How to Have a Healthy Relationship with Food and Lose Weight

I’m not saying eating noodles in the bath is always a sign of not having a healthy relationship with food, but it is definitely one of the more odd behaviours I have seen photographed.

This is a big topic. Big because there are an awful lot of people who don’t have a healthy relationship with food, big because there is never one straight forward solution to this problem and big because the issues that underline having an unhealthy relationship with food are often very deep-seated and everyone will have their own way of figuring that out.

So in this article, I am simply going to outline what an unhealthy realtionship with food looks like, give you the strategies that could work for you, and try to point you in a better direction to start healing.

I simply can’t promise that reading this will fix your realtiopnship with food, as that takes time, hard work and many ups and downs but I do hope it might help you identify what you may need to do to start improving this relationship.

There are very few things I love more than helping people - and if you are here on this page, then I am going to presume that you would like as much support as possible. Rebuilding your relationship with food can be tough, and having a safe space to send thoughts to can be immeasurable. So how about you send me a freidn request, and you have unlimited and open permission to email me anything you need help with.

You will also get some free goodies from me, some things that will be useful for you rebuilding this relationship with food, and some that might not be - but that is for you to choose as you receive them.

How To Know You If You Have An Unhealthy Relationship With Food

Chances are that if you have ended up here, you are already suspecting that you may need to address your relationship with food.

Identification is a very important aspect of beginning to change your relationship with food.

There is an important line in the sand we need to draw here - and that is that having an unhealthy relationship with food, and having an eating disorder can be related. However, just because you have an unhealthy relationship with food, doesn’t mean that you have an eating disorder.

So here are some questions that you may need to consider to see if you do need to work on building a healthy relationship with food:

Do you feel stress and anxiety when food is being offered to you?
Do you research calories on menus before you eat out?
Do you not eat to “save calories” for later in the day?
Do you hit the gym after you have eaten to burn off the calories?
Do you constantly yo-yo diet?
Have you been on a diet your whole life?
Do you have a randomness to the time of day you eat and how often you eat?
Do you ignore when your body is telling you it’s hungry?
Do you overeat and then restrict over and over again?
Do you count calories using a calorie-counting app?
Do you eat food away from other people?
Do you feel guilty whenever you eat food?

It is also wise to point out that you may go through phases of feeling this way about the food you are eating, and you may go through phases where you don’t. All relationships can be more intense at times than at others.

If any of those questions have resonated with you, then I am so pleased you are here, because here is where you can find help, a safe space and hopefully start your path to having a better relationship with food. There is nothing wrong with struggling, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to work on and improving your relationship with food.

Chances are that your relationship with food has deteriorated over time without you even realising it. With so many of my clients, it occurs the story is somewhat similar - and I bet its a story you can relate to as well.

You have low self-esteem, which is oftentimes a result of bullying or never feeling good enough for whatever reason in your lives - whether that be with a partner, a parent or friends and this has eroded your body image.

To correct this you misidentified the issue with your body image and automatically related it to being “fat” and then went looking for a weight loss solution. This has happened with clients of mine who have high, normal and low BMIs. It is often quite scary how many people in this world see themselves as fat when in fact they are below average bodyweight for society.

You likely then headed to a Gym or some weight loss diet program meeting and spoke to someone. This someone is a trusted “Personal Trainer” or “expert” and they sit down and have the “chat with you”.

In many of the Gyms I have worked in this meeting doesn’t even happen with a fully qualified Personal Trainer at all, but in fact with a salesperson who happens to look like a personal trainer or who might be able to do the odd group class just to look credible.

At diet clubs, the leader of the club isn’t a qualified nutritionist or professional, but simply someone who has paid the company money, to run the meetings and get the most basic company-centric view training to be able to host them. 90% of the time they are also people for whom the diet worked, and that is what “inspired” them to go around destroying other people’s relationship with food.

