This is Day 12 of Live a Healthier Life in 21 Days Challenge, Jan 2012 run. Subscribe to the free newsletter for lifetime access of personal development articles and future challenge announcements like this one.

Today is Day 12, and we've crossed the mid-point of the 21DHL Challenge. Having embarked on our healthy living journey 1.5 weeks ago, there's now another 1.5 weeks to go before our challenge concludes.

In the next 9 days (including today), let us make the best out of the challenge here. 21DHL is a challenge I've created to enable all of us to work towards our healthy living goals together. It's not every day that we get a common platform like this to group together and achieve our health/fitness goals together, hence let's make the best out of our remaining 9 days here.

Day 12 - Evaluate Your Relationship With Food

Having identified your healthy living pitstops yesterday (Day 11), today, your task is to explore your relationship with food.

Many of us have a weak, unhealthy relationship with food today, thanks to the conditioning we have received from the media and society since we were a child.

Looking through everyone's journals, it's interesting to see the words we use to describe food.

"I love steak. I'm never going to give it up."
"I love cookies. They make me so happy."
"I have sinned because I ate that piece of cake."
"I cheated on my diet."
"I feel like crap because I didn't stick to my diet and ate cheese."
"I feel so happy because I'm drinking my favorite smoothie now."
"I feel guilty for for eating that chocolate just now."
"I hate myself for overeating."

It's funny because all these are extremely strong words we're using. Love. Hate. Sinned. Cheated. Crap. Guilty. All these are strong emotions that we're evoking, all in the name of food. Yet is food a living thing? It's not. Food is not alive. It's dead. It's a non-living thing that just sits there in the kitchen counter/fridge/container we've put it in whether we like it or not. No matter how much we love it or hate it, it's not going to bounce out and hug us. It's never going to return whatever emotions we hold for it.

Because this is a 1-way relationship that is never going to be reciprocated, the intense emotions we hold towards our food leads to an unhealthy, erratic eating behavior. From depriving ourselves of a certain food because we'll feel guilty about eating it, to binging that exact same food the next moment. From feeling ecstatic about getting to eat our favorite food, to feeling upset and unhappy when we don't have it. From rewarding ourselves for adhering to our diet, to beating ourselves up when we fall off our tiny wagon.

As I shared in 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You), the emotions we created from food didn't just appear out of nothing of course. They have been built since our childhood, from the advertisements we see of happy people eating a certain food (think fast food, like McDonald's and KFC); from billboard pictures of food items; from situations we experience with food (e.g., celebrating an event such as a birthday with lots of food); from things people tell us about food (e.g., "If you eat this you're a good child").

For me, like I shared in my heartfelt series My Journey with Emotional Eating (I highly recommend you to read it if you haven't), my relationship with food was one that was forged between my parents and love. When I was young, my parents, especially my mom, would buy a lot of food for me and my brother. For them, buying food for us is their way of expressing love. Hence, the link that eating/food = love became deeply embedded in my subconsciousness. As I grew up, eating became a natural reaction to situations I face, particularly frustration and stress. I would eat just to offset those negative emotions.

The key to addressing this isn't to negate your existing emotions for food, but to understand where they stem from. For example, if I specifically my current love for smoothies and salads, it's because of the vitality and high energy they bring me. Hence, it's not the smoothies and the salads that I love - it's the increased energy, which lets me feel more alive, hence experiencing life on a heightened scale. Knowing this helps me to unchain any unnecessary emotional links I have with the food itself, and connect with the underlying reason, so that I can then focus on living life with vitality vs. craving for smoothies/salads to do that.

Today, let us spend some time to evaluate our relationship with food as a whole, via our eating habits. The more conscious we are of our eating behaviors, the more it'll help us develop healthy eating habits and live a healthy life.

Step 1: Reflect on your motivations for eating and your behavior around food

In 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You), I listed 12 clear signs which reveals whether you are an emotional eater or not. These signs are based on my personal journey with emotional eating for the past decade of my life, which made me realize that I had, in fact, been eating to feed my emotions all this while, vs. eating because I was truly hungry.

Let us now evaluate how our relationship is with food, via these 12 signs. Refer to the 12 signs on 12 Indicative Signs of Emotional Eating (and 7 Reasons Emotional Eating is Bad For You), and give yourself a point (+1) if the sign is relevant to you. If it isn't, then don't give yourself any point (0).

Step 2: Identify the group you fall under

Now, tally up the points. You should end up in one of the 4 groups below:

1. Group A: 0-2 points
2. Group B: 3-5 points
3. Group C: 6-8 points
4. Group D: 9-12 points

And here's the evaluation based on the group you fell under:

1. Group A: You have a healthy to very healthy relationship with food. You should be happy that you have a neutral stance towards eating, because most people don't. Having such a healthy relationship with food is no doubt extremely helpful in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and adhering to weight loss/gain goals (if you have any).
2. Group B: You have an okay, somewhat average relationship with food, which can be improved much further. While food doesn't cause you much anguish, it certainly doesn't serve your healthy living goals either. The next steps in the today's exercise will help you do that.
3. Group C: You have an average to poor relationship with food. It's not unlike the kind of relationship most people in our society have with food today, since this is what the media perpetuates. It's highly important that you look into it and address it if you want to commit yourself to healthy living.
4. Group D: You have an extremely unhealthy relationship with food. This would be the relationship I used to have, which often led to bingeing, hating myself for bingeing, and bingeing yet again. Your very poor relationship with food is very likely due to compounded issues/attachments with food/falsified beliefs, which take time to slowly explore and unravel.

Step 3: Reflect on your relationship with food

Look at the group that fall under. What do you think about it? Do you think it accuracy depicts your relationship with food? Why or why not? And how so?

For tomorrow (Day 13)'s task, we will be exploring our relationship with food. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I recommend that you read the emotional eating series, which shares my horrific journey with food in the past 10 years, along with a detailed guide on how to overcome emotional eating at the end. Reading this will provide a good basis for tomorrow's task.

Day 12 of Your 21-Day Healthy Living Plan

What are your tasks listed for today? Do them with excellence and report them in your 21DHL Journal.

Also, read your group mates' 21DHL journals and cheer them along! Pick a few members' journals and make it a point to post meaningful replies there.

Update Your 21DHL Journals

Once you are done for the day, update your 21DHL Journal. You are also welcome to update your 21DHL Journal multiple times throughout the day. Post all your results for today's task and your 21-Day Healthy Living Plan directly in your journal.

If you have any questions specific to today's task, post them here.

"If you want to get something you have never gotten before, you've to do something you've never done before."
Personal Excellence - For people passionate about achieving excellence in life

My score is 10. Ouch. I make a lot of healthy choices but I can have a ridiculous fascination with eating out. For some reason I feel like it's a great treat. It's something that's entertaining and special. I even feel this way about fast food where the food isn't especially good. This is probably something that started when I was very young.

Hey Matt, it's not that bad considering that I used to be a full 12 points going by those signs. What's most important is you have developed awareness of the situation, which helps you to address it. Day 13's exercise is definitely helpful to work this through.

"If you want to get something you have never gotten before, you've to do something you've never done before."
Personal Excellence - For people passionate about achieving excellence in life