How to Heal Your Relationship With Food
Your relationship with food is how you think, see, and eat it. Food is necessary in life, but it should not take over our life or our headspace. Excessive dieting, trauma, bad body image, and over-exercising can all lead to having a bad relationship with food. This is not good because over time a bad relationship with food can lead to an eating disorder, weight cycling, high blood pressure, high-stress levels, weakened immune system, and increased risk for heart disease.
To heal your relationship with food you need to implement the principles of intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is an eating style where you eat when you want, what you want, and however much you want. Now it is a lot more complex than what it seems like because in intuitive eating, you are eating food based on listening to your stomach, your cravings, your hunger, and your emotions. Intuitive eating is not mindless eating and it is not a diet. There is no restriction in intuitive eating. This eating pattern is created to be utilized every day over a life span. Everyone is invited to follow intuitive eating, and this eating pattern is meant to benefit all people.
Intuitive eating became popularized by two dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, who wrote the book called Intuitive Eating. In the book, they created 10 major principles which are to be followed in order. Here I will summarize the first 8 principles, but I highly encourage you to read the full book in order to gain the best understanding of the principles. While going through the principles start with the first principle, learn it, understand it, and implement it into your life before trying to implement the proceeding principles.
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Here is how to heal your relationship with food:
1. REJECT DIET MENTALITY
Rejecting the diet mentality is the first principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. To reject this mentality that you need to diet, you have to start with retraining your thoughts. First, you have to acknowledge the destruction that dieting causes us mentally and physically. A diet is an eating pattern that restricts types of foods when you are not intolerant or allergic to them, and dieting is also any eating pattern that restricts the amount of food you consume. Dieting usually originates from the desire to be smaller. The cycle of dieting starts off easy and you think it’ll be sustainable but after a few days, weeks, or months it becomes impossible and you go back to eating how you normally do. This ‘failure’ is a sign that your body was not getting its needs met, and it sent you all the signals possible to make you eat more. Dieting is not healthy because it promotes weight cycling, or periods of lower weight and then a period of higher weight. This pattern is shown to increase the overall death rate and increase the risk of developing heart disease. Dieting also slows down your metabolism and teaches the body to hold onto more fat. Dieting is also one of the most common causes of eating disorders. The next step to rejecting the diet mentality is to be aware of unconscious thoughts you have that are linked to the diet mentality. Recognize that your failed diets in the past were not a result of having low willpower because eating should not require willpower. Recognize that you do not need to be obedient to any food rules. Furthermore, the third step is to eliminate dieter tools. To do this, ditch the scale, while on your journey to intuitive eating, you can not be focused on weight, because fortunately, weight is a poor indicator of health. The diet culture wants you to care about your weight, but intuitive eating wants you to care about how you feel.
Here are some thought switches to be cognisant of:
Dieter mentality: “Do I deserve it?”
Non-dieter mentality: “Am I hungry?”
Dieter mentality: “I will feel guilty if I eat that”
Non-dieter mentality: “Will I feel deprived if I don’t allow myself to eat that?”
Dieter mentality: “I can only eat x, y, or z for lunch”
Non-dieter mentality: “What sounds good to eat right now?”
Dieter mentality: “I can not allow myself freedom with food because I will gain weight”
Non-dieter mentality: “I trust myself to listen to my body, and wherever my weight ends up is completely fine with me if it means I will have a healthy relationship with food”
2. HONOR YOUR HUNGER
Honoring your hunger is the next principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. Many times people eat when it is ‘lunch time’ or they stop eating because it is ‘past their eating window’. Through these specific time-regulated eating rules, many people are ignoring when they are hungry and when they are full or satisfied. Our body has a multitude of hunger and fullness hormones that allow us to recognize if we should start or stop eating, so it is important to trust these signals. Studies show that eating in response to initial hunger cues is beneficial for weight management and health markers. A past of dieting may have damaged some of these mechanisms in the body causing you to be overly hungry all the time, or when you start eating you can’t recognize when you are full anymore. This a sign you need to learn to honor your hunger by exploring the hunger scale listed below. Use this scale every time you feel a sense you want to eat, or whenever you are eating. Try your best to always stay between the 4 and 8 because if you get outside of these levels you are putting your body into a state of stress. When you are about to eat, or while you are in the middle of a meal, take a moment and ask yourself, Am I hungry? How full is my stomach? Am I in pain? How are my energy levels? Now we do not always eat based on hunger, because we are human sometimes at work your boss brings in homemade donuts and you want to try one because they look delicious but you are not hungry. It is still okay to eat! The authors call this taste hunger. Practical hunger occurs when you eat because you know that food won’t be available during a certain window of your day so you eat beforehand. An example of this is when you know you will be at a professional football game for 4 hours but you don’t want to pay for an overpriced hot dog at the game so you eat beforehand. Lastly, emotional hunger is when you eat because you are stressed, sad, or lonely. Eating while in these emotional states can bring some joy back into your life, but eating should not be your only coping mechanism.
