Grief And Loss In Diet Change

Tuesday, August 15, 2017 / Autoimmune Disease, Blog, Chronic Illness, Food Sensitivities, Motivation To Change

If you or your child have challenging symptoms that are negatively impacting your life, what prevents you from changing your diet to see if it would help?  What stops you from listening to your wise inner voice that says “Maybe, just maybe, it is all that peanut butter I am eating!”

Change is difficult.  It is edgy, frustrating, and upsets the status quo and routine of our life.  Even if things aren’t perfect, we are still reluctant to change.

Food is an integral part of our daily life and is part of many family traditions and long remembered comforts.  The advertising industry capitalizes often on this fact and uses commercials to make you believe that no childhood would be complete or healthy without milk and cookies or a cold can of Coke.

My book, “Could It Really Be Something They Ate? The Life Changing Impact of Addressing Food Sensitivity in Children” contains lots of information about the stages of change and how we can increase our motivation when we want to change but are stuck.  One of the things that is often not considered is that anticipating the removal of a favourite food from the family diet initiates a grief response.  Grief has been well researched and there are defined steps that people move through before they are able to embrace their new situation as normal. Read through these stages as defined by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross and see if you, perhaps, are stuck in one of these early stages and it is preventing you from addressing some issues with your child or yourself that desperately need some help.

The stages of grief and loss:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance.

For a more complete explanation of these stages and how they relate to diet changes, please refer to chapter 4 in my book, “Could It Really Be Something They Ate? The Life Changing Impact of Addressing Food Sensitivities in Children”