To Change Your Eating Habits, Change Your Food Relationship

If you want to change your eating habits, this is for you.

Here’s how to build a foundation for adding joy to your food relationship and subtracting the tension.

Changing your food habits is hard. Like really hard.

The way we eat is something we’ve developed over years and even decades so when we try to change our habits overnight, we tend to only be successful short-term. This is a frustrating experience that leaves us blaming ourselves and our willpower for not being strong enough. It sucks.

But the truth is, making a sustainable, long-term shift in your eating style, means addressing your relationship with food first.

In other words, you need to fix the foundation before renovating.

For many of us, that foundation is filled with feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, stress, and constant self-criticism. These feelings take the joy out of your food experiences and, ultimately, tend to take you further away from where you’d actually like to go. So, until you can address these feelings and fix that foundation, it’s going to seem like you’re constantly working against yourself.

You’ve heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder,” right? That’s what you’re doing when you start with addressing your food relationship to switch your habits versus expecting a dietary change to magically improve your food mindset. Making any kind of dietary shifts when your food relationship is filled with tension is like going uphill on a treadmill - it’s tough and you’re not actually moving forward.

Changing your relationship with food starts by recognizing the thought patterns that aren’t serving you and how those thought patterns translate to food habits that do the same. Taking the time to first recognize those patterns allows us to intentionally create new ones - so we can replace those feelings of guilt, shame, and self-criticism and with a foundation of kindness, understanding, self-compassion, and a desire to truly nourish. This shift in our mindset opens the space for a change in our eating habits to be organic and easeful rather than something that creates additional tension, resistance, and disappointment (no thanks!).

Your mindset about food and the experiences that helped shape it take time to unpack, but it’s worth it - in fact, it will change your whole life.

The first step?

Check your foundation.