1 Ravenous, you want to eat anything, you are irritated
2 Stomach pangs, food dominate your thoughts,
3 Stomach growling
4 Hungry and thinking about what you want to eat
5 Neutral, neither hungry nor full (usually how you feel after a snack)
6 Satisfied but can eat more
7 Full
8 Full and you do not want any more food but not uncomfortable
9 Stuffed, feeling bloated, might unbutton your pants
10 Sick, feeling uncomfortable and immobile, painfully full
3. MAKE PEACE WITH FOOD
Making peace with food is the third principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. This principle is all about adopting the mindset that you have unconditional permission to eat. During diets, people make rules about what foods they can and can not eat, but then on the weekends, they allow themselves a ‘cheat day’ where nothing is off-limits. Because these people during the week do not allow the ‘cheat day foods’, once the weekend comes they go overboard and usually eat until they are uncomfortable levels at a 9 or 10. Following these cheat meals, enormous regret and shame pile up because they ate ‘too much’ of the forbidden food in their eyes. In intuitive eating, no food is off-limits, and no amount of a certain food is limited. Making peace with food means you will allow yourself to eat any food at any time. This may seem scary at first, but if you are thinking ‘I could never trust myself to not eat everything in sight if I allowed myself permission’, this means that you have been living in a restrictive mindset. Once you tell yourself that no foods are off-limits, and no food is good or bad, you will find over time you do not put certain foods on a pedestal. Think about it, when you are told you can’t do something, it just makes you want to rebel and do it. The same thing happens with food, once you allow full permission to eat any food, you won’t have the drive to eat as much as you can of it.
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4. CHALLENGE THE FOOD POLICE
Challenging the food police is the fourth principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food.The food police are the people who fuel the dieting thoughts and behaviors in your brain. These people are coworkers, relatives, friends, doctors, and celebrities. They all perpetuate that flawed conception that dieting is how you become thin and happy. Dieting thoughts, turn into attitudes, which turn into behaviors, over time this develops a dieting habit and leads you into the dieting cycle. To challenge the food police, it starts with challenging your inner food police within your thoughts. To identify any irrational thoughts ask yourself, am I having repetitive and intense feelings about food? What am I thinking that’s leading me to feel this way? What is true or correct about this belief? What is false? Now that you know what negative thoughts are consuming your headspace, it is time to challenge and change them. When a disordered thought about food comes up, instead of just trying to think about something different, ask yourself where that thought came from and then after finding the root of it, change the thought to something realistic and positive. Examples:
Diet thought: “I have to eat good this week because I ate a lot of cake over the weekend”
Changed thought: “I can eat what my body wants this week, and the cake I had over the weekend was really good”
Diet thought: “I shouldn’t buy junk when I go to the grocery store, I want to be healthy”
Changed thought: “No food is junk or bad, I am being healthy by eating intuitively”
FREE HAPPY HORMONE GUIDE:
5. FEEL YOUR FULLNESS
Feel your fullness is the fifth principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. Many dieters have been so accustomed to eating at specific times of the day because that is the proper ‘lunch’ time or the proper ‘dinner’ time. What they fail to do is to really listen to their body and notice if they are even hungry during those mealtimes. It is okay to delay a meal until you are actually hungry. Feeling your fullness is all about noticing when you are still too full to eat a normal meal, and noticing when during a meal you are getting to a comfortable fullness level. One way to tell if you are full is to take away distractions while you are eating. This means to turn off the tv and put away your phone while you are eating. How many times have you grabbed a big bag of chips and sat on the couch to watch a movie and you finished the whole bag without realizing it? Remember, feeling your fullness is not a mechanism to make you eat less to lose weight. Feeling your fullness is all about training your hunger and fullness cues so that you never are famished or uncomfortably stuffed. You will feel more energized when you listen to these cues. Another way to feel your fullness include, stopping in the middle of a meal and decide if you want to keep eating or if you want to wait and save the rest for later. You do not have to make a clean plate every time you eat.
As you start to really understand your hunger and fullness signals, you will also note the importance of meal composition, and ‘air foods’. If you are eating a big bowl of fruit, you will probably eat a larger quantity of this to feel full than you would if you had a sandwich. This is just because different foods fill up our stomachs in different ways.
