Creating food freedom can sound like a pipe dream after years of dieting, but it may be more realistic than you think. A peaceful relationship with food is something we were all born into. Our life experiences may have complicated our relationship with food, but it’s possible to regain trust in your body to create a trusting and easy relationship with food.
What is food freedom?
Food freedom is creating a relationship with food that feels loving, trusting, and empowering. It’s knowing you don’t need food rules to keep yourself on track, and trusting yourself around food.
Creating food freedom is breaking free from diet and wellness culture because you don’t need that pressure to motivate yourself to take care of yourself.
Eating with a food freedom approach looks like
- Allowing yourself to eat all food
- Choosing foods based on how they make you feel physically and mentally
- Leaving the stress and worry about food behind you
Diet culture and your relationship with food
Diet culture teaches you just need the right motivation to keep up your discipline and willpower. But the biggest problem is, it works against our natural biological cues. It tells you to eat on a schedule that too often goes against your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues.
Restricting foods can create an unhealthy relationship with food and can create a feeling of scarcity around off limits foods that increase your cravings for those foods. Like when you tell yourself you can’t keep chips in the house or you’ll eat the whole bag. Then when you finally do have chips again, it’s so rare that they taste better and knowing you won’t be able to eat them again for a while, you eat chips until you feel stuffed or the bag runs out.
Way too many dieting tips teach you not to trust yourself with food. Back when I would diet, I would try to follow as many of these tips as possible, like
- Don’t keep bad foods in the house
- Plan out your meals
- Track what you’re eating
And I could go on and on. But notice what those tips really are saying.
If you keep the bad foods in the house, you can’t trust yourself not to eat them.
If you don’t plan out your meals, you’ll default to making bad choices with easy, unhealthy meals.
If you don’t track what you’re eating, you won’t realize how much you’re eating.
Dieting and wellness tips teach you how to control yourself around food, while creating food freedom teaches you how to trust yourself around food so you don’t need to control yourself or your environment.
How a bad relationship with food impacts your day
When I was at the worst point of my relationship with food, I spent all day thinking about food and checking my progress in my food goals. During that time, I was constantly watching for foods that would tempt me off my plan and worrying about messing up. Which always leads me to feeling burnt out from using self control and inevitably messing up my diet plan.
A bad relationship with food impacts your whole day. It wastes energy thinking about food and adds extra stress and worry. I honestly didn’t realize how much time and energy I was putting towards my diet and exercise goals until I started working on my relationship with food through the intuitive eating principles.
If that’s where you are, know once you reach food freedom you’ll be amazed by how much extra time and energy you’ll have.
How to heal your relationship with food and find food freedom
Healing your relationship with food starts with getting to know your body’s hunger and fullness cues plus giving yourself full permission to eat all foods. It can be overwhelming to try to let go of all your food rules at once, which is why I like to start simple with regaining awareness of your hunger cues and bringing in permission.
Once you feel comfortable there you can move to the other stages of creating food freedom. While every journey can be unique, these are all common stages you could experience:
- Grieving the loss of the dream of reaching the perfect diet and weight loss goals
- Coming to terms with why dieting hasn’t worked (it’s not you and a lack of discipline)
- Challenge food rules
- Keep practicing eating without rules
- If emotional eating is a concern for you – building out your emotional wellness toolkit and working on emotional eating
- Growing relationship with movement and exercise
- And repeating it all until you rebuild trust and create a peaceful relationship with food