Motivation & Mindset, Nutrition & Recipes
7 Steps to Building a Better Relationship with Food
Jul
Do you ever feel like you are in a battle with food? Like your always wading through the grey zone, sometimes stoically steadfast in your commitment to the latest diet, and sometimes falling head first into the plate of “never eating this again”? Building a better relationship with food is a major step towards creating a healthier, happier lifestyle in which you are confident and in control without feeling crazy.
On a scale of 1-10, 1 being “please don’t make me answer” and 10 being “I am a master of all things”, how would you rate your relationship with food? For me, I’d go with an 8. I feel good about it, but there’s always work to be done. 10 years ago? I would have asked to kindly plead the 5th. I was struggling with an eating disorder and constantly battling my brain, that was smart enough to know I was doing harm, and my disorder, which was strong enough to leave me feeling depressed and lost.
Stop labeling food good and bad.
Are eggs bad? For most people, no. But what if you’re allergic to eggs?
What about wine? For some people, any type of alcohol is completely bad and off limits. For other people, shoot for entire cultures, wine is an integral part of life.
And how about protein? For most people, protein is an essential part of a healthy diet, especially if you are working towards any type of fitness goal. But if you have a kidney disease, a high protein diet has dire consequences.
There is no such thing as a bad food.
Sure, some foods don’t benefit your body (trans fats, additives, preservatives…). And if you have allergies, or diseases or disorders that change the way your body handles certain foods, you should avoid those foods.
But thinking about food as simply good or bad is incredibly simplistic, and confusing. It’s a mindset that sets up rules and restrictions that don’t need to exist. It’s a black tunnel into a world of guilt and self-judgement.
Rather than think about foods as inherently good or bad, start thing about them on a spectrum of health in relation to your own body.
What foods make you feel healthy, energized and strong? Eat more of those.
What foods leave you feeling bloated and lethargic? Eat less of those.
Focus on quality over quantity.
Aka, put less emphasis on calories, and more emphasis on nutrients.
Rather than choosing food based on their caloric value, choose foods based on their nutrient quality.
Despite the oft-repeated dietary mantra “a calorie is a calorie”, studies actually show that that’s not entirely true.
High-quality foods that provide your body with the nutrients it needs to survive and thrive are far more beneficial than low-quality, highly processed foods that provide little to no nutrients.
What’s that mean? That means choose whole foods that are unprocessed and as close to their natural state as possible. Apples instead of apple strudels. Oranges instead of orange juice.
Learn to enjoy mealtime again.
When to comes to building a better relationship with food, the how is almost as important as the what or why. Through out history, food has been a means of sharing, caring and bringing family and friends and cultures together. We’ve gathered at tables to share home cooked meals for thousands of years…until recently.
More often than not in today’s high-pressure society, we eat on the run, at our desks, working or moving from one task to the next. We eat so fast that we don’t taste our food, never mind enjoy it or realize how much we’re eating until the bag is empty on our laps.
Building a better relationship with food takes time…time spent in the kitchen and time spent at the dinner table. Take the time to set a beautiful table. Serve meals on real plates and eat with real knives and forks and napkins. Spend time with your family and friends, lingering over flavors and appreciating food as more than fuel or calories.
Track portion sizes, not calories.
To lose fat, you need to watch how much you eat. If you love numbers, if you need a short-term strategy to get back on track, or if you have supremely advanced needs (i.e. you plan to hop on stage in a glittering thong bikini in 12 weeks), calorie tracking could work well for you.
But if you are looking at building a better relationship with food, and if you are looking for a lifelong strategy to stay healthy and fit, try portion control instead. It’s easy, portable, personal and precise enough for the average babe (i.e. you, me, my best friend and her sister).
Recognize that no meal is going to make or break your diet.
Sometimes a girls gotta order the nachos. And you know what? That’s just fine.
I preach the 80/20 rule. Stick to healthy, balanced food choices 80% of the time so that 20% of the time, you can enjoy those treats and occasional splurge meals that make birthdays, holidays and date nights what they are.
Your body does an incredible job of maintaining itself despite the fluctuations in movement, sleep, fuel and recovery that it’s faced with. Just as one salad is not going to bring you a 6-pack tomorrow, a hot chocolate chip cookie and glass of milk is not going to break your diet.
Stop restricting and start fueling.
When you restrict food, you purposefully reduce the amount of food that you eat. Whether it’s through forbidding certain foods, or not allowing yourself to eat over a certain amount, diet culture has told us that the best way to lose weight is to deprive yourself.
And as soon as you do that, as soon as your body doesn’t have enough food to fuel basic physiological activities, you start to feel hungry constantly and your brain focus on one thing only: getting more food.
Ever notice that when you are hungry, all you can think about is food? If you skip a meal, it’s harder to make healthy decisions when food is finally in reach.
When I was struggling with anorexia I sometimes at as little as a couple hundred calories a day. Yet I thought about food all the time. In fact, it was often the only thing I could think about! I obsessively flipped through cookbooks and magazines, writing down recipes I’d never eat.
I thought restricting food put me in control when in fact, the opposite was true.
Giving your body what it needs is a major step towards building a better relationship with food. If your muscles, your heart and your brain are full, you’re able to make smarter, healthier decisions day in and day out.
Put time into learning to cook at home.
Ever notice how the more you know about something, the more comfortable you are with it? Learning to cook makes eating less novel. Exploring ingredients and techniques make food less foreign, and familiar enough to get creative.
Start by learning how to cook a few dishes. Get your grandmothers sauce recipe and master it. Look up Food & Wine Magazine’s best salad recipes, and challenge yourself to explore the more exotic ingredients and flavor profiles you might find there.
You don’t know what you don’t know. Start learning, start putting that knowledge to work.
Recipes you might enjoy trying if you are just starting out:
