How You Eat Is How You Make Love

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

And how you eat is how you make love.

You could go through the drive-thru and distractedly wolf down some junk food while driving.

This is like having sex with a prostitute.

You could follow the rigid, deprivation-based rules of a one-size-fits-all, quick-fix diet and do things like weigh your food and count kilocalories and grams.

This is like someone doing sex moves they read about in Maxim or Cosmo on you.

You could set the table and savor a meal made from fresh, local food that’s nutritious, delicious, fragrant, and appealing to your eyes while listening to beautiful music.

This is like making love with the love of your life, bonding deeply, and savoring a deeply sensual experience together.

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

And how you eat is how you make love.

Both eating and making love are deeply sensory, sensuous, sensual experiences.

Both eating and making love are decidedly life-affirming experiences.

If you do them well.

Doing them well comes naturally, as long as you avoid the two common traps:

1. Letting your approach to eating become careless.
2. Letting your approach to eating become neurotic.

Junk-food businesses want nothing more than for you to approach eating carelessly. Careless eaters hitting the drive-thru are great for their balance sheets. But careless eating isn’t so great for your well-being.

Weight-loss charlatans want nothing more than for you to approach eating neurotically. Neurotic eaters on the lookout for the next diet sensation are great for their balance sheets. But neurotic eating isn’t so great for your well-being.

What kind of lover do you want to be?

Do you want to grab some food on the go and wolf it down while rushing around and thinking about other things?

Do you want to be rigid and uptight about food?

Or do you want to be present, spontaneous, caring, and thankful?

About Jason Gootman
Jason Gootman is a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach as well as a certified nutritionist and certified exercise physiologist. Jason helps people reverse and prevent type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other ailments with evidence-based approaches to nutrition, exercise, stress reduction, holistic wellness, and, most importantly, lasting behavior improvement and positive habit formation. As part of this work, Jason often helps people lose weight and keep it off, in part by helping them overcome the common challenges of yo-yo dieting and emotional eating. Jason helps people go from knowing what to do and having good intentions to consistently taking great care of themselves in ways that help them add years to their lives and life to their years.