How to Make Peace With Food

It’s not easy to make peace with food. Like any good relationship, a healthy relationship with food requires trust, respect and appreciation. However, this isn’t easy for everyone - especially if you’re dealing with weight, health or mental health issues. The idea is not to have the perfect relationship with food - but to work on improving it over time. You will have good days and bad days - it takes time to see progress with your ability to listen and trust your body, understand hunger and fullness cues, not have post-meal food guilt or not be constantly bombarded by intrusive thoughts around eating, aka food noise.

Here are some ways to get started and get to a more peaceful place with food:

1. Give yourself permission to enjoy foods you love - including less nutritious foods like dessert, fried foods and packaged foods! Deprivation creates desire. If you find yourself feeling out of control around certain foods, avoidance and restriction could be a major reason why.

2. Focus on ADDing nutritious foods into your diet, not what you need to avoid. The more lean fiber, lean protein and anti-inflammatory fats you include the better your blood sugar will be and thus, less cravings and urges to eat other less nutrient dense desserts.

3. Practice body neutrality - body image can have a major impact on your relationship with food. A bad body image day can lead you to want to ignore your hunger and fullness cues. Work on appreciating your body for what it can DO not what it looks like. Body image is not what you see, it’s how you feel about what you see. If you’re feeling bad about yourself or in general, that can take its toll on your self esteem.

4. Ditch restricting dieting - restricting dieting is the #1 reason people stop listening to their own hunger and fullness cues and develop more noise around food. Food noise can trigger over-eating and a tumultuous relationship with food.

5. Consider working 1:1 with a therapist to complement working with a dietitian. We have 2 therapists on our team who accept health insurance.