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Editor's Note: This interview originally appeared in our September 2012 issue. To read the rest of the magazine, be sure to subscribe to Black Belt+ and gain access to our entire digital archive!
As martial artists in the 21st century, we're blessed with a wealth of information about nutrition. Nevertheless, many of us exhibit unhealthy eating behaviors that can have a severe impact on our physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.
Those behaviors can range from a relatively harmless habit of experimenting with various diets and nutritional programs to adopting a mindset that causes us to eat in a way that impairs our psychological, social and bodily functioning. The following extreme behaviors fall into the second category.
Nutrition Trap #1: Binge Eating
Binge eating is probably the most common unhealthy behavior. I'm not talking about occasionally cheating on your nutritional program because you crave something; rather, I'm referring to the consumption of large amounts of certain foods to satisfy an underlying emotional need.
If you binge while you're on a poorly designed or sensationalized diet that deprives your body of the calories and nutrients it needs, it just makes matters worse. Such behavior frequently involves spending lots of time planning what you'll be eating and even hoarding foods beforehand.
Nutrition Trap #2: Unhealthy Dieting
Unhealthy dieting and its extreme, starvation, can occur when you attempt to respond to the inordinate amount of guilt you feel after a binge. In severe instances, you can develop anorexia nervosa or bulimia.
With anorexia, you develop a fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, repeatedly attempt to lose weight and have a distorted image of your body.
With bulimia, you lead a life that's dominated by uncontrollable episodes of bingeing and purging—often to the point of social and emotional impairment. Both can kill.
Nutrition Trap #3: Hyper-Responsive Eating
Hyper-responsive eating is triggered by an environmental or physical cue such as a food advertisement, a tempting smell, a sensation of immediate hunger or an insulin rush.
You have difficulty controlling your urge to eat and seldom differentiate between the foods you consume. You cannot turn down food and often eat until it's gone, regardless of whether you feel full. It indicates the presence of problems with impulse management, self-esteem and other areas of emotional functioning.
Nutrition Trap #4: Emotional Eating
Emotional eating is even worse than hyper-responsive eating. When you fall victim to this disorder, you eat for purely psychological reasons such as boredom, depression, anxiety, happiness or loneliness. You rely on food as a source of mental or emotional satisfaction, often with disastrous physical results, and you substitute food for other pleasures, activities or rewards.
Nutrition Trap #5: Consciously Restrained Eating
Consciously restrained eating is marked by your use of sheer willpower to control your urge to overeat, binge or eat emotionally or hyper-responsively. You must expend great mental effort to avoid the negative behavior, and that drains you and damages your quality of life.
Many people who were formerly overweight or obese become consciously restrained eaters. However, their misery only deepens when they eventually lose their mental battle and overeat again and again—and follow up with purging and starvation in response to the guilt they feel.
Unhealthy eating behaviors are damaging to anyone who practices them, but martial artists need to be particularly concerned because the effect on our ability to perform can be huge. It will prevent us from enjoying optimized strength, conditioning, reaction time, recovery ability and mental clarity.
The emotional and spiritual impact can be equally devastating. Living with these unresolved issues can darken our spirit and create an insurmountable barrier to achieving our best. Remember that the ultimate goal of martial arts training is not only for us to equip ourselves with combative skills but also to facilitate inner development and happiness.
