Lauren Coleman is a nutritionist and personal trainer who specialises in helping people stop yo-yo dieting, improve their relationship with food and become more confident in their body at the same time. She works with clients in person and online, and hosts a podcast called A Seat at The Table.
You might have encountered the concept of having either a positive or negative relationship with food. It may seem strange to be concerned about your relationship with food if you’re unfamiliar with what it means. But your relationship with food has a bigger influence on your overall health and well-being than you might know.
What do we mean by your 'relationship with food'?
Your relationship with food is reflected by how you think about food and make eating decisions. A positive relationship with food is when we can trust ourselves to make the eating decisions that feel best for ourselves and our bodies most of the time. People with a positive relationship with food can eat intuitively, and they are not preoccupied with intrusive negative thoughts related to food all the time.
Conversely, people with a negative relationship with food may have habits on the spectrum of disordered eating, whether that is a diagnosed eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia or binge eating, or finding themselves in a ‘binge-restrict cycle’, where they either binge eat or overeat, then drastically restrict calories or compensate with exercise in an attempt to manage their overeating.
People’s relationships with food are always on a spectrum, and you may find that your relationship with food varies throughout your life.
A negative relationship with food makes it difficult to set and maintain habits and may influence your physical and mental well-being in multiple ways.
4 reasons why your relationship with food impacts your well-being
1. A poor relationship with food makes you prone to emotional eating
Emotional eating is a coping strategy many of us rely on in times of stress, turmoil, sadness, loneliness, boredom and anxiety. Food provides a reliable source of comfort, especially when certain foods can hold nostalgic significance for us.
It’s important to emphasise that emotional eating is not bad. It is a healthier coping mechanism than others such as excess alcohol and drug use.
However, when we attempt to restrict our food intake – particularly our intake of ‘comfort foods’, if we don’t have alternative ways to regulate our emotions as they arise, our cravings for those foods will only heighten. This means we will become prone to eating those foods in excess when we eventually feel the urge to eat emotionally.
Labelling comfort foods as ‘bad’ and restricting our intake of them worsens our relationship with food by instilling fear and weakening self-trust. If we can’t trust ourselves around certain foods, we aren’t allowing our bodies to guide our eating decisions – i.e. practice intuitive eating.
What ends up happening when we restrict ourselves from comfort foods is a cycle of temporarily restricting, eventually giving in to emotional eating urges, consuming more of these foods than usual, feeling a strong sense of guilt afterwards, and then feeling the urge to restrict again. But now you also carry feelings of shame and guilt related to your body and your eating habits, which further increases your likelihood of emotional eating.
The only way to break the cycle is to heal your relationship with food first, and you will find instances of emotional eating will occur far less frequently.
2. A poor relationship with food keeps you stuck in a binge-restrict cycle
Along with eating to soothe negative emotions, people binge eat or overeat due to physiological hunger, exposure to new or different foods, social situations and self-sabotage.
Usually, people’s first experience of excessive overeating is following a period of prolonged hunger. Yo-yo dieters will likely be able to remember the first time they dieted and how it eventually ended – likely consuming large amounts of foods they felt they had been ‘missing out on’.
Just as people who experience emotional eating become more prone to doing so when restricting certain foods, the same thing causes people to overeat during social occasions or when exposed to foods they don’t usually keep in the house.
Whilst we may assume that the solution should be to avoid social occasions or keep ‘trigger’ foods out of the house, this only delays the next episode of overeating.
It’s important to address hunger when addressing overeating. When we are in a binge-restrict cycle we might not even be able to notice our hunger signals and therefore honour them. We may even disagree that we are hungry because when we binge eat or overeat, we eat far beyond the point of fullness and often gain weight.
However, just because we don’t feel hungry doesn’t mean the body isn’t. Due to previous extended attempts at restriction, the impulsive urge to consume food more frequently and in bigger portions than usual is how your body is trying to restore homeostasis.
This is why you should stop any dietary restriction – including tracking calories or macros, intermittent fasting or limiting yourself from different food groups – when healing your relationship with food.
Once your relationship with food is healed, only then will you no longer feel trapped in the cycle of bingeing and restricting.
