How to Create a Healthy Relationship with Food

For as long as I can remember, I struggled to have a normal relationship with food. Since losing 100 pounds and keeping it off for over 20 years, I’ve learned how to create a healthy relationship with food and developed a method for other women to do the same.

Why is Food So Hard?

If you are like me, you might ask yourself questions like,

• Why are food issues so hard for me when other people never even think about food?
• Why can’t I have a normal relationship with food?
• Why can’t I think of food as fuel?
• Why am I consumed by thoughts of food (food noise)?

You might feel isolated and alone but are far from the only one.

Consider these statistics:

• Nearly 1 in 3 adults (30.7%) are overweight.
• More than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) have obesity.
• Nine percent of the US population, or 28.8 million Americans, will have an eating disorder in their lifetime. (And, those numbers are likely much higher since this is only reported eating disorders.)

Our need for food is deeply primal. Humans typically eat daily when food is available, and we can only survive a few weeks without nourishment.

Add to that:

• Genetics – Some of us are genetically predestined to be more food-sensitive than others. A few thousands years ago, this was handy since it meant a better chance of survival. With the industrialized calorie-rich environment we now live in, this works against us.
• Food culture & environment – Do you know the #1 most important factor determining your body weight? Your zip code. As much as we love to think of ourselves as independent thinkers, we are highly influenced by our environment.
• Food availability & options – Your inherent human desire is to conserve energy. You might think you are lazy, but it’s built into your DNA for survival. For most of human history, people feared expending more calories than they could consume.
• History – You were raised with specific beliefs about food, both spoken and unspoken. You grew up eating foods that you associate with pleasurable textures and flavors. While these preferences can be changed, it requires intentional effort. Also, consider the fact that past trauma makes you more disposed to disordered or unhealthy eating behaviors.

This is to say that food issues are hard because they’re hard. Your struggles are entirely understandable, so give yourself some grace. There’s nothing wrong with you.

The Goal: Calm & Balanced Eating

What do you want your relationship with food to look like? Take some time to consider this question. What does a healthy relationship with food look like?

Instead of focusing on everything you do wrong, consider who you want to be around food. Then, move toward becoming that person.

After my life-long struggles, plus helping thousands of women, I believe a healthy food relationship is:

1. Calm – Your thoughts about food are gentle. You approach meals calmly and eat peacefully.
2. Balanced – Your food choices are balanced nutritionally and within your lifestyle. You enjoy healthy foods and choose them most often, but you eat treats, too. You can enjoy treats without binging or overeating them.

Rolling River vs. Roller Coaster

Your goal with your food choices is to aim for a rolling river, not a roller coaster.

Since there is no perfect eater, your meals, snacks, and treats will never be ideal. Unrealistic goals set you up to fall off the wagon. Try for food choices that are up and down a bit but overall steady.

Avoid wild swings in terms of calories, volume, and splurges. (Roller coasters are fun at the amusement park but aren’t fun to live on daily.)

This is life at weight maintenance. The more you even out your food choices, the more you will see a generally steady weight decrease or maintenance range.

Let me encourage you if these goals sound lofty (and impossible!). By following the steps below, you will see tremendous progress.

How to Heal an Unhealthy Relationship with Eating

Here at The Holy Mess, we’ve developed a healthy eating triangle that provides step-by-step guidance on how to have a healthier relationship with food, starting today.

• Levels 1 and 2 focus on your Hunger.
• Levels 3 and 4 focus on your Habits.
• Levels 5 and 6 focus on your Heart.

Level 1: SAFE Eating

The foundation of eating recovery is getting enough nutrition and calories. This may seem easy in today’s overfed culture, but it’s more complex than you might think.

For much of my life, my eating habits had wild shifts because I thought dieting meant half-starving myself into thinness. This leads to primal hunger that is almost impossible to control.

The Minnesota Starvation Study has incredible research into the effects of not eating proper nutrition.

As a certified Recovery Coach with The Binge Code-Recovery Works, I teach a healthier approach using the SAFE eating model.

