I want you to imagine you’re at work, and someone brings in donuts. Do you think to yourself:

  1. I’m going to have a donut. I bet they taste really good, and I see no reason to deprive myself.
  2. Why the hell can’t I have a donut? Everyone else is having a donut! I’m going to have a donut! …ugh, why did I have a donut? I feel awful now.
  3. Food is fuel. Food is only as good as it makes my body feel. I feel lousy after eating donuts. I will not eat the donut.
  4. Oh god, I’m such a fat slob. Ugh, I suck. No donuts for me until I’m worthy of donuts.

These thoughts contain a lot of information about how you interact with food. Notice that this is not a question of whether or not you ate the donut, but rather the way you thought about your decision. With thoughts 1 and 2, you ate the donut, and with thoughts 3 and 4, you did not eat the donut. However, 1 and 3 are healthy thoughts – that is, they make you feel neutral or good, and 2 and 4 are damaging thoughts – that is, they make you feel bad about yourself.

 

We are all in a relationship with food.

For some people, it’s a casual, utilitarian relationship. A “how-do-you-do-may-I-borrow-a-cup-of-sugar” neighborly relationship. It’s something that is part of day-to-day life, but does not take up large amounts of emotional energy.

For others, it’s an intimate, emotionally intense relationship, filled with drama, fraught with edge-of-your-seat “will they or won’t they” dynamics. Thinking about food uses a lot of emotional energy and causes a great deal of stress.

To clarify, when I talk about having a good relationship with food, I don’t mean that you’re only eating broccoli and grilled chicken breasts. What I mean is that your thoughts about food are not fraught with emotional drama, self-esteem meltdowns, and punitive reactions. In general, you try to eat things that make your body feel energized and strong. And if you eat something outside of your usual guidelines, you recognize that it doesn’t reflect on who you are as a person.

 

Let’s compare this to your relationships with people.

Some of the relationships in your life, I hope, are healthy, but others may be toxic.

The healthy ones are probably easy, or at least manageable. You may not think much about them (the relationships, not the people), and when you do, you feel warmth, gratitude, and contentedness. When these relationships have moments of conflict, after some initial hurt feelings, you talk things over and resolve them. Then you forgive each other, move forward, and go back to the gratitude-warmth feeling. You enjoy each other’s company, but you don’t depend on each other.

But if you’ve ever had a toxic relationship – even a platonic one – you know that these are full of turmoil. There might be moments of laughter, fun, and joy, but on some level you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe the other person is quick to anger. Maybe they’re extremely flaky, or standoffish around other people. Maybe they’re rude or insulting. Or maybe you and they have become so codependent that you’ve lost your own identities.

If you think about the four “food thoughts” at the beginning of this article, consider whether your relationship with food is toxic or healthy. It doesn’t have to be consistent – it can vary from day to day or meal to meal, but it’s worth paying attention to.

 

Food Rules

Many people will try to give you rules about food: what you should eat, how much you should eat, even when and with whom! If that’s what you’re looking for, I recommend working with a licensed nutritionist or dietician. That person can help you figure out what foods are best for your body and your goals.

But as a psychotherapist, my food rules are a little bit different. They’re aspirational rules about a healthy attitude towards food. I hope you find them helpful:

 

1. The goal is a sustainable and healthy lifestyle, not a temporary diet.

Celebrity fitness trainer Kit Rich says, “nothing extreme ever lasts.” A healthy relationship with food is not about cleanses. It’s not about breaking up with whole food groups for a few weeks before a flailing return to the “Standard American Diet”. It’s not about yo-yo dieting, binge-and-deprive, or sweating for the wedding. It’s about small changes – whether in diet or in attitude – that you can sustain to live a healthier lifestyle for a long time.

 

2. Like in fitness, my barometer for what I eat is at its best when it’s based on a desire to feel energetic, strong, and healthy, rather than arbitrary rules.

It’s not about the latest study that tells you sugar will kill you or everyone is allergic to gluten. It’s about mindfulness, and being aware of how you feel after you eat certain foods. I know that I feel sluggish after pastries, but I also know that the back of my throat gets itchy if I eat a stalk of celery. I eat both of those things, but in moderation. Pay attention to how your body reacts when you eat different things, and make choices accordingly.

 

3. What I eat is no one else’s business. What other people eat is none of my business. We are each on our own journey.

We have this strange cultural tendency to comment on other people’s food choices. It’s odd, because these choices are a result of all different kinds of things – culture, lifestyle, goals, mood – and can be deeply personal. No two bodies are the same (see #2) and no one choice reflects a person’s entire attitude towards eating and food. Let’s all vow to focus on what’s on our own plates.

 

4. A good relationship with food – just like a good relationship with another person – does not involve strict rules with severe consequences.

What if your romantic partner said to you, “if you leave your socks on the floor again, I won’t hug you for a week!”? This is how we sometimes interact with food. We say to ourselves, “I will not eat anything with sugar/gluten/meat/dairy/carbs/fat ever again.” And then when, inevitably, we “slip up,” our reaction is self-loathing which, at its best, consists of negative self-talk: “You’re such a screw-up. Boy are you worthless.” At its worst, this is physically damaging backlash – exercising to an unhealthy degree, cleanses that deprive your body of necessary nutrients, and stress levels that cause you to become physically ill.

Good relationships with food don’t require strict adherence to rigid dogma. They also don’t involve “cheat meals” or “cheat days”. Instead, they involve mindful decisions to make exceptions to the way you usually eat.

 

5. That being said, specific situations may call for there to be a rule. That’s ok. I can break this rule, but only if I understand that that comes with consequences.

This is a bit of an exception to rule #4, but has everything to do with rule #2:

I once knew someone whose child had about a dozen seizures a day until they put him on a ketogenic diet. That child needs to follow strict rules and adhere to very specific dietary restrictions. If your body tells you something is genuinely not good for you. Someone with a peanut allergy should have a pretty rigid “no peanuts” rule if they don’t want to be rushed to the hospital with hives.

Sometimes these rules can be broken, but they come with consequences. An acquaintance of mine is lactose intolerant, but says that once in a while he treats himself to a “dairy day.” He knows that when he does this, he will have a terrible stomach ache for several days, but to him it’s worth it to indulge in some ice cream and pizza. Every adult has the right to make decisions, with full awareness of the likely consequences, even if those consequences are unpleasant.

This can be a tenuous balance. Someone once told me that she had overcome an eating disorder, and that the focus of her treatment was to learn to let go of a need for rules and structure around food. A few years later, she was diagnosed with celiac disease, and her doctor told her she couldn’t eat gluten. She then had to integrate her doctor’s orders to not eat gluten into her paradigm of not putting restrictions on her diet. It was a delicate process.

 

6. Cultivating the ability to listen to myself – mind, body, and emotions – is the thing that is most healing to my relationship with food.

Ultimately, it all comes down to deliberate, informed decisions, challenging damaging attitudes, and paying attention to how your food choices make you feel.