Healing Your Relationship with Food During Eating Disorder Recovery
How different would your life be if you were completely at peace with food? No more dieting, no more disordered eating behaviors, no more preoccupation with food, no more obsessing over what is “healthy” or “unhealthy.” You could actually eat the foods that you enjoy because you trust that your body knows what it needs. This may sound like a fairytale, but it is attainable! The following principles will help you on your journey to developing a healthy relationship with food.
by: Megan Madsen
If you’re familiar with the Intuitive Eating Movement, you’ve likely encountered at least a handful of articles, social media posts, or podcasts about “having a healthy relationship with food” or “healing your relationship with food.” What does that even mean? How can you have a relationship with food? Despite how unusual it sounds, EVERYONE has their own distinct relationship with food. As with our personal relationships, relationships with food can likewise be healthy or dysfunctional. Your relationship with food is incredibly important.
In order to cultivate and nurture a healthy relationship with another person, it is important to show each other respect, trust, and support. These behaviors are also relevant in fostering a healthy relationship with food. To do so, we must honor and respect our hunger cues, trust our bodies, and support ourselves on the journey to food freedom.
It is also possible to have an unhealthy or disordered relationship with food. In contrast to a healthy relationship, feelings of guilt, shame, or manipulation are often associated with an unhealthy relationship. Which, you guessed it, is also applicable to our relationship with food. You may be thinking, “I eat food every day, shouldn’t that mean my relationship with food is strong?” Not necessarily. The frequency in which you eat and what you consume only play a small role in your relationship status with food.
Respect Your Hunger Cues
The first step in respecting your hunger cues is to DTR - define the relationship. Respecting your hunger cues has more to it than just recognizing when you’re hungry and full; you need to take a step back and evaluate where you stand with food right now. Do you follow certain food rules? I.e. restricting certain foods or food groups, only eating within a certain timeframe during the day, labeling foods as “good” or “bad”, limiting yourself to a set number of calories each day, etc. If so, write them down! Make yourself aware of them. Ask yourself why you follow them and write that down as well. Defining your relationship status is imperative for improving your relationship with food and honoring your hunger cues.
Respecting your hunger cues and eating intuitively means getting rid of your food rules. Yes, all of them. Food rules are arbitrary guidelines or habits that are created with the intention of manipulating and controlling one’s body size. When these rules are broken, they elicit feelings of guilt and shame, which, if you recall, are the same emotions that correlate with an unhealthy relationship. You cannot fully respect and honor your hunger cues if you are restricting the foods you eat, the quantities, or the specific times in which you eat. Ignoring hunger cues is a dangerous habit that diet culture regards as a positive practice of willpower. This can be detrimental to your health and can lead to even more disordered eating behaviors and rules.
Trust Your Body
Trust is a two-way street. You can trust your body and your body should be able to trust you. You trust that your body will continue to function and keep you alive, and your body trusts that you will provide it with adequate nourishment in return. Your body does not keep track of your dieting or food rules in order to accommodate your “body goals”; you’re either supplying your body with proper nourishment, or you are depriving it of receiving the nutrients that it needs to run properly.
Trust that you can eat less nutrient-dense foods and still benefit from them. A healthy relationship with food enables you to experience life without intrusive food thoughts, behaviors, or rules. You are allowed to eat both for pleasure and for hunger, as they are both beneficial in different ways. As discussed above, eating for hunger ensures that every system in the body is nourished and functioning efficiently. Eating for pleasure is important simply because it is pleasurable! You are allowed to eat foods that are tasty, nostalgic, or that just make you happy. Food is not just fuel, it is meant to be experienced and enjoyed. Date your food and observe how your relationship grows.
Support Yourself On This Journey
Developing a healthy relationship with food is not a straightforward process. It is meant to be flexible! There may be times when you need to override honoring your hunger cues in order to nourish your body. For instance, you may, for various reasons, have a lack of appetite and will need to make intuitive decisions to determine when to eat. Sometimes you eat past fullness for emotional reasons. You may find it difficult to give up all of your food rules, but you make small changes toward food freedom every day. Be patient with yourself! Be proud of your progress. Support and encourage yourself as you heal your relationship with food. If you find yourself struggling to break the cycle of diet culture, seek the help of a specialized eating disorder treatment team.
At BALANCE eating disorder treatment center, each of our treatment programs offers nutrition groups, mealtime support, and food-based exposure therapy to help heal your relationship with food during eating disorder recovery.
This post was written by BALANCE Marketing Assistant, Megan Madsen.
Megan is currently working toward receiving her B.S. in Psychology. She is a Certified Nursing Assistant with a passion for eating disorder research and education. Megan has worked as a CNA on several units in a hospital setting and as a Psych Tech at an eating disorder treatment center. It was there that she discovered her passion for helping those afflicted with eating disorders and where her desire for educating patients and the community on eating disorders and mental illnesses began. In the future, she hopes to work as a Clinical Psychologist with a focus on eating disorder treatment.