If you use food to cope with life’s good and bad and feel out of control, you’re in the right place. It can feel so exhausting and frustrating to not feel in control of your emotions or your actions with food, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
I’m going to break down how I’ve been able to heal my coping with food, and continue to do it.
Because I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this will take years to do.
You can have some quick wins, even today after reading this post! But the true healing and change only comes with time, messy action and allowing yourself to be human.
This post is all about how to break coping with food.
Mindset
Before you can truly address everything, you need to understand what your mindset is around food.
Are there good and bad foods?
Are there foods just for celebration?
What is your guilty pleasure?
Do you use it to comfort and numb out during hard times?
Is there anything you don’t have control over?
Once you can pinpoint this, you’ll have a better understanding on which foods are the ones you cope with, need to be wary of in hard times and maybe need to have a more set system around.
And I’m definitely not saying to avoid food! I love food just as much as the next person. But when it’s all you think about from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, something needs to change.
And simply starting with realizing what foods you gravitate towards more, the better.
If you want a better breakdown of why you could be using food in a negative sense and can’t stick with a diet, check out Why Diets Don’t Work.
Tigger Moments
Once you have the foods you gravitate towards in times of struggle, celebration or mindlessly munch on, you’ll want to be aware of those moments that cause you to lose control.
Is work the cause of all your stress, or is it just during the holidays when it’s busy you lose control?
When you only sleep 3 hours at night rather than 7, are you more willing to “give up” on your meals you prepped and grab your favorite comfort?
Is there tension in your relationship and rather than keep working through it, the ice cream is a better friend?
Are you just lonely and having a hard time making friends, so snacks and the TV are a better option?
Or is your diet so extreme that in a moment of weakness you eat the entire jar of PB2 in order to silence the hunger cravings you can’t avoid?
All of these moments need to be addressed in order to break the habit and find healthier coping mechanisms.
You need food to survive and you want to have a healthy relationship with it. One that you can truly enjoy what you eat, look forward to fun times, but not just eat everything in sight because you “can’t” have it again.
List out the big moments you think of and then be aware as you walk through life. Because I promise, as much as you don’t want it, more moments will come up.
Check out Self Care Tips to Avoid Burnout for more ideas on working through the in-between of life as you work on this.
Daily Practice
And now the hard part start, living life and making small adjustments each day and as you notice moments come up.
It won’t always be perfect, but that’t not what we’re going for here. The goal is lived experience and real practice with it each day.
You’ll find out more and more as you do it.
Maybe on your super stressful seasons at work, you make sure you don’t have extra obligations to take care of, have fun and easy meals at home for you and focus just on reading after a long day.
Maybe having cookies in the house is too tempting for you to just grab one throughout the day or mindlessly much, so you never buy them but always get a dessert when it’s date night out instead.
Maybe you try going for a walk rather than spiraling during difficult times and realize that helps a lot more than the extra coffee and ice cream you’d use instead to cope.
And maybe sometimes you succeed in healing your relationship with food, but life throws a new version of it at you that you aren’t prepared for and you fall back into old habits. BUT this time, instead of the whole bag of chips, 10 beers and ice cream sunday, you eat half a bag of chips and plan a coffee date with a friend or family member.
THAT’S STILL SUCCESS!
Life happens, things come up, but it’s the choices you make each time that will either push you forward or keep you the same.
And if you want a simple tracker that I use in my Food Experiment journal, join my newsletter down below and I’ll send you a copy for free!
Real Life Examples
Again, life will never look the same for everyone, but here’s a couple examples of how I adjusted from extreme to more relaxed and controlled with my relationship with food.
It’s not always perfect, but it IS progress.
I had a bakery job that during the holidays went from maybe 8 hour days to 15 hour days with 1 quick break in the afternoon. I used to come home from that, exhausted and snacking on anything that brought me joy until I was too uncomfortable to move and then would hate myself because of it.
I addressed spiral to having some “healthier” options those weeks and planning some fun snacks to have throughout the day. So instead of starving for those 15 hours and eating food that never sat well with me, I’d have some granola, fruit or my favorite protein bar to snack on, and then come home to chicken nuggets and Goodles to eat at night.
Is this a perfect example? No, but it’s a compromise that made me feel less guilty about the choices I was making and it was also foods that didn’t cause me to bloat and feel bad after eating them.
Another example brings me back to college when I REALLY got into fitness and got a diet plan that was for 1500 calories a day, 2 hours of intense lifting workouts 6 days a week, and fasted cardio at least 3 days a week. 100% would NOT recommend this, as this is the exact reason I found myself at the bottom of a PB2 jar and still starving with no results.
So because of that, I had to do A LOT of healing when it comes to food. But the biggest shift for me was when I worked on the mindset of “I can have this whenever”. Not that I ate it all the time, but when you’re allowed one cheat MEAL a week, or every other week, you’re sacrificing on so many good foods. So when you have access to them, you eat as many as possible before they’re gone forever.
So if it’s always available, that means if I don’t have it now, I could have it later. Or just because I’m having one piece doesn’t mean I’ll never get it again.
It allowed me to actually enjoy the foods I was eating rather than fearing this was the one and only time I’d ever get access to it. It also made me realize how much my life revolved around health and fitness, and I didn’t have anything of real joy to show for it.
So my biggest recommendation is start living your life, find hobbies that JUST bring you joy and it will help as you start reducing your coping relationship with food.
Check out 5 Simple and Lazy Adult Hobbies to Try for some ideas on my favorites at the moment.
This post was all about how to break coping with food.
I hope this was helpful in giving you some ideas on how to best heal your relationship with food and learning to stop using it to cope with your emotions.
This will be a lifelong process as more scenarios you get handed happen, but once you create that solid baseline of what health means to you, the better off you’ll be!
Be sure to save this post for later or add it to your Pinterest board and check out the other resources I have.
Again, the next blog posts I’d recommend to support you through this process would be:
Why Diets Don’t Work
Self Care Tips to Avoid Burnout
5 Simple and Lazy Adult Hobbies to Try
And of course join the newsletter for more freebies to help you along the way, and weekly real-time support as we navigate creating this truly healthy life together!
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