You might be asking yourself: what does sensuality have to do with eating well? I’m glad you asked!

Let me start by explaining sensuality…

Sensuality is experiencing through your senses… taste, touch, seeing, smelling and hearing. These are heightened through awareness of your physical body and everything around you.

The most feminine parts of your physical body are your breasts, your vagina and your vulva. They are certainly where intense pleasure can be experienced. But sensual pleasure doesn’t have to have anything to do with sex or your lady parts.

Which is why food is such a big deal to most people. For some, it is the ONLY way they experience pleasure. However, it can also be a coping mechanism for dealing with things that are missing in your life and food is used to fill that void. Sadly, there is nothing sensual about that!

Connecting with our sensuality is necessary to ground us in our bodies and also so that we can go deeper into our sexuality. Women need to focus on pleasure, not goals. Determining what we like, what we need and what we want is paramount to having a pleasurable life and sex life.

READ: 6 Clues That You’re Not Getting Enough Pleasure

 

Does the average woman eat well?

 

Not really. We eat for many reasons and hardly any of them are the right ones. I say that because it’s a well-known fact that most people don’t have a great relationship with food. This manifests in poor eating habits, weight problems, overeating and binging, emotional eating, constant dieting and nutrition-related health challenges, not to mention issues with guilt, shame and self-hatred around food.

We’re also constantly given contradictory and misleading information on what to eat, what not to eat and the best ways to lose weight. And because weight is probably the biggest motivator out there, when it comes to food, our relationship with food is always intricately connected to a sense of deprivation or indulgence, neither of which are healthy.

But what drives us to eat the way we do in the first place? And does it come from a place of respect for our body or hatred of it?

There can be many factors that drive our eating, for example…

We are emotionally driven to overeat when our lives are too stressful & when the quality of food is not satisfying.

We are psychologically driven to overeat when we don’t see our thoughts around food & we eat without awareness.

And we are physiologically driven to overeat when our meals fail to provide us with nourishment and pleasure.

Have you ever considered that…

• stress,
• the wide-spread availability of poor quality and nutrient-deficient food,
• our constant state of distraction,
• our guilt around pleasure,
• our negative thoughts and beliefs and
• a lack of reverence for food…

may have an impact on what we eat? When you consider all of that you can see that

It’s not just what you eat. But how you eat.

We’ll get to the what, but let’s first look at the how part of eating to support our bodies in a healthy and sensual way.

I have an entire lesson on eating well in my online course, How To Get Your Sexy Back, which is too long to cover in a blog. But I’m going to share a few secrets:

 

The power of relaxation

 

If you’ve ever eaten in a hurry and felt like your food was just sitting in your stomach, it was. It was literally waiting for your stress levels to go down to digest it. Depending on your level of stress, there will always be a corresponding degree of digestive shutdown. How long that will take could be minutes to hours.

The simple act of slowing down and taking time to eat properly will shift your nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic mode.

• Sympathetic Nervous System (Fight-or-flight): activates the stress response and suppresses digestion.
• Parasympathetic Nervous System (Rest and digest): relaxes the body and allows for digestion to occur. Hence the name rest and digest.

Learn to eat slowly

When we slow down, we are better able to relax.

And when we relax, we are better able to digest our food.

Slow is the answer. Slow creates timelessness and sensuality.

Pleasure loves slow.

Anything done slowly and with conscious awareness allows us time to appreciate and be grateful for it…. Whether it’s food or sex.

READ: 5 Reasons Why You Should Slow Down

 

The power of thought

 

Your thoughts affect your body.

Food is neither good nor bad. Of course, there are foods that enhance your health while others that detract from it, but food itself is not morally good or bad.

When we label food as “bad”, what does that mean when we eat it? That we’re bad as well?  That’s a recipe for shame and guilt.

 “Any guilt about food, shame about the body, or judgement about health are considered stressors by the brain and are immediately transduced into their electrochemical equivalents in the body. You could eat the healthiest meal on the planet, but if you’re thinking toxic thoughts the digestion of your food goes down and your fat storage metabolism goes up.” ~ Marc David

Guilt and shame have a negative impact on the body.

Whether your thoughts are about food, sex or your body, guilt and shame will produce negative feelings that manifest in negative reactions in the body. Therefore,

“A negative self-judgment such as “I’m fat” or “I’m not beautiful” or “I am not enough as I am” is a curse. When uttered silently and continuously over time, the hex takes hold. It’s a literal neurochemical instruction to the brain that is modulated by the hypothalamus, endocrine, immune, and neuropeptide networks and brought into bodily reality.” ~ Marc David

Your thoughts can create pleasure or pain.

You can either derive pleasure from something or you can poison it with your thoughts.

Have you ever wanted to eat a piece of cake, then ate it, and then felt guilty for it? Well, you just undermined the pleasure of it. You may have had your cake, but you probably didn’t enjoy it. So, you basically took the calorie hit without any satisfaction.

Or perhaps you elected not to eat the cake, even though you really really wanted it, and ate some carrots instead. Did you really enjoy those carrots? I doubt it. In fact, you were probably left with a hankering for that cake… and you ended up eating the cake after all… and then felt more guilt.

In food, as in sex, there’s no place for guilt and shame.

READ: 10 Reasons Why You Should Love Your Body

 

Foods need to feed us on every level… physically, emotionally & spiritually.

So, what are the foods that can do that? They’re the foods that nature has provided for us and they’re the foundation on which to build your health.

 

Foods for good health include:

 

• Fruits (such as apples, bananas, cherries, dates, figs, grapes, lemons, mangoes, oranges, papayas and pears).
• Vegetables (such as asparagus, cucumbers, leafy greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash).
• Herbs and spices (such as celery juice, yes celery is technically an herb; ginger, garlic, cilantro, parsley, turmeric and herbal teas).
• Wild foods (such as aloe vera, sea vegetables such as dulse, chaga mushrooms, dandelion greens or tea, coconut, raw honey, and wild blueberries).

You can go to my HEALTH page by clicking HERE, to find out more about WHY these foods are so good for you.

Foods from nature are the best foods for the Divine Feminine because they are both intimately connected to the earth and moon cycles.

Start treating food and your body as sacred… because they are!

 

Book suggestions:

Medical Medium Life-Changing Foods: Save yourself and the ones you love with the hidden healing powers of fruits & vegetables by Anthony William.

The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss by Marc David

Photo Credit: adobestock.com/deagreez