If you’ve landed here, I’m guessing it’s because you’re trying to figure out if your relationship with food is a healthy one.
Chances are that if you’re thinking about this, it probably isn’t as balanced as it could be and it’s affecting your life in some shape or form.
And I wouldn’t blame you. Toxic diet culture and disordered eating is everywhere – so much so that we don’t realise the cumulative effect it has on us over the years. It’s so normal for people to say things like “I’m having a cheat day ” or to follow up their pizza order with “I worked out this morning – I earned this.”, as if they needed to justify themselves.
What is worse, an unhealthy relationship with food is often praised as health-conscious or virtuous (both from people on the outside and the person themselves). But just because we’ve normalised things like swapping every sweet treat possible with a healthy-fied alternative or drinking water to suppress our hunger, doesn’t mean those things are always good for us. When you take a closer look, a lot of people’s food choices are steeped in a sense of fear of weight gain and come from a place of restriction and control rather than genuine self-care and empowerment.
Don’t get me wrong, you can be genuinely health-conscious and have a healthy relationship with food. At the same time, you can also be health-conscious but have a horrible relationship with food. From the outside, the both might look quite similar. But on the inside, things might be vastly different. The way I see it is that it’s less about what you’re eating, and more about the intentions and mindset behind your food choices.
So, let’s have a closer look at a couple of red flags:
You focus on nutritional labels and calories
Do you feel the need to look at all nutrition labels when grocery shopping? Do you mentally count calories or track them in an app like MyFitnessPal? Do you rely on these external metrics to tell you when you’re done eating for the day? And do you feel unsettled if you don’t know what ingredients or how many calories are in a meal? Those are all tell-signs of an unhealthy relationship with food. Wanting to focus on the quality of your food intake is not bad per say, but it becomes a problem if it causes you consistent distress and anxiety.
In the Intuitive Eating world, we have a term for this inner food critic that fixates, judges and criticizes – Inner Food Police. It’s the voice inside your head that feels the need to control every morsel of food that enters your body and makes you feel guilty when eating ‘too much’ according to things ‘off limit’.
Pay attention to the Inner Food Police and notice how often it chimes in. Is it every day, with every meal?
2. You feel guilt, frustration or even shame when eating things considered “off limits, unhealthy or not clean”
Do you have a list of good and bad foods? Do you set self-imposed rules to avoid certain foods but then beat yourself up when you cave? Do you punish yourself for eating something that deviates from your rules? Does one meal that didn’t go according to plan derail you into days of overeating/binge eating?
That’s your Inner Food Police running the show again. This voice makes you feel guilty for the smallest of indiscretions and will make you ruminate over every bite you had. On the flipside, intuitive eaters will eat something and then promptly move on with their lives.
3. You experience feelings of losing control around food, followed by a commitment to restrict afterwards
When you deny yourself food you really crave, it increases your likelihood of experiencing a loss of control around that food, or even binge eat. This is a natural response to physical restriction (actually not eating said food) or mental restriction (eating said food but not truly allowing yourself to have it). We often underestimate how powerful mental restriction is. For example, you may be eating chocolate but all the while you are thinking “I really shouldn’t have this.” or “Tomorrow I’ll have to make up for it.”
The simple truth is that your subconscious will remain in a perceived state of food deprivation until you truly give yourself the unconditional permission to eat everything and anything, no strings attached.
So again, pay attention to the Inner Food Police that tells you what you can and cannot eat. Do you notice a correlation between what foods you restrict the most and around which foods you feel most out of control?