It is one of the main reasons I suck at sales meetings because getting someone’s money is less important to me than making sure that person is safe and respected and that I don’t do anything to compound their already low self-esteem. Which the client will think relates to their goals, but is there simply to get their money. It is based around being shamed into believing you are overweight, and that even if you want to lose just “a couple of pounds healthily” you do need to do that so that you feel better about yourself.

You then likely embarked on a “weight loss” program where you were celebrated for losing weight, given meal plans, calorie counters and strategies to manage your weight loss - often coupled with rigorous high-intensity workouts that are seldom suited to your physical ability because there are 30 other people in the class.

Let’s take a moment.

Did you notice the critical sentence in my story?

This sentence is the reason that many people’s relationship with food deteriorates.

What do you think it is?

“You then likely embarked on a “weight loss” program where you were celebrated for losing weight”

In being celebrated only for when you lose weight you naturally associate weight loss as a success and weight gain as a failure.

This then will lead you to more and more drastic behaviours to try and stop being a failure.

As you drift away from the place you went to rebuild your self-esteem, you carry this internal feeling of success and failure directly relating to weight loss and weight gain and the only way in which you can control that is through manipulating your food.

This experience of intrinsically feeling like a success when you lose weight and a failure when you lose weight can happen throughout your life. It could be your parents trying to discourage you from eating junk food as a child, with the best of intentions, but it has a deeper effect. It could be that your aunty always talks about your weight and the way you look. It could be that all you see on Social Media is the “thin ideal” and every time you scroll you feel isolated from the way you look compared to what you are seeing on the fiction-packed internet.

But the result is always the same, it all stems back to:

Weight Gain = Failure

Weight Loss =Success

And this is so often why people develop an unhealthy relationship with food.

Gaining weight is not a sign of failure. You aren’t a failure. You are a beautiful human who is doing their best at all times to manage the cards you are being dealt.

How To Know You If You Have A Healthy Relationship With Food

Much like the previous section, there are certain things that we can identify in someone’s eating habits that would suggest that they have a healthy relationship with food.

Do you eat regular meals each day?
Do you look for colour on your plate?
Do you give yourself unconditional permission to eat food?
Do you eat when you are hungry?
Do you finish eating when you feel full without finishing your plate?
Do you enjoy a variety of different cuisines?
Can you in a relaxed manner in front of other people?
Do you feel comfortable eating “non-healthy” foods?
Do you enjoy eating in moderation?
Do you not let other people’s opinions on the food you eat stop you?
Do you not worry about fluctuations on a scale?
Do you make calorie-free choices?

Once again, you don’t have to do all of the above, but if you are ticking off a fair few of the questions in a positive light then you are probably on the right path with your relationship with food.

Many people I have come across who do have a healthy relationship with food have all managed to remove the pressure of a certain “look” or “scale number” from their lives. They have all accepted that their body is their body, and have learnt to be incredibly grateful for what it can do, and the way it presents itself.

This is very much true of myself.

I have had a good relationship with food, for most of the time in my life. This is because I have on the whole as an adult been happy with my body weight - and the times in my life when I have had a very odd relationship with food has been whenever I have tried to gain weight.

Like all people, there are aspects of myself I would love to change in an ideal world, and I grew up very much hating the way I looked. I am skinny, scrawny, and lanky. I used. to not wear shorts because I didn’t want people bullying me about the lack of hair on my legs as a teenager. Like with all insecurities, I tried to fix them for most of my life, but the time I took it most seriously was when I was performing in Othello at the National Theatre in London, I set myself a goal of trying to put on some muscle. My Trainer at the time told me to eat 3500kcals of food a day. It was horrible. I was eating three servings of lasagne for dinner and there is only one word to describe how I felt:

It felt like I was eating all day long, I was eating anything and everything in sight just to get the calories in, my energy was low, my appetite was shot to pieces, and I was spending way to long fixating on two numbers:

Number of calories consumed
The scale

When I look back on that time in my life, and I look at the list of questions I posed at the start of this section - everything was off. There was no structure to the way I was eating, I wasn’t telling anyone why I was eating so much, I was very very poor because eating that much is expensive, I was eating when I wasn’t hungry, I was not listening to my body when I was full.

