improve
your relationship
with food
5 tips to improve your relationship with food
Many people, especially women, are struggling with their relationship with food. If you are one of them, then you know how draining and exhausting this is. Doubting every choice you make during the day, overthinking food a lot, and maybe can even barely enjoy your days and social occasions anymore. And how unfair, because you still don’t have the results you want either! I help many women with improving and healing their relationship with food. Today I would love to share 5 tips to improve your relationship with food and explain why this will bring you closer to your goals.
1. Stop counting calories
Stop counting calories or macros or whatever, stop just counting. If you start counting calories, then you start seeing foods as a dangerous number or something negative. You start having this negative feeling with it. It’s like the higher the number, the worse. This is the worst for your relationship with food.
2. Stop with restrictions or fear-foods
Stop giving yourself fear-foods or restrictions. I will explain this by making the comparison with a child and candies. If you tell a kid ‘you can only have one candy’, then as soon as the parents are gone the child would run to the kitchen and try to find candies. That is what children do, because you restrict them. If you do this to yourself with certain food groups or foods, all you do is telling your body ‘you cannot have this certain food’ and the result is that all you want is that specific food. You will see that as soon as you stop the restriction, the more you start finding a healthy relationship with certain foods, and you actually turns out that you don’t really want it that much anymore.
3. Work on your mind-body connection
The more you start listening to the signs of your body, the more you’re gonna give your body what it needs and the less it’s going to crave and think about food all the time. The longer you don’t listen to your body, the less signs the body is giving and the more you loose the mind-body connection. You don’t know if you are hungry or full, if you ate enough or need something more. You lost the connection and you miss the signs. You can heal this connection by giving the body the nutrients it needs again. After a while your body will start giving sings again, because it start trusting you again. Try to figure out every day what is my body trying to tell me and react on it.
4. Know your triggers
What are your triggers for keeping up your unhealthy relationship with food? Maybe stress can be triggering for you to find control over your food, or to start binge eating. Or maybe it’s boredom that’s always hard for you. Maybe you feel triggered when you see influencers online, or maybe someone in your close environment has a bad influence on you. I will explain you how you can map out your triggers and the way you want to deal with it.
1. Write down your triggers that have an impact on your relationship with food.
2. Write next to the triggers how you react on them now. For instance: I always binge eat, I feel like I need to workout, I tend to stop eating.
3. Then write down how you ideally would love to react. For instance: I would love to go out and get some fresh air, I would love to make myself a healthy meal, drink some water, or read a book. This is important, because you will recognize a trigger in the future and you know how you want to react on it. Practicing will make the difference!
5. Stop searching for quick results
I always tell my clients: mostly the quicker you will see results, the shorter the results will stay. It’s super hard to keep having a no-carb diet, to fully avoid sugars, to workout 7 times a week 2 hours a day, to not eat any fats, or to keep up with a crash diet for the rest of your life. You will see that as soon as your stop following your quick-fix diet, you will gain all the weight again, and even more! Your body is so happy you are finally giving it the nutrients it has been asking for for a while, that your body start saving the food you will give it after a crash diet. Because it thinks: ‘maybe she will start another crash diet very soon?’. That’s when you gain actually more weight than before you started your crash diet. Find something that you can actually maintain, like a lifestyle that you can stick with, that doesn’t mess with your relationship with food.
When you work on these tips, and thereby on your relationship with food, you will be so much more relaxed and your body experiences so much less stress. This will be great for your body, you will be surprised by the results. Your body starts trusting you again, and this is the base you need for a healthy lifestyle. You will have less food cravings, binge moments and stress. A healthy lifestyle is the only way to get results and maintain them on long term.
I hope you got inspired by these tips, but I know they are very hard to change yourself. This is why I give online personal lifestyle coaching, wherein I will take your hand and walk you step by step towards your balance. We will work on a healthy routine, but very important, also work on your mindset. Have a look at my services.