You're About to Spend Three Months Thinking About Food

You're About to Spend Three Months Thinking About Food

What's on your other menu?

From now until January, we are all going to be thinking about eating.

It starts gently. Pumpkin appears in things that have no business containing pumpkin. Then Thanksgiving, then the cookies somebody brings to the office, then the party where you stand next to the cheese board having a quiet negotiation with yourself. Then January arrives and we all announce what we're cutting out.

Three solid months of thinking about what goes into our bodies.

And in all of that, almost nobody stops to ask the other question.

What have you been feeding your mind?

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Most of us have given real thought to our food. Some of us have counted calories. Some read every label on the shelf. Some have tried one plan, then another, then downloaded an app that tracks the whole business down to the gram.

Now ask yourself honestly. When did you last look at what you fed your mind today?

Because there's a menu there too, and most of us are eating off it without reading it.

Criticism, our own and other people's. Comparison, which is mostly just measuring our insides against somebody else's outsides. Scarcity, the belief that there's never enough love, enough money, enough time. Shame about the past. Old stories that stopped being true years ago, but we've told them so many times they feel like facts. Other people's opinions about who we are and what we're capable of, which we then mistake for our identity.

That's the menu. And we eat it every single day without noticing, and then wonder why we feel heavy.

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Fall has one particular item on it that I want to name, because it is about to be served to you constantly.

Comparison.

For the next three months your phone is going to show you other people's tables. Their families, laughing. Their trips. Their houses looking like a magazine. Their parents, still here. Their marriages, apparently effortless. And you're going to hold all of that up against your actual Tuesday, and something in you is going to conclude that everybody got a life you didn't get.

Please hear me. You're comparing your whole insides to somebody's best four seconds.

That is not information. That is not data about your life. That's just a dish somebody handed you, and you don't have to eat it.

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There's one habit underneath all of this that I want to point at, because it's the one that keeps the menu the same year after year.

We argue for our limitations.

I'm not good with money. I've always been the anxious one. I'm too old to start that. I'm not a morning person. I don't have the discipline. That's just how I am.

Listen to how confident those sentences are. We defend them. We produce evidence for them. And here's the thing about arguing for your limitations, which I learned the long way round.

If you win the argument, you get to keep them.

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I'm not going to hand you a program, because that's the opposite of the point. Just do one thing this week.

Once a day, catch what you're chewing on. That's it. You're in the car, or in line, or lying there at eleven at night, and you notice the thought running. Don't fight it and don't scold yourself for having it. Just look at it and ask one question.

Would I serve this to somebody I love?

If the answer is no, swap it. Compassion instead of criticism. Gratitude instead of comparison. Not because you're pretending everything is wonderful, but because you get to choose what you consume, and you always did.

That's the whole diet. It really is that simple, and it really is that hard, and it works the same way food does. Not in a day. Over a season.

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So go and enjoy the pie. I mean that. Have the stuffing and the second helping and the thing your aunt only makes once a year.

Just notice what else you're swallowing while you do.

Because whatever we consume consistently eventually becomes us. What we eat becomes our body. What we think becomes our emotional life. What we believe becomes our reality.

And this is the one diet you don't have to wait until January to start.

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Susan Foxley is a yoga teacher, life coach and hypnotherapist in Santa Monica. Her fifth book, The Real Love Diet: Love Yourself Into the Life You Want, is coming in 2027.