Everything was yucky.

Needless to say, I never gained the muscle I was hoping for, I fired that Personal Trainer and I have never done something like that ever again.

The second I stopped trying to achieve this goal relating to my body weight, my relationship with my food improved immeasurably. This leads me nicely to the next section of this blog.

5 Ways To Reset Your Relationship With Food

Luckily there are strategies you can work on to help you reset your relationship with food.

Sadly, it is not as simple as just hitting a button. It is more a series of buttons that you will have to keep pressing over and over and over again as you meander through this journey.

Resetting your relationship with food will take time. The idea of some of the strategies I am about to lay out might give you anxiety, might make you feel conflicted and it might not make a lot of sense as you sit here reading this right now.

However, you have to keep in mind the long-term goal.

If you build the right foundation and relationship with your food, then you may be able to achieve all the things you want to achieve that are currently damaging your relationship with food.

Without the right foundations, nothing can be built.

But that is a way down the track. Right now the goal is to reduce anxiety, make you feel like you are in control of this relationship, and give you practical and achievable steps to follow to help you.

the Goal Is Health

Before I give you the 5 strategies, I want you to remember that the aim is to give you health. Health is a multifaceted topic, but we are literally working on going from unhealthy to healthy, in the context of your relationship with food.

But this will also improve other health markers in your life as a consequence.

Your relationship with food is integrated with your psychological state and so much of the strategies I lay out here are here to help improve your psychological state as well as your physical state. With my clients and myself, I can see clearly the link between emotional state and food choice.

How you feel literally dictates what you eat.

This why my strategies are there to improve all aspects of health, not just the health of your relationship with food.

It will improve you:

Physical Health
Mental Health
Metabolic Health
Social Health
Emotional Health

Imagine how beautiful you will feel if you manage to move even some of those categories of health up a notch.

Some of my strategies might seem like they are acting against what you want to achieve from a fitness point of view - but that is the point - because fitness goals normally drive people to the oddest and most strained behaviours around food - because to achieve great things in fitness, relative to who you are, you are likely going to need extreme behaviours to get you there.

It is extreme behaviours that have got you here, reading this blog.

So let’s drop the extreme and focus on the mundane - because the mundane is where balance exists, and balance is where improving your health exists.

1. Stop Looking At The Scale

It is very hard to be healthy if you are under pressure. Pressure leads to stress, stress leads to comforting behaviours, not healthy behaviours.

You can’t improve your relationship with food whilst putting yourself under pressure to lose or gain weight. You can’t lose or gain weight without having a strong foundation in place, and the scale will always undermine your ability to build these foundations.

This doesn’t mean that weight-based goals aren’t going to happen, but they shouldn’t be your focus. The scale is a fickle thing. The scale goes up and down based on so many variable factors like hormones, water levels in the body, the outside temperature, whether or not you have eaten, whether or not you have worked out, whether or not you have been to the toilet - and if you are working on rebuilding your relationship with food then you don’t want the rug to be constantly pulled from under your feet.

The scale gives you zero information on whether or not you are healthy. The scale doesn’t tell anyone whether or not you have a healthy relationship with food, all it does is tell you how much you weigh. It doesn’t disseminate what your arteries look like, or whether or not your organs are performing as they should. It doesn’t tell you how your mental health is, or how integrated into society you feel.

It is literally a number. A number that has been loaded with emotion, over time in your life by various influences that have led you to let this number determine your self-esteem.

“How can how you look on the outside reflect how you are feeling and functioning on the inside?”

— Rhiannon Lambert

2. Structured Eating

One strategy I give to all of my clients who work with me one-on-one on the Strong and Confident Program who need to work on building a healthy relationship with food is having a structured eating plan in place.

Making sure that you are regulating your food intake is important in the process of building a healthy relationship with food.

