5 Tips for Cultivating A Healthy Relationship With Food
Last week on Instagram, I shared about the 5 hidden signs of an unhealthy relationship with food and today, I want to elaborate on them and give you some inisght into what a healthy relationship with food might look like and what you can do to improve your own relationship with food.
First of all, it’s important to note that we each have a unique relationship with food, based on our upbringing, our family habits and practices, our culture, our senses, our habits and psychological tendencies. As such, having a healthy relationship with food looks different for everyone.
What is a relationship with food?
As babies and small children, we are born with an innate wisdom to know what our body needs and when it needs it. We eat when we’re hungry, eat what we like, and stop when we’re full.
As we get older, we become inundated with outside input about what we should eat, when we should eat and how much we should eat. More often than not this causes us to disconnect from our body’s innate wisdom and lose trust in ourselves to know what, when and how much to eat.
For some, this leads to a complex and troubled relationship with food, including extreme dieting, rules, restrictions, assocations and a lot of guilt and shame. I’d argue that even those of us who think we have a “normal” enough relationship with food often have rules and associations and subconscious beliefs about food that make that relationship a little more complex.
We may not all develop an eating disoder, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have disordered eating habits.
For many years, I thought I had a healthy realtionship with food because I equated an unhealthy relationship with food to eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia, eating only “junk” food and not making an effort to care about your food choices.
I never stopped to consider how complex my relationship with food was, in the absence of the obvious signs and alarm bells.
5 hidden signs of an unhealthy or troubled relationship with food
You regularly find yourself undereating or overeating
This can happen because you're not being mindful and intentional with your eating habits and/or have lost touch with your hunger and satiety cues and can't self regulate.
Overeating can happen for many reasons including repeatedly being forced to ignore your fullness and clean your plate as a child, poor eating habits (the how not the what) and psychological factors that lead to emotional/stress eating to name just a few.
Undereating can happen for reasons such as dieting and restricting, not making the time to eat when you’re busy, or when you’re suffering from a mental health condition like depression or an eating disorder.
Going out to eat leaves you feeling guilty or dissatisfied
For years I thought I had a healthy relationship with food because I paid attention to what I was eating and care about nourishing my body well. Unfortunately, I cared to the point of obsession and everytime I’d go out to eat I’d either deprive myself of something I really wanted becaues it didn’t align with the "healthy" image I wanted others to associte me with and end up feeling dissatisfied with my meal, or I’d go ahead and eat the “unhealthy” food then feel guilty and dissappointed with myself.
You're all in or all out with healthy eating
You're either eating really well or you're not. You can't find balance and consistency and healthy eating feels like a struggle.
You decide you want to eat healthy and dive in head first. You make a meal plan, buy all the things, get cooking, and feel great about your efforts until suddenly you find yourself struggling, give in to your cravings and quit.
You neglect to recognize the progress you’ve made and expect perfection from yourself which causes you to bounce back and forth between all in eating perfectly all the time to all out neglecting your nutritional needs all together.
You have poor body image
Most of the time, our complex relationship with food has nothing to do with the food itself and everything to do with how we feel about ourselves.
Poor body image or body dissatisfaction can lead to dieting and restricting food intake in an effort to change and shrink your body.
It may also be used as an excuse for why your body doesn't look the way you think it should and can lead to feelings of guilt and shame around food. You may worry about eating certain foods in front of others and then binge on them when you’re not alone.
You're a perfectionist
Perfectionism is like a plague that wreaks havoc on many areas of your life including your relationship with food. You may turn to food for comfort when things don't go as planned and/or develop disordered eating habits out of a desire to be in control of everything in your life, starting with your food choices and/or your body.
What does a healthy relationship with food look like?
As I mentioned in the introduction of this article, having a healthy relationship with food looks different for everyone because we are unique individuals with unique circumstances. At it’s most basic, having a healthy relationship with food means that you care about and make an effort to nourish yourself well and meet your nutritional needs without following food rules, restrictions and rigid plans and routines to dictate what, how much and when you eat. It could also mean that you:
listen to your hunger and fullness cues and respect them, which means you eat until you are comfortably full and aren’t afraid to leave food on your plate or save it for later.
make time to nourish yourself well, even when you’re busy.
are mindful about your food choices, but allow yourself to eat a variety of foods without guilt, shame and regret.
How to have a healthy relationship with food
Practice mindful awareness at meal times
Get curious about your hunger, practice presence at meal times, engage your senses fully to activate your digestive enzymes, slow down and savour your meal and notice your physical feeling shifting from hunger to fullness. Try this exercise.
Practice eating the foods you love in moderation
If you’re constantly depriving yourself, limiting and restricting foods, in particular foods you love that you consider to be enjoyable and palate pleasing, it’s inevitable that you’re going to lose control around them. Get in the habit of giving yourself permission to eat these foods mindfully and in moderation and let go of food guilt and shame.
Aim for balance & consistency
Instead of going all in and then burning out, work on cultivating healthy and mindful eating habits that are sustainable for you long term. Aim for balance in the way you nourish yourself, meaning, don’t be extreme about it. Make choices that feel realistic to you and that you can maintain with ease and simplicity.
Practice Self Love & Self Compassion
Resolve to treat yourself with compassion and speak to yourself the way you would speak to a friend; with love, kindness, reassurance and encouragement.
Choose to nourish yourself well because you love your body and not because you want to change it. Make healthier choices for their inherent benefits, so you can feel good from the inside out. Nourishment is about love not self control.
Aim for progress over perfection
Remember that perfection isn’t possible, or necessary for success. Aim to show up for yourself and do the work consistently so you can move forward. It’s called progress and it’s the more important measure of success there is. The only measure if you ask me.
Find other ways to cope with your emotions
When you find yourself turning to food for emotional reasons, find something else to do to bring yourself joy and comfort. Take a bath if you can, doodle or draw, dance it out. If that doesn’t work and you find yourself reaching for food anyways, acknowledge it. Write how it makes you feel in your journal and move on. Awareness in the first step to making a change.
