If you find yourself thinking about food all the time, it’s like a complex relationship with food leading to your thinking about food all the time. So this post isn’t going to be some quick fix answer to stop obsessing over food.
But I’ll give you an idea of some of the factors that lead to increased time spent thinking about food and what you can do to stop thinking about food all the time.
Why you’re thinking about food all the time and what to do about it
I first want to call out how being food insecure can impact your relationship with food and research associates it with mental health problems. So if you currently or in the past have experienced food insecurity, this could be a factor in thinking about food more often.
The other factors I want to talk about are ones that are influenced by diet and wellness culture.
Physical hunger
One lesson you’ll get over and over from diet culture is how to eat less and avoid eating certain foods. Meaning if you’ve been trying to diet you may not be eating enough to meet your body’s needs. So you might be thinking about food because you’re hungry.
And in this case all you need to do to think less about food, is to meet your body’s hunger needs.
Unhealthy relationship with food
Your relationship with food could be driving how frequently you’re thinking about food.
This is actually the reason I was thinking about food all the time before learning intuitive eating. I did not at all trust myself around food and picked up the habit of thinking about food all the time to try to keep myself on track with my healthy lifestyle change.
But this just lead to be spending all day planning out my meals and snack while doing the math to make sure I was within my macro and calorie limits. Until the end of the day would come and I was so mentally exhausted I wouldn’t have any energy to maintain my willpower
When I learned to trust myself around food again, I stopped needing to think about food all the time because I no longer had to spend any energy monitoring and controlling myself around food.
Tips to stop thinking about food
If you want to stop thinking about food all the time, you’ll need to address the reasons you’re thinking about food.
It’s normal to be thinking about food when you’re hungry. So if that’s why you’re thinking about food then simply let yourself eat something and meet your body’s needs.
If you’re thinking about food all the time because of your relationship with food, it will take some practice to break the habit and create more peace around food. One way to do that is to create more freedom around food with intuitive eating.
Here’s 3 tips to help you start improving your relationship with food.
- Practice creating a more neutral relationship with food
- Give yourself permission to eat the foods you’re craving
- Journal about why you’re thinking about food to increase understanding about food beliefs