6. DISCOVER THE SATISFACTION FACTOR
Discovering the satisfaction factor is the sixth principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. Satisfaction is at the center of intuitive eating because the purpose of all these principles is to get you to be satisfied with the food you eat and how much you eat of it. In modern times, we eat for survival but we also eat for enjoyment and pleasure. This is a good thing. We should be enjoying our food because of how many options there are available to us. If coming from a dieting past, you may have lost touch with what you really want to eat because your mind immediately tells you to the ‘healthiest’ option in your kitchen instead of tapping into what you really want. To figure out what you want, pay attention to all the qualities of foods, taste, texture, aroma, temperature, appearance, and the fullness factor (how rich or dense the food is). Another way to increase the satisfaction of your food is to eat it slowly and really notice what you like about that food. Slowing down as you eat also gives your hunger cues more time to develop. When you eat food you do not enjoy, no one is forcing you to continue to eat it, again there are endless amounts of foods and dishes you can make that you do enjoy.
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7. COPE WITH YOUR EMOTIONS
Coping with your emotions without using food is the next principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. It is important to note that using food to cope is an okay strategy, but it should not be your only strategy. Emotional eating is partly innate behavior because as an infant when we cried we were offered the breast or the bottle to calm us down. The importance of emotional eating is that you should never feel guilty after you eat. Guilt comes from doing something wrong or immoral, and eating is not wrong even if you eat to a level 10 on the hunger scale. There are different types of emotional eating.
Comfort eating is when you use food to feel whole or complete, examples could be eating smores on a camping trip, or grabbing an ice cream cone with friends after a bad. Eating food for comfort is part of a healthy relationship with food as long as you do not feel shame or guilt following the action.
Bored eating is another kind of emotional eating that originates from not paying attention to hunger cues. You eat to pass time between classes or you are in traffic and happen to finish some snacks in your bag. Again just be conscious of the behavior and how you feel after you ate out of boredom. Also when you sense you could be eating out of boredom, ask yourself before and throughout how you are feeling and if there is a void you are trying to fill. You can also pick an activity to do first before going for the snack.
Bribery and reward is another form of emotional eating. Telling yourself you can eat when you finish a project or finish cleaning the house is a form of bribery. This is not good behavior because you are putting food on a pedestal that has to be earned, but in fact, food is food, it holds no value.
Bottom line, if you sense strong feelings that are pulling you to eat to cover up an emotion, try to slow yourself down and see if eating the food is the best decision for you, or if there are any other ways to cope. If you decide you want to emotional eat, then go ahead but listen to your hunger signals and then go about your life.
8. RESPECT YOUR BODY
Respecting your body is the eighth principle of intuitive eating to heal your relationship with food. Diet culture is rooted in the thin ideal and promoting a specific eating pattern to lead you to this idealistic body type. Consequently, the human body varies, and not all body’s look the same. Just because someone dieted and exercised a certain way to shape their body, does not mean that every human can do that too. Due to this, having an obsession with the outward appearance of your body is not practical. Studies show the more you focus on the appearance of your body, the worse you will feel about yourself. This is why having respect for your body is important. We need to treat our body’s as our vehicle through life, not as our enemy that holds us back from the beauty standard. To give you an idea of how much you may be disrespecting your body, try to listen to every time you think about your body throughout the day and imagine if you told your sister or your mom the same thing about their body. Once you recognize the negative self-talk about your body, it is time to revamp your thoughts and begin to respect your body.
The first step is to get comfortable. This is the most tangible step, where you should go through your closet and donate or sell any clothing item you are hoping to fit into one day once you ‘reach X pounds or X size’. These clothes that don’t fit you are just a reminder to keep you in diet culture. Clothes are supposed to fit us, we are not supposed to fit them.
The next step is to stop body checking. Every time you check your body and suck in and try to imagine what you’d look like with a different physique, you are stimulating the mindset that your body isn’t good enough. It’s okay to look in the mirror and check out your outfit, but it is not okay to squish your arms and suck in as an effort to pick at yourself. Your body is a result of genetics and also lifestyle factors, so you can’t compare yourself to someone else.
The next step is to not engage in body shaming. This step takes a lot of self-awareness and work to notice and challenge the body-shaming thoughts in your head. Right now you may think it’s out of your control, but it isn’t. In fact, you have all the control to change your view of your body. Body respect does not mean you have to love the way you look. The goal here is body neutrality first. When you have a negative thought about a part of your body, you either change the thought to be grateful about the function of that body part:
Body shaming thought: “My belly is too big, I look pregnant”
Body respecting thought: “My belly holds all of my organs that allow me to live and eat food, so I am grateful for my belly”
Or, you can also change the thought to say something positive about your personality or about another part of your body you like:
Body shaming thought: “I don’t like my arms, they have no muscle tone”
Body respecting thought: “I love my big smile, and I love how I make people laugh and happy when they are around me”
