Healing Your Relationship With Food, One Step at a Time

An unhealthy lifestyle isn’t always an easy thing to change. Every little effort can help, and learning more about exercise and diet is crucial; at the same time, it can go a lot deeper than just our motivations to be better. Our relationship to health is one of the key defining pillars of a healthy lifestyle, and these relationships can go back as far as our childhood. However, you can start addressing it with the tips below and, over time, you might find yourself able to live much more healthily and happily with the food that you eat.

 

Stop Thinking In Terms Of “Diets”

Although certain diet routines and tips can definitely help you eat healthier, one of the worst habits you can pick up is thinking of nutrition changes as “going on a diet.” Diets imply that the changes are temporary and goal-specific, and we tend to associate them with restriction and judgment, labelling foods as “good” and “bad”, and in turn, our own actions become defined by what we eat. This puts way too much pressure on ourselves, creating feelings of guilt when we fail, and making it harder to stick to the changes we make in the long-term. Instead, you need to think about changes you can make going forward that are built to last, and allow you to sustainably improve your nutrition.

 

Education Is Important To Execution

If you want to change how you think about food, then often being much more aware of what’s actually in what you eat, and what your body needs, can be a big help. You might know that certain foods aren’t particularly good for you, but when you actually learn to read about their nutritional content, to know how their caloric mass fits into your intake aim, as well as their fat, sugar, and simple carb content, you can feel it much more effectively. Similarly, when you know about what your body really needs and how it affects how you feel every day, you can more easily maximise the nutrition in your diet just by paying a little more attention.

 

Don’t Underestimate The Power Of The Brain’s Chemistry

Not everything about your relationship to food is down to your personality or the habits that you’ve developed. Sometimes, it’s down to changes in the brain, as well. A lot of people who experience strong cravings do so because the “hunger noise” in their brain becomes too difficult to resist. This isn’t just a matter of discipline; it can just as easily be helped with the increasingly popular weight loss injectibles, which work by directly targeting the hormones that not only cause this hunger noise but can help us feel fuller more easily, and improve our energy use throughout the day. Addressing the problem at the source sometimes means going to the brain’s biology, not just our own habits.

 

Make Eating Mindful

It’s very easy to find yourself scarfing down food when you’re hungry. However, how we eat our food can influence our relationship with it just as much as the food that we eat. Mindful eating has become very popular because not only does it give the brain and body time to balance hunger and satiety signals properly, but it also allows us to much better appreciate food when we eat it. For starters, you should try eating without distraction. We’ve all become used to eating in front of the TV or the computer screen, but focusing on the taste, texture, and smell of your food while slowing down to chew can make it a lot easier to eat just as much as you need. Don’t feel guilty about leaving food on the plate if you feel full, either.

 

Cut Out Critical Voices

It’s not just our own experience that colours our relationship with food, but how much we think about others’ perception of our eating habits, as well. While making meaningful changes to your eating habits is important, it’s not helped by listening to those who are constantly critical of us. This can lead to those feelings of guilt, which make it a lot easier to backslide into bad habits. Cut out influencers, blogs, or other online media that promote restrictive diets and use shame as a motivating force, and instead consider working with nutritionists or personal trainers who can much more effectively use positive reinforcement. 

 

Your relationship with food can’t be fixed in one day. It can, however, be adjusted and addressed over time to make those healthier eating habits stick for longer. Take it step-by-step and use the tools that make it easier to make healthy habit changes stick.

 

Want to unlock greater wellness?

Listen to our friends over at the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast to unlock your best self with Dr. John Lieurance; Founder of MitoZen; creators of the ZEN Spray and Lumetol Blue™ Bars with Methylene Blue.