Healing an unhealthy relationship with food after years, even decades, of dieting often feels overwhelming and isolating. After dieting and disconnecting from your body’s hunger cues, food can become a source of stress and anxiety. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
This blog post goes over how dieting can create an unhealthy relationship with food and where to start when healing your relationship with food.
How dieting can create an unhealthy relationship with food
Dieting works to develop habits and change the way you approach food. Usually, these tips are well intended but are framed as helping you overcome yourself.
They teach you to
- Keep food out of your house so you don’t tempt yourself
- Put half your meal in a to-go container so you don’t overeat
- Drink water because you may be thirsty and will fill your stomach
I could keep going with these diet tips, but I think you get the picture.
What these tips are really teaching you is that you can’t trust yourself around food without rules and ways to control yourself. That underlying belief then forms your relationship with food and you start to believe:
- You can’t trust yourself to be left alone with food without overeating
- Diets don’t work for you because you don’t have self-control
- You don’t have the discipline to keep going
Then you get into the cycle where one day you’re motivated and follow your diet perfectly until you can’t do it anymore and decide to indulge in a cheat meal that leads to restarting the diet next week.
Until one day you doubt any diet will ever work for you and reach your dieting rock bottom.
Signs of an unhealthy relationship with food
- Thinking about food frequently throughout the day
- Mentally re-calculating your macros or calories multiple times a day
- Snacking in private where no one will see
- Being “good” throughout the day only to overeat at night
- Overeating on holidays because it’s a special occasion so you can finally enjoy “bad” foods
- Overeating the foods you don’t let yourself eat because it feels like you have to get it before it’s not allowed again
- Dreading exercise because it feels like you need to
- Viewing exercise as a way to earn more food and calories
- Frequently feeling negative about your body
Your relationship with food is formed by the beliefs you have about food, how those beliefs leave you feeling about food, and how you act around food. All of that creates your experience with food.
How to start healing an unhealthy relationship with food after years of dieting
After years of dieting it can feel overwhelming to follow a non-diet approach. With a non-diet approach comes the freedom to choose any food without any rules about what you can or can’t eat.
One of the best places to start with a non-diet approach is getting very familiar with your hunger and fullness cues. Dieting will teach you to ignore your hunger cues to follow a diet plan. So it’s common to not be in tune with all your more subtle hunger cues and even your fullness cues.
You might think your cues are a growling stomach to an uncomfortably full stomach. But usually, those are signs of extreme hunger and beyond comfortably full. Read more about hunger and fullness cues in this blog post.