SAFE stands for Structure – Adequacy – Food Groups – Enjoyment.

What This Looks Like

Here is what SAFE eating looks like:

• Eating regularly and consistently throughout the day.
• Eating enough calories and nutrition to fuel your body.
• Resisting diet culture and the urge to under-eat.
• Weight loss goals that are realistic, with a small weight loss each week that does not trigger primal hunger.
• Eating all three macros (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) daily.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 1 – SAFE eating:

1. Find your daily calorie range using our calculator or My Fitness Pal app.
2. Use one of The Holy Mess meal plans for a realistic, structured plan that is done for you.
3. Check out the Holy Mess Meal Planning Workshop.
4. Watch this video about the weight loss rolling river vs roller coaster.

Level 2: BACK on Track

Once you regularly eat an adequate and enjoyable amount, the next level of progress is learning how to get back on track quickly when you mess up or fall off the food wagon.

Because you cannot eat perfectly, it’s not matter of if you get off track; it’s about when you do. Accept this as a regular part of the process and plan for when it happens.

BACK stands for Back Track – Ask, What did I learn? – Compassion – Keep Plans the Same

What This Looks Like

Here’s what getting BACK on track looks like:

• Get BACK on track fast with:
  • BackTrack
  • Ask, What did I learn?
  • Compassion
  • Keep Plans the Same
• Return to your healthy eating plan quickly – within a day, not a week, next month, or after the holidays.
• Expecting your food plan to have ups and downs.
• Compassion & forgiveness when you have slip-ups.
• Not using a mistake as an excuse to binge, overeat, or go on a food bender.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 2 – BACK on Track:

1. Read our detailed explanation of the BACK on track action plan.
2. Print our free BACK on track worksheet.
3. Check out the Mindset Makeover Video series.
4. Join our next 30-Day Weight Loss Challenge, which focuses on accountability and daily healthy habits that can be maintained long-term. (Plus, we have fun doing it.)

Level 3: Create a Yes Zone

Your surroundings and food environment are essential for your weight loss success.

We call this creating a Yes Zone because the goal is to set yourself up for success by saying YES as much as possible and reducing the times you have to say no.

I don’t know about you, but I have a rebellious streak. Tell me I can’t have something, then suddenly I want it 100 times more. If you are constantly surrounded by chips, candy, fast food, and other junk, guess what you’ll eat? Chips, candy, fast food, and junk.

Stop telling yourself you “should” be able to handle it when other people eat junk food around you. No one has limitless willpower, plus who wants to live in constant frustration?

You’ll never be able to control your environment 100%, but you can take steps to make it easy for yourself to make good choices.

What This Looks Like

Here is what creating a YES zone looks like:

• Bringing healthy foods (that you enjoy) into the house and having them prepped, ready, and within easy reach.
• Reducing triggers by keeping tempting foods out of the house or out of your line of sight.
• Eating treats regularly, without binging or overeating them.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 3 – Creating a YES Zone:

1. Check out the Holy Mess Treat Box for how to enjoy treats safely.
2. Read more about food triggers and how to manage them.
3. Download our free calorie density guide to focus on filling, wholesome foods.
4. Use our Meal Planning Personality Quiz to practice prepping fresh foods you enjoy.

Level 4: Managing Thoughts and Relationships

I used to believe I had no control over my thoughts. It seemed like all kinds of things just randomly popped into my head, and there just wasn’t much I could do about it.

I was wrong.

The Bible tells us to take our thoughts captive to obey Christ. You won’t be able to stop the hundreds of thousands of thoughts you have daily, but that doesn’t mean you have no control.

When you recognize unhelpful, wrong, or harmful thoughts, you can work to manage them with Bible verses, prayers, and affirmations.

I like to say unchecked thoughts are like a room full of toddlers. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. We all have primitive, toddler-brain-type thoughts. This isn’t a problem, but we also don’t want them in the driver’s seat of our lives.

