Nourishment and Risk Taking: Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone - Part I
What does risk-taking, aka being out of your comfort zone, look like when you think of nourishment—especially radical nourishment?
Why this question? It is an important topic for not always obvious reasons, and as such is the second in my Radical Nourishment series. I have found most of us yearn for our acts of nourishment to happen effortlessly, where it is just second nature and needing little attention. Unfortunately, there are many steps of learning to get to “the second nature” or intuitive part of things. I’ll talk more about the steps in Part II of Risk Taking, but know every part of this journey to deeply nourish yourself will require stepping out of your comfort zone. I hope this topic will give you ideas and confidence in holding feelings and behaviors that come up when out of your comfort zone.
To start, what might be risky about nourishing yourself? Below are a few situations that I see regularly in my practice and may be challenging for people when they begin to really nourish themselves.
Checking out the calories for a meal/food can feel risky and out of alignment with your wellness goals. But can actually be supportive at times. Often, when eating off their meal plan folks will assume the food/meal has at least a million calories because it tastes good or they have heard rumors about the calories or the nutritional value of the food. The idea of eating a million calories can overwhelm any hope of correcting for the situation. Often shame and guilt ensue, along with giving up either for the entire day or a longer period of time. But, checking out the actual calories can feel even riskier, making it hard to break out of the relapse cycle.
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Setting boundaries with family and friends can feel risky and bring up a lot of emotions. There is nothing like the fall-out from saying “no” for the first time to family and friends to push you out of your comfort zone.
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It can feel really risky and scary for a person with a new diabetes diagnosis who needs to eat off their usual plan, eg, they are traveling and not in control of food choices or would like to go to an ethnic restaurant etc. There are methods to navigate these situations, but it involves eating a small amount of the food. The risk is in not knowing how the new food might impact their blood sugar. Will it be higher than recommended ? If yes, how will they do a course correction?
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It can also feel risky to dream big and confront those voices (not to mention the opinions of others) we all carry inside ourselves that say we aren’t good enough, smart enough, experienced enough, __________(fill in the blank) that we have to wait to have a better job, be healthy, be in a relationship, ________(fill in the blank).
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Being bored and/or sitting quietly can feel very scary.
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Walking through the unknown can be terrifying! Being in a situation out of your control, not knowing when a difficult time in your life will end, ie, difficult work place, sick child, managing a chronic illness.
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Becoming more physically active can feel hugely risky. For some folks moving is uncomfortable, for those with a trauma history it might even feel dangerous.
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As you’ll see in Part II of this topic, developing an intuitive sense of how to handle tough situations is the result of much practice gathering data about various difficult situations you may encounter. Sometime the information gathered will be about the situation, eg, how many calories are in a food, other times it will be about the feelings that come up. No matter, it is the hard work of gathering the data and reflecting on how it can help you in the future to achieve your goals that will develop your second nature or intuition about these things.
Reflection
Now, back to the question at the beginning: What does risk-taking look like when you think of nourishment? Once you have identified 1-2 risky situations, list 2-3 small changes that will help you expand your comfort zone. They might involve getting additional information. Other times, it might be helpful to talk to others to get more ideas. Sometimes the answers will be easy once you see the risks.
Create a risk-taking scale for yourself. 0-10, with 10 being the most scariest of risk of all. For me, a ten is jumping off a diving board, with climbing ladders being 8-9 and hard conversations with my family being 6-7. How about you? What is the scariest thing of all? Eating on vacation? Staying at your mom’s home?
These may not be easy questions to answer. Take your time with it and see what comes up.