Having regular meals at regular times will create regularity with many aspects of your appetite and metabolism. The main advantage of doing this however is that it regulates two hormones which are integral for your appetite control.

Grehlin and Leptin control both your hunger and satiety and if you give them regularity, it will help you to learn to listen to your body a lot more.

My structured eating method is the following:

Breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
Two snacks.
Each meal must fit on one plate.
You should also eat uninterrupted and participate as much as possible in the making and creating of the food.

The other thing to remember with structured eating is that it requires mindful eating as well. This will help you pay attention to your body's hunger and fullness cues, and eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied. Avoid distractions like TV or phone while eating, as these can cause you to eat more than you need. Mindful eating is effective for weight loss and the prevention of weight gain.

Again, when we are looking at building foundations, the word structure makes a lot of sense here. This isn’t to say you aren’t allowed to deviate from this structure, but you must have it in place to begin with, to stray from it because one very important aspect of moving away from a structure is making sure you return to it as well.

This structure will become your comfort when it comes to food, your safe space, your place where you can exert the most control over your appetite and body, and the place that allows you to keep building that healthy relationship with food the most.

3. Give yourself More

Restriction gets you nowhere in the long term. When losing weight, you do need what is called a calorie deficit, and this is often thought about as a restrictive measure. However, let me ask you this…how has trying to restrict yourself worked for you thus far?

It is probably one of the contributing factors to your need to build a healthy relationship with food now because being unable to stick to the restrictive nature of your weight loss regime leads to you feeling like a failure and then putting you on the hamster wheel of binge and restriction.

How would not binging sound to you?

Well the key to that, is not restricting.

One of the biggest contributing factors to binge eating is something called dichotomous thinking or black-and-white thinking. Many weight loss programs will tell you that you aren’t allowed to eat many of your favourite foods, or if you do, then you need to then earn those calories back somehow through restriction or movement.

Well, the truth is that you don’t need to do any of that.

You need to give yourself more. Way more.

And the thing you need to start with is more respect.

If you begin to respect yourself more, you will do all of the things you need to do in order to build a healthy relationship with food. When you treat your body with respect you will listen to it more, you will treat it with more love, you will want to do things for it that make it thrive and this will lead to more positive behaviours in your life.

By giving your body more respect, I simply mean giving yourself more permission to be yourself.

Give yourself more permission to:

To eat more foods you enjoy.
To explore more respectful movement.
To eat more foods your body is craving.
To drink more water.

Whenever I have this conversation with clients they get anxious about the prospect of unconditional permission, they believe that because they have binged, that by telling them they can eat whatever they want, whenever they want, that they won’t be able to regulate to moderation.

I simply pointed out to them, that if the restriction was working on them, they would already have a healthier relationship with food.

When it comes to binge and restriction, it is very similar to how people view emotional eating. People always want to fix the “eating” side of the equation.

Binging isn’t the problem with the binge and restrict cycle, in the same way that eating isn’t the problem when it comes to emotional eating.

If you want to move away from these relationships with food you need to fix the “restrict” and the “emotional”.

It is amazing what happens when you give yourself more respect, how these charged psychological states diminish from view in your relationship with food.

More respect.

You deserve more respect. Don’t you?

4. Manage Stress and Emotional Pressure

As you now know, your unhealthy relationship with food is a psychological issue as much as it is anything else. This means you will need to work on the emotional triggers that lead you to react to food.

Food is a comfort to us all and we all regulate food somewhat in our lives, however, the frequency of that regulation is linked intrinsically to how handle our emotions.

Many clients of mine find it hard to sit in uncomfortable emotions and to avoid those feelings will turn to food. But as we explored in the previous section, this only leads to more turmoil as you end up on an emotional/binge-eating hamster wheel.

There are many strategies you can use to help manage your stress and emotions but to date the most powerful one I know of is to improve your sleep.

Sleeping well is one of the strongest tools you have to reduce your emotional reaction to the world around you.

