Picture yourself sitting in a restaurant looking at a menu. What criteria would you be using to decide what to order?
Would you be on the lookout for the choice that has the fewest calories, or the one with the most nutrients?
Would you be scanning the menu looking for something you know you like, or for something new and exciting that you’ve never tried before?
Would you be asking yourself what your body most needs, or asking yourself which menu choice would be the tastiest and most pleasurable to eat?
Would you be looking for the most ethical choice, or feeling confused and stressed because you don’t know what to order?
Depending on what drives your relationship with food, you may have any combination of these, and other considerations, going through your mind as you peruse a restaurant menu – or, for that matter, walk the aisles of the supermarket.
Your relationship with food may be very simple, or it may be extremely complex.
A unique and insightful new book can help you shed light on what is driving your food choices, and may also help you break any patterns around food that aren’t serving you.
The book is Eat Right For Your Personality Type, and the author is Karen Knowler.
After a decade as The Raw Food Coach, and thousands of clients, she noticed some distinct patterns.
The premise behind the book is that our personality type governs our relationship with food, and the author identifies 10 types of eater: functional, sensual, intellectual, emotional, focused, intuitive, conscious, experimental, confused and social.
While you may have an idea which type/s apply to you, the forces that drive our behaviour (around food, and every aspect of life) are often unconscious.
In the book you can take a quiz to help you identify which type or types you are – many of us are not just one of these, but a mixture of two, three or more.
In the book, the author also invites you to take her Ultimate Eater Quiz, where your score out of 100 will give you a benchmark for how happy, or otherwise, your relationship with food is currently.
As well as outlining each type in detail, the author also gives an overview of how each type integrates with every other – i.e. whether the two together make for good or a bad mix.
For example, being both a functional and an intuitive eater can really work, while being an emotional and confused one – a very common mix, in my experience – is guaranteed to cause problems. “Should this unfortunate pairing happen, the net result can only be stress and upset of epidemic proportions,” writes Knowler.
In fact, once you understand the personality type or types that govern your behaviour around food, you may understand for the first time why what you eat has been such a source of frustration and anguish for you, while for others it seems so easy and matter of fact.
However, another premise of the book is that everyone has all 10 types in them. We’ve made one or two stronger through our choices and beliefs, but we can teach ourselves to harness other types in order to get the results and experience we want.
So once you’ve established which type/s you are, the author invites you to look at how these types are working in your life – i.e. to what extent they’re either helping you reach your goals, or causing you problems.
Next, she invites you to choose from ten possibilities, ranging from eating for weight loss to eating for peace, connection and contentment.
You pick one of the ten, and then turn to the relevant section, where you’ll find ten different blueprints for achieving it, one for each personality type.
Each blueprint gives a brief overview of how to approach your chosen goal given your dominant personality type, followed by the three “best-fit next action steps” the author recommends to get you well on the way to achieving your goal.
If you are eating in a way that doesn’t serve you and have been unable to change that until now, I highly recommend this book.
It will at the very least give you some valuable insights and “aha” moments, and may even provide the information you need in order to turn things around once and for all.
I have two copies to give away, and I’d love to give one of them to you.
To be in with a chance of winning just write in and tell me, in 100 words or less, and as much detail as you can, what goes through your mind when you are sitting in a restaurant looking at a menu.
Order Eat Right for your Personality Type here.
May 11 update: Thank you to all who entered. The winners are Margaret Marean of Edmonton, Canada and Misa Kuca of Hainburg an der Donau, Austria.
i have what i can only describe as an abusive relationship with food and after reading this book i know why — i am a confused emotional eater. the awareness of this has been helpful, and the book has also opened my eyes to other ways i can relate to food.
View CommentMy initial reaction when I see a restaurant menu is ‘OMG is there anything I can eat’. I will look at the salad option(s)(iceberg and tomato?), ask for more detail, find out if they can add avocado, and wonder if I’ll add a jacket spud to bulk out the raw food.
View CommentRestaurants are easy. They don’t tempt me much unless there are lots of organic vegan options. My real danger is buffets where friends have lovingly made wholesome food, beautifully spread out before me. My response to food is very visual.
Now I’m off to take the quiz!