3 Ways to Heal Your Relationship With Food

On Tuesday, I looked at a research article that studied whether people would make healthier choices if food/drink labels also showed how much exercise was required to burn off that particular item. People did.

My fears around such a label, though, go to the fact that so many individuals already have an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise, using the latter to punish themselves for the former.

Maybe you do that too...? What about using food/drink to cope....turning to it when you’re stressed, bored, sad, angry, maybe even happy? What about holding feelings of guilt or shame around food? Or rigid rules around how/what/when you eat?

Sixty-five percent of U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 45 reported disordered eating behaviors, in a 2008 survey sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and SELF Magazine.

And "dieting is one of the most common forms of disordered eating," according to the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

If you feel your relationship with food is even “kinda” unhealthy, what can you do?

1. Ask for help.

Turn to a licensed professional counselor, or other mental health professional, who can help you work through some underlying patterns that are affecting your relationship with food/drink. It really, really is OK to seek help and support. Here’s a place to start. 

2. Hone your Mindfulness Skills.

Mindfulness is thrown around a lot. It may seem like its something you either have or you don’t. In actuality, it is a skill you can develop. Mindfulness is the skill of awareness of the present moment, without judgement.

Mindfulness skills will help you develop self-awareness, and the ability to: stop, breathe, think, then act (rather than react). This in turn will help you build coping skills other than eating or drinking, restricting, or over-exercising. You can start strengthening your mindfulness skills through short meditations and breathing exercises. Here are some examples.

3. Develop Appetite Awareness.

An off-shoot of the self-awareness in number 2, is developing appetite awareness. When you go to eat, ask yourself, how hungry am I on a scale of 1-10? If you’re less than a 7, try waiting 5 more minutes. Just 5. If 5 minutes wasn’t so bad, try waiting another 5. Then another. See how the urge passes or doesn’t. If it does, you may have been turning to food because you were thirsty, coping with an emotion, or because it was “time to eat”.

If it doesn’t and you get to a 7 or more on the appetite scale, then go ahead and dig in...but in a slow, mindful way 😉 . Try eating slowly and to 80 percent full to improve digestion and practice natural portion control!