There was an article in the paper over last weekend, about the fact that for some folk, the craving for junk food is in their genes, hard-wired into their body if you like. As always with pieces like this, my first instinct is to fold my arms, nod profusely and say ‘I told you so‘ to anyone who’ll listen. Then I remember I’m over making excuses, and come back down to earth with a bump.
I’m always curious to know whether this is journalistic license, or whether the smarts who churn out these theories genuinely think it’s so, but either way you know me well enough by now to realise where I spy an opportunity to take the piss out of the more outlandish ones, I’ll take full advantage.
It’s a funny one is this though, when you think about it. There is something in the fact that your attitude, thoughts and feelings about food are kind of hardwired into you – I’m not sure it’s genetic, although I’ve definitely referred to it in the past as being part of my DNA, which boils down to the same thing – on reflection I think as something that’s at the root of my whole belief system, if it’s hard-wired anywhere, it has to be in my psyche. And I even understand why…see, all those sessions with the hookie spooky lady didn’t go to waste.
When I think back to all the food related messages I got from my mum in my formative years, they all involved eating everything on my plate, leave stuff and there’ll be no pudding (which as a two year old with a sweet tooth was the equivalent of my world ending) not to mention the starving children in Africa who would be grateful for the meal I might be trying to get out of eating. K mentioned on the blog last Saturday that she’d had similar emotionally driven messages from her Grandfather…I think we’ve all been there.
And my mum’s answer to anything from a skinned knee to a fall-out with a friend involved eating something to make me feel better so again, it’s how I learned to cope with anything that hurt. I’m not blaming my mum per se…there comes a point as an adult where you take responsibility for your own shit you know? All I’m saying is that if I’d grown up hearing you can have some of that but too much of it is bad for you, or food is the fuel that makes your body work but make sure you only eat ’till you’re full, the stuff baked into my psyche might have been slightly less destructive than it’s turned out to be.
There was a great response to the article from a bloke in the states which I took the liberty of pinching to share with you…
“I am hardwired to want fat and sugar, (really, who isn’t?) but I developed my own software (willpower) to govern it. The more you use your software, the easier it becomes.”
He’s not wrong! That is such a great way of looking at it I was compelled to adopt it immediately. A tekkie friend of mine once told me that software was the bit you plugged into the hardware to make the hardware do what you wanted it to do. So that being the case, no matter how far down in my roots those beliefs reside, I have the software to re-programme them, and so do you.
Anyone seen the manual lying around..?
