Personality and how it Impacts Your Diet

What describes you best?

Busybodies eat for one reason and one reason only—to fuel their activity. These individuals eat as a means to the end and often eat on the run when their stomach starts to growl. Busybodies are lucky in some ways, because their diet is not influenced by their emotions and food is not overemphasized for them. However, it can be hard to pay attention to the nutritional quality of the foods that are eaten when you’re just grabbing at whatever is most convenient. In addition, these people have a tendency to go for too long of a period of time without eating and can suffer medical repercussions because of this.

Feelers are usually very emotional, and not all of these emotions are negative in nature. These people are often capable of extreme happiness and joy, as well as the negative connotations that are attached to “emotional” people. When most people hear the term “emotional eater,” they tend to conjure up images of sad people eating too much ice cream as a way of escaping pain. What about the relaxed, happy person who eats too much on vacation as a way of celebrating? This, too, is emotional eating. The good news is that feelers are often capable of enjoying food more than other people, if they approach eating in a healthy manner. The bad news is that these people are prone to eating too much. They enter into an endless cycle of eating too much, then promising to do better the next day, and then berating themselves when they don’t.

Independents live in the moment and don’t really care about following rules or keeping up with the status quo. Independent eaters are the most likely of all of the personality types to overeat during holidays or other celebrations. They often are very good at coming up with new and inventive ways to make food taste good, a quality that is useful in altering recipes to make them more healthful. Unfortunately, independents aren’t always good at controlling their cravings and may “splurge” a bit too often.

Improvers always strive to better themselves and push their loved ones to do the same. The desire to succeed is the first step in living a healthy lifestyle, and this personality type has no problem with this. Improvers have a tendency to take nutrition advice and research findings at face value, and at times, they are quite gullible. Improvers have a tendency to cut healthy foods from their diet, if the newest fad diet recommends doing so.

Organizers like to plan their upcoming weekend by mid-week and always have an itinerary planned for every vacation. Highly organized people like to think of themselves as being well prepared for every possibility. Organizers are exceptionally good at planning their menus and at making certain to have a healthy lunch packed the night before. The problem is that highly organized people have a tendency to be inflexible and may beat themselves up emotionally for eating a food that they deem to be “bad.”