Many people with food problems have boundary problems in relationships. You might struggle to say no to others. Standing up for your needs will be essential to your healing process.

What This Looks Like

Here is what managing your thoughts looks like:

• Making decisions based on adult choices, not giving in to toddler voice temper tantrums.
• Deciding what you want to think.
• Taking ownership of your thoughts and behavior instead of playing the victim.
• Giving yourself the grace and compassion you would give to a friend.
• Use affirmations and truth statements to turn around thinking errors.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 4 – Managing Thoughts:

1. Check out our Self-Sabotage No More! course for help with managing your thoughts.
2. Read more about Toddler vs Adult voice here.
3. Check out the Mindset Makeover Video series.

Level 5: Conquering Emotional Eating

You may recognize that stress eating or turning to food for comfort is emotional eating. But did you know these are emotional eating, too?

• Boredom eating
• Eating from fatigue.
• Eating to please others.
• Eating to avoid a task.
• Transition eating.
• Celebration eating.

When I first attended therapy for weight loss, I knew I used food as a way to cope with emotions, but I didn’t understand why. I had been overeating and binging since I was a little girl. I had no clue how to manage life without it.

Learning to recognize and feel your feelings is the way to process them.

Talking about your feelings is incredibly powerful because what we can’t speak out, we act out.

What This Looks Like

Here is what managing your emotions looks like:

• Recognizing your feelings like sadness, anger, boredom, and frustration.
• Procesing through your emotions in healthy ways that don’t involve overeating.
• Nourishing yourself with healthy self-care activities instead of only turning to food for comfort.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 5 – Conquer Emotional Eating:

1. Check out Beat the Cravings – End Emotional Eating course.
2. Read more about how trauma can block weight loss.
3. Consider recovery coaching or therapy if you continue to struggle with processing emotions.

Level 6: Peace

The final step in a healthy relationship with food is learning to develop peaceful acceptance.

Peaceful acceptance includes:

• Appreciation for the body you have (even if it’s not quite the body you want).
• Recognizing that intentional effort around food may continually be required.
• Finding deeper meaning or ways to give back and help others as part of your recovery process.

The journey to body acceptance may take a path like this:

Body respect → Body Neutrality → Body Functionality → Body Gratitude = Body Acceptance.

In my experience, peaceful acceptance is one of the last and most profound steps to healing.

What This Looks Like

Here is what peace with food and your body looks like:

• Appreciate your body as a gift from God. (This doesn’t mean you always love your body or all the parts of it.)
• Accept the consequences of your past food behaviors and receive God’s forgiveness and grace.
• Handle weigh-ins, clothes shopping, and seeing yourself in the mirror or photos with a calm, graceful acceptance.
• Recognizing that other people may eat differently from you.
• Finding ways to give back to others who have similar struggles.

Your Next Steps

Here are some helpful next steps to focus on Level 6 – Peaceful Acceptance:

1. Take baby steps to body acceptance or body neutrality. Check out this video, starting at minute 41, where I discuss how to accept seeing yourself in pictures (an area where many of us struggle).
2. Take time to appreciate the things your body does for you. Focus on gratitude for what your body CAN do rather than what it cannot do.
3. Read these Bible verses about improving your body image or try this mental body image exercise.

Signs of an Unhealthy Relationship with Food

What are some warning signs of an unhealthy relationship with food?

• You think you have an unhealthy relationship with food.
• You obsess about food.
• You change daily life decisions based on the food available.
• You are scared of eating, avoiding food, or fearing weight gain.
• You find yourself unable to stop over- or under-eating, including binging.
• You live in a cycle of over-restricting and then over-eating.
• Food makes you feel anxious, depressed, scared, or angry.
• Fear of eating in front of others.
• Feeling the need to earn the right to eat with exercise.
• Purging calories, either from vomiting, laxative abuse, or hours of exercise.
• You engage in secret eating.
• You feel out of control around food.

What are your thoughts about this triangle? On what level would you place yourself? Share in the comments below.