Food Related Rewards: Should They Be Explored or Ignored?
A Bite-Size Read for Your Health and Your Waistline
We’re sad…cookies! It’s hot…ice cream! Work is stressful…a bag of chips! Your kid potties in the toilet…M&M’s! Kids’ baseball game or even practice…juice box and pretzels!
We’re human; we commonly use food as a reward or to cope with our emotions. When negative and even positive feelings arise, we often look to food. You might say “Today I was really stressed so I’m gonna go home and indulge in a large bowl of ice cream to help me relax.” But you already rewarded yourself yesterday, with two cocktails after a great, productive day at work.
Nowadays, there is another major area where food acts as our reward. Can you think of it? Working out. Yep! There is a strong connection between food and exercise. Imagine: you go to lunch with a friend who orders a burger and a large side of fries justifying her choices by declaring to you, “I killed it in my workout this morning!” We reward ourselves for working hard physically by indulging in decadent food choices. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Your other friend eats almost the whole basket of chips with her guac and promises to work out extra hard tomorrow to make up for it. (A pre-reward?) While I’m all about balance, you’ll also hear me say, “You can’t outrun your fork.” Unfortunately, we can’t cancel the food we eat by doing a workout.
In the same vein, a lot of the choices we make to reward ourselves lead to more negative feelings than positive ones. Give it an hour, or even just 10 minutes and we realize that ‘reward,’ whether it be the bowl of ice cream or the cocktails, didn’t truly serve its purpose after all. With this realization comes a hard dose of reality and we feel even worse. A man who’s stressed at work might come home and shovel a gallon of ice cream into his mouth to cope with his feelings. But once the realization sets in, he is still stressed about work and is now even more stressed because of how much unhealthy food he just ate. The ice cream piled on the stress rather than relieving it. Our best intentions went awry…so far awry as to be considered counterproductive!
But it’s not the idea of rewards we need to shift. It’s what qualifies as a reward. We want to exchange these unhelpful, counterproductive rewards for ones that are motivating and truly support our best efforts to keep going. These rewards are what I call NFRR, non-food-related rewards. Different for everyone, the NFRR are more about what makes your heart happy (AKA the things we enjoy that aren’t food, but still just as decadent and indulgent). For me, it’s often shopping and buying something special to remind myself of the accomplishment.
One pro-tip for the NFRR: small milestones are just as worthy of celebrations as big ones. For more everyday victories, your NFRR could be getting a mani-pedi or a massage. Maybe even just some well-deserved alone time or quality time with someone you love. Celebrating the seemingly small, daily wins often motivates us to keep going, keep growing, working to reach the big goal for the big reward. Delaying any celebrations until we hit that final thing, whether that be complete happiness or a perfectly healthy body, is infinitely more challenging and we’re more likely to give-up before we get there; it removes recognition of progress.
Here’s a quick way to get started. Write a list. What do you enjoy? What do you feel like you never have time to do? If you went on vacation, how would you treat yourself? Who makes you laugh that you’d love to spend more time with? Allow others to help you; what do your friends enjoy? Do they have NFRR? Once your list has a few items, save it in your phone, put it on a post-it on your computer, maybe another post-it copy on the pint of ice cream in the freezer. Now, when the moment arises, look at your list. Pick one. And GO! You’re off on your NFRR. These rewards are part of the magic in the evolution of our healthiest selves.
Health goes beyond your diet. In fact, it begins in the brain. Learning to reward ourselves in ways other than food is true nourishment; nourishment for the soul and mind. The non-food-related-rewards help you shift your relationship with food when you realize the indulgent food makes you feel happy for only a short-time and then adds to the challenge. And may I say, just by reading this, you’re already on your way to long term happiness and truly healthful eating!
