5 Ways Curiosity Improves Your Relationship with Food and Body

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Curiosity is one of those human characteristics that seems to work in the background. It often directs us down one path or another in life. Interestingly, curiosity is a human trait that can actually provide us with a longer life, a higher quality of life. Curiosity is helpful for survival, slowing us down to manage stress, connect with the people we love and with ourselves, and to help us feel engaged with our community and purpose in life. In today’s episode of the One Small Bite Podcast, David will elaborate on all of these and outline the those in five clear methods curiosity can help us build a more positive relationship with food and our bodies.

Highlights of this episode:

• Curiosity and Health
• Food is key to survival
• Curiosity can help us manage our stress
• Participation and Enjoyment
• Slowing down – there it is again!
• Empathy and helping others

Episode Show Notes: 

[02:22] Curiosity and Health
Curiosity involves wonder and interest in something different from the day-to-day or the automatic habits of life. It is the desire to take in new knowledge, information, and experiences so that we can learn and grow in life. The urge to explore and seek novelty in life, and a way of accomplishing, achieving, and adapting to life’s challenges. Like a crab that molts into a new skin, change can be difficult, and it might even hurt, but the crab cannot stay in its current skin or it will die. Curiosity forces people toward their fears, unknowns, and places that can be difficult or dangerous, but that’s what makes people stronger, smarter, faster, kinder, and empathetic. Curiosity allows people to make new healthier habits for a longer and higher quality life. Let’s look at how that plays out below.

[03:44] Food is Key to Survival
“It’s not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, it’s the one most adaptable to change.” ~Darwin

How can people change if they don’t pay attention to curiosity, to the wonders of life and how they can adapt? People can live their lives without changing much at all, but when something does happen, like an accident, a job loss, or getting older, then there’s no other choice than to change. The same applies with our relationship with food. Diet culture tells people that sugar is evil, that weight-loss will enhance their health, that thinness is beauty, or a muscular body is “good.” We therefore attempt to restrict, avoid, diet, cut out, eliminate, lessen, or reduce the food we love, even if it’s part of our culture, all in order to achieve this ideal image of conventional good looks. People have been trying to be thinner or leaner and it hasn’t really enhance our lifespan or quality of life. Good looks is not a sign of health, it’s just a social construct passed down from generation at the turn of the industrial revolution.

[05:50] Curiosity can Help Us Manage Our Stress
Curious people generally tend to be happier. In fact, there are some studies that show that curious people tend to be less stressed and have a more positive attitude towards life. They have healthier outcomes in life and live a fuller and higher quality of life. This is where I think about the Blue Zones populations around the world that have the greatest number of centenarians in that population, and most of these people tend to be very curious, among other things. Our relationship with food is just as much about filling our bodies with nutrients as it is with filling ourselves with emotion and experiences. Feeling good about what we eat, despite what it is, might be more beneficial at helping us manage our stress than a bowl kale with quinoa, nuts, roasted chickpeas, and olive oil. Yup, I said it!

These people in the Blue Zones around the world have community. They eat together and put family and themselves first. In our fast pace, grind culture world that most of live in however, we want to get out of the house as fast as possible. We are taught from a young age that we must do it alone…pull up our bootstraps and make something of ourselves. This only leads to greater isolation.

[11:08] Participation and Enjoyment
Curiosity can help us pay attention to what really matters in life like family and deep meaningful connections with friends and loved ones. Participation means getting involved with yourself as well. Curiosity helps you pay attention to you. Cooking is not easy, but when you get a hang of it, it really creates a sense of accomplishment. I love the “yums” and “umms” I get when we sit together as a family to eat. I love making foods my mother used to make, even if some of my family doesn’t like it. It warms my hear and allows me to connect to the people I love. If I don’t pay attention to my curiosity, don’t explore or experiment a little, I will get stuck in the same ironically deceiving comfort-zone and never get to live a full life.

Nothing brings us back to our youth or past experiences like foods, those smells, those feelings, whether bad or good. It’s what we hold dear in our past that is important. Diet culture tells us often to give those things up. Well, how well has that worked for us so far?

[14:01] Slowing Down – There It is Again!
People tell me that when they pay attention to their body’s needs, listen to how food really feels, that they feel so liberated. Whether they eat more or not, it really doesn’t matter because they can trust their body to handle it. They come back to me and tell me how liberating it felt to know that food was no longer their enemy. It was creating a more positive relationship with food and the body. Curiosity has to allow people to slow down, to turn off that autopilot life that we don’t even pay attention to our bodies. Slowing down allow us to build that interoceptive awareness in order to build a positive relationship to food and your body.

[19:15] Empathy and Helping Others
Curiosity allows us to look at purpose in life. It gives us a need to be connected to individuals and helping others so that we eventually help ourselves in the process. We help our fellow brother, sister, neighbor, family, or friend not because we should, but because it’s important for our survival and enjoyment. Making a meal for family or friends, volunteering at a soup kitchen, food bank, or at your church can be so fulfilling. This is what living fully also means. Giving back. Hmm. I’m curious, how to feel less selfish and self-absorbed, and thinking only about myself and how I can get ahead in life and not paying attention to how we are not alone in this world. One of the single greatest reasons why our health deteriorates is isolation. We are social creatures and food gives us that opportunity to nourish our bodies and our souls!

Resources:

Daily Stressor-Related Negative Mood and its Associations with Flourishing and Daily Curiosity; Journal of Happiness Studies: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00404-2

Six Surprising Benefits of Curiosity, Greater Good Magazine; https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_surprising_benefits_of_curiosity

Todd B. Kashdan, Paul Rose, Frank D. Fincham; Curiosity and Exploration: Facilitating Positive Subjective Experiences and Personal Growth Opportunities; Journal of Personality Assessment: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa8203_05#.Vbu4EWTF8m8

Harackiewicz, J. M., Barron, K. E., Tauer, J. M., & Elliot, A. J. (2002). Predicting success in college: A longitudinal study of achievement goals and ability measures as predictors of interest and performance from freshman year through graduation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(3), 562–575. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.94.3.562

Sophie von Stumm, Benedikt Hell, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic The Hungry Mind: Intellectual Curiosity Is the Third Pillar of Academic Performance; Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol 6, Issue 6, 2011: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691611421204

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