Why Your Relationship With Food Isn’t Just About Habits

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why can’t I just stay on top of eating healthy?” Maybe you’ve beaten yourself up over not staying consistent or focused on measuring your progress by how much weight you’ve gained or lost. Maybe you know you have a hot and cold relationship with your body or food, but you just can’t seem to break out of the cycle.

If that resonates with you, stick around because this one is for you.

I didn’t really intend to have eating disorders, food, and body image be an area of focus for me, but after I started working with clients from all kinds of backgrounds and upbringings, I started to realize that every person has some kind of a relationship with their body and food. The longer I worked with clients, the more I started to see how pervasive and common it was to hear about clients having complicated feelings about their own bodies or food habits, especially women.

The interesting thing about body image and disordered eating is that, at its core, it rarely has as much to do about food as it does with your relationship with yourself. Often times food is just the mask or the symptom to a larger problem. It becomes the thing we see or focus on, but behavior management rarely creates a long term fix for body image issues. For example, if I just stop eating this type of food, then I will be able to control how my body looks. Or if I lose this much weight, then I won’t have to obsess over how clothes fit me. However, the greater issue is that our relationship food and our body image usually is just a smoke screen for how we treat ourselves. They often reveal a person’s tendency to tear and pick themselves apart. It can show us that they might have deeper wounds around how their parents unintentionally placed value on performance, achievement, or looks. It can reflect shame that if a body doesn’t look the way you feel it should, we are less than: less likable, less valuable, less attractive, less lovable, etc.

When we view it in this light, body image and food becomes much more about self worth, our experiences with our family of origin, how we view ourselves, and what a struggle it is to cultivate a loving, steady, and trustworthy relationship with our bodies.

Okay, so you may be wondering - now what? How do I stick to healthier habits or how do I get into a workout routine that works for me. And I think that is the crux of where I see a lot of my clients struggle. They want to lose weight or stop relying on food for comfort or eat healthier.

And I have so much compassion and understanding for this desire and yet, I often have to redirect the focus from control to relationship. Body image issues hinge on of the belief that exercise is the way to control your weight. Disordered eating hinges on the belief that if you can control what you’re eating and how often you're eating you can be skinny.

I try to remind clients that control keeps you in a cycle of shame and forces you to keep treading water. I encourage my clients that how you engage with yourself after you’ve binged, restricted, criticized your body, or beat yourself up about what you ate or the exercise you didn’t get around to doing is just as important as the behavior itself. For many people, it can be very scary to allow yourself to eat something you’ve been craving or allow yourself to not work out, but pausing and working toward cultivating relationship with your body that allows you to attune to yourself, to your body, to your emotions will slowly gives you an opportunity to develop a healthier, more compassionate, more holistic relationship with yourself. And this is very important because when we have safety, trust, and attunement, it allows us to not just react with control but be intentional about what you are choosing.

I’m by no means suggesting that the answer is just to be permissive of whatever you want, but I am suggesting that we actually need to think about food and body as a relationship that needs to me nurtured instead of a habit that needs to be enforced. This is where the rich, deep, sustainable, and rewarding work is with clients. I could say so much more, but if this interested you or spoke to you in some way, don’t be a stranger. I offer free 15-minute consultations if you’re interested in exploring whether therapy together would be a good fit here. If you’d like to read a bit more on my philosophy on eating disorders, click here.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for sticking around. I hope you were able to glean something, learn something, or have your experience be seen.