3. A poor relationship with food can affect your relationships
If you are constantly thinking about food what you wish you could eat right now, whether the meal you just ate was too high in calories or too processed, wondering how you’re going to navigate the next social event that comes up, that is a sign that your relationship with food could use some work.
It’s also likely that you also experience dissatisfaction with your body and anxiety around gaining weight, especially if you frequently think about how your body looks and obsessively monitor your weight or take progress pictures all the time.
A poor relationship with food and poor body image tend to go hand in hand. Improving one will improve the other, but if one worsens, so will the other.
Constantly thinking about food or your body occupies mental and emotional space that could be used productively in other, more fulfilling areas of your life.
For example, if you have a poor relationship with food or poor body image, you may find that your intimate relationships will suffer. You will likely have feelings of insecurity that can sabotage a relationship, plus the inability to connect with your partner on a deeper level and meet their needs.
Insecurity about your own body can lead to self-absorption and cause you to project your anxieties onto your partner – believing that they should be constantly reassuring you and meeting your needs without acknowledging whether you are meeting theirs.
This insecurity can stem from the feelings of guilt and shame that arise after periods of binge eating or overeating occur. It is embarrassing to admit to other people, including our loved ones, that we struggle to ‘eat normally’, and we may even resent our partners if they demonstrate the ability to do so.
Healing your relationship with food frees up your mental and emotional capacity to be more present in your lives and personal relationships. We become more confident in ourselves and can invest energy into the areas of our lives that bring us joy and make us happier people leading to healthier relationships.
4. A poor relationship with food makes maintaining weight loss more difficult
Many people delay healing their relationship with food because they are nervous about the potential to gain weight or because they don’t want to put their weight loss goal on the back burner.
However, if we don’t intentionally work on improving our relationship with food, even if we do manage to lose weight through dieting, we are far more likely to regain that weight that we lost. Once we increase our exposure to foods we have been restricting, start socialising more and turn to food for comfort during times of distress, we’re likely to ‘go overboard’ and reverse all the hard work we’ve put in.
Since weight loss requires restriction of some kind, and restriction is the underlying cause of overeating, it is impossible to simultaneously heal your relationship with food whilst intentionally pursuing weight loss. Dieting or restricting may give you a sense of control that prevents you from overeating, however, you won’t be able to tell whether your relationship with food has improved until you remove that control.
That’s not to say that you can never intentionally lose weight; rather, healing your relationship with food before attempting weight loss will help you become more resilient against the urge to binge or overeat after your dieting phase has finished.
This means you can successfully reintroduce foods you’ve been restricting and eat more, without gaining weight back.
If you have gained weight from overeating or binge eating, healing your relationship with food might be all that you need to do to slowly and sustainably lose weight.
However, it’s important not to make weight loss the primary focus when healing your relationship with food. Instead, take things one step at a time. Healing your relationship with food puts you in a better position to pursue weight loss without increasing your likelihood of ‘bouncing back’ once it’s ended.
Conclusion
Many of us might not even be aware that our relationship with food needs working on, but if you are caught in a yo-yo dieting cycle, a binge-restrict cycle, or you feel overly consumed by emotional eating – then perhaps next time you are tempted to jump on another diet or restrict your calories in some way, consider working on your relationship with food instead.
The benefits of improving your relationship with food encompass your overall health, happiness and quality of life. You will likely notice better body image, more mental capacity to be present in your life, improved relationships, more consistency with eating habits and a more stable body weight.
It takes time and effort to improve your relationship with food, but you’ll never regret the time you invest in it.
If you’re looking for guidance, seek help from a nutrition coach who focuses on improving your relationship with food and re-building sustainable habits such as myself! Get in touch via my email address for more information.
Read more from Lauren Coleman
Lauren Coleman, Nutritionist and Fitness Coach
Lauren Coleman is an expert in helping people overcome emotional eating, stop yo-yo dieting and re-wire their thought processes around health, nutrition, body image and exercise. She is passionate about debunking unhelpful advice about fitness and diet, making a healthy lifestyle accessible to everybody. She provides a pragmatic and science-based approach to habit change that embraces imperfect action and body appreciation – rather than perfectionism and body dissatisfaction. This results in meaningful transformation not only in how we eat, but how we feel about ourselves as well.