If you struggle to sleep and want to find out more about the correlation between sleep and your emotional state then please read my Blog: Why Does Slee Effect Your Weight Loss?

Other really helpful methods to help reduce stress and anxiety are:

Journalling
Meditataion: The Daily Stillness (this is my own Meditations course which yu can get for free)
Going for a walk
Being in nature

One other key aspect of this is being able to correctly identify what emotion you are feeling. When you feel emotionally rocked, and if you have a poor relationship with food already, then a common theme is to just eat your way through those emotions - as opposed to actually identifying what it is you are feeling and therefore need to do.

You could be:

Feeling bored
Feeling lonely
Feeling unheard
Feeling desperate
Feeling overhwhelmed
Feeling worried
Feeling lost
Feeling nervous

Plus many more emotions. But being able to correctly identify the way you feel, and then being able to correctly address that feeling, as opposed to using food to address it will help you immeasurably. This is what I mean when I say “sit in uncomfortable emotions”. It can be very challenging to name what you are feeling, and then address it - but over time it will improve your relationship with food and your ability to handle yourself in this way.

5. Focus on Getting Stronger In The Gym

I have news for you.

You don’t have to do weight loss workouts anymore.

I wouldn’t even know what a Weight Loss Workout is, because working out isn’t a tool for you to lose weight. The minimal amount of calories you burn in a workout is not going to move the dial for you in terms of helping you lose weight.

Added to that, if you are restricting your food, working out sucks. You have little energy, you won’t enjoy your workouts and everything will feel sluggish and hard.

Whereas if you change your focus in your workouts from trying to burn as much as possible, to trying to build as much as possible you will significantly impact your relationship with food. You will see food as a fuel source, as a source of power and strength, and crucially something you need in order to make your workouts feel awesome.

The gym is designed as a place for a human to get stronger, not to get smaller. Nothing bad can come of getting stronger can it?

In fact, all your desires for losing weight, all of the self esteem issues you think that losing weight will fix will in fact be helped a lot more by getting stronger, not smaller.

There are really heavy things in the Gym, and the purpose of those heavy things is that a human moves them from point A to point B - and one major aspect of being able to do that is eating the right food to fuel your workouts.

Another aspect of getting stronger is also respecting your body enough to listen to what it needs. The other day I was feeling really low on energy, I was fatigued and wanted to be anywhere except doing a gruelling workout. Except that I had made a promise to myself to work out. Therefore I listened to myself and executed a workout that respected how I was feeling.

I did some stretching, three sets of a Sumo Deadlift, three sets of a Leg Press and went home.

Thats it.

I respected myself based on how I was feeling, and I respected my goal to workout that day. I felt much better for balancing how I was feeling with what I was doing - compared to if I had still tried to a tough workout, or gone home altogether.

You have to listen to yourself and what feels best for you in the Gym. If you go too hard when you aren’t up to it, that could have a bigger impact on the way you mange your food that day, and then you could end up in a cycle of harming your relationship with food again.

Remember this rule: Too tired to go for a run? Go for a walk instead.

Nothing bad can come of going for a walk - a walk cures everything.

Don’t be scared of getting stronger - it is the path to healing.

A Final Word…

Everyone has a personal and unique relationship with food, and getting a healthier relationship with food isn’t the easiest journey in the world.

This is why focussing on practising strength and resilience will help you.

That being said, not everyone can cure these deep-seated psychological links to food on their own, and if you really are struggling with an eating disorder like Binge Eating Disorder, Anorexia Nervosa or Bullemia then please do reach out to a mental health professional for assistance.

There are lots of charities all over the world that are there to help you with these conditions and I cannot emphasise how important getting professional help is.

If you have enjoyed this Blog please feel free to reach out to me and let me know - nothing brings me more joy than hearing how my words have helped others.

Other than that, I wish you all the luck in the world, and cannot wait to hear from you in the future.

Peace, Love and Protein

Coach Adam

Adam Berry - The Gym Starter29 December 2023The Gym Starter