Solar Plexus Chakra – Eating for the Goal
Food choices are guided by achievement. Nutrition plays the role of helping you attain the result. The goals are usually based on aesthetics, performance or competition. At this stage you will start to break away from the lower impulses that previously guided food choices. This is a great way to establish will power, discipline and cement lasting habits. A sign of development here is not giving up despite failure.
At this stage (no matter what the end goal is) it is serving the purpose of developing self worth. Unfortunately, no achievement can provide lasting self worth. As such there is an issue that needs to be considered.
The deeper the lack of self worth the more extreme the goal becomes to compensate. Since dietary choices are subservient to the goal, then extreme goals lead to distorted food choices. If the goal is based on vanity, extreme dieting can arise. If the goal is competition, then reliance on artificial or low quality foods can become the way. Balance gets tossed out the window in favour of obsessive compulsive or ultra competitive tendencies. Either way health is secondary to success. The body’s needs can fall by the wayside.
The trap here is dependence on achievement for any sense of personal value and so nutrition habits develop in a way to serve that.
There are a few ways to adjust perception to help:
- Don’t make success or failure about the result. Its about all the work you did along the way regardless of outcome. Knowing that you can achieve whatever you want if you are willing to put in the time and the effort is hugely empowering. Believe it.
- Your true value is infinite. Just because. There is no reason needed to justify.
- Performance and vanity are not always in alignment with long term health. Embrace that.
Once these ideas really sink in then goals become more balanced. The desire for excessive achievement deflates. Once this happens, the deeper motive for nutrition habits needs to evolve. Moving to a mind set where eating what you enjoy is in alignment with healthy foods that support overall well being is a good place to start.