7 Signs You Have A Bad Relationship With Food
Your relationship with food is how you think, see, and eat food. Food is necessary for life, but it should not take over our life or our headspace. We need it for survival, but we also use food for celebration, socializing, and culture. Food is an integrated part of our lives so we need to have a healthy way of interacting with it. Poor relationships with food usually originate from diet culture and false nutrition information in the media. The constant pressure to be thin is never-ending, leading women into a dark tunnel of excessive dieting, bad body image, and obsession with food. The relationship you have with food and your body image is very tightly correlated together. Over time a bad relationship with food can lead to an eating disorder, weight cycling, imbalanced hormones, weakened immune system, and increased risk for heart disease.
Here are 7 signs you have a bad relationship with food
1. Body Checking
Body checking is one of the signs you have a bad relationship with food. If your first action after getting out of bed in the morning is to check your body in the mirror, this is problematic. Notice if you body check during the day too, if you have been doing it for a while you might not even realize how much of a habit it has become. Body checking is related to bad body image because you are constantly observing if your body has changed the way you want it too. This is a sign you have a bad relationship with food because you will begin to associate what you eat with how you look when there are so many other factors that play into your body size. When the motivation behind eating is to change your body, you will fall into the trap of becoming hyper-focused on what you look like and becoming repeatedly more dissatisfied. The problem with this is that your body type is largely genetic and eating can only go so far as to modify it before you become obsessed with eating
2. Emotionally Reliant on Scale weight
The next sign that you have a bad relationship with food is if you are emotionally reliant of scale weight. If how you eat during the day is impacted by your scale weight then you definitely have a bad relationship with food. This is because how you eat should be reliant on your own hunger cues, and it should not be based off of your scale weight or how your body looks. Weight on the scale fluctuates based on more things than just fat loss and gain. That number encompasses water weight, muscle mass, amount of food still digesting in the gut, bone density, and fat mass. Your weight will especially be variable during the week of your period due to increased water retention that causes bloating.
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3. Constant thoughts about food
Having constant thoughts about food is another one of the signs you have a bad relationship with food. This is because food should not be taking up your headspace. Constantly thinking about your next meal, how much you are going to eat, what you want to eat but ‘won’t let yourself have’ are all problematic thoughts to have all day every day. These thoughts are a sign you are not eating intuitively because a food-obsessed mind can be indicative that you have a past of significant food restriction. The principle of this arises because if you are told to not do something it only makes you think about and want it more. In the case of either mental or physical food restriction, this can lead people to only think about food so much more because they feel guilty about eating. In a bad relationship with food, you do not see food as something that needs to be controlled, but in reality, food does not need to be harshly controlled in our life with rules. Humans have evolved to harbor hunger and fullness signals which tell us when and what to eat. If we fall under a path of dieting and purposeful restriction, this leads us to have obsessive thoughts about food.
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4. Counting calories obsessively
Obsessively counting calories is another sign you have a bad relationship with food because you are not focused on numbers rather than your hunger signals. The amount of calories you burn each day changes on a daily basis. This also means that your hunger cues and signals will change on a daily basis too. Eating a certain amount of calories each day is not beneficial because of these variances. In addition, whatever number you chose as your daily calorie intake is probably not accurate for your height, weight, gender, and activity level if you just got the number off of a website. Those websites work off of averages and are not personalized. Furthermore, counting calories is inefficient because all food companies are allowed to have a margin of error on the components of the nutrition label of 20%. So if you are purchasing a “low calorie” labeled product at the store, that company can label that a serving is 100 calories when in reality it is 120 calories.
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5. Constant Emotional Eating
Constant emotional eating is another one of the signs you have a bad relationship with food. Emotional eating is when we use eating as a coping mechanism for when we are sad, angry, depressed, etc. Eating as a coping mechanism is not always a negative thing, it is normal to use eating as a coping mechanism here and there. The issue lies in the regularity of your emotional eating and how much you eat when you use it as a coping mechanism. There is a difference between having an ice cream on the way home from a hard day at work versus being depressed and eating an entire gallon of ice cream plus a box of cereal until you feel sick. If the ladder is the case, it is time to dig deeper into the root causes of this behavior and ways to overcome emotional eating. The goal is to not have emotional eating as your only coping mechanism when you are feeling down.
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6. Good Foods and Bad Foods
Having the mindset of good and bad foods is another sign of a bad relationship with food. This idea usually goes back to when we are young kids when we learned that good behavior is rewarded usually with something sweet like candy or ice cream. These sweet foods are not allowed to be eaten unless we eat our full plate of dinner, if we go on vacation, or if we are well behaved. As we grow older it is hard to break certain mindsets that you obtain in childhood. This reward system of foods can create a hierarchy that healthy foods are ‘good’ and we need to eat a ton of these to earn the ‘bad’ foods which are usually deserts. Living with this mindset can create immense feelings of guilt around the ‘bad’ foods when one doesn’t think they have ‘earned’ it. In reality, there is no such thing as good and bad foods. Some foods have more nutrient value than others, but there should not be any hierarchy attached to foods. Seeing all foods as neutral will take away the power from the ‘bad’ foods and eventually you won’t feel guilty after eating them.
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7. Avoiding Social Events because of food
Avoiding social events because of food is another sign of a bad relationship with food. Social events like a holiday, a birthday party, or a work event all usually center around food. This can make people with a bad relationship with food anxious because they feel like they won’t be able to control themselves around ‘bad foods’. When food controls your life to the point that you have to avoid social events is detrimental to your relationship with food.
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