5 Tell Signs That You Have An Unhealthy Relationship With Food
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?
4. You spend a significant amount of time reading, researching and planning about what you’re going to eat (e.g. compulsively looking up restaurant food menu’s before visiting)
As mentioned, being invested in your health and caring for what you put in your body is not a bad thing. But focusing on the quality of your food intake is only healthy if your relationship with food is healthy. If the thought of a spontaneous dinner where you didn’t get to look at the menu ahead of time or other people choosing food for you causes you panic, that’s a sign that your approach to food may be too rigid. Flexibly is key to having a relaxed relationship with food.
At the end of the day, it’s not a bad thing to want to take better care of yourself and nourish your body from the inside out, but when this is happening to the detriment of your mental health, then it’s no longer healthy.
5. You isolate yourself and say no to social gatherings where there will be food
There’s many reasons why you may try to avoid social gatherings that involve food. Perhaps it makes you self-conscious to eat in front of others, perhaps you feel judged about your food choices or your portion sizes, or perhaps you don’t trust yourself in a setting with lots of food readily available? Maybe it’s a combination of all three. Whatever it is, feeling immense stress and anxiety when eating in social settings and the increased isolation that comes with it is a sign of an unhealthy relationship with food. It is a vicious cycle that brings about more guilt, shame and embarrassment.
If you identify with one or multiple of these tell signs, you may want to do some further work on this. I always say that if your relationship with food affects any aspect of your life in even the tiniest of ways – be it work, social life, intimate relationships – then you deserve to work on this. It’s not something you can achieve overnight, but it is possible. You can have a healthy relationship with food and discover food freedom.
How does that look like, you ask?
It involves giving yourself unconditional permission to eat anything and everything, with no guilt attached. No foods are off-limits and there’s no diet rules. Rigidity is replaced with flexibility. Control with spontaneitiy. As a result, you actually are able to make empowering food choices that FEEL good. Now doesn’t that sound liberating and empowering?
As I mentioned at the start, the nuance is that your relationship with food is less about the behaviour per say, but the negative emotional baggage that comes with it!
I think I have an unhealthy relationship with food – what next?
Just because you have no diagnosis or you don't fit a certain weight criteria or it's not as bad as for someone else, doesn't mean that your story isn't valid. You don't have to wait for it to get really bad to deserve asking for help.
So make that call. Read the first chapter of that book. Open up to that friend. Have that chat. Book in that appointment with a professional in the field.
Looking for more support?
Check out Discovery Food Freedom, my online, self-paced intuitive eating course to help you make peace with food and your body, once and for all. The perfect time to start never really comes. So start now. 💥
