This was all I wanted for so long.
I wanted to not think about food all the time, to not obsess about wanting it, to not eat way more of it than my body needed, to not have endless chatter in my head when I was around it or when I had junk food in my home.
I wanted to be able to just eat a meal and be done. I wanted to be able to have any type of food in my home without constantly thinking about it being there. I wanted to stop blaming food for my binge eating.
Why wasn’t able to get all these things I wanted so badly for so long?
Because I was trying to work on the wrong relationship.
To have a healthy relationship with food, you must have a healthy relationship with yourself first.
This doesn’t mean you have to love yourself, but you can’t hate yourself.
Like yourself enough so that you’ll be willing to listen to your true wants and commit to do doing good for yourself. Then the food won’t even matter. You won’t even want to eat so much of it because you’ll care more about your well-being.
I was able to stop binge eating when I was able to make feeling good a top priority. Eating a shit-ton of food doesn’t make me feel good so when the thought of binge eating was present, giving in to that urge was not an option.
The hard part of course is remembering in those moments that binge eating is a false way to feel good. We continue to do it either because we forget this or because we don’t want to put in the effort to try the new, better way of feeling good – which is delayed gratification.
I was talking with someone recently who is taking little action towards changing her eating. When I brought up this topic about self-relationship first they said, “Yeah, it’s true. I want to eat better, but most of the time I just don’t care enough.”
When we’re not around food, we care, but in the moments when we’re faced with the decision of eating or not eating, we don’t.
That’s not going to get you anywhere.
How many times have you come to the moment when you’re thinking about binge eating and you give in because you just don’t care right now?
I know that’s what was going on in my head most times.
When you find yourself in the “I don’t care” zone, ask yourself why you don’t. See if those answers are inline with what you think when you’re not wanting to binge.
If you honestly care about your emotional and physical health, then when it comes time to make a decision about whether you’re going to give in and eat, it will be a no-brainer. Your health wins over the craving and desire.
You want to be healthy and happy and you’re not going to get there if you keep running to food anytime you feel uncomfortable, or feel a craving, or feel an urge to eat.
To learn how to build a healthy relationship with yourself, look at healthy relationships you have with other people.
How do you treat them? What do you do for people you care about? Are you willing to listen to what they want? Do you honor your commits to them?
We do these things for other people yet fail to do them for ourselves and when we fail at this, we run to food for comfort. But there are so many other ways to find comfort without it – meditate, stretch, move your body, journal, color, listen to your favorite music, hang out with or call a friend, and the list goes on and on.
Start with noticing how you talk to yourself. Are you kind? Are you hateful? Are you forgiving? Are you disrespectful? Would you want to hang out with someone who talks to you the way you talk to you?
They say treat others as you want to be treated. How about you treat yourself as you want to be treated.
When you’re trying to build heathy relationships with other people do you just say “screw it” when times get tough? No, so don’t do that to yourself. Follow through on your own commitments no matter what, pay attention to yourself, and listen to what’s going on in your mind and your body. Most importantly, don’t run from your feelings. Feel them and uncover the thoughts and beliefs that are causing them so you can finally take the steps towards releasing the ones that are holding you back.
A better relationship with yourself will bring forth a better relationship with food. Start with you.
