Food Freedom Friday Edition 256 - Your Food & You

Having a healthy relationship with food and eating is important, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. We’re inundated from a young age with the messaging that food is something to be feared, restricted, and weaponized into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ To add insult to injury, the more years you spend on diet, trying to make your body into something it’s not, the more you harm your relationship with food. 

My clients are constantly sharing that all the messaging from all the diets they’ve seen and been on is jumbled in their head, affecting how they feel about food and the choices they make around it every single day. 

A healthy relationship with food means that you can make food choices based on what you want, and what nourishes you physically and emotionally. Those choices should never be based on fear, which, unfortunately, can play a huge role in your broken relationship with food and choosing what, when and how to eat.

A healthy relationship with food also means that you can enjoy what you eat without guilt, shame, or anxiety. Those reactions disrupt the decisions you make, and the experience of eating, and ultimately make you feel awful, less than optimal and definitely not living your best life.

How to tell if you are having challenges with your relationship with food:

Your Life Fits Your Diet.

This is as opposed to your diet fitting your lifestyle. You find yourself obsessing about what you’re going to eat, what you’re eating, or what you’ve eaten.

Everything you do is predicated on your food situation (If you struggle with food allergies and do this because you have to, this clearly does not apply to you). 

From declining dinner invitations because you think you might eat too much, to bringing your own food to events, to getting up super early on vacation to exercise off those extra calories, you mold your life around your diet.

You feel major anxiety about eating anywhere outside your home, because you might go ‘off plan.’  And when you do end up eating something you think is wrong, you struggle to let it go. Your mind goes into planning mode about what you need to do to make up for the ‘transgression

This behavior is often about the fear of food and the fear that you might lose control and somehow gain weight. 

Fear drives all of these scenarios and is a major stressor. You probably wish you were able to simply love what you are eating, relax and not have to make food into the primary consideration for everything.

To get rid of the fear, you need to figure out the source, where is stems from. This may mean speaking to a counsellor, especially if this reaction to eating is paralyzing or disruptive to your life. 

To begin, ask yourself some tough questions.  

·       Start with ‘why.’

·       Ask yourself why you feel the way you do. If you are afraid to go out with your friends because you might overeat, ask yourself why.

·       Maybe the answer will be, ‘because I don’t want to gain weight.’

·       Why? What do you think is going to happen? Has this happened in the past?

·       Where did this fear come from? Is this from you, or did it belong to someone else and they transferred it onto you?

·       Do you believe your reaction is rational?

·       How much weight are you going to gain from one meal? 

·       What are you losing by thinking in this way?

·       What’s it costing you, emotionally? Physically? 

·       What could you be doing with the energy and time you’re expending on this fear?

This is a LOT of questions and is a process that can be very hard. It is, however, worth it

Again, a qualified professional can support you in working through all of this if you feel really stuck. 

You Think In Terms Of Numbers, Not Food.

You have become an expert counter in macros, calories, servings, grams, and whatever else. You sometimes choose lower-quality food over more nourishing choices because it has fewer calories. Your food choices rely on external factors rather than your own feelings, and doing this causes distrust and a disconnect between you and your physiology.   

It is true that you might enjoy counting things, but when that’s the only thing that concerns you, you are reducing the experience of eating down to something very one-dimensional. 

I understand that not everyone loves food, but denying yourself the emotional, social, and sensory aspects of eating because you are so deep into hacking the numbers, and because you don’t trust your body to tell you what it wants and needs, is far from optimal.

The issue with number goals is that they are frequently arbitrary. This means that you cannot be certain they are actually accurate. Above this, counting everything will drive you crazy. Why would you want to do that for the rest of your life? For what…5 extra pounds?

I would say that is not worth it!

A better, gentler approach is really taking note of your hunger and fullness cues, what you feel like eating at the time, and how food along with the experience of eating makes you feel.

This too is a process. It implies learning to trust your body, not automatically assigning a number to everything you put into your mouth. Eventually you will come to learn that nothing catastrophic will happen if you do not log it into your app.

You Label Food “Good” & “Bad”

You probably find yourself berating or praising yourself (and other people) based on what you (or they) consume on any given day.

The judgement is real. Sometimes it’s hard for you to eat at all, because you are so conflicted about the ‘bad’ food you crave and the ‘good’ food you think you should be eating. This does not even begin to address how you feel about yourself if you indulge in something you believe you should avoid or the secret judgement you have for other people whose diets are full of those foods. 

Your judgement of them and of yourself speaks volumes about how you feel about yourself (if you were happy about your diet and your body, you would not care what other people were or were not eating)

Once again, it all comes down to fear. 

Fear that you are a bad person if you eat ‘bad’ food. Fear that you might lose control like that person whose diet you’re judging. Fear that if you don’t ‘eat clean,’ something scary is going to happen. . 

And the ‘shoulds’…

I should eat this.

I should weigh this.

I tell people to beware of the ‘should-ing on themselves,’ because no good has ever come from that. These are rules you have set for yourself that are often based on outside influences and ideas that may not be realistic at all. 

Stop worrying about what other people are eating.

Stop talking about food all. the. time. with our friends. Those conversations where you carefully recount ALL of the ice cream you ate last night or how fat you might feel for eating those fries, just perpetuate this warped thinking about food. To add insult to injury, these chats are boring. No one really cares (except you!)

Stop thinking of food as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ because there are no good or bad foods. It’s all just food, and a healthy diet has all foods in it.

A healthy diet isn’t only about what we eat, but how we feel about food and eating. 

You are not defined by your diet. 

You Try To ‘Erase’ Or ‘Correct’ With Exercise Or Dieting. 

Let’s be very clear here – you cannot out-exercise a poor diet or a poor food choice. Trying to achieve that is a fool’s game. It also destroys your relationship with food to see what you eat as something that should be ‘erased’ of by relentless activity.

You end up over exercising, which leads to hunger and likely overeating. You also end up stressing your body out and causing elevated cortisol, which again can lead to overeating and fat storage. Perhaps most importantly, you become a slave to what amounts to a guess because you actually have little idea how many calories you need, and how many calories you ate, and how many calories your body actually absorbed.

To top it off, the number of calories we can realistically burn with exercise is not all that high.

This entire mindset is oppressive.

The solution? Forget about it. Easier said then done, I truly do understand, but necessary none-the-less

Food is not harmful, and it does not need to be ‘burned off.’ It nourishes you.

Occasional overeating is completely normal, and will not cause some massive weight gain. Trying to correct it often ends up being an overcorrection that comes with complications, both physical and emotional.

If you think you may have overeaten, get over it and move on. If you believe this happens often as a coping mechanism, it is probably time to get more coping tools in your toolbox. Again, working with a qualified professional can support you in making the changes necessary to understand and deal with your food choices in a positive and healthful way!