becoming fun, all right? Notice if you're bringing more stress into it. Notice if you're adding the dimension of resistance, if you're not actually enjoying the journey anymore. And if you notice that you're not enjoying it anymore, then there may be a time to also reevaluate and say, “What could I be doing differently here?”

Or just even taking a look at your goals. What is my goal here? What am I trying to do? Right? What am I trying to actually achieve here with my diet? Is losing those last ten pounds, is that it? And then after that, then what? What's the next thing after that? Right? Sometimes, what I find, Kevin, is that simply by just being attached to a particular goal, that often creates those levels of desire, because people are so fixated on the goal. “OK, I need to get here, I need to get here, I need to get here.” That they start tripping up, that they stop focusing on the day to day things that they did in the beginning, and that they're so focused on the goal that they start stumbling on the fact that they're not making progress fast enough. “I'm not doing it quick enough.” And just by reevaluating it, I often find, just by taking an opportunity to actually reevaluate those goals, just by taking an opportunity to reflect on those goals. Sometimes people are able to make tremendous progress and realize, "Wow! I'm chasing after my tail. It's a valid goal, and it's a good thing to achieve, but I'm so fixated on it that I can't think about anything else. I can